Thanks, this completely illustrated the point I've been trying to make.
Everyone here has these heavily dogmatically weighted blinders on about
star faring aliens. They think that because they may be eons ahead of us
that their technology will never break down, that by their point in
development, an interstellar trip would be as easy and common an
operating regeime as highway or airline travel is for us, that the idea
that their ships would break is ludicrous. We've been building highway
capable cars for 100 years with trillions of miles, and billions of
production units to show for it, and still its extremely rare to have a
car that doesn't break something unexpectedly even at least once in the
first 50,000 miles. Even though a properly maintained car may last
200,000 miles, or even a million in EvMick's case, it is still gonna
break, and Murphy knows that its gonna break when you least expect or
want it to.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@tpk.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/Mikey's Animatronic Factory My Own Nuclear Espionage Agency (MONEA) MIKEYMAS(tm): The New Internet Holiday Transhumans of New Hampshire (>HNH) ------------------------------------------------------------ #!/usr/local/bin/perl-0777---export-a-crypto-system-sig-RC4-3-lines-PERL @k=unpack('C*',pack('H*',shift));for(@t=@s=0..255){$y=($k[$_%@k]+$s[$x=$_ ]+$y)%256;&S}$x=$y=0;for(unpack('C*',<>)){$x++;$y=($s[$x%=256]+$y)%256; &S;print pack(C,$_^=$s[($s[$x]+$s[$y])%256])}sub S{@s[$x,$y]=@s[$y,$x]}