Remind me of the joke on how mathematicians fight fire...
A physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel in separate rooms. A fire breaks out in the physicist's bathroom. The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, does some calculations on his calculator, fills a cup of water, and throws it at the base of the fire putting it out while getting the rest of the bathroom hardly wet at all, and then goes back to sleep.
A fire breaks out in the engineer's bathroom later that night. The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, runs into the hallway and brings the firehose into the bathroom and lets the stream go full blast. After a minute or so, the fire is out, and the bathroom is soaking wet with water dripping everywhere, but the fire is out and the engineer goes back to bed.
A fire breaks out in the mathematician's room. The mathematician wakes up and sees the fire, does some lengthy calculations on paper, lights a match and drops it in a glass of water, says "It can be done", and goes back to bed.
the episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and i think it was one of the best TNG episodes aired.
I have on tape a Star Trek Marathon shown on WPIX a few years ago (or maybe like 10 years ago, man I'm old). They had a voting period where people could vote for their favorite TNG episodes. I think this was a legit thing, since the marathon was MC'd by Jonathan Frakes, giving little trivia bits for each show. The top 5 episodes in descending order were...
5. Relics (The one where they rescue Scotty from the Dyson Sphere)
4. The Inner Light (Picard's mind gets taken over by an alien probe, and he lives a lifetime on some alien planet in the course of about 30 minutes)
3. Yesterday's Enterprise
2 and 1. The Best of Both Worlds Parts I and II (Kickass episodes involving a Borg Cube attempting to invade earth. An interesting note Frakes made was the the original script had Picard and Data borgified into one unit.)
Well, we saw what the genesis torpedo did to the planet. Despite killing all life already on the planet, it destroyed the planet as well, neither of which would probably sit well with the federation. Thus it makes sense that the federation would destroy all data of the Genesis Torpedo to prevent its falling into romulan or cardassian hands. It would be too dangerous otherwise. One Romulan scout ship could sneak into Klingon space and genesis bomb Kronos, and you know they'd do it too if they could.
hey're not prepared to pay the salaries Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
I don't think a new TNG movie was ever in consideration. Riker and Troi are off on their own ship. Data is dead. Worf... well, I guess they always had a reason to bring him back in the previous movies. Anyways, the crew is effectively split up to make a new TNG movie not very plausible. Plus, I remember Brent Spiner saying that he was glad his run with Star Trek was over, which is probably why they killed off Data, but left the B4 backdoor.
The picard manuver came from when he was captain of the Stargazer. It happened such that the stargazer was about 30 light-seconds away from a Ferengi ship. So whatever image the ferengi had was 30 seconds old. Picard used this time discrepency to make a warp 9 jump right next to the ferengi ship. Thus, the ferengi saw the 30 second old image of the stargazer from it's initial position and from the Stargazer's actual position right next to the Ferengi ship. The Ferengi thus saw two ships on their sensors and were unprepared for the possibility of having to face two starships. In this moment of confusion, the stargazer was able to open fire into the unprepared Ferengi vessel.
Going independent is a good move for these people who look like they are looking to turn their cartooning into their primary job. However, for most internet cartoonists, I think Keenspot is still the best option for those who make 1-2 comics a week and don't want to deal with the hassle of having to maintain a server, deal with bandwidth issues, etc. The downside of working with Keenspot is that they take a big chunk of the advertising revenue that a site generates. A few weeks back, Tycho at PA had a comment about someone he knew who left Keenspot and went independent and started making triple what he used to make from advertising. For its flaws though, it seems that Keenspot (Or Keenspace rather for those undiscovered comics) is still the best place for a new cartoonist to start.
Screw that, why doesn't he make a bona fide arcade for adults. These days it's damn near impossible to find an arcade that isn't dedicated to kids games that involve collecting tickets to redeem for various bits of crap. The most adult orientated video arcades I've found are at movie theatres, but they're horrendously expensive. Plus, have some other games other than fighting games, and light gun games. I like Tekken and Time Crisis as well as anyone else, but I miss games like Alien vs. Predator or X-Men or Golden Axe.
As I recall, there was an episode of Deep Space Nine that played with this idea about controlling an electron's spin. There was a device which would randomly make an unusual proportion of electrons spin in one direction, the the result was that a person's luck would be changed to either unusually good or unusually bad. I thought it was an intersting idea on what might happen if you change one of the fundamental aspects of matter in that spins are always balanced, some kind of quantum conservation of momentum.
It reminds me of a story I heard from a professor I heard a few weeks ago. He went to medical school about 50 years ago in the deep south (Georgia I think). He worked his way through school by working at the county register office (or whatever you call it) where birth cirtificates for babies were filed. He would notice that from time to time, poor uneducated black families would name their babies things like "Clitoris" or "Ghonorrea". It was obvious that these families didn't know what those words meant, but heard them in the hospital and though they sounded pretty. What was even more asenine was that the doctors and nurses in the hospital didn't try to change their mind, even though they knew very well what was happening, but rather they found it funny. And it wasn't that they didn't know what was happening, because they would have to sign off on the documentation before it was filed. So my professor would refuse to accept the certificates on some kind of technicality until the names were more appropriate. One day he got a call from the a hospital administrator saying that if he didn't stop poking his nose where it didn't belong, he would report him to his superiors and perhaps make trouble from him at his medical school too. My prof replied that if the administrator wanted to go down that route, he would go visit the newspaper editor at the printing plant across the street and give him some material for some interesting stories on the matter. He said he didn't run into any trouble after that.
Duke - Get Webster on the phone. Noah, how ya doing? It's Duke. How much would it cost to make kwizibyck a word? I don't know what it means. Uhh, how about a big problem? Great. How 'bout that other word I invented, Dukelicious? No one's using it? What a Duketastrophy!
From the Poochie episode, in the recording studio with June Bellamy, the voice of Itchy and Scratchy
Homer: How'd you get to be so good?
June: Oh, just experience I suppose. I started out as Roadrunner. [as Roadrunner] Meep!
Homer: You mean "meep-meep"?
June: No, they only paid me to say it once, then they doubled it up on the soundtrack. [to herself] Cheap bastards.
This question reminds me of a joke gift I had a while back. It was a small, elongated, yellow box with the words "Emergency backup word processor" on it. Inside was a pencil with the word "input" and an arrow pointing to the tip of the pencil, and the word "delete" with an arrow pointing to the ereaser. I don't have it anymore, I gave it to my roomate when his hard drive fizzled the night before a paper was due.
Even the Emperor gets his ass handed to him by Mace Windu, it's only Anakin's surprise intervention that shifted the scales then.
It wasn't a "surprise" intervention. Palpatine needed Aniken to intentionally turn against the Jedi in order to fall to the dark side. Did you miss the part where Palpatine had plenty of power left to zap Windu after Aniken cut his hand off? I believe that it went precisly the way the emperor had planned it. He took down the other 3 jedi right off the bat, he was only toying with Windu long enough for Aniken to get there.
Was there ever a point where any of those powers would have been useful?
During episode 4, R2 didn't need to fly or fight in any of the scenes. In the begninning with the jawas, the restraining bolt kept him from using any of his cool abilities.
In episode 5, on Degoba, there were a few times where he could have used some powers. As for popping out of ships, I think that was a function of the ship, and not one of R2's abilities. So that's why he popped out of republic starfighters, and had a slow ascent out of X-wing fighters. Then, when he fell into the swamp, he couldn't ignight his rockets underwater. When he was swallowed by the swamp moster, he probably zapped it so that the monster would spit him out. Then, when getting the light back from Yoda, he probably could have done more than just pulling on it, but he didn't want to hurt Yoda (He probably recognized him too maybe). Then at the end, he managed to reassemble C3PO's legs and fix the Falcon's hyperdrive, indicating a fair degree of ability to manipulate himself and other large objects.
In ROTJ, R2 couldn't use most of his powers on Jabba's palace probably because he had a restraining bolt applied to him, which is why he couldn't fly out of the sand when they fell of Jabba's Sail Barge. On the moon of endor, he showed ingeniuity in getting out of the Ewok's nets. When captured by the Ewoks, he probably could have escaped again, but Luke said to go along with it, so R2 didn't try any fancy tricks. And then during the forest battle, R2 didn't need to do anything until he was called to open the door, then he got blasted, and then he was out of comission until the end of the movie.
Thus, the fact that R2 isn't flying around and kicking ass in episodes 4-6 isn't really indicative of his lack of ability.
Dogs "see" with their noses. My dog is developing cataracts, and when I asked the vet what could be done, he said there were a few horrendously expensive options, but that there was really no reason to treat it agressively. He said that as long as my dog could see well enough to not run into walls and traverse stairs, he would be fine. Any time a dog wants to know more about an object or an area, what does he do? He sniffs it.
For those in New England, it will actually be airing in Saturday at 8pm instead of Friday since it's been replaced by baseball.
The Red Sox are in Seattle tonight, and the Yankees are in Oakland. Both games will air at 10PM tonight, so Enterprise should be on schedule tonight. That's what TVguide online is showing anyways.
IIRC, the game is set so that the mines are distributed after you choose your first spot, ensuring that you never die on the first move. Makes sense, since in all the years I've played Minesweeper, I don't ever recall having hit a mine on the first try. Just to test this out, I made a custom game with a 10x10 grid and 81 mines (I tried 99 mines, but 81 seems to be the max for these dimensions). After about 20 games, I have yet to hit a mine on my first try.
I didn't say you had to be a Jedi to touch a lightsaber, but rather that the lightsaber enhanced force abilities. If I were to be given a sword, I could flail it about ineffectively, or perhaps show enough skill to cut a peice of cake with it. However, it I were to try and use it to knock an arrow out of the air before it impaliled me, odds are I'd be screwed. It is a Jedi's tool, just like a paintbrush is an artist's tool. In the hands of a random person, a painbrush is just a stick with some fuzz on the end of it, but give that same brush to Michelangelo and it becomes an effective tool enhancing the artist's natural abilities.
As I've understood it, the lightsabers are made with the Jedi's use of the force to meld the component parts together, thus ensuring that only the jedi can construct lightsabers. The lightsaber, in addition to being a slicing and dicing weapon, becomes a focal point for the jedi to focus their force abilties upon. The Force is the jedi's ultimate weaspon, the lightsaber is simply a means of utilizing this weapon and through it deflect blaster bolts and such. Darth Vader, being a supreme master of the Force can use his own hand to block blaster bolts (as seen in TESB), and Yoda could absorb Force Lightning with his hand. However, regular Jedi like Obi Wan need lightsabers to block blaster bolts and absorb Force Lightning.
Slashdot Mirror
That's preposterous. Everything that's cool today will be cool forever, like "All your base are belong to us" and "Wassssaaaaaaaaaaaap?".
Remind me of the joke on how mathematicians fight fire...
A physicist, an engineer, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel in separate rooms. A fire breaks out in the physicist's bathroom. The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, does some calculations on his calculator, fills a cup of water, and throws it at the base of the fire putting it out while getting the rest of the bathroom hardly wet at all, and then goes back to sleep.
A fire breaks out in the engineer's bathroom later that night. The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, runs into the hallway and brings the firehose into the bathroom and lets the stream go full blast. After a minute or so, the fire is out, and the bathroom is soaking wet with water dripping everywhere, but the fire is out and the engineer goes back to bed.
A fire breaks out in the mathematician's room. The mathematician wakes up and sees the fire, does some lengthy calculations on paper, lights a match and drops it in a glass of water, says "It can be done", and goes back to bed.
the episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and i think it was one of the best TNG episodes aired.
I have on tape a Star Trek Marathon shown on WPIX a few years ago (or maybe like 10 years ago, man I'm old). They had a voting period where people could vote for their favorite TNG episodes. I think this was a legit thing, since the marathon was MC'd by Jonathan Frakes, giving little trivia bits for each show. The top 5 episodes in descending order were...
5. Relics (The one where they rescue Scotty from the Dyson Sphere)
4. The Inner Light (Picard's mind gets taken over by an alien probe, and he lives a lifetime on some alien planet in the course of about 30 minutes)
3. Yesterday's Enterprise
2 and 1. The Best of Both Worlds Parts I and II (Kickass episodes involving a Borg Cube attempting to invade earth. An interesting note Frakes made was the the original script had Picard and Data borgified into one unit.)
we never saw the Genesis torpedo again.
Well, we saw what the genesis torpedo did to the planet. Despite killing all life already on the planet, it destroyed the planet as well, neither of which would probably sit well with the federation. Thus it makes sense that the federation would destroy all data of the Genesis Torpedo to prevent its falling into romulan or cardassian hands. It would be too dangerous otherwise. One Romulan scout ship could sneak into Klingon space and genesis bomb Kronos, and you know they'd do it too if they could.
hey're not prepared to pay the salaries Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes
... well, I guess they always had a reason to bring him back in the previous movies. Anyways, the crew is effectively split up to make a new TNG movie not very plausible. Plus, I remember Brent Spiner saying that he was glad his run with Star Trek was over, which is probably why they killed off Data, but left the B4 backdoor.
I don't think a new TNG movie was ever in consideration. Riker and Troi are off on their own ship. Data is dead. Worf
The picard manuver came from when he was captain of the Stargazer. It happened such that the stargazer was about 30 light-seconds away from a Ferengi ship. So whatever image the ferengi had was 30 seconds old. Picard used this time discrepency to make a warp 9 jump right next to the ferengi ship. Thus, the ferengi saw the 30 second old image of the stargazer from it's initial position and from the Stargazer's actual position right next to the Ferengi ship. The Ferengi thus saw two ships on their sensors and were unprepared for the possibility of having to face two starships. In this moment of confusion, the stargazer was able to open fire into the unprepared Ferengi vessel.
I wonder how many times you're allowed to take the "Chief of Starfleet Operations" exam :-P
Going independent is a good move for these people who look like they are looking to turn their cartooning into their primary job. However, for most internet cartoonists, I think Keenspot is still the best option for those who make 1-2 comics a week and don't want to deal with the hassle of having to maintain a server, deal with bandwidth issues, etc. The downside of working with Keenspot is that they take a big chunk of the advertising revenue that a site generates. A few weeks back, Tycho at PA had a comment about someone he knew who left Keenspot and went independent and started making triple what he used to make from advertising. For its flaws though, it seems that Keenspot (Or Keenspace rather for those undiscovered comics) is still the best place for a new cartoonist to start.
Screw that, why doesn't he make a bona fide arcade for adults. These days it's damn near impossible to find an arcade that isn't dedicated to kids games that involve collecting tickets to redeem for various bits of crap. The most adult orientated video arcades I've found are at movie theatres, but they're horrendously expensive. Plus, have some other games other than fighting games, and light gun games. I like Tekken and Time Crisis as well as anyone else, but I miss games like Alien vs. Predator or X-Men or Golden Axe.
Now where are they gonna find some Nazi's I wanna know.
I believe there was an entire movie that didn't involve Nazis. What was it called, Temple of something? Something of doom? Something of something?
As I recall, there was an episode of Deep Space Nine that played with this idea about controlling an electron's spin. There was a device which would randomly make an unusual proportion of electrons spin in one direction, the the result was that a person's luck would be changed to either unusually good or unusually bad. I thought it was an intersting idea on what might happen if you change one of the fundamental aspects of matter in that spins are always balanced, some kind of quantum conservation of momentum.
It reminds me of a story I heard from a professor I heard a few weeks ago. He went to medical school about 50 years ago in the deep south (Georgia I think). He worked his way through school by working at the county register office (or whatever you call it) where birth cirtificates for babies were filed. He would notice that from time to time, poor uneducated black families would name their babies things like "Clitoris" or "Ghonorrea". It was obvious that these families didn't know what those words meant, but heard them in the hospital and though they sounded pretty. What was even more asenine was that the doctors and nurses in the hospital didn't try to change their mind, even though they knew very well what was happening, but rather they found it funny. And it wasn't that they didn't know what was happening, because they would have to sign off on the documentation before it was filed. So my professor would refuse to accept the certificates on some kind of technicality until the names were more appropriate. One day he got a call from the a hospital administrator saying that if he didn't stop poking his nose where it didn't belong, he would report him to his superiors and perhaps make trouble from him at his medical school too. My prof replied that if the administrator wanted to go down that route, he would go visit the newspaper editor at the printing plant across the street and give him some material for some interesting stories on the matter. He said he didn't run into any trouble after that.
(Duke, Marty, and Jay are playing scrabble)
Duke - Kwizibyck.
Marty - That's not a word.
Duke - Get Webster on the phone. Noah, how ya doing? It's Duke. How much would it cost to make kwizibyck a word? I don't know what it means. Uhh, how about a big problem? Great. How 'bout that other word I invented, Dukelicious? No one's using it? What a Duketastrophy!
From the Poochie episode, in the recording studio with June Bellamy, the voice of Itchy and Scratchy
Homer: How'd you get to be so good?
June: Oh, just experience I suppose. I started out as Roadrunner. [as Roadrunner] Meep!
Homer: You mean "meep-meep"?
June: No, they only paid me to say it once, then they doubled it up on the soundtrack. [to herself] Cheap bastards.
Iomega Patents 850GB DVD Nano-Technology
Holy Buzzword Bingo Batman
This question reminds me of a joke gift I had a while back. It was a small, elongated, yellow box with the words "Emergency backup word processor" on it. Inside was a pencil with the word "input" and an arrow pointing to the tip of the pencil, and the word "delete" with an arrow pointing to the ereaser. I don't have it anymore, I gave it to my roomate when his hard drive fizzled the night before a paper was due.
Even the Emperor gets his ass handed to him by Mace Windu, it's only Anakin's surprise intervention that shifted the scales then.
It wasn't a "surprise" intervention. Palpatine needed Aniken to intentionally turn against the Jedi in order to fall to the dark side. Did you miss the part where Palpatine had plenty of power left to zap Windu after Aniken cut his hand off? I believe that it went precisly the way the emperor had planned it. He took down the other 3 jedi right off the bat, he was only toying with Windu long enough for Aniken to get there.
Was there ever a point where any of those powers would have been useful?
During episode 4, R2 didn't need to fly or fight in any of the scenes. In the begninning with the jawas, the restraining bolt kept him from using any of his cool abilities.
In episode 5, on Degoba, there were a few times where he could have used some powers. As for popping out of ships, I think that was a function of the ship, and not one of R2's abilities. So that's why he popped out of republic starfighters, and had a slow ascent out of X-wing fighters. Then, when he fell into the swamp, he couldn't ignight his rockets underwater. When he was swallowed by the swamp moster, he probably zapped it so that the monster would spit him out. Then, when getting the light back from Yoda, he probably could have done more than just pulling on it, but he didn't want to hurt Yoda (He probably recognized him too maybe). Then at the end, he managed to reassemble C3PO's legs and fix the Falcon's hyperdrive, indicating a fair degree of ability to manipulate himself and other large objects.
In ROTJ, R2 couldn't use most of his powers on Jabba's palace probably because he had a restraining bolt applied to him, which is why he couldn't fly out of the sand when they fell of Jabba's Sail Barge. On the moon of endor, he showed ingeniuity in getting out of the Ewok's nets. When captured by the Ewoks, he probably could have escaped again, but Luke said to go along with it, so R2 didn't try any fancy tricks. And then during the forest battle, R2 didn't need to do anything until he was called to open the door, then he got blasted, and then he was out of comission until the end of the movie.
Thus, the fact that R2 isn't flying around and kicking ass in episodes 4-6 isn't really indicative of his lack of ability.
Dogs "see" with their noses. My dog is developing cataracts, and when I asked the vet what could be done, he said there were a few horrendously expensive options, but that there was really no reason to treat it agressively. He said that as long as my dog could see well enough to not run into walls and traverse stairs, he would be fine. Any time a dog wants to know more about an object or an area, what does he do? He sniffs it.
Anybody with enough money to sponsor a politican's campaign for office becomes an indirect legislative body. It goes something like...
Politician - "I don't like this bill"
Evil Corp. - "Do it or find your own money for re-election next year"
Politician - "Of course Master. Please forgive my vile tounge"
(Thunder and Lightning)
Evil Corp. - Mwa ha ha ha. MWA HA HA HA
(Organ Music)
For those in New England, it will actually be airing in Saturday at 8pm instead of Friday since it's been replaced by baseball.
The Red Sox are in Seattle tonight, and the Yankees are in Oakland. Both games will air at 10PM tonight, so Enterprise should be on schedule tonight. That's what TVguide online is showing anyways.
IIRC, the game is set so that the mines are distributed after you choose your first spot, ensuring that you never die on the first move. Makes sense, since in all the years I've played Minesweeper, I don't ever recall having hit a mine on the first try. Just to test this out, I made a custom game with a 10x10 grid and 81 mines (I tried 99 mines, but 81 seems to be the max for these dimensions). After about 20 games, I have yet to hit a mine on my first try.
I didn't say you had to be a Jedi to touch a lightsaber, but rather that the lightsaber enhanced force abilities. If I were to be given a sword, I could flail it about ineffectively, or perhaps show enough skill to cut a peice of cake with it. However, it I were to try and use it to knock an arrow out of the air before it impaliled me, odds are I'd be screwed. It is a Jedi's tool, just like a paintbrush is an artist's tool. In the hands of a random person, a painbrush is just a stick with some fuzz on the end of it, but give that same brush to Michelangelo and it becomes an effective tool enhancing the artist's natural abilities.
As I've understood it, the lightsabers are made with the Jedi's use of the force to meld the component parts together, thus ensuring that only the jedi can construct lightsabers. The lightsaber, in addition to being a slicing and dicing weapon, becomes a focal point for the jedi to focus their force abilties upon. The Force is the jedi's ultimate weaspon, the lightsaber is simply a means of utilizing this weapon and through it deflect blaster bolts and such. Darth Vader, being a supreme master of the Force can use his own hand to block blaster bolts (as seen in TESB), and Yoda could absorb Force Lightning with his hand. However, regular Jedi like Obi Wan need lightsabers to block blaster bolts and absorb Force Lightning.
Hello?? McFly?? Did you miss the first line of every single movie??
A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
It's already happened, thus it's feasability is already established.