Yeah, I know it's an old complaint, but the only thing that's kept me from switching for the last few years has been the price. I only got an iPod in December, and that's not really a factor at all.
And yeah, I know, Mac mini. It's neat, but it's still overpriced relative to comparable PC gear (and the 1GB models are backordered bigtime, I hear).
At any rate, I also can't see the Mac replacing my main workstation's functionality (Debian development platform) or my Windows box's functionality (games). I guess it's a niche product that I don't have a niche for.
O'Brien was one of the core characters from the start and makes his first appearance as a regular in the series pilot. (Ro was also supposed to be, but Michelle Forbes flaked, which is why she wasn't banned from TNG until they finally let up in the 7th season. You didn't think the bitchy Bajoran woman was a coincidence, did you?:)
Babylon 5's pilot aired all of a month after DS9's pilot, with the regular run beginning a year after. By the time the first regular episode of B5 aired, DS9 had already kicked off some major plot threads (other than the obvious one [Odo's origins], the Opaka/Winn/Barial stuff and the first hints at the Dominion). The Dominion first appeared in November 1993, two months ahead of B5's first regular episode. I will grant that the Klingon skirmish was probably a way to kill time while they figured out the Dominion stuff, while simultaneously bringing in viewers with something familiar.
Ira Steven Behr may not have planned everything out the way J. Michael Straczynski did, and B5 certainly influenced DS9, but to say that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 is a bit disingenuous. Certainly some things were cribbed from B5, but I recall seeing a lot of things on B5 that made me think "oh, I see JMS is keeping up with Behr."
And yeah, I have all the DVDs of both series and have watched them backwards and forwards. It seems to me that the mid-late '90s were a golden age for TV scifi fans as we reaped the benefits of an arms race between B5 and DS9.
We certainly seem to agree on one thing, though -- Berman's ignoring DS9 and giving Behr free reign was a wondeful thing.
You may now award me geek points (and subtract from girlfriend points as appropriate)...
Ira Steven Behr had far more to do with that story arc than Berman did. Berman was busy with his baby, Voyager; he wasn't very interested in DS9 with its "boring" space station and, you know, characters. (No, I don't have a cite, but it's been at least seven years since I read about Berman saying he preferred the starship-based exploration-type stuff on Voyager; I guess you'll just have to take my word for it:).
Of course, the arms race between IRB and JMS sure didn't hurt. As I understand it, JMS had the general plot overviews for each season already sketched out, but filled them in a season at a time when he sat down before one to map it out in detail. It seems like DS9 and B5 both stole from each other, and I'm so glad because they both were great shows for it.
And, just for the record, I agree: DS9 was the best Trek ever. TNG was very good after its shaky first seasons, but DS9 was just fantastic.
Sounds like too much fan service to me. The whole benefit to doing a movie of a show that was on the air for several years and had a devoted following is that you don't have to expend too much time developing a dynamic between characters and making them interesting. This means, if it's a good movie, that we can get straight to the plot and how it affects/changes the characters -- i.e. the good stuff.
AFAIK, seedless watermelons and the like are simply bred to start producing seeds much later in life than normal. The problem with something that never produces seeds is that you're only ever going to get a single generation out of it (and how the *hell* are you going to sell it as a seed, for that matter?)
Besides, a contract that you have actually signed is rather a different thing than a click-through agreement. Signing your name to anything you have not read is pretty boneheaded, and I've been known to make people wait for quite some time while I read everything I'm about to sign my name to. The guy had the option of simply not signing the contract, i.e. not buying the seeds. In a case like this, where the contract is basically essential to the continued existence of his business, he has no excuse for not paying a lawyer a few bucks to read it.
With all of that said, the article (yes, I actually RTFAed) also mentioned one guy getting eight months in *prison*. Now, call me crazy, but shouldn't that be a purely civil matter? How in the hell does one go to prison for violating a civil contract?
... Except that if you read the rest of the article, it wasn't particularly secret.
Mr. Moulitsas said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
Corporate misconduct tends to be the fault of individuals rather than the entire corporation, though. That would be akin to putting an entire family in jail because Junior knocked over a bank.
I'll skip the political aspects because debating politics, especially online, is akin to pissing in the wind. However, everything I've read about the new crop of hybrids (like the '04 Civic and the '05 Accord and Escape) has suggested that they are most definitely ready for prime-time. The Accord hybrid has, according to Car and Driver, better acceleration numbers than the V-6 model (to say nothing of the 4-banger), and gets far better mileage both in the EPA ratings and in the real world. And, of course, spews far less tailpipe junk.
I've got a 4x160GB SATA software RAID-5 array (about 450Gb usable) serving up files on my home network right now, running under the 2.6 kernel.
These drives are all crammed into an old Dell that was my Wintendo a couple of years ago. A few months back, the grilles on the drive-bay coolers I installed got clogged up and I lost one of the drives to overheating. Upon replacing the drive, the rebuild took the better part of an evening (but didn't need to be attended). No lost or corrupt data.
The only major problem I had was that the RAID was dirty in addition to being degraded (insert "your mom" joke here), because I brought my machine down hard before realizing what was going on. In theory, I could have done a raidhotremove on the bogus drive and brought things down normally
I ended up having to do some twiddling to get it to rebuild the dirty+degraded array. I don't remember what that was, but as long as you don't do something boneheaded like ignore kern.log messages about write errors to a specific drive, get annoyed that it's taking so long to cleanly unmount the filesystem, and hard-reset the box, that shouldn't be an issue:).
Grew up there, didn't think there even was a damn tech community there. To put things into perspective, I thought Cleveland was nice after a decade in El Paso.
Here's a thought: do your DNSBL check before your SPF check. You know the sending IP before you know the MAIL FROM: anyway, and there's nothing in the SPF spec that says you should accept mail just because it passes. It's assumed that spammers will start registering their own domains so they can do SPF-valid emailings. Now maybe we'll know how to get ahold of the scumbags and hold them responsible. Even if not, though, at least they won't be sullying my name.
As for wasted bandwidth, I'm not sure this is much more of an impact than, say, a PTR lookup on every incoming connection -- which most MTAs do. DNS is heavily cached, and TXT records have TTLs, too.
At any rate, this already has more momentum behind it than most people realize it. Big companies are on board, small shops are on board (as it happens, I'm involved from both sides), and maybe I'm just anal-retentive, but I set up SMTP AUTH on the servers I provide and share w/friends years ago, anyway, and made everyone start using it, and next time some jackass spams three million Hotmail users using my email address, maybe Hotmail won't send 200k bounces to me. That, frankly, would make setting up SMTP AUTH, publishing records, and compiling the Milter app to do checks 100% worth it for me.
It's going to be quite some time before anyone starts rejecting mail simply because of the nonexistence of SPF records
It's going to be a long time before anyone is penalized for *not* publishing SPF, and in the meantime, it can seriously cut down on spoofing. The spec does not define the lack of SPF records as a failure; a failed SPF check happens when the published SPF records do not say that this host/sender combination are permitted. Not publishing will get you "Received-SPF: none", and that's about it.
In fact, it will be advantageous to spammers to start spoofing large ISPs via SPF. The only way to stop spammers from exploiting wide SPF holes will be to filter port 25 traffic from unauthorized IP space, which will do more to stop spamming and worm propagation than SPF.
Most ISPs will not be authorizing their entire IP space to send mail from their domain name, but rather, just their own MTAs. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised to see a new breed of DNSBLs crop up containing providers with intentionally over-broad or otherwise bad or pointless SPF records (+all, anyone?).
SPF isn't going to stop spam, but it can and will prevent spoofing, making the spammers more accountable and preventing bounces to otherwise innocent parties who've been spoofed in a spam attack.
There is no magic bullet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what steps we can. You don't win a war by waiting until you've developed the ultimate weapon before you even begin fighting. Hell, even with the ultimate weapon at the end of WWII, the US still had to do a significant amount of fighting before they were even in a position to use it.
You take what you have into battle and you win the battles, one at a time. Stopping spam is a war, and spoofing is another battlefield.
I guess DNSBLs should also be boycotted, huh? After all, their use prevents broken, misconfigured, or untrustworthy servers from making direct SMTP connections, and apparently, that's not in the spirit of the Internet. Nor, for that matter, is having your ISP put in packet filter rules next time you get DoSed. Wouldn't want to stop traffic from a source that might conceivably someday send something legit.
Quit with the knee-jerk "THIS IS DIFFERENT!!!!" reaction already. It's going to be quite some time before anyone starts rejecting mail simply because of the nonexistence of SPF records, and in the meantime it has more potential to curb email spoofing than anything out there that's currently viable.
All this does is add accountability, and that is a Good Thing(tm).
Frankly, that article is probably one of the better ones I've seen in the mainstream press. It gets the facts right and I certainly didn't read any support for SCO's claims into it -- they merely stated that such a concern exists. It does. No matter how meritless we all know SCO's claims to be, corporate America must at least be aware of these sorts of things. The article says that the claims exist and insinuates that others could make similar claims in the future, and that's factually correct.
The part about warranties bugs me, though, since I'm 99% sure that the last Windows EULA I read also offered no warranties. They're still pretty on the mark with the possible concerns there, though.
At any rate, it looks like an interesting article to send to less-savvy friends and relatives who wonder about this open-source stuff you're always on about...
Seems to me that Apache and Sendmail are pretty likely to have prior art on anything important that also happens to be implemented on IIS or Exchange, given that both were fairly entrenched at a time when Microsoft still considered the Internet to be a passing fad. I suppose they may have bought some patents somewhere, but it still seems like a pretty remote chance.
Not only that, but those two aren't even licensed under the GPL, which is ostensibly the target here.
This all sounds vaguely like something this Gary Campbell fellow pulled out of his ass...
Why bother? Berman and Braga already neutered the Borg anyway. If the last half of Voyager is any indication, all they need to do is bring Admiral (*gag*) Janeway out to modulate the field density and penetrate the shields, or something.
No, the Borg are just as ruined as most of the rest of the franchise at this point, and cramming all the casts into one movie screams of a pitiful attempt at fan service: "We can't deliver a decent movie, so we're just gonna throw characters at you; one of these must be your favorite!"
As many others have said, Trek needs a long break. With any luck, it'll be able to lie dormant until Rick Berman dies a horrible death.
> To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
Good job, genius; you've now proved to the entire Slashdot readership that you're a moron. Might want to limit the editorialization in future submissions.
If the Apple AAC DRM being cracked pushes people towards WMV, then that's fine. I give it six months to a year from the time when someone with sales figures worth mentioning (i.e. demand for product) actually starts using WMV with DRM until it's cracked. There's simply more impetus to crack iTunes's DRM right now because nobody gives a rat's ass about the guys selling WMV.
As for the implications of the story itself, frankly, this is *more* likely to make me shop at the iTunes store. I can't play DRMed files (in ANY format) on my hard-drive-based car MP3 player and I'm not going to spend money for a downloadable file that I have to burn to CD and re-rip just to use. I rarely want just singles anyway, so at that point, what's the goddamn point buying a downloadable version? Give me something I can strip the restrictions off of and slap onto the hard drive under my seat, and we might talk. If six, seven, maybe more years of MP3 haven't killed the music industry, this sure as hell isn't going to.
I guess I'm preaching to the choir here, so I'll address this to the record companies: the real answer is for you to see the writing on the wall and do something INNOVATIVE for a change to keep yourselves operating. You can keep whining to your paid-for politicians and getting more restrictive laws passed, but the consumer backlash will kill your business long before the laws could turn the tide.
The file-sharing genie is out of the bottle and no amount of legal measures will ever get it back in. Embrace it by using it as a marketing tool like you do radio, music videos, etc. or you're basically going to whine yourselves into irrelevance.
But the "artificial gravity" only has to work in one direction, namely towards the deckplates, while the inertial dampers have to work in every direction to account for the ship's movement in 3D space. It seems like there would be advantages to separating them into two systems, thereby keeping the inertial dampers from having to worry about ALSO accounting for which direction is "down". Their job is hard enough, which could explain why they're so prone to partial, I guess. I can't imagine that we've ever seen a complete failure of inertial dampers, as that would basically mean the death of anyone aboard if even a fraction of the engines' power were used under such circumstances.
Additionally, I suppose, the artificial gravity could be a much simpler system since its task is both simpler and less critical (people don't splat against bulkheads at significant fractions of C when the artificial gravity fails and, presumably, the inertial dampers could help out SOME, i.e. keeping the poor crew from being tossed against the floor and ceiling). In other words, similar principles but separate systems.
Aside from the above hypotheses, there's also the fact that the TNG tech manual clearly indicated separate artificial gravity generators and inertial dampers, and I've definitely heard them referred to separately on the various shows and movies.
Now that I've earned my Comic Book Guy points for the day, I guess it's back to work...
Those are two separate things. The artificial gravity is, well, artificial gravity. It holds the people to the deckplates and etc. The inertial dampers are the magic forcefields that keep people from going "splat" against a wall during 50G maneuvers, and yes, those do seem pretty unreliable.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know it's an old complaint, but the only thing that's kept me from switching for the last few years has been the price. I only got an iPod in December, and that's not really a factor at all.
And yeah, I know, Mac mini. It's neat, but it's still overpriced relative to comparable PC gear (and the 1GB models are backordered bigtime, I hear).
At any rate, I also can't see the Mac replacing my main workstation's functionality (Debian development platform) or my Windows box's functionality (games). I guess it's a niche product that I don't have a niche for.
Your timelines are pretty fucked-up.
:)
O'Brien was one of the core characters from the start and makes his first appearance as a regular in the series pilot. (Ro was also supposed to be, but Michelle Forbes flaked, which is why she wasn't banned from TNG until they finally let up in the 7th season. You didn't think the bitchy Bajoran woman was a coincidence, did you?
Babylon 5's pilot aired all of a month after DS9's pilot, with the regular run beginning a year after. By the time the first regular episode of B5 aired, DS9 had already kicked off some major plot threads (other than the obvious one [Odo's origins], the Opaka/Winn/Barial stuff and the first hints at the Dominion). The Dominion first appeared in November 1993, two months ahead of B5's first regular episode. I will grant that the Klingon skirmish was probably a way to kill time while they figured out the Dominion stuff, while simultaneously bringing in viewers with something familiar.
Ira Steven Behr may not have planned everything out the way J. Michael Straczynski did, and B5 certainly influenced DS9, but to say that DS9 was a ripoff of B5 is a bit disingenuous. Certainly some things were cribbed from B5, but I recall seeing a lot of things on B5 that made me think "oh, I see JMS is keeping up with Behr."
And yeah, I have all the DVDs of both series and have watched them backwards and forwards. It seems to me that the mid-late '90s were a golden age for TV scifi fans as we reaped the benefits of an arms race between B5 and DS9.
We certainly seem to agree on one thing, though -- Berman's ignoring DS9 and giving Behr free reign was a wondeful thing.
You may now award me geek points (and subtract from girlfriend points as appropriate)...
Errrr. s/IRB/ISB/
Ira Steven Behr had far more to do with that story arc than Berman did. Berman was busy with his baby, Voyager; he wasn't very interested in DS9 with its "boring" space station and, you know, characters. (No, I don't have a cite, but it's been at least seven years since I read about Berman saying he preferred the starship-based exploration-type stuff on Voyager; I guess you'll just have to take my word for it :).
Of course, the arms race between IRB and JMS sure didn't hurt. As I understand it, JMS had the general plot overviews for each season already sketched out, but filled them in a season at a time when he sat down before one to map it out in detail. It seems like DS9 and B5 both stole from each other, and I'm so glad because they both were great shows for it.
And, just for the record, I agree: DS9 was the best Trek ever. TNG was very good after its shaky first seasons, but DS9 was just fantastic.
Sounds like too much fan service to me. The whole benefit to doing a movie of a show that was on the air for several years and had a devoted following is that you don't have to expend too much time developing a dynamic between characters and making them interesting. This means, if it's a good movie, that we can get straight to the plot and how it affects/changes the characters -- i.e. the good stuff.
AFAIK, seedless watermelons and the like are simply bred to start producing seeds much later in life than normal. The problem with something that never produces seeds is that you're only ever going to get a single generation out of it (and how the *hell* are you going to sell it as a seed, for that matter?)
Besides, a contract that you have actually signed is rather a different thing than a click-through agreement. Signing your name to anything you have not read is pretty boneheaded, and I've been known to make people wait for quite some time while I read everything I'm about to sign my name to. The guy had the option of simply not signing the contract, i.e. not buying the seeds. In a case like this, where the contract is basically essential to the continued existence of his business, he has no excuse for not paying a lawyer a few bucks to read it.
With all of that said, the article (yes, I actually RTFAed) also mentioned one guy getting eight months in *prison*. Now, call me crazy, but shouldn't that be a purely civil matter? How in the hell does one go to prison for violating a civil contract?
... Except that if you read the rest of the article, it wasn't particularly secret.
Mr. Moulitsas said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
Corporate misconduct tends to be the fault of individuals rather than the entire corporation, though. That would be akin to putting an entire family in jail because Junior knocked over a bank.
I'll skip the political aspects because debating politics, especially online, is akin to pissing in the wind. However, everything I've read about the new crop of hybrids (like the '04 Civic and the '05 Accord and Escape) has suggested that they are most definitely ready for prime-time. The Accord hybrid has, according to Car and Driver, better acceleration numbers than the V-6 model (to say nothing of the 4-banger), and gets far better mileage both in the EPA ratings and in the real world. And, of course, spews far less tailpipe junk.
I'm not. :)
Of course, you don't exactly know me...
I've got a 4x160GB SATA software RAID-5 array (about 450Gb usable) serving up files on my home network right now, running under the 2.6 kernel.
:).
These drives are all crammed into an old Dell that was my Wintendo a couple of years ago. A few months back, the grilles on the drive-bay coolers I installed got clogged up and I lost one of the drives to overheating. Upon replacing the drive, the rebuild took the better part of an evening (but didn't need to be attended). No lost or corrupt data.
The only major problem I had was that the RAID was dirty in addition to being degraded (insert "your mom" joke here), because I brought my machine down hard before realizing what was going on. In theory, I could have done a raidhotremove on the bogus drive and brought things down normally
I ended up having to do some twiddling to get it to rebuild the dirty+degraded array. I don't remember what that was, but as long as you don't do something boneheaded like ignore kern.log messages about write errors to a specific drive, get annoyed that it's taking so long to cleanly unmount the filesystem, and hard-reset the box, that shouldn't be an issue
It was de-terraformed?
Grew up there, didn't think there even was a damn tech community there. To put things into perspective, I thought Cleveland was nice after a decade in El Paso.
Here's a thought: do your DNSBL check before your SPF check. You know the sending IP before you know the MAIL FROM: anyway, and there's nothing in the SPF spec that says you should accept mail just because it passes. It's assumed that spammers will start registering their own domains so they can do SPF-valid emailings. Now maybe we'll know how to get ahold of the scumbags and hold them responsible. Even if not, though, at least they won't be sullying my name.
As for wasted bandwidth, I'm not sure this is much more of an impact than, say, a PTR lookup on every incoming connection -- which most MTAs do. DNS is heavily cached, and TXT records have TTLs, too.
At any rate, this already has more momentum behind it than most people realize it. Big companies are on board, small shops are on board (as it happens, I'm involved from both sides), and maybe I'm just anal-retentive, but I set up SMTP AUTH on the servers I provide and share w/friends years ago, anyway, and made everyone start using it, and next time some jackass spams three million Hotmail users using my email address, maybe Hotmail won't send 200k bounces to me. That, frankly, would make setting up SMTP AUTH, publishing records, and compiling the Milter app to do checks 100% worth it for me.
It's going to be a long time before anyone is penalized for *not* publishing SPF, and in the meantime, it can seriously cut down on spoofing. The spec does not define the lack of SPF records as a failure; a failed SPF check happens when the published SPF records do not say that this host/sender combination are permitted. Not publishing will get you "Received-SPF: none", and that's about it.
Most ISPs will not be authorizing their entire IP space to send mail from their domain name, but rather, just their own MTAs. For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised to see a new breed of DNSBLs crop up containing providers with intentionally over-broad or otherwise bad or pointless SPF records (+all, anyone?).
SPF isn't going to stop spam, but it can and will prevent spoofing, making the spammers more accountable and preventing bounces to otherwise innocent parties who've been spoofed in a spam attack.
There is no magic bullet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take what steps we can. You don't win a war by waiting until you've developed the ultimate weapon before you even begin fighting. Hell, even with the ultimate weapon at the end of WWII, the US still had to do a significant amount of fighting before they were even in a position to use it.
You take what you have into battle and you win the battles, one at a time. Stopping spam is a war, and spoofing is another battlefield.
I guess DNSBLs should also be boycotted, huh? After all, their use prevents broken, misconfigured, or untrustworthy servers from making direct SMTP connections, and apparently, that's not in the spirit of the Internet. Nor, for that matter, is having your ISP put in packet filter rules next time you get DoSed. Wouldn't want to stop traffic from a source that might conceivably someday send something legit.
Quit with the knee-jerk "THIS IS DIFFERENT!!!!" reaction already. It's going to be quite some time before anyone starts rejecting mail simply because of the nonexistence of SPF records, and in the meantime it has more potential to curb email spoofing than anything out there that's currently viable.
All this does is add accountability, and that is a Good Thing(tm).
Frankly, that article is probably one of the better ones I've seen in the mainstream press. It gets the facts right and I certainly didn't read any support for SCO's claims into it -- they merely stated that such a concern exists. It does. No matter how meritless we all know SCO's claims to be, corporate America must at least be aware of these sorts of things. The article says that the claims exist and insinuates that others could make similar claims in the future, and that's factually correct.
The part about warranties bugs me, though, since I'm 99% sure that the last Windows EULA I read also offered no warranties. They're still pretty on the mark with the possible concerns there, though.
At any rate, it looks like an interesting article to send to less-savvy friends and relatives who wonder about this open-source stuff you're always on about...
Seems to me that Apache and Sendmail are pretty likely to have prior art on anything important that also happens to be implemented on IIS or Exchange, given that both were fairly entrenched at a time when Microsoft still considered the Internet to be a passing fad. I suppose they may have bought some patents somewhere, but it still seems like a pretty remote chance.
Not only that, but those two aren't even licensed under the GPL, which is ostensibly the target here.
This all sounds vaguely like something this Gary Campbell fellow pulled out of his ass...
That is impossible, we are the Mooninites!
Yes.
Why bother? Berman and Braga already neutered the Borg anyway. If the last half of Voyager is any indication, all they need to do is bring Admiral (*gag*) Janeway out to modulate the field density and penetrate the shields, or something.
No, the Borg are just as ruined as most of the rest of the franchise at this point, and cramming all the casts into one movie screams of a pitiful attempt at fan service: "We can't deliver a decent movie, so we're just gonna throw characters at you; one of these must be your favorite!"
As many others have said, Trek needs a long break. With any luck, it'll be able to lie dormant until Rick Berman dies a horrible death.
> To me the authors are vandals not revolutionaries, and may have ensured WMA becomes the standard.
Good job, genius; you've now proved to the entire Slashdot readership that you're a moron. Might want to limit the editorialization in future submissions.
If the Apple AAC DRM being cracked pushes people towards WMV, then that's fine. I give it six months to a year from the time when someone with sales figures worth mentioning (i.e. demand for product) actually starts using WMV with DRM until it's cracked. There's simply more impetus to crack iTunes's DRM right now because nobody gives a rat's ass about the guys selling WMV.
As for the implications of the story itself, frankly, this is *more* likely to make me shop at the iTunes store. I can't play DRMed files (in ANY format) on my hard-drive-based car MP3 player and I'm not going to spend money for a downloadable file that I have to burn to CD and re-rip just to use. I rarely want just singles anyway, so at that point, what's the goddamn point buying a downloadable version? Give me something I can strip the restrictions off of and slap onto the hard drive under my seat, and we might talk. If six, seven, maybe more years of MP3 haven't killed the music industry, this sure as hell isn't going to.
I guess I'm preaching to the choir here, so I'll address this to the record companies: the real answer is for you to see the writing on the wall and do something INNOVATIVE for a change to keep yourselves operating. You can keep whining to your paid-for politicians and getting more restrictive laws passed, but the consumer backlash will kill your business long before the laws could turn the tide.
The file-sharing genie is out of the bottle and no amount of legal measures will ever get it back in. Embrace it by using it as a marketing tool like you do radio, music videos, etc. or you're basically going to whine yourselves into irrelevance.
</soapbox>
But the "artificial gravity" only has to work in one direction, namely towards the deckplates, while the inertial dampers have to work in every direction to account for the ship's movement in 3D space. It seems like there would be advantages to separating them into two systems, thereby keeping the inertial dampers from having to worry about ALSO accounting for which direction is "down". Their job is hard enough, which could explain why they're so prone to partial, I guess. I can't imagine that we've ever seen a complete failure of inertial dampers, as that would basically mean the death of anyone aboard if even a fraction of the engines' power were used under such circumstances.
Additionally, I suppose, the artificial gravity could be a much simpler system since its task is both simpler and less critical (people don't splat against bulkheads at significant fractions of C when the artificial gravity fails and, presumably, the inertial dampers could help out SOME, i.e. keeping the poor crew from being tossed against the floor and ceiling). In other words, similar principles but separate systems.
Aside from the above hypotheses, there's also the fact that the TNG tech manual clearly indicated separate artificial gravity generators and inertial dampers, and I've definitely heard them referred to separately on the various shows and movies.
Now that I've earned my Comic Book Guy points for the day, I guess it's back to work...
Ugh, I'm gonna hate myself for knowing this...
:)
Those are two separate things. The artificial gravity is, well, artificial gravity. It holds the people to the deckplates and etc. The inertial dampers are the magic forcefields that keep people from going "splat" against a wall during 50G maneuvers, and yes, those do seem pretty unreliable.
Except, of course, that you can no longer moderate this thread... :)