Then, the Saudis (and the other countries as well) executed imperialism by nationalizing the oil fields.
By "economic imperialism" I mean using our military might to undermine the soverignty of other nations in the interest of our economic goals.
Well, except for one thing. The oil in question isn't being "Acquired by imperialism". It was bought many years ago by free consent.
Think again, my friend. This may be the case for some of the oil we acquire, but our need for oil is much stronger than that...
For instance, our attempt to force a coup in Venezuela earlier this year, over oil. And most visibly, our attempt to construct a pipeline through Afghanistan, which required that we first dismantle its government. (There is evidince that a war in Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11/2001 -- we've wanted to get oil out of Turkmenistan for at least a decade)
Now whatever our disagreement with the Taliban, it is not our business to overthrow governments. (Admittedly, I would have cheered to see them fall, if they had fallen by the action of the Afghani people and not our imperialism) In Venezuela it was purely economic. They were planning an embargo that would have hurt the US economically. In Afghanistan we had a more convenient political excuse involving some airplanes or something. But it appears that the war was successful in its true goals.
Secondly, we should not be enforcing our contracts militarily. It is always in the best interest of small nations to control their resources. "Free trade" generally only helps the larger nation, and keeps the poorer one poor. So I cannot blame the Saudis for nationalizing their oil fields (though I do not know the situation that well). I will not defend the Saudi's too far though because a handful of Saudi princes have become absurdly wealthy off selling US oil, while oppressing the rest of the country. Since this is a situation that benefits the US we let it continue. Do not let the rhetoric about "spreading democracy" or the horrible things the Taliban did sway you, because Saudi Arabia is no better, yet we continue to support them.
And I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with giving guns to militant groups for decades, propping up opressive governments, keeping a handful of extremely rich saudis in power, supporting Isreal in their military conquests, or just outright killing them.
How silly of me to think that.
Surely you are right, it is because we are Good(tm) and they are Bad(tm).
Your self-righteousness appalls me. People like you make me ashamed to call myself an American.
Thank you for actually understanding my point. Almost every other idiot reply clearly doesn't understand the simple sentence that is the 4th ammendment.
Everyone wants to quibble about how they think it's ok to be searched or technicalities of legal interpretation without even reading the fucking ammendment.
I think it's quite simple. Put air marshals (with guns) on the plane. Block off the cockpit from passenger access. Have walk-through, non-invasive bomb sniffers at airports (i.e. detect trace airborn quantities of explosive chemicals -- this can be done). If you detect explosives non-invasively, only then do you have probable cause to search that person. And most importantly, stop devastating entire regions of the world in the name of our economic imperialism. Would it really be that bad to pay $5/gallon for gas? Is that extra few dollars a gallon worth millions of lives?
Our leaders realize the oil supply is running out. The situation in obtaining oil is only going to get uglier. It's better to face the music now and put serious effort into alternatives.
That the government has interpreted away my rights, and erected 80,000 other laws which chip away at my rights...does not make it right.
The principles of this once grand republic have been long lost.
I can't wait until all these various violations are challenged in court. The cop-pulling-over-for-speeding example has been tested in court many times, and the circumstances under which a cop may search your car are clearly delineated, and you are given the opportunity to refuse.
If you refused at an airport you would be detained against your will. There have been numerous examples of this over the last year.
BTW you are not reading (or understanding) my arguments. Your arguments have been correct. (Except for me being wrong;-) But do not address my arguments. I end this here. I made my point, re-read my original post.
If the searches were being done by a private company, your statements would be correct.
However, the searches are done by federal employees working for a federal agency, under mandate by the federal government. In my view, this directly violates the 4th ammendment, which does not allow the government to do this.
To turn your argument around, YOU make the choice to leave the house every day. Before you leave the house you must inform your local sherrif so he can come over, pat you down, and ensure that you won't be walking the streets carrying a firearm. Would you consider that a volation of your rights? After all, you don't have to leave the house.
Today to have access to most (all?) federal buildings you must also submit to a search, again by the government, without warrant, in violation of the 4th ammendment.
Read the ammendment again. It says nothing about your choice to do diddly squat. The government simply is not granted the power to search you at its whim. The only arguing point about it is the definition of "unreasonable".
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The argument "we must search you because you might have a bomb/gun/dildo" is a valid statement for any person, anywhere, any time, under any circumstances. It was also true at the time the constitution was written. Nonetheless, we have the 4th Ammendment.
Perhaps the solution is not in searching every person, everwhere, all the time, under all circumstances, but to address why we have created an entire subcontinent that wants us dead.
The reason they want you to turn off electronic devices during takeoff and landing has nothing to do with navigational interference. The flight crew wants you alert and responsive in case of an emergency (i.e. not unable to hear them because you're wearing headphones cranked up to volume level 10). The feed us this line of bullshit because if they told you at the beginning that 95% of airline accidents occur at takeoff and landing, they'd scare the shit out of the passengers. So instead they make up this excuse about electronic equipment to placate the sheeple. Frankly though its dumb because there's nothing to stop you from putting in your earplugs and sleeping mask.
Some airlines in Europe won't let you use CD players, on the exact same aircraft used by US carriers that do let you use CD players.
They should treat us like intelligent human beings...but I digress...
If your walkman did interfere with the navigation system, they would probably ban them for the entire flight, as this article suggests for UWB devices. (and rightfully so, IMHO -- though I will be pissed if they tell me I can't bring my laptop) The FCC regulates the EM frequency spectrum for exactly this purpose...to prevent interference. The ILS in planes does not use the same frequencies as your cell phone. If random EM emission was a problem, they would never allow computers on board. (Do you have any idea how much EMF your average computer puts out? It's HUGE!)
The other thing to realize is that the head of the FAA is a political appointment. The person in that position has never had any experience with flying planes or security. This is why they thought asking you if you had unknown crap in your bag was an effective security measure.
The contest you are thinking of is the Cheap Access To Space (CATS) Prize. Unfortunately, that one expired on November 8, 2000 and the money was returned to the investors. As far as I know, no one since has succeeded in acheiving the requirements for the CATS prize. I think these guys will be the first.
The X-Prize is a $10 million prize to get 3 people to 100km twice within 2 weeks.
My computer is admittedly aging. I have a Matrox Marvel G200 video card and I record TV shows direct to disk, edit out the commercials and then re-encode them to mpeg2 or divx to burn on CD. At this moment I've got almost all of Farscape. Once upon a time I recorded all of Babylon 5 to videotape. Call me an eccentric collector of sci-fi.;)
These newer Athlons/P4's should be able to record straight to MPEG4/DivX without an intermediate step which would seriously reduce the disk space and time required. My current computer takes about a day to encode a 1-hour show to mpeg2.
However I'm waiting for the dual Opteron systems to come out. That way I can also use my computer while it's recording/encoding.
Yeah, I could get a PVR, but then I would lose the ability to edit out commercials, and do you know any PVR's which use MPEG4 and can transfer shows off so I can burn them on CD?
I can't stand to watch regular TV anymore. About 3 seconds into the commercial I get bored and want to go do something else. Besides I don't like them telling me when I have to watch their show. I have better things to do. I'll watch it on my own time thank you.;)
I think that for any programmer, given that they have an existing codebase that works, writing a completely new implementation without using any of the old code would be damn near impossible. I mean, you'd look at the old code, "hmmm...that's a reasonable way to do it, and I know it works...why change it?" Even if the programmers retyped every character (no cut and paste) there would still be a large amount of code that is similar, maybe even entire functions that would have the same disassembly.
About the only way a company could reasonably pull off this kind of "removing GPL code" would be to forcibly remove the old codebase from the developers eyes. This is something that would cost them a lot of time and money in re-implementation. I don't think any company would do it. You'd also need a manager willing and able to find and remove the code. That must be hard to find...
Companies should realize if they get stuck in this situation, that it's better, in the long run, to contribute to the existing codebase and cooperate with the developers they're trying to steal from. The benefits of base of coders not employed by you improving your stuff for free far outweighs the benefits of having a closed-source implementation. I mean, what good does it to to have a proprietary implementation if there are 5 good open source ones out there? Closing the source doesn't buy you anything! It's not like they invented MPEG-4.!
If they stop editing movies for TV, I might actually *watch* TV again. It's so incredibly aggrivating to see movies mangled for TV that I just refuse to watch. When the edit the dialog it's always very obvious. And come on, fuzzing out middle fingers and buttcracks? Does this actually matter to anyone? How many people can honestly say their lives are better because they've never heard 'fuck' on TV?
Here is a far more informative article, straight from the horse's mouth. (I hate it when lay journalists "distill" the actual information down to nothingness and don't provide a reference to the original source...anyway) And Here is the experiment's home page, with a nice plot of the measurement.
This is simply a fantastic experiment. The level of precision they have acheived is phenomenal, and they should all be commended for their efforts. The fact that the experiment was cancelled is a great tragedy. These kinds of experiments are a cheap way to look for new forms of matter. They won't tell you what the new matter is, but they will tell you it's there. They do this by very accurately measuring things that are easy to measure (like the muon's magnetic moment, or "g-2"), which are changed very slightly by the presence of new matter. The complimentary experiments are The Tevatron and The Large Hadron Collider which may be able to directly produce the new kinds of matter (if the new matter isn't too heavy) and thus identify it and study its properties.
From a theoretical point of view, it is very easy to "screw up" this measurement. That is to say, if you write down a new theory that has almost any kind of new matter, it gives a contribution to the muon's g-2. This is why there was so much excitement last year when they announced a deviation from the Standard Model. One must remember however that the community's accepted standard for a "discovery" is 5 standard deviations between the measurement and the prediction. The top quark discovery had more than 5 standard deviations signal over background. I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.
Practically speaking, 2-standard deviation measurements pop up and then disappear all the time in physics. This is why we require the stringent "5-sigma" rule.
This is has nothing to do with debian. This is a kernel feature, added some months ago, so that kernel developers could sort out bug reports (ksymoops) from folks running binary drivers from those who are not. In other words, if you used the binary-only NVIDIA driver and it crashed, the kernel developers don't want to help you track it down. It's nvidia's problem. Reproduce the bug without installing a binary-only module and they'll be happy to look at it though.;)
The reason some clearly-GPL modules get the "tainted" message is that it just took a while to propegate the GPL-licensed symbol to all modules. It does not affect the operation of the kernel in any way. (and again, has nothing to do with debian)
I wonder if Steven Wolfram himself has to call up Wolfram tech support when he gets a new laptop, dig up his registration number, license number, and hardware ID, and explain to them that he wants to transfer his license to a new computer and why he wants to transfer his Mathematica license to a new computer and assure them that yes he will delete the old copy and give them the hardware identifier for his new machine and install a new Big Bro^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H License Manager...yadda yadda
Sure it's a useful piece of software. But it's an absolute pain in the ass, Wolfram is a paranoid bastard, and it's not worth half the price they ask for it. For my professional work, I choose Maple. Go away Wolfram and annoy someone else. I don't want to talk to you after I have legally purchased your product. It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!
Remember dongles? The things you put on your serial port to keep you running Autocad on only one machine? Mathematica is one big software dongle.
The reason is that the G450 and G550 implement Macrovision. I could rant for hours about this stupidity, but there is presumably some kind of secret agreement between the Macrovision Nazis and Matrox. Macrovision doesn't want their secrets out, becaus then *horrors* people could watch their movies in ways not authorized!
It's going to have to be reverse-engineered on these cards.
Matrox has been traditionally very friendly to linux. They produce Their own set of drivers (with source!) as well as a tool called "powerdesk" which lets you switch X resolutions on the fly. In addition,
they are very friendly to developers.
All of my video card money goes to Matrox. End of story. I won't waste my time with these half-assed, hostile companies like ATI and Nvidia. (Yeah, so I'm a little behind the curve on this whole "3D game" thing...;) I'm extremely happy that Matrox will produce a good 3D card! I have owned the Millenium II, Marvel G200, and G450 dualhead and been extremely happy with them all. Now I'm just waiting for the Marvel G1000!
Nah, you couldn't fly a helicopter at all in a low tunnel like that. When they're flying in the air you have an infinite volume of air above you to suck on and blow down to hold you up. In a tunnel, the air above you is very restricted. For the same blade rotation and pitch, you get a lot more lift in the tunnel. (It's a lot like ground-effect lift) So flying in the tunnel would cause you to quickly hit the ceiling. Maybe an expert pilot and a really big tunnel could handle it, but not at 45 degrees.
Well no, but there is a literary technique called Suspension of Disbelief. Authors create a self-consistent universe in which we accept the fact that certain things happen. In Star Trek they have transporters, in X-Men they have mutant powers, and in Star Wars Luke can use the Force. But in the case of a good movie/book, these things are clearly delineated, and have limits. Storm cannot, for instance, shoot lasers from her eyeballs because that's not one of her powers. Captain Picard can't transport the entire Enterprise across the galaxy because their transporters just can't do that.
On the other hand, a bad movie will violate their own rules (and/or other accepted rules like physics) when convenient to advance the plot. Tom Cruise jumping off the nose of a helicopter, which happens to be flying in a tunnel, and landing on the nose of a 200MPH train is my favorite example. Prior to this, we are not presented with a self-consistent universe in which Tom Cruise is part superman. He is just a regular guy. We are not told that he has adamantium bones, and therefore will not break every bone in his body when hitting a 200MPH train. We are not told that this is a special magical helicopter that can fly in tunnels without being sucked up to the ceiling. The scene was created solely for the purpose of advancing the plot, and is inconsistent, and sucks.
Many of the greatest novels/movies of all time have created a self-consistent universe, and then explored the limits of that universe. No, it doesn't match with our universe. Yes, they can do things that when taken out of context in and of themselves are incompatible with what we know. But, in general, we know about these "powers" before they are used, and new "powers" are not invented on the spot. When some new "power" is introduced, it is well explained, and becomes part of the universe. For example, using EMP pulses to kill the squiddies in The Matrix. The device has become part of the Matrix universe, and I imagine will be used in future movies with little explanation. Some examples of great universes: Dune, The Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Asimov's Robot novels (3 laws of robotics).
If you're going to violate laws of physics in particular, authors had better be prepared to create an entire universe with different laws of physics. Because as far as I know, you just can't do it. Physics is an accepted, implied characteristic of a universe, whether the author spells it out or not. There are only a handful of exceptions that we as audiences have come to accept. Namely: faster-than-light-travel and/or wormholes/hyperspace/stargates. But hey, I am a physicist, so maybe I'm biased.;)
Nah, like fast CD's. I like having my officemates think that I secretly have an F-15 under my desk. So what if we have to shout at each other whenever I'm installing software? Besides, the vibrations transmitted through my desk give me a good massage, and may be preventing me from getting carpal tunnel. The screen does vibrate too much for me to read it though. I had to pass up a flat screen though because I was afraid the CD-ROM would knock it over. And this CD-ROM is my secret way of getting back at the people in the machine shop upstairs from my office...
Oh, the speed is so you can read data faster, you say? Who cares? I was happy with 20x.
Nuclear power is not a clean source of energy as alleged in this article. The mining, production and disposal of nuclear material makes it one of the more dangerous forms of energy production.
How many people have died due to gasoline fires? Oil well mishaps? The fact that people can be harmed by a technology is not a good reason to not pursue the technology. As with everything, we must minimize the risk and get on with life. As you say, no human activity is 100% failsafe. We are now, and will continue to produce nuclear material. The amount of nuclear material used in rockets will be very small compared to the amount used in power plants worldwide.
Also, beyond the production and disposal of nuclear material, what happens when something goes wrong with the rocket itself? Could you imagine a nuclear version of the Challenger disaster?
A fundamental design requirement of any nuclear reactor is that it must survive re-entry intact. Nuclear fallout is simply unacceptable. Tests can be performed. Take the reaction vessel, fill it with a volatile liquid, and drop it out the ISS airlock. If none of the liquid escapes and the vessel is recovered intact, then it's good enough to house nuclear material.
Again, this is simply a design requirement, and not a good argument to stop all development of nuclear rockets.
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Think again, my friend. This may be the case for some of the oil we acquire, but our need for oil is much stronger than that...
For instance, our attempt to force a coup in Venezuela earlier this year, over oil. And most visibly, our attempt to construct a pipeline through Afghanistan, which required that we first dismantle its government. (There is evidince that a war in Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11/2001 -- we've wanted to get oil out of Turkmenistan for at least a decade)
Now whatever our disagreement with the Taliban, it is not our business to overthrow governments. (Admittedly, I would have cheered to see them fall, if they had fallen by the action of the Afghani people and not our imperialism) In Venezuela it was purely economic. They were planning an embargo that would have hurt the US economically. In Afghanistan we had a more convenient political excuse involving some airplanes or something. But it appears that the war was successful in its true goals.
Secondly, we should not be enforcing our contracts militarily. It is always in the best interest of small nations to control their resources. "Free trade" generally only helps the larger nation, and keeps the poorer one poor. So I cannot blame the Saudis for nationalizing their oil fields (though I do not know the situation that well). I will not defend the Saudi's too far though because a handful of Saudi princes have become absurdly wealthy off selling US oil, while oppressing the rest of the country. Since this is a situation that benefits the US we let it continue. Do not let the rhetoric about "spreading democracy" or the horrible things the Taliban did sway you, because Saudi Arabia is no better, yet we continue to support them.
-- Bob
How silly of me to think that.
Surely you are right, it is because we are Good(tm) and they are Bad(tm).
Your self-righteousness appalls me. People like you make me ashamed to call myself an American.
-- Bob
Everyone wants to quibble about how they think it's ok to be searched or technicalities of legal interpretation without even reading the fucking ammendment.
I think it's quite simple. Put air marshals (with guns) on the plane. Block off the cockpit from passenger access. Have walk-through, non-invasive bomb sniffers at airports (i.e. detect trace airborn quantities of explosive chemicals -- this can be done). If you detect explosives non-invasively, only then do you have probable cause to search that person. And most importantly, stop devastating entire regions of the world in the name of our economic imperialism. Would it really be that bad to pay $5/gallon for gas? Is that extra few dollars a gallon worth millions of lives?
Our leaders realize the oil supply is running out. The situation in obtaining oil is only going to get uglier. It's better to face the music now and put serious effort into alternatives.
-- Bob
The principles of this once grand republic have been long lost.
I can't wait until all these various violations are challenged in court. The cop-pulling-over-for-speeding example has been tested in court many times, and the circumstances under which a cop may search your car are clearly delineated, and you are given the opportunity to refuse.
If you refused at an airport you would be detained against your will. There have been numerous examples of this over the last year.
BTW you are not reading (or understanding) my arguments. Your arguments have been correct. (Except for me being wrong ;-) But do not address my arguments. I end this here. I made my point, re-read my original post.
-- Bob
Cool! Great idea!
However, the searches are done by federal employees working for a federal agency, under mandate by the federal government. In my view, this directly violates the 4th ammendment, which does not allow the government to do this.
To turn your argument around, YOU make the choice to leave the house every day. Before you leave the house you must inform your local sherrif so he can come over, pat you down, and ensure that you won't be walking the streets carrying a firearm. Would you consider that a volation of your rights? After all, you don't have to leave the house.
Today to have access to most (all?) federal buildings you must also submit to a search, again by the government, without warrant, in violation of the 4th ammendment.
Read the ammendment again. It says nothing about your choice to do diddly squat. The government simply is not granted the power to search you at its whim. The only arguing point about it is the definition of "unreasonable".
-- Bob
The argument "we must search you because you might have a bomb/gun/dildo" is a valid statement for any person, anywhere, any time, under any circumstances. It was also true at the time the constitution was written. Nonetheless, we have the 4th Ammendment.
Perhaps the solution is not in searching every person, everwhere, all the time, under all circumstances, but to address why we have created an entire subcontinent that wants us dead.
-- Bob
Some airlines in Europe won't let you use CD players, on the exact same aircraft used by US carriers that do let you use CD players.
They should treat us like intelligent human beings...but I digress...
If your walkman did interfere with the navigation system, they would probably ban them for the entire flight, as this article suggests for UWB devices. (and rightfully so, IMHO -- though I will be pissed if they tell me I can't bring my laptop) The FCC regulates the EM frequency spectrum for exactly this purpose...to prevent interference. The ILS in planes does not use the same frequencies as your cell phone. If random EM emission was a problem, they would never allow computers on board. (Do you have any idea how much EMF your average computer puts out? It's HUGE!)
The other thing to realize is that the head of the FAA is a political appointment. The person in that position has never had any experience with flying planes or security. This is why they thought asking you if you had unknown crap in your bag was an effective security measure.
-- Bob
The X-Prize is a $10 million prize to get 3 people to 100km twice within 2 weeks.
-- Bob
My computer is admittedly aging. I have a Matrox Marvel G200 video card and I record TV shows direct to disk, edit out the commercials and then re-encode them to mpeg2 or divx to burn on CD. At this moment I've got almost all of Farscape. Once upon a time I recorded all of Babylon 5 to videotape. Call me an eccentric collector of sci-fi. ;)
These newer Athlons/P4's should be able to record straight to MPEG4/DivX without an intermediate step which would seriously reduce the disk space and time required. My current computer takes about a day to encode a 1-hour show to mpeg2.
However I'm waiting for the dual Opteron systems to come out. That way I can also use my computer while it's recording/encoding.
Yeah, I could get a PVR, but then I would lose the ability to edit out commercials, and do you know any PVR's which use MPEG4 and can transfer shows off so I can burn them on CD?
I can't stand to watch regular TV anymore. About 3 seconds into the commercial I get bored and want to go do something else. Besides I don't like them telling me when I have to watch their show. I have better things to do. I'll watch it on my own time thank you. ;)
-- Bob
About the only way a company could reasonably pull off this kind of "removing GPL code" would be to forcibly remove the old codebase from the developers eyes. This is something that would cost them a lot of time and money in re-implementation. I don't think any company would do it. You'd also need a manager willing and able to find and remove the code. That must be hard to find...
Companies should realize if they get stuck in this situation, that it's better, in the long run, to contribute to the existing codebase and cooperate with the developers they're trying to steal from. The benefits of base of coders not employed by you improving your stuff for free far outweighs the benefits of having a closed-source implementation. I mean, what good does it to to have a proprietary implementation if there are 5 good open source ones out there? Closing the source doesn't buy you anything! It's not like they invented MPEG-4.!
-- Bob
-- Bob
Good luck to these guys.
-- Bob
Oh...wait...I forgot, dancing is evil.
What's the word on the funding cut? Is it political or have you guys exhausted the experiment's capability?
This is simply a fantastic experiment. The level of precision they have acheived is phenomenal, and they should all be commended for their efforts. The fact that the experiment was cancelled is a great tragedy. These kinds of experiments are a cheap way to look for new forms of matter. They won't tell you what the new matter is, but they will tell you it's there. They do this by very accurately measuring things that are easy to measure (like the muon's magnetic moment, or "g-2"), which are changed very slightly by the presence of new matter. The complimentary experiments are The Tevatron and The Large Hadron Collider which may be able to directly produce the new kinds of matter (if the new matter isn't too heavy) and thus identify it and study its properties.
From a theoretical point of view, it is very easy to "screw up" this measurement. That is to say, if you write down a new theory that has almost any kind of new matter, it gives a contribution to the muon's g-2. This is why there was so much excitement last year when they announced a deviation from the Standard Model. One must remember however that the community's accepted standard for a "discovery" is 5 standard deviations between the measurement and the prediction. The top quark discovery had more than 5 standard deviations signal over background. I cannot find numbers on their home page but it appears from their plot that their measurement is around 2 standard deviations.
Practically speaking, 2-standard deviation measurements pop up and then disappear all the time in physics. This is why we require the stringent "5-sigma" rule.
-- Bob
The reason some clearly-GPL modules get the "tainted" message is that it just took a while to propegate the GPL-licensed symbol to all modules. It does not affect the operation of the kernel in any way. (and again, has nothing to do with debian)
-- Bob
I think that is the most likely explanation. No civilizations make routine interstellar trips simply because it is so expensive.
-- Bob (hoping for another revolution in physics...)
Sure it's a useful piece of software. But it's an absolute pain in the ass, Wolfram is a paranoid bastard, and it's not worth half the price they ask for it. For my professional work, I choose Maple. Go away Wolfram and annoy someone else. I don't want to talk to you after I have legally purchased your product. It's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!
Remember dongles? The things you put on your serial port to keep you running Autocad on only one machine? Mathematica is one big software dongle.
--Bob
It's going to have to be reverse-engineered on these cards.
-- Bob
All of my video card money goes to Matrox. End of story. I won't waste my time with these half-assed, hostile companies like ATI and Nvidia. (Yeah, so I'm a little behind the curve on this whole "3D game" thing...;) I'm extremely happy that Matrox will produce a good 3D card! I have owned the Millenium II, Marvel G200, and G450 dualhead and been extremely happy with them all. Now I'm just waiting for the Marvel G1000!
--Bob
-- Bob
Well no, but there is a literary technique called Suspension of Disbelief. Authors create a self-consistent universe in which we accept the fact that certain things happen. In Star Trek they have transporters, in X-Men they have mutant powers, and in Star Wars Luke can use the Force. But in the case of a good movie/book, these things are clearly delineated, and have limits. Storm cannot, for instance, shoot lasers from her eyeballs because that's not one of her powers. Captain Picard can't transport the entire Enterprise across the galaxy because their transporters just can't do that.
On the other hand, a bad movie will violate their own rules (and/or other accepted rules like physics) when convenient to advance the plot. Tom Cruise jumping off the nose of a helicopter, which happens to be flying in a tunnel, and landing on the nose of a 200MPH train is my favorite example. Prior to this, we are not presented with a self-consistent universe in which Tom Cruise is part superman. He is just a regular guy. We are not told that he has adamantium bones, and therefore will not break every bone in his body when hitting a 200MPH train. We are not told that this is a special magical helicopter that can fly in tunnels without being sucked up to the ceiling. The scene was created solely for the purpose of advancing the plot, and is inconsistent, and sucks.
Many of the greatest novels/movies of all time have created a self-consistent universe, and then explored the limits of that universe. No, it doesn't match with our universe. Yes, they can do things that when taken out of context in and of themselves are incompatible with what we know. But, in general, we know about these "powers" before they are used, and new "powers" are not invented on the spot. When some new "power" is introduced, it is well explained, and becomes part of the universe. For example, using EMP pulses to kill the squiddies in The Matrix. The device has become part of the Matrix universe, and I imagine will be used in future movies with little explanation. Some examples of great universes: Dune, The Matrix, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Asimov's Robot novels (3 laws of robotics).
If you're going to violate laws of physics in particular, authors had better be prepared to create an entire universe with different laws of physics. Because as far as I know, you just can't do it. Physics is an accepted, implied characteristic of a universe, whether the author spells it out or not. There are only a handful of exceptions that we as audiences have come to accept. Namely: faster-than-light-travel and/or wormholes/hyperspace/stargates. But hey, I am a physicist, so maybe I'm biased. ;)
-- Bob
Oh, the speed is so you can read data faster, you say? Who cares? I was happy with 20x.
-- Bob
How many people have died due to gasoline fires? Oil well mishaps? The fact that people can be harmed by a technology is not a good reason to not pursue the technology. As with everything, we must minimize the risk and get on with life. As you say, no human activity is 100% failsafe. We are now, and will continue to produce nuclear material. The amount of nuclear material used in rockets will be very small compared to the amount used in power plants worldwide.
A fundamental design requirement of any nuclear reactor is that it must survive re-entry intact. Nuclear fallout is simply unacceptable. Tests can be performed. Take the reaction vessel, fill it with a volatile liquid, and drop it out the ISS airlock. If none of the liquid escapes and the vessel is recovered intact, then it's good enough to house nuclear material.Again, this is simply a design requirement, and not a good argument to stop all development of nuclear rockets.
-- Bob