...for Moffat's job at IBM.

I agree. The guy I was replying to was using it as his tag line and it was the first time I'd heard it. It wouldn't really surprise me, though, to find it was true.

I just did a quick Google search on the quote and found the following. Don't know if it's true or not, but it makes for good reading.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/ghwbush.htm

Nope, I'm not thinking myself in circles, just pointing out a plot device that I see as a plot hole. It's obviously not the first Ancient ship to travel through that part of space because it connected to a local stargate at the end of the pilot. It was even commented on that ships had been sent ahead to scout good planets and manufacture/place said stargates. Maybe they're trying to imply that the Ancients were so arrogant as to assume their stuff never breaks (possible), but I think it was just a case of Hollywood writers reaching into a bag to pull out ideas that they haven't thought through properly. Kind of like the "...one shot stuns, two shots kill and three shots disintegrate..." bit with the zat guns. They even made fun of themselves over that one in a later episode.

"...Having a ship full of ancient repair robots would be weird since I don't think we've ever seen anything similar..."

By your reasoning there should have been no Kenos either because something that useful should have been all over Atlantis. :D

I found the pilot interesting and will definitely give the show a chance, but I saw too little Stargate and far too much BSG in it for my liking.

"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush

I knew there was a reason I never liked that guy.
- card-carrying atheist, and proud of it

They made a big deal out of the ship "waking up" during the opening credits. My guess is that things like life support were shut down until the ship detected someone trying to connect to the gate.

My big complaint about the plot is that any race planning to send an automated ship on a multi-thousand year trip with no crew would surely have built some kind of automated repair system. Where are the little R2D2-equivalents that should be running around patching stuff? Maybe something similar to replicators, but carrying containers of goo that can be turned into spare parts as needed.

I've come across sites that seem to post only good reviews (which always makes me suspicious), and sites that choose to sort owner comments by number of "stars" given so that the good comments bubble to the top. It's always best to check product reviews from multiple sources before buying.

"100 degrees Fahrenheit is not "pretty hot" - it's the temperature water BOILS AT..."

Ummmm, no. Water boils at 212F (100C).

...but I definitely see the need for a special Medic Alert badge for this.

Another disclaimer...I WAS an IBM'r until fairly recently.

I truly hope they have updated Symphony. The version that I tried a few months back was based on Open Office, but was at least two generations behind (was a late 1.x or early 2.x core) and was total crap compared to OO 3.x. To add insult to injury, they had it integrated with the Notes 8 interface. Opening a spreadsheet or document would bring it up in Notes instead of a separate window. There were options to change that behavior, but based on how poorly the app ran to begin with I opted to change the file associations to just point to the newer OO. The combination of Notes + Symphony absolutely killed my four year old T42 laptop, even with 2 GB RAM installed. It took nearly a gig of RAM just to boot up in the morning, and the CPU would occasionally spike and hang at 100%, something that could be traced back directly to Notes + Symphony.

(I was a long time IBM'r until the Spring cullings...)

There are install packages on ISSI, but if you read the fine print it states that you have to get a license key through the proper channels. You can install it all day long but it won't work without a key.

You're not the only one, but I suspect we're a dying breed. I don't have a facebook account, or a twitter account, or any other social networking crap account. Heck, I even refuse to get those stupid store discount cards. True, they might save me a buck or two occasionally, but I don't want people tracking what I do, what I think or what I buy.

Thanks for clarifying that. I have limited experience with Vista (just enough to know that it's a pile of crap) and haven't dug into Server 2008 enough to realize that PAE had been disabled. XP and Win2k3 are still my primary Windows environments.

The 32-bit x86 CPUs can only access 2^32 bytes (4 GB) of physical memory. Windows and other OS's implemented work arounds like PAE (Physical Address Extension) which allowed the kernel to reserve part of physical RAM to use like a disk paging file. PAE worked, in a way, but the overhead of moving bits of memory from higher addresses to lower addresses (so the CPU could access the contents) and back was hardly worth the effort. Calling this a "licensing issue" is complete BS.

I agree on the short life span of most current lithium based batteries, but the high cost is mostly due to the fact that every manufacturer designs a new battery for almost each new device, therefore making them relatively short-run production items. Spare batteries for laptops, cell phones, etc are high profit items. They don't want them standardized to the point that you could go to the corner shop and pick up a Duracell or Energizer equivalent.

The auto industry needs to standardize on a small handful of basic battery units (the fewer the better), then build up the packs as needed. When a traditional lead-acid car battery goes bad it's usually a single cell, not the entire battery, but because they're so small it's easier to replace it as a whole. The typical electric car will require a suitcase-to-steamer trunk sized battery pack which just isn't practical to replace in its entirety. Better to design it around the multi-cell model, then the local garage can identify and replace small standardized units as needed.

Once production is ramped up on standardized units then prices will come way down.