del Toro would do better with the first one. Hes got more nuance than Abrams.

I'd preffer it to be:
Episode I: Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Episode II: Directed by J.J. Abrams
Episode III: Directed by Christopher Nolan

Because barring a completely different plot, I dont see how you could weave that many characters together and suck people into the world without being prepared to make an intricate, 3 hour remake of it so the story doesnt seem like a rushed hack job. Abrams would be about as good at Ep 1 with regards to being subtle about the political subplot as Michael Bay. Though... speaking of mr Bay. Ep 2 might be fun to watch his take of. I mean if anyone can make a massive robot fight scene fun, its Mr Bay.

Ive always wanted to see the diff output between the George Lucas version of Empire Strikes Back
and the Irvin Kershner version. Its well known they butted heads over the Carbon Freeze scene.
But that cant be the only one. He says that was the only disagrement they had, but was it
really the only time he and Lucas saw it differently. I imagine he must have made countless small
contributions to the movie and I always wanted to sit down with Kershner and ask him about what
he was given in the script and what he chose to shoot for so many scenes that I doubt that I'll ever
have answers from other people. Hes at one with the force now, so I wont have my chance to ask him directly
but I always look forward to more behind the scenes content from the archives, more so than any new movie or game set in the SW galaxy.

I know he wasnt as deeply involved in SW as Lucas was, but I always wanted to know where he left his marks on the movie. Even if my questions were answered with "actually that was George's idea"

The top guestions I wanted to ask Kershner:
1 - The 'I am your father' scene. I wanted him to disect and describe this pivotal moment more than any other.
2 - The Dinner, deception reveal and then the exchange between Vader and Lando. Was that exactly as scripted.
3 - When they are briefing the bounty hunters, were all their little quirks of behavior in the script as written or did you direct the actors & puppeters to create some personanilty.
4 - Was working with so many characters that lacked an emotive'face' challenging? what did you do to compensate where you couldnt get a facial expression in a shot?

What your looking for is Desura... and it has been on Linux for a while already. Its not a bad little App. Even plays nice with Steam by installing Mods so they show up in both Steam and Desura. Its become sortof a companion app to steam with more of a noDRM/Modder/Indy oriented crowd. Shame GOG dont team up with Desura or release their own Linux 'store app' since they could easily automate the wrapper processes for their apps since most just use DOSBox.

This is a Late reply I know... but I wanted to directly give you and any subsequent readers with similar questions, the proper answer.

NBC Suits are designed to protect against exposure to contaminants. These are designed to prevent liquid contaminants from skin contact, airborne gasses, liquid aerosols, and physical particulate aerosols (think airborne dust) contaminants from being inhaled, and lastly provide a protective barrier from contact against any dangerous physical material that must be handled.

The term NBC suit is more commonly used with regard to Military issue equipment, the term Hazmat Suit tends to be used for civilian equipment. Regardless both are considered standard Personal Protective Equipment with regards to a wide range of environmental hazards from simple chemical protection against acid or other highly toxic vapors to biological protection when dealing with medical waste, and the other major use is as protection against radiological & nuclear hazards. They come in grades for which there are 2 major standards the 4 grade US version and the 6 grade EU version.

Now the thing about the level of protection these suits can offer (not all types will protect from radiation) is in 2 areas, hazmat gear designed specifically to deal with nuclear/radioactive material will likely have some additional layers of shielding which will protect against alpha (if its thicker than paper it shields against alpha), likely protects from beta (tinfoil does a decent job), and may offer some reduction in exposure to lower energy gamma radiation, but this is usually not considered the primary benefit of wearing such gear in a 'hot zone' since skin exposure to alpha and beta radiation are stopped with minimal effort. The biggest reason to wear full hazmat gear which includes its own air supply, (US level A or B) is that there are a number of substances that are radioactive gasses which emit alpha and beta radiation, which if you inhaled them, would be irradiating (in the can cause cancer fashion) AND burning your lungs from the inside due to a type of radiation burns typically called 'beta burns' and they are a lot the kind of serious burns received from heat/fire.

Airborne radioactive gasses & particles, be they already in the air, or more commonly due to radiation induced embrittlement accelerating the creation of fine dust like particles they can be coating surfaces and when disturbed are dispersed into the air surrounding the person that disturbed the material.
By using this kind of protective clothing, they arent exposing themselves to surface and internal burns from radioactive gasses & airborne particulates. Which given the fact it takes 3 inches of lead to stop a gamma ray on average, means that you are providing the workers with as much protection as possible while still letting them do their work.

An area can be hazardously radioactive yet not have sufficient gamma radiation being produced by the contaminants to make humans working there impossible. These suits can block 2 of the 3 types of hazardous ionizing radiation, the ratio of alpha, beta and gamma radiation will depend on the isotopes contaminating the area, and so if the radioactive contamination isn't producing too much gamma radiation then these suits can make working in the area safe enough for people to work.

Those are 2 of the coolest air accident stories I have ever heard.... and I now have a mental picture of the SR-71 Blackbird disintegrating like in a cartoon, leaving the guy upright in his ejector seat looking round confused like Wile E Coyote after running off the edge of a cliff just before gravity kicks in.

This is contingent on the judges being cognizant of the systemic effects of the decision and basing a judgement on those effects being blatantly unreasonable.
If I'm not mistaken, they are meant to be deciding if that's what the law as passed by congress was meant to do or not.
Not if the outcome is potentially the start of the second american civil war.

Its a coin toss in my mind. Its easy to see both sides, one side appears to be a major plus for the profits & health of american companies and the economy as a whole, the other seems to be missing out on those advantages, however is better due to potentially unforeseen (by the judges) socioeconomic consequences implicit in not choosing this decision.

I would like to think the decision wont destroy first sale doctrine, however based on precedent in lower courts and the previous decision Omega S.A v. Costco Wholesale Corp. I see the distinct possibility that the court may decided in such a way as to subtly gut first use to the core for the entire USA and cause havoc and chaos.

On the other hand, nothing stops public economic pressure (car you can resell is worth more, and sells higher brand new, so 'first sale doctrine rights' may wind up like factory installed aircon and mag wheels as a little plus on luxury cars, and congress or state legislatures might try to mandate manufacturers of certain things such as cars to make their grant of sale rights a requirement for the products to be sold in a state. Such as the 'may cause cancer' warnings required by California.

I think the more fundamental question revolves around the difference between the rocket engines being 'fail-safe' and the rocket itself as a whole being 'fail-safe'.

The engines are clearly designed to be as fail-safe as they can make, complete with efforts to reduce the effect of an entire engine undergoing a violent, uncontrolled, rapid, exothermic dis-assembly. Its fail-safe in a unit test fashion.

The rocket as a whole however... is only partly fail-safe. Its designed to automatically react to faults (eg: that launch pad self abort), handle 2 dead engines and can as evidenced definitely handle 1 dead engine, its even designed to limit the impact of an engine exploding so it doesnt kill the other engines. There is a lot of work making sure individual failures dont destroy the rocket one way or another.
But once its airborne, I am not aware of any launch abort that qualifies for the term fail-safe (correct me if I'm wrong, I love knowing how awesome the guys at SpaceX are). Once the ignition takes place and its airborne, I am aware of only 4 possible final outcomes, none of which is truly fail-safe in terms of mission success (payload to orbit safe, payload in the air safe, or payload on the ground safe).

These only refer to the scenarios after liftoff. Pad auto abort is clearly a fail-safe state (barring the rocket exploding on the pad lol)
1 => Launch runs ok - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit, - No failure - Not fail-safe
2 => Launch successful, but with anomaly eg: 1 engine failure - 'the rocket' did not fail to place its payload in orbit - No failure - Not fail-safe
3 => Launch failure, rocket goes out of control kerbal style, destroys itself without outside intervention, eg: nosedives into the Atlantic or shreds itself while airborne, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe
4 => Launch failure, rocket suffers from an issue requiring the Launch Control team to initiate a self destruct abort, - 'the rocket' failed to place its payload in orbit - Failure - Not fail-safe

So while various parts are fail-safe I dont think we can qualify the rocket itself as fail-safe once its airborne, only while on the pad. Liftoff seems to be the moment the launch passes beyond the fail-safe point at present excluding the future possibilities of the planned powered reusable return stuff and the launch abort escape system which isn't used for regular satellite launches (would be awesome if it was, since normally its either orbit or explode for commercial satellites).

Just my thoughts.

Would love to read the PhD thesis, that sounds like some quality work. Do you have a citation I can look up?

... What a wonderful thing to learn after starting to learn Finish.
Finland +1, USA, -1

I really wish they would just test the damn 2 lump dumbbell configuration full size and be done with it already.
Bidgelow put up 2 inflatable stations big enough to have tested the situation extremely effectively. We just need them linked together with a mechanically appropriate truss to prove we can manage the mechanical stresses & resonances involved.

I want to go to space (proper, not suborbital) one day, and will do it if I can, even if its on the top of a giant controlled explosion, and even if I have to float around in a semi-nauseous state for the few days I get to spend up there. But I sure would like a more comfortable place to sleep up there, and I'm sure many of the other less committed, more rich types are likely to be partially curious till they get the first 'vomit comet' ride as part of training and discover they have less control over the way they react to unpleasant sensations from their vestibular system than they thought. These people may like having a little region of comfortable gravity to return to in order to avoid the urge to vomit profusely.

The rich types are creating a whole new market, and its going to be a lot more profitable for the people who can offer a 7 day stay where you wont want to vomit and can sleep properly.

Books you care about ( I have some books older than every living member of my family and every dead one I've met too. ) need airtight seals for shipping unless you know with certainty that they are being shipping in a climate controlled or at least fully air sealed and regularly cleaned container. Otherwise they will be exposed to a pretty impressive amount of weather which carries humidity and those containers also become home to a wonderful variety of mold and fungi in various stages of dormancy. Most of the things are harmless but will cause little problems like the yellowing you mentioned.

So the best solution is individual (to reduce the risk of damage affecting multiple items) ziplock bags with desiccant sachets to prevent internal condensation from heat in transit, and for items too big for regular ziplock bags you can place them in one of those vacuum suction 'space bag' type things and as above, plenty of desiccant.

Man, those were the days, posting as AC, back before I signed up, which was before the UID ever seemed important as a way of proving 'you were here when'.
Can we kick the DBA hard enough to dredge up these old relics? or are they truly gone?

I can easily see this actually having serious merit and I'm surprised its not being adequately explored, I say its not explored simply because you cant hide the thousands of full size planes required for this to work.
High efficiency propeller driven planes based on WW2 era designs with some minor modern improvements likely in materials & engines + Modern sensors + Drone AI/Remote control.
Picture 10000 highly maneuverable spitfires/mustangs/zeros armed with 1 or 2 modern missiles on each plane, could probably ditch the guns too since they wouldnt be as useful but that would need testing to determine the effectiveness of the coordinated fire of dozens of older robot planes vs a modern plane. each plane doesnt need more than 2 missiles since if your putting 12 or more robots up for every 1 actual fighter pilot the enemy had, then your able to distribute the missiles out and accept that you may lose 4 or 5 planes for each F-22, the remaining planes having plenty of time to target and launch on the F22 since they occupy more airspace, provide a greater range of forward orientation, and have a smaller turning circle, so as long as one plane of the formation (likely more could) can turn to track your enemies shiny F-22 fast enough (basic aerodynamics says they would be by virtue of relative stall speeds \, but i wont assume it 100% true they can turn fast enough) and that the planes sensors and the missiles sensors can track long enough that they can launch with reasonable accuracy.

Think of them like a cloud of flying sentry turrets that costs so little, that there are 50-100 of them with missiles, for every 1 plane your rocking up with...
I can see this standing a very very good chance against modern fighters.

The conflict between self interest in the face repercussions (in this case, severe ones should it be sufficiently misconstrued) and wanting to live up to your own morals and 'do whats right' is where I feel society is most warped by media interests and soundbyte talking head news shows feeding off fears and other base human emotion. Its why I pretty much dont watch the news anymore, I got sick of seeing the attempts to manipulate my view ... and I dont even live in America.

You shouldnt feel bad, in the situation 'non life threatening social kindness' vs 'shived in prison due to perception as likely child molester even if you werent convicted as such' ... its very hard to not hesitate if you felt it could literally threaten your life, which the parents reaction placed the increased fear of in your mind. Personally I would have asked them 2 things to their face while the police were present so they get it all in writing. "Why did you think less of me for not having my daughter home?" and "Would you have preferred I had just given your daughter a towel and umbrella and said 'sorry I wont let you in, I dont know what your mother might think'?"

This is why I think that while the concept of a sex offender registry and the restrictions to liberty it entails are useful, I feel that its use as a publicly listed socio-sexual 'no fly list' with no effective way to be removed is a flawed concept.
I'm not saying you can cure a pedophile, I'm just confused how they ignore the obvious things like 'drunk man takes dick out in public' gets a life sentence to the 'you touch kiddies club' that is the sex offender registry and didnt put in place a suitable method to fix such issues. He is obviously still guilty but clearly not of a deliberately sexual motivated offence thus the association between public indecency/public nudity and the sex offender list should not be upheld. Mens rea should be required for such a list to serve its proper purpose, identifying people who have deliberately acted on sexual urge or desires that make them a possible danger or serious threat to people in their community.
I'd want to know that Jane Doe abducted men, bound them so they couldnt escape and pissed on them while she masturbated, just as much as I want to know John Doe (no-relation) is a kiddy fiddler. What I dont give a damn about is that Mr Drinks-A-Lot, has a bit of an impulse control problem and thought that taking all his clothes off while utterly blind drunk was the easiest way to avoid getting any urine on them when he needed to take a leak at 2am on a Saturday morning.
The law can be remarkably stupid once lawmakers (elected officials, not judges and lawyers who just do their jobs) get involved.