My question is, which book or movie in the science fiction genre is the most accurate and closest to actual science, or the events in the work is the most plausible or likely to happen? For example, H.G. Wells predicted the development of nuclear weapons in The World Set Free, of which actually did happen two decades after its publication.
I think H.G. Wells, other classic, The Time Machine, is also pretty plausible, that the human race would probably de-evolve into a race such as the Eloi due to human politics, technology and art.

How about 2001: A Space Odyssey. I thought that the technology in that movie was more realistic compared to many other science fiction movies.

Why are Mac users snubbed by so many projects? I looked at GridRepublic....no Mac support, but all the screen shots of BOINC projects are shown on an iMac G5. Quite confused. Climate/BBC have completely snubbed Mac's.
I remember Linux being so alien to some folks for so many years, but now it seems Mac's are on the way out. even the addon's for projects are lacking so much for Macs. Anyone wanna buy my Mac?

Hi all,

In the not too distant past, I was thinking (Yeah, I know….dangerous!) that apart from SETI@Home and any other BOINC/distributed computing projects, will anybody do anything for nothing anymore?? All sense of community spirit seems to have been lost! (Well, over this side of the pond it has!)

So…..as an attempt to ‘restore’ some community spirit, I have set up a completely FREE to use, no catch (I promise), international classifieds directory, so people can buy and sell their things online for FREE. This is not intended as a commercial message, but that of an informative one that I hope you all may find useful, and help, once again, to bring a sense of community back!

Please visit FlogIt4Free.com – there might be stuff just dying to be turned into a crunching farm!

Thanks,

Jonathan

If we were to build one, might we not wish to conceal ourselves and perhaps build within a nebular or some other obscuring gas cloud that could mask the infrared leakage?

Well and like I said above... the sheer denisity of something like a Dyson's Sphear would produce a huge dint in space time. I would think that factor alone would actully make finding one easyer.

Personally, I have always thought of the space shuttle the US has as a piece of garbage as summarized by Rockhound in Armageddon. It has also proven to be a largely backward step, science experiments or no.

Our shuttle was never the best design put forth, just the cheapest with every negative connotation of the word...it certainly hasn't been inexpensive.

The space shuttle program was designed for building space stations, and the original expectation is that it'd have been retired by now. It was not intended to be the "only" way for the US to get people into space, and it certainly wasn't designed to be the "all things to all missions" that NASA tried to make the Shuttle into.

It's called a Shuttle for a reason. It shuttles people and material between Earth and Earth orbit.

Somewhere along the way the Shuttle became The Shuttle, and any follow-on replacement had to be The Shuttle Replacement. A victim of its own success (if we define success as being able to survive endless scope creep of its mission), the expectiations on any follow-on projects have become unreasonable. No one should expect any one vehicle to do all the things that the Shuttle program currently does... because the Shuttle program wasn't designed to do all those things and somewhat-specialized vehicles would do the job much better.

Agreed, 100%. Someplace along the line, we lost our vision, our drive.

It's like requiring a plane in a modern air force be capable of all air missions because that's what the British RAF's first effective plane, the Sopwith Camel, did. With that kind of thinking we'd never have mid-air refuelers, gigantic cargo planes, etc.

EDIT: grammar

It is pretty arrogant to think we are the first human civilization. Our brains haven't changed in 320k years, and we're no smarter than we were then. So, all that is left is arrogance.

Calling something 'arrogant' isn't an argument. That's absurd.

Secondly, latest evidence shows human minds began to acquire certain new genes only in the last few thousand years.....much much later than your 320k. There are 2 sets related to abstract thinking, logic, and consciousness. 1 exists in about 80% of all of us. The other in perhaps 25%.

Jeffrey believes it and so do many others and that is why my question was directed at him.

You can explain it all away with quotations from other scriptures but my challenge will remain unanswered won't it? Noah's WORLDWIDE flood? really?

Lazarus rising from the dead? Angels? A burning bush? The list is endless. Take your pick. If we used our hypothetical time machine and you believe those things existed then we could watch it on a tv monitor. Period. Do you REALLY believe that?

Across my clump of old windows servers, I'm experiencing several (say, 3 to 6) workunits per day which are hung. Specifically, the unit's <active task state> is 1 but 15 or more minutes have elapsed since the unit's state.sah file has been updated. There is an approximately even split between hung units which have stopped using cpu and hung units which are using all the cpu they can acquire.

Since I have BOINC running as a service, I've found a simple way to get them to error out is to just restart the boinc service when I find one.

Question is, since I'm now detecting them with a little utility program, is there any place I might want to automatically ship these off to for analysis of the problem?

Heyyyyyy....there's something FISHY going on in here.....

Sorry...terrible joke but I just couldn't resist.

Good luck with the aquarium Doc. :-)

Tnx buddy!
Its going wary good now that i haw desinfected the fish and got active carbon:)

Personally, I have always thought of the space shuttle the US has as a piece of garbage as summarized by Rockhound in Armageddon. It has also proven to be a largely backward step, science experiments or no.

Our shuttle was never the best design put forth, just the cheapest with every negative connotation of the word...it certainly hasn't been inexpensive.

The space shuttle program was designed for building space stations, and the original expectation is that it'd have been retired by now. It was not intended to be the "only" way for the US to get people into space, and it certainly wasn't designed to be the "all things to all missions" that NASA tried to make the Shuttle into.

It's called a Shuttle for a reason. It shuttles people and material between Earth and Earth orbit.

Somewhere along the way the Shuttle became The Shuttle, and any follow-on replacement had to be The Shuttle Replacement. A victim of its own success (if we define success as being able to survive endless scope creep of its mission), the expectiations on any follow-on projects have become unreasonable. No one should expect any one vehicle to do all the things that the Shuttle program currently does... because the Shuttle program wasn't designed to do all those things and somewhat-specialized vehicles would do the job much better.

Jeffrey, if man someday invents a time machine (or aliens do) we'd be able to take a videocamera back in time and literally film Adam being created up out of the soil and Eve being transmorphed out of one of his ribs right? We could all watch it on tape, right?

It should still emit heat we could detect. There's no such thing as a perfect insulator.

Yes, I was wondering, an entire solar system and sun surrounded by one of these spheres might create a little too much heat inside wouldn't it? I don't suppose the astronomers would be pleased either if they couldn't view the universe.

Susan.

The astronomers could just take an elevator "down" to the outer surface and have all the space they could want to set up observatories that are always in "night."

The theoretical motivation to build a Dyson Sphere is to harness all of the star's output... presumably the civilization would have a use for all that energy and a means of getting rid of the waste heat. The waste heat would be the most obvious "leakage" that astronomers could look for, but there is no reason to expect it to be sent out uniformly in all directions.

Germanium exotic???
The *first* transistors were made of germanium!
Even before that, the original "crystal" radios used germanium crystals!
There's nothing exotic about germanium. Maybe in the way they use it, but sure not in the material itself! Talk about going back to the roots! Haha.

Core 2 Duo is a brand name by Intel - Dual-Core is a generic description meaning two separate physical cores in one chip package.

HTH,
Simon.

My understanding is that the Core 2 Duo ius actually the laptop version of the P4D 800/900 series (dual core) and is more energy efficient simply because it's a more 'militaristic" dual core...at least as explained by a mega computer geek to me.

That "mega computer geek" is incorrect. The Core 2 Duo Conroes are the desktop versions of the Pentium 4/Pentium Ds. They are more energy efficient because they were made from the ground up to be, seeing as Intel was hitting the power ceiling on some of it's CPUs within large corporations. They had to cut power consumption because some localities have power restrictions on companies and only allow them to consume so many kilowatt hours. If these companies need more processing power but have already run into this restriction, you start looking at less power-hungry chips, such as those from your rival competitor. Intel, in order to stay competitive, had to produce a much more environment friendly CPU. Besides, Intel did have a 10GHz Pentium 4 in their labs, but the power requirements were above that which any motherboard could feed without burning up. The circuits on the motherboards were overloading. Plugging in a more powerful power supply didn't help, as it wasn't a power supply issue, but rather too much power flowing through the motherboard.

It is the Core 2 Duo "Meroms" that are the laptop versions of the Conroes. Kentsfield is the server version of this new architecture.

Core 2 Duo is a brand name by Intel - Dual-Core is a generic description meaning two separate physical cores in one chip package.

HTH,
Simon.

Just food for thought. ;)

Well actually Russia has a lot of money at the moment. They have just paid off their Soviet era debt of $22 Billion and with high oil prices will make that up soon.

And the Soviet Union did get to the moon with Luna 2 before the US. They may not have got a man there but that doesn't mean they didn't have the technology to do so.

And also, who do you think has been supplying the astronauts on the ISS for the last 2 years ?

Sadly, I can only assume that your current state of Knowledge can be summarized as "In the beginning there was nothing----which then exploded."
Who do all you people think GOD is anyway???? HE is the HIGHEST of All Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Who do you think made the NOTHING explode???

You're new to these boards. That is obvious. I believe in nothing of the sort. Assumptions are for those who don't look at the evidence before making a conclusions.

Would you also characterize these highly respected scientists as 'schizophrenic'?

I really don't know these people, so I cannot judge them as schizo. I've met many unstable scientists though. The better and generally more successful ones, tend to not be deep into religion.

Selective Hearing"

Right. I read the bible. On my own as a youngster, I went to sunday school, I went vacation bible school at three churches in my area every year, I listened to the sermons, and I made a conclusion. I gave it a chance. Have you tried atheism? I doubt it. So please, quit being full of yourself.

By the way, can you tell me how to construct the alter for the animal sacrifice to god as it was done in the old days?