About a year ago, they started flagging broadcast channels on the box, even though they also transmitted unencrypted on a channel you can get with a regular QAM tuner. Then about six months ago, they unblocked almost everything on the Digital Starter plan. Someone with pull complained to the FCC, but as I understand, it was under the radar.
I would personally like to see someone start making some noise about this, just to keep the cablecos honest, and discourage them from reflagging stuff. I mean, I understand encrypting the signal to the box, but if I legally have a box, I ought to be able to get at the data I pay for. This look-but-don't touch nonsense really ticks me off.
"Get of in Shanghai?"
Back in my day, that would sound unpatriotic.
And I since I'm only a few years out of college, this *is* my day, and it *is* unpatriotic.
Someone's gotta be paid to assemble things and hand-solder 12-mil surface-mount ICs. The fewer people know how, the more they get paid, the more incentive there is to learn. It's not really that hard. Strength training and practice, and you can get those skills back if you need them.
They used to be more principled in conducting their experiments. Then they started making big bucks and ran out of ideas trying to milk it with nonrepeatable stunts.
"God doesn't play dice" is a lament that the universe is not as predictable as we thought it was prior to the development of modern quantum mechanics by Schroedinger, Dirac, Feynman, et al. It actually expresses preference for a universe that's more easily mastered by science, not less.
BZZT. False. Science rests on the belief that order and rationality exist in the universe. The prerequisite of "I can show/demonstrate/repeat" is a faith that the universe is not chaotic, and that if I drop an apple and it fell 100 times that last 100 times I tried it, there's a damn small chance it'll hover the next time. And it's a real leap of faith to extrapolate the order to the timescale of billions of years, as is common practice in computing things like the Hubble Constant, and modeling evolution by natural selection and random variation of traits over hundreds of generations. We geeks share this faith in an ordered universe. Except that pinko atheists scream bloody murder about religion while making this substantive leap of faith, and normal people like me conclude that God wrote the immutable laws of mathematics and physics.
Its safer to make a left turn when the driver is sitting on the left and gets a better view of oncoming traffic. I imagine that people in countries that drive on the wrong side of the road would take that safety feature very seriously when deciding to buy any car.
What people don't get is that the point of liquid gasoline or CNG or LNG or whatever is that it takes 5 minutes at most to fill up and off you go. That and range are the two criteria that make electric cars unacceptable to Joe Sixpack at the moment. If you can make an electric car that gets 300 miles per charge and charges up in 5 minutes, then you've got a competitor (except for the problem of not being able to hitchhike down the road to bring back a can of gas in an emergency). Until you bring those two parameters down to the convenience of the gas powered car, the electric vehicle will be confined to things like taxis and delivery vehicles with well-defined operating modes. Normal people aren't going to buy a vehicle that lets them do less than a normal gas-powered car.
True, but lithium from old batteries is more recyclable than the CO2 that comes out of a normal tail pipe. The supply/recycling thing might work even better if instead of relying primarily on recharging, a network of battery swapping stations is built up, where you'd lease the battery, and the manufacturer would necessarily get it back at the end of life for refurbishment.
That said, I still think the future is synthetic gasoline that runs in a normal engine. Less of a pain in the rear to implement and no additional infrastructure to build up during the phase where petroleum-based gas and whatever new thing is are both in use.
In the PBS version of Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond starts out with the aboriginals on Papua New Guinea. If you buy the latest claims of mitochondrial DNA mapping, these guys went straight from Africa heading east ~100k years ago and havent changed since. I mention the PBS version because the opening scenes of this segment show almost an entire village squatted down in a dirt field tending to individual tubers ( I forget what kind exactly, but it's supposedly the only stuff that can grow in the highlands). That scene should make you understand what selective forces the environment can have on the cultural evolution of different races. These guys settled in a place where in each and every one of them had to squat down in the dirt all day just to put enough food on the table. With a constraint like that, its no surprise that they been living in the same grass huts for a hundred millenia. There's simply no time to think, let alone advance.
That's the point of what cultural evolution is. The basics nuts and bolts haven't changed. But what you do with it has. 30 years ago, you didn't do your personal banking online, you didn't read news online, you didn't do your research online, and you couldn't get a quick sanity check on your calculations by looking up something on google or wikipedia. But after 30 years of purely software innovations running on the same hardware, the (cultural) mindset us geeks have when using a computer has adopted useful practices and rejected the dead ends, which is exactly what cultural evolution is.
This is a fairly accepted view among cultural anthropologists, who pay their bills by digging up ancient cultures and studying the progression of ideas, religions, and technologies. One guy, whose name I forget, but whose paper they made me read in Anthropology 101 made the comparison between hardware and software evolution. In more modern terms, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, all run on the nearly ~30-year-old x86 CPU, but no one is going to say that computer programs now are where they were 30 years ago, just because the instruction set hasn't changed much.
Any artificial mind that can be fully understood and analyzed by a human mind must be smaller than the human mind and by any objective measure (if such a thing can exist) is inferior to it in the "soul" department. Flipping the "I'm sad" bit in software doesn't constitute sadness the way it does in humans unless some neuroscience breakthrough discovers an analogous set of bits in the living human mind.
In short, software doesn't have feelings.
Just because you're naive doesn't mean you're right. We need sonar because people we don't implicitly trust (Iran, China, Russia, NKorea?) have submarines. Some carrying nukes. They are not under our control. So if we give up our ability to track them underwater, we have no reason to think they will either announce themselves out of the goodness of their hearts or get out of the water period. The fact is we have potential enemies. Wishing that it were not so does not, unfortunately make it not so.
In the Old South during the Civil Rights days, Freedom Riders would go down and rent buses to take poor black folks to get registered and vote. White Sheriffs didn't like that too much, so occasionally, they'd impound the buses they were using to transport the voters on some trumped up or nonsensical violation. My personal favorite: the bus is too yellow. You do the math.
DS9 was dog ass boring. Stargate's state of Ascension is a well-known, agnostic approach to evolution of Energy but if you recall, ascended humans [ancients], has nothing to do with the creation of species, planets, the Universe, etc., as the Alpha and the Omega.
Sure they colonized thousands of planets [yeah right], but the Universe and all it's laws of physics, energy forms, etc., were already there and thus there to experiment upon and discover all it holds--to evolve our collective body of wisdom.
I don't really see anything other than a semantic difference. One the one hand you have a supreme being that can will the right wave function to collapse and create animals and trees and proto-humans on another world a million light-years away, and on the other hand, you have an all-powerful alien that developed the technology to be able to will the right wavefunction collapse and create animals and trees and proto-humans on a world a million light-years away. The empiricist would agree that in any measurable sense, the two are identical.
What about "The Prophets" a la DS9? Or Stargate's Ascension. There they're called aliens. Here they're called angels. It may not be intellectually satisfying to those hard rationalists who eschew any notion of spirituality in SF, but it's a common thread, going back to Arthur C Clarke and beyond.
Not all of us worship at the alter of Al Gore either. Some of us take our freedom very seriously. People who look for the latest excuse to control their fellow citizens' lives often guise it in terms of The Greater Good. Some of them even believe their own hype (ie parent). But all of it, *all of it* is nothing more and nothing less than the ugly instinct of man to control his neighbor attempting to reassert itself. It is, quite simply, an evil.
In America, we have the Bill of Rights, which guarantees our right to open communication (Amendment I), and our right and duty to defend that liberty from oppressors, both foreign and domestic (Amendment II). In 200+ years of American Democracy, we have not yet needed to exercise the latter right, and here's hopin' and prayin' that we keep that trend going by resisting fascistic urges to control our fellow man.
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About a year ago, they started flagging broadcast channels on the box, even though they also transmitted unencrypted on a channel you can get with a regular QAM tuner. Then about six months ago, they unblocked almost everything on the Digital Starter plan. Someone with pull complained to the FCC, but as I understand, it was under the radar. I would personally like to see someone start making some noise about this, just to keep the cablecos honest, and discourage them from reflagging stuff. I mean, I understand encrypting the signal to the box, but if I legally have a box, I ought to be able to get at the data I pay for. This look-but-don't touch nonsense really ticks me off.
"Get of in Shanghai?" Back in my day, that would sound unpatriotic. And I since I'm only a few years out of college, this *is* my day, and it *is* unpatriotic.
Someone's gotta be paid to assemble things and hand-solder 12-mil surface-mount ICs. The fewer people know how, the more they get paid, the more incentive there is to learn. It's not really that hard. Strength training and practice, and you can get those skills back if you need them.
Also, he invented the internet. Sorry.
They used to be more principled in conducting their experiments. Then they started making big bucks and ran out of ideas trying to milk it with nonrepeatable stunts.
"God doesn't play dice" is a lament that the universe is not as predictable as we thought it was prior to the development of modern quantum mechanics by Schroedinger, Dirac, Feynman, et al. It actually expresses preference for a universe that's more easily mastered by science, not less.
BZZT. False. Science rests on the belief that order and rationality exist in the universe. The prerequisite of "I can show/demonstrate/repeat" is a faith that the universe is not chaotic, and that if I drop an apple and it fell 100 times that last 100 times I tried it, there's a damn small chance it'll hover the next time. And it's a real leap of faith to extrapolate the order to the timescale of billions of years, as is common practice in computing things like the Hubble Constant, and modeling evolution by natural selection and random variation of traits over hundreds of generations. We geeks share this faith in an ordered universe. Except that pinko atheists scream bloody murder about religion while making this substantive leap of faith, and normal people like me conclude that God wrote the immutable laws of mathematics and physics.
Its safer to make a left turn when the driver is sitting on the left and gets a better view of oncoming traffic. I imagine that people in countries that drive on the wrong side of the road would take that safety feature very seriously when deciding to buy any car.
What people don't get is that the point of liquid gasoline or CNG or LNG or whatever is that it takes 5 minutes at most to fill up and off you go. That and range are the two criteria that make electric cars unacceptable to Joe Sixpack at the moment. If you can make an electric car that gets 300 miles per charge and charges up in 5 minutes, then you've got a competitor (except for the problem of not being able to hitchhike down the road to bring back a can of gas in an emergency). Until you bring those two parameters down to the convenience of the gas powered car, the electric vehicle will be confined to things like taxis and delivery vehicles with well-defined operating modes. Normal people aren't going to buy a vehicle that lets them do less than a normal gas-powered car.
True, but lithium from old batteries is more recyclable than the CO2 that comes out of a normal tail pipe. The supply/recycling thing might work even better if instead of relying primarily on recharging, a network of battery swapping stations is built up, where you'd lease the battery, and the manufacturer would necessarily get it back at the end of life for refurbishment. That said, I still think the future is synthetic gasoline that runs in a normal engine. Less of a pain in the rear to implement and no additional infrastructure to build up during the phase where petroleum-based gas and whatever new thing is are both in use.
In the PBS version of Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond starts out with the aboriginals on Papua New Guinea. If you buy the latest claims of mitochondrial DNA mapping, these guys went straight from Africa heading east ~100k years ago and havent changed since. I mention the PBS version because the opening scenes of this segment show almost an entire village squatted down in a dirt field tending to individual tubers ( I forget what kind exactly, but it's supposedly the only stuff that can grow in the highlands). That scene should make you understand what selective forces the environment can have on the cultural evolution of different races. These guys settled in a place where in each and every one of them had to squat down in the dirt all day just to put enough food on the table. With a constraint like that, its no surprise that they been living in the same grass huts for a hundred millenia. There's simply no time to think, let alone advance.
That's the point of what cultural evolution is. The basics nuts and bolts haven't changed. But what you do with it has. 30 years ago, you didn't do your personal banking online, you didn't read news online, you didn't do your research online, and you couldn't get a quick sanity check on your calculations by looking up something on google or wikipedia. But after 30 years of purely software innovations running on the same hardware, the (cultural) mindset us geeks have when using a computer has adopted useful practices and rejected the dead ends, which is exactly what cultural evolution is.
This is a fairly accepted view among cultural anthropologists, who pay their bills by digging up ancient cultures and studying the progression of ideas, religions, and technologies. One guy, whose name I forget, but whose paper they made me read in Anthropology 101 made the comparison between hardware and software evolution. In more modern terms, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, all run on the nearly ~30-year-old x86 CPU, but no one is going to say that computer programs now are where they were 30 years ago, just because the instruction set hasn't changed much.
Rules of engagement:
Be nice or we'll nuke your spaceships.
Don't colonize us or we'll nuke your spaceships.
Try to overpower us and we'll nuke your spaceships and make the planet uninhabitable, causing you untold waste in fuel and travel time.
Give us your (green) women or we'll nuke your spaceships.
Etc, etc...
Any artificial mind that can be fully understood and analyzed by a human mind must be smaller than the human mind and by any objective measure (if such a thing can exist) is inferior to it in the "soul" department. Flipping the "I'm sad" bit in software doesn't constitute sadness the way it does in humans unless some neuroscience breakthrough discovers an analogous set of bits in the living human mind. In short, software doesn't have feelings.
We'll do the next best thing. Block it out.
Just because you're naive doesn't mean you're right. We need sonar because people we don't implicitly trust (Iran, China, Russia, NKorea?) have submarines. Some carrying nukes. They are not under our control. So if we give up our ability to track them underwater, we have no reason to think they will either announce themselves out of the goodness of their hearts or get out of the water period. The fact is we have potential enemies. Wishing that it were not so does not, unfortunately make it not so.
In the Old South during the Civil Rights days, Freedom Riders would go down and rent buses to take poor black folks to get registered and vote. White Sheriffs didn't like that too much, so occasionally, they'd impound the buses they were using to transport the voters on some trumped up or nonsensical violation. My personal favorite: the bus is too yellow. You do the math.
DS9 was dog ass boring. Stargate's state of Ascension is a well-known, agnostic approach to evolution of Energy but if you recall, ascended humans [ancients], has nothing to do with the creation of species, planets, the Universe, etc., as the Alpha and the Omega.
Sure they colonized thousands of planets [yeah right], but the Universe and all it's laws of physics, energy forms, etc., were already there and thus there to experiment upon and discover all it holds--to evolve our collective body of wisdom.
I don't really see anything other than a semantic difference. One the one hand you have a supreme being that can will the right wave function to collapse and create animals and trees and proto-humans on another world a million light-years away, and on the other hand, you have an all-powerful alien that developed the technology to be able to will the right wavefunction collapse and create animals and trees and proto-humans on a world a million light-years away. The empiricist would agree that in any measurable sense, the two are identical.
Starbuck was called several times the harbinger of death.
Death of what?
It's always the Cylons who called her that. The death of the Cylons would be a good guess.
What about "The Prophets" a la DS9? Or Stargate's Ascension. There they're called aliens. Here they're called angels. It may not be intellectually satisfying to those hard rationalists who eschew any notion of spirituality in SF, but it's a common thread, going back to Arthur C Clarke and beyond.
Not all of us worship at the alter of Al Gore either. Some of us take our freedom very seriously. People who look for the latest excuse to control their fellow citizens' lives often guise it in terms of The Greater Good. Some of them even believe their own hype (ie parent). But all of it, *all of it* is nothing more and nothing less than the ugly instinct of man to control his neighbor attempting to reassert itself. It is, quite simply, an evil.
And you all laughed when Dick Cheney threatened to use his time machine. Now who's laughing?!1!
I dunno if Obama can pull that off. San Francisco and Manhattan are big voting blocks.
In America, we have the Bill of Rights, which guarantees our right to open communication (Amendment I), and our right and duty to defend that liberty from oppressors, both foreign and domestic (Amendment II). In 200+ years of American Democracy, we have not yet needed to exercise the latter right, and here's hopin' and prayin' that we keep that trend going by resisting fascistic urges to control our fellow man.