The Enterprise, at least by the TNG era, is an odd battleship. Crew families on board are not exactly likely to inspire bravery and risk-taking. The majority of the crew have science and diplomacy related jobs too, with only minimal training in the use of firearms and warfare.
If you go nearly a Century without war and no real threats, you'd the same thing...
The Enterprise in Kirk's time was quite different, because, you know, Russians (er, I mean Klingons!)
Notice the families were taken off the USS Odyssey before it went into the Gamma Quadrant at the end of Season 2 of DS9? The Federation was slowly buying a clue that perhaps their plan to put families on battleships was stupid.
That was the idea with the saucer section separation. When battle was required and there was time, a small subset of the crew could pilot the engineering section and the majority could stay out of harms way on the saucer. The engineering section even had a "battle bridge".
Yep, again, a Century of no war and no threats does that to you... Stupid idea, not really useful or used all that much, but featured a few times in the show because they spent a lot of money getting ILM to do those shots...
The real irony is that you're calling out others while you think this is a problem solved by selecting a different figurehead in a broken system of government.
I'd rather try a new figurehead who at least might toss out the bums, before tossing out the entire Government... Putting Hillary in office does nothing, it just continues the existing path we've been on for many years...
Removing them all will be ugly before it gets better, and isn't a decision to be taken lightly... We aren't there yet, but I can see it happening within my remaining lifetime if we don't change course...
---
Since WWII, we've had 2 or 3 really good Presidents, and a lot of bad ones... Congress is a problem as is money in government...
America has only become better during Obama's tenure. I certainly am proud of my country.
You have a funny idea of what "better" means...
The sad thing is, like I said, you won't know what you've lost until it is gone...
If more people have to die, just to make you proud of your country, I dont think I can support that.
You make my point, you simply don't get it... It is unlikely I could say anything to help you since you probably aren't open to learning anything. You would rather reinforce your existing viewpoint rather than open your mind to something new.
But Obama has not been bad president for any of these reasons. I dont mind 4 more years (or 8 more years) of Obama alike.
No, he has been a terrible President for lots of other reasons...:)
You may not mind 4 more years of him, but you would if you understood what was happening to America in the process... unless of course, you WANT that to happen to America, I suppose those people exist too..
America has become diminished, less, in the eyes of the world and in itself in the past 8 years. I am no longer proud of my country and now see it for the falling power that it once was.
And this is sad, because so many men fought and died to get us here, and now so many are willing to throw that all away...
You won't know what you've got until it is gone, then it will be too late...
No, seriously, I actually did that. I also got X to work on a Hercules Graphics Card, and if you even know what that is, you're old.
My first computer was an Apple IIe with an 80 column text card, does that count?:)
It did have the 64K ram upgrade to 128K, that was expensive, but it was needed for some programs... and... I was lucky, I had the Disk II Duo, so I had TWO 5.25" floppy drives!!!
Yes, I'm old, but not THAT old, I was a kid back then.:)
To quote the Russians at Leningrad in the winter of 1941, they were stuck between two dictators, but they prefered to pick the one who spoke Russian...
I'll take my chances on Trump, Hillary will just drive this nation further down the hole, Trump might do it, or might not...
Do you want to play Russian roulette with the revolver with 5 bullets in it, or 6?
The irony is that half of you idiots complaining will vote for Hillary Clinton, who is 100% guaranteed to not only continue this, but do MORE of it for her Wall Street Buddies...
Now I have no idea if Trump would do anything to stop it, but there is at least a CHANCE... Even Bernie would be better than Hillary... (and I think Bernie is nuts! But I also think he is an honest nuts, and I can live with that)
But go ahead, rant at how evil companies are, then keep voting for the same idiots in office over and over...
NOTE: This applies to both the R's and the D's, Paul Ryan isn't any better than Nancy Pelosi in this regard... So I'm not playing favorites there...
Maybe Trump himself doesn't hate Mexicans and Muslims, there's no real way to know. Trump continuously contradicts himself, he has never been in office and thus has no political record, maybe he just rants about Mexicans and Muslims because he wants to win votes from the demographic who fear the "other" out there.
All true points...
This is a concept adopted from the Nazis.
The irony is that I consider Hillary to be FAR closer to the Nazis than Trump is...
If Hillary wins, then as far as I'm concerned, the system is no longer democratic and we have a failed nation. I will never accept her as President and instruct those in power to block everything and anything she does.
We had Obama who was bad, but Hillary makes him almost look mild by comparison, she is MUCH worse than he is...
We won't have a country much longer if this keeps up... in many respects, maybe we don't... Consider this VERY STORY about special interests and money... and yet all the idiots keep voting for people like Hillary who will only CONTINUE THAT!
Will Trump stop it? I have no idea, but at least there is a CHANCE he would.
Note: I'm against the system, I'd vote for Bernie over Hillary, and I think he is nuts, but at least he is an honest sort of nuts.
That, and whenever the "bad guys" show up, who responds?
Starfleet...
And they show up with ships armed with shields, torpedoes, and phasers for ship-to-ship combat, and so on...
What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else... You would have ship security dressed nicely for casual times, but you'd have armored soldiers for real fighting, but again... "TV show"...:)
a) Do you think it's worse than "naturally" breeding a monoculture of cattle, fruit (bananas, etc.) for farming? Because that's been going on for THOUSANDS of years.
Yes, because it is being done much more precisely and it takes it much further...
BTW, the selective breeding "naturally" has not been good either, we took that too far as well and now we are missing things that we had just 100 years ago (bananas for example, are all clones, we lost most of them over the past 100 years)
b) We don't have hundreds of years of experience with plastic. Or many oil derivatives. Or electromagnetism in devices held next to your head. And yet all the same scaremongering bollocks applies to those too.
Those all concern me just as much... We are rapidly trashing the planet and changing things in ways that may or may not be supportive of human life going forward.
Humans are not nearly as smart as they think they are...
Genetically modified organisms and foods are a safe way to meet the demands of a ballooning global population, the 109 laureates wrote in a letter posted online and officially unveiled at a news conference on Thursday in Washington, D.C...
No, they don't actually know that, they can't...
Why? Because they don't have hundreds of years of experience with it, and that much at least will be needed to know if we are totally screwing with our food supply or not...
This is our food, without it, we all die. This is one of the most important things we can touch, next to our air and water...
We don't have any idea what the long term evolution changes will be to the general food supply with all our tampering, but I do know that we already have narrowed down a lot of foods due to selective harvesting and many varieties of foods are already gone.
They are playing around with Pandora's box, assuming the contents won't hurt anyone. But they haven't had the box open long enough to really know the outcome...
Since engineering workstations are a niche ignored by MS why should I care about marketshare instead of using something that works?
Maybe you shouldn't, just don't confuse your own situation with the wider world, that's all..
There are people who, honest to goodness, still drive around daily in a 1950s car, even in the US... there aren't many of them however and don't reflect the larger car market.
Linux has a place, to be sure, it is just a small one. It is not, and never will be "the big thing for the desktop" like so many of its true believers think.
Like I said, OS X could be there, if Apple wanted it to be, but perhaps they don't.
In my workplace probably around ten systems, one of them less than two years old (user wanted it). If you count virtual machines of WinXP on *nix boxes add more than a dozen more if they were all fired up at once.
Yes, but those are special situations in locked down VMs, not general purpose Windows desktops with open access to the Internet (or I sure as heck hope not anyway).
Everything from drivers to software will slowly move on, today many things do work in XP, sort of, sometimes... but try installing a modern video card on XP...
I suppose threats of "I'm never upgrading again!" might feel nice to make, but I've heard them before since the DOS days (I'm never using that new fangled Windows 3.0 crap!)
Yea, yea, of course you're not, how many people are still rocking DOS in 2016?
Oh wait, I've heard the other one, "I'm going to Linux!"
Yea, yea, of course you're not, remind me what the Linux desktop marketshare in 2016 is? That's right, almost nothing.
OS X is the only serious competition Windows has, and as long as it remains stuck on crappy Apple options for computers, it will not grow beyond its current 5% share, give or take. And yes, I've run the current version of OS X, and yes it is fine. My issues with it have to do with the hardware choices, not the OS itself. If they licensed it like Windows, I think they would triple their marketshare within a year or two...
I have on Windows, OS X, and many flavors of Linux
Good for you, you're the special one then, enjoy that world...
No, it isn't changing, the marketshare numbers don't lie... Linux isn't taking over the desktop, ever... and OS X isn't going anywhere so long as Apple keeps doing what it does...
The irony is that OS X might challenge Windows, if Apple cared about trying, but they are making so much money from iOS devices they probably haven't given it that much thought...
No, not really, the marketshare numbers don't lie...
No my dear monoculturist, I am on Windows, OS X, Linux and Unix. Rather than limit myself to one product, I use whatever tool is the best for the job.
And OS X isn't that for anything, and yes I've used one recently, and no it isn't all that...
For OS X to matter, it needs to be on more than Apple's very limited platforms...
Because just like VHS, Windows might be in wider use, but it is seldom the best.
Yea, Beta didn't win that, in case you weren't keeping track... and if you want the best, you didn't want VHS or Beta, you wanted a professional tape format...
Otherwise, it's goodbye...and i'll keep running Windows 7 until driver support evaporates, and then re-evaluate. My guess is that i'll be able to keep running it beyond 2020.
Yea, yea... everyone said that about Windows XP as well, yet how many of you are still running that?
Windows 7 will stop being useful for general purpose computing at some point, maybe before or after 2020, but it will slowly not be a reasonable option. By 2020 it will be 11 years old, technology and time marches on...
And yes, I know there are still people using Windows 95 today, that doesn't invalidate my point, rather they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Pay for it every year, forever? Why would you want to do that when you can pay for it once?
You can pay for it once, the problem is the expectation of updates for 10 years...
You can buy MS Office and own it forever, but you won't get updates forever... Or you can subscribe to it, pay less up front and always have the newest version.
This isn't complicated, but for some reason people want to get all hung up over this... What MS is doing is adjusting the expectations of 10 years of free updates... Rather than raise the price of Windows, they are lowering the "free updates" time...
Slashdot Mirror
The Enterprise, at least by the TNG era, is an odd battleship. Crew families on board are not exactly likely to inspire bravery and risk-taking. The majority of the crew have science and diplomacy related jobs too, with only minimal training in the use of firearms and warfare.
If you go nearly a Century without war and no real threats, you'd the same thing...
The Enterprise in Kirk's time was quite different, because, you know, Russians (er, I mean Klingons!)
Notice the families were taken off the USS Odyssey before it went into the Gamma Quadrant at the end of Season 2 of DS9? The Federation was slowly buying a clue that perhaps their plan to put families on battleships was stupid.
That was the idea with the saucer section separation. When battle was required and there was time, a small subset of the crew could pilot the engineering section and the majority could stay out of harms way on the saucer. The engineering section even had a "battle bridge".
Yep, again, a Century of no war and no threats does that to you... Stupid idea, not really useful or used all that much, but featured a few times in the show because they spent a lot of money getting ILM to do those shots...
Nope, even in the war scenes (mostly in DS9), they don't have armor.
You might read what I wrote again...
"What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else..."
It's just not that kinda show.
No shit... that is why I pointed that very point out. :)
The real irony is that you're calling out others while you think this is a problem solved by selecting a different figurehead in a broken system of government.
I'd rather try a new figurehead who at least might toss out the bums, before tossing out the entire Government... Putting Hillary in office does nothing, it just continues the existing path we've been on for many years...
Removing them all will be ugly before it gets better, and isn't a decision to be taken lightly... We aren't there yet, but I can see it happening within my remaining lifetime if we don't change course...
---
Since WWII, we've had 2 or 3 really good Presidents, and a lot of bad ones... Congress is a problem as is money in government...
America has only become better during Obama's tenure. I certainly am proud of my country.
You have a funny idea of what "better" means...
The sad thing is, like I said, you won't know what you've lost until it is gone...
If more people have to die, just to make you proud of your country, I dont think I can support that.
You make my point, you simply don't get it... It is unlikely I could say anything to help you since you probably aren't open to learning anything. You would rather reinforce your existing viewpoint rather than open your mind to something new.
But Obama has not been bad president for any of these reasons. I dont mind 4 more years (or 8 more years) of Obama alike.
No, he has been a terrible President for lots of other reasons... :)
You may not mind 4 more years of him, but you would if you understood what was happening to America in the process... unless of course, you WANT that to happen to America, I suppose those people exist too..
America has become diminished, less, in the eyes of the world and in itself in the past 8 years. I am no longer proud of my country and now see it for the falling power that it once was.
And this is sad, because so many men fought and died to get us here, and now so many are willing to throw that all away...
You won't know what you've got until it is gone, then it will be too late...
No, seriously, I actually did that. I also got X to work on a Hercules Graphics Card, and if you even know what that is, you're old.
My first computer was an Apple IIe with an 80 column text card, does that count? :)
It did have the 64K ram upgrade to 128K, that was expensive, but it was needed for some programs... and... I was lucky, I had the Disk II Duo, so I had TWO 5.25" floppy drives!!!
Yes, I'm old, but not THAT old, I was a kid back then. :)
To quote the Russians at Leningrad in the winter of 1941, they were stuck between two dictators, but they prefered to pick the one who spoke Russian...
I'll take my chances on Trump, Hillary will just drive this nation further down the hole, Trump might do it, or might not...
Do you want to play Russian roulette with the revolver with 5 bullets in it, or 6?
The irony is that half of you idiots complaining will vote for Hillary Clinton, who is 100% guaranteed to not only continue this, but do MORE of it for her Wall Street Buddies...
Now I have no idea if Trump would do anything to stop it, but there is at least a CHANCE... Even Bernie would be better than Hillary... (and I think Bernie is nuts! But I also think he is an honest nuts, and I can live with that)
But go ahead, rant at how evil companies are, then keep voting for the same idiots in office over and over...
NOTE: This applies to both the R's and the D's, Paul Ryan isn't any better than Nancy Pelosi in this regard... So I'm not playing favorites there...
Maybe Trump himself doesn't hate Mexicans and Muslims, there's no real way to know. Trump continuously contradicts himself, he has never been in office and thus has no political record, maybe he just rants about Mexicans and Muslims because he wants to win votes from the demographic who fear the "other" out there.
All true points...
This is a concept adopted from the Nazis.
The irony is that I consider Hillary to be FAR closer to the Nazis than Trump is...
If Hillary wins, then as far as I'm concerned, the system is no longer democratic and we have a failed nation. I will never accept her as President and instruct those in power to block everything and anything she does.
We had Obama who was bad, but Hillary makes him almost look mild by comparison, she is MUCH worse than he is...
We won't have a country much longer if this keeps up... in many respects, maybe we don't... Consider this VERY STORY about special interests and money... and yet all the idiots keep voting for people like Hillary who will only CONTINUE THAT!
Will Trump stop it? I have no idea, but at least there is a CHANCE he would.
Note: I'm against the system, I'd vote for Bernie over Hillary, and I think he is nuts, but at least he is an honest sort of nuts.
Hillary's a shitty candidate, but she'll make a better president. It really is that simple.
Well, no, she won't... what is sad is that so many people believe that...
Bunch of idiots, the lot of you... know nothing about history, know nothing about the person, and don't care...
You will see America destroyed with your attitude, and the sad part is you don't even know it...
Don't you understand.
No, just like you don't...
To Trump's loyal followers, what Trump does is irrelevant.
Nonsense, Trump has done and said several things that make me wince...
What Trump has going for him is that he isn't Hillary, I look at her and say "well, whatever Trump's failings, at least he isn't evil like her".
All that counts is that he hates Mexicans and Muslims
He doesn't, but if you really think he does, that explains why you don't understand.
That, and whenever the "bad guys" show up, who responds?
Starfleet...
And they show up with ships armed with shields, torpedoes, and phasers for ship-to-ship combat, and so on...
What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else... You would have ship security dressed nicely for casual times, but you'd have armored soldiers for real fighting, but again... "TV show"... :)
a) Do you think it's worse than "naturally" breeding a monoculture of cattle, fruit (bananas, etc.) for farming? Because that's been going on for THOUSANDS of years.
Yes, because it is being done much more precisely and it takes it much further...
BTW, the selective breeding "naturally" has not been good either, we took that too far as well and now we are missing things that we had just 100 years ago (bananas for example, are all clones, we lost most of them over the past 100 years)
b) We don't have hundreds of years of experience with plastic. Or many oil derivatives. Or electromagnetism in devices held next to your head. And yet all the same scaremongering bollocks applies to those too.
Those all concern me just as much... We are rapidly trashing the planet and changing things in ways that may or may not be supportive of human life going forward.
Humans are not nearly as smart as they think they are...
TFA is hopeless confused. For example, I calls Star Fleet an "armed forces", but it's not a military organization.
Yes it is... if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck...
They have battleships (Enterprise), cruisers and destroyers (Voyager and Defiant), fighters, etc...
They are just a soft, pretty military that doesn't look scary, but the differences are minor...
She hasn't thought through the fact that this makes it unlike a wife as well, eh
No, a girlfriend is a toy, a wife is a life mate...
No robot could ever replace my wife, she is my soul mate and I love her every waking minute...
But she can't pole dance to save her life. :) (and yes, she tried, even took classes, cause she loves me!)
Would she care if I had a pole-dancing sexy robot? No, she really wouldn't.
Would she care if I had a pole-dancing sexy girlfriend? Yes, she really would.
The difference, to use her words... "the robot doesn't want to become your wife, the girlfriend will".
Genetically modified organisms and foods are a safe way to meet the demands of a ballooning global population, the 109 laureates wrote in a letter posted online and officially unveiled at a news conference on Thursday in Washington, D.C...
No, they don't actually know that, they can't...
Why? Because they don't have hundreds of years of experience with it, and that much at least will be needed to know if we are totally screwing with our food supply or not...
This is our food, without it, we all die. This is one of the most important things we can touch, next to our air and water...
We don't have any idea what the long term evolution changes will be to the general food supply with all our tampering, but I do know that we already have narrowed down a lot of foods due to selective harvesting and many varieties of foods are already gone.
They are playing around with Pandora's box, assuming the contents won't hurt anyone. But they haven't had the box open long enough to really know the outcome...
Since engineering workstations are a niche ignored by MS why should I care about marketshare instead of using something that works?
Maybe you shouldn't, just don't confuse your own situation with the wider world, that's all..
There are people who, honest to goodness, still drive around daily in a 1950s car, even in the US... there aren't many of them however and don't reflect the larger car market.
Linux has a place, to be sure, it is just a small one. It is not, and never will be "the big thing for the desktop" like so many of its true believers think.
Like I said, OS X could be there, if Apple wanted it to be, but perhaps they don't.
What you describe is all too common, you are not alone...
The market for personal assistants will be massive... they need to get better in being able to hold a conversation, but that will come with time...
please gimme a blowjo. Thank you.
In 20 years, that might actually not be out of the question...
My wife joked that she wouldn't mind an Alexa sex robot, because unlike a real girlfriend, Alexa would have an off switch. :)
In my workplace probably around ten systems, one of them less than two years old (user wanted it). If you count virtual machines of WinXP on *nix boxes add more than a dozen more if they were all fired up at once.
Yes, but those are special situations in locked down VMs, not general purpose Windows desktops with open access to the Internet (or I sure as heck hope not anyway).
Everything from drivers to software will slowly move on, today many things do work in XP, sort of, sometimes... but try installing a modern video card on XP...
I suppose threats of "I'm never upgrading again!" might feel nice to make, but I've heard them before since the DOS days (I'm never using that new fangled Windows 3.0 crap!)
Yea, yea, of course you're not, how many people are still rocking DOS in 2016?
Oh wait, I've heard the other one, "I'm going to Linux!"
Yea, yea, of course you're not, remind me what the Linux desktop marketshare in 2016 is? That's right, almost nothing.
OS X is the only serious competition Windows has, and as long as it remains stuck on crappy Apple options for computers, it will not grow beyond its current 5% share, give or take. And yes, I've run the current version of OS X, and yes it is fine. My issues with it have to do with the hardware choices, not the OS itself. If they licensed it like Windows, I think they would triple their marketshare within a year or two...
Linux can't give itself away to the desktop...
I have on Windows, OS X, and many flavors of Linux
Good for you, you're the special one then, enjoy that world...
No, it isn't changing, the marketshare numbers don't lie... Linux isn't taking over the desktop, ever... and OS X isn't going anywhere so long as Apple keeps doing what it does...
The irony is that OS X might challenge Windows, if Apple cared about trying, but they are making so much money from iOS devices they probably haven't given it that much thought...
A lot more than you think.
No, not really, the marketshare numbers don't lie...
No my dear monoculturist, I am on Windows, OS X, Linux and Unix. Rather than limit myself to one product, I use whatever tool is the best for the job.
And OS X isn't that for anything, and yes I've used one recently, and no it isn't all that...
For OS X to matter, it needs to be on more than Apple's very limited platforms...
Because just like VHS, Windows might be in wider use, but it is seldom the best.
Yea, Beta didn't win that, in case you weren't keeping track... and if you want the best, you didn't want VHS or Beta, you wanted a professional tape format...
Otherwise, it's goodbye...and i'll keep running Windows 7 until driver support evaporates, and then re-evaluate. My guess is that i'll be able to keep running it beyond 2020.
Yea, yea... everyone said that about Windows XP as well, yet how many of you are still running that?
Windows 7 will stop being useful for general purpose computing at some point, maybe before or after 2020, but it will slowly not be a reasonable option. By 2020 it will be 11 years old, technology and time marches on...
And yes, I know there are still people using Windows 95 today, that doesn't invalidate my point, rather they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
False equivalence.
No, it isn't, but you will keep thinking so... and you'll be ignored and it will happen sooner or later without you...
Having an old unpatched computer on the net is not an immediate threat to the owner or to others
You're wrong, but that's ok, we'll help you too...
Pay for it every year, forever? Why would you want to do that when you can pay for it once?
You can pay for it once, the problem is the expectation of updates for 10 years...
You can buy MS Office and own it forever, but you won't get updates forever... Or you can subscribe to it, pay less up front and always have the newest version.
This isn't complicated, but for some reason people want to get all hung up over this... What MS is doing is adjusting the expectations of 10 years of free updates... Rather than raise the price of Windows, they are lowering the "free updates" time...