Turns out we're not the only animal that uses tools so there's no reason why it would have appeared recently in human evolution. What's more impressive is our ability to design tools to attain a certain objective by using only our imagination (abstract thought) rather than the ability to pick up a rock from the vicinity to carve up a carcass. That's likely much more recent.
Yeah, the emperor is the embodiment of the empire not the other way around. He has to act presidential, not show weakness and show the hordes at the gate the splendor and power of the empire. So we get the same power mongering bullshit as before.
The technology that annoyed me the most about Star Trek and TNG was cameras. Here you're sending people over to strange ships and planets and asking "What's going on? Can you describe to me what you see?" Give me a break! 400 years in the future and they can't envision wireless video, but wireless audio is everywhere.
There's video communication all over the place, just not to away teams. I always assumed they were limited by being on a planet surface and having to communicate with a ship in orbit using only low power communicators (the little badge things.) Most planets presumably not even having communication satellites for them to bounce their signals off.
On the topic of the PADD, I've been making my way through the various Star Trek series, and one of the things that's really struck me is how even though the Federation has access to advanced computing power and networking technology, crew members still physically hand each other PADDs to transfer information. In some cases, they'll end up with piles of PADDs on their desks if they're studying a particular topic in depth.
All the other comments are great for offering up technical explanations for this but also remember this is a TV show and so the audience needs a visual indication of information being exchanged and people working with lots of different sources at once. It's also visually a lot more interesting than showing a bare desk.
"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.'" -- George Carlin
You know private browsing wasn't exactly design to be a DOD level security feature. It is supposed to keep your browsing habits from the casual observer using the same computer. If you take security seriously you have to have other measures in place.
The good thing is that they are actually asking these questions in the first place. We all know other companies (not all) that wouldn't give some of these balancing ideals even a moment of reflection.
and no I'm not a Google fanboy
And what good fortune that such a soul-seeking document about the corporation torn (torn I say) between its golden heart and desire for profit should surface right now when they are in the spotlight for abandoning their principals ("No, no just a little compromise") on net neutrality. You see they're really good at heart, doesn't this introspection prove it ?
Where's the sarcasm tag ? You'd think that a society that sees so much of it in every area of business to politics would be used to this kind of misdirection and spin by now.
Sure, it's a great thing to help out the less fortunate. It's call charity and the US is among the (if not The) most charitable countries in the world.
It's a common claim: "but we're so charitable." Muslims use it too to justify harsh conditions under sharia law.
By taxing out the charity you only reduce the amount people are able to give to causes they think are noble. You take away the ability for someone to decide for themselves that they want to seriously help that family down the street that just just had a house fire. If you mandate insurance for all, you take away that sympathy. Now the person down the street is likely to say, "Oh well, they have insurance." You care less about your neighbors and your neighborhood because you start to assume that everyone gets the same as you... you even alienate those that might have given by forcing them to give.
Circular reasoning: if you take away the reason people need charity people won't feel obliged to be charitable. Of course since charity if such a great christian (and muslim, etc) value we wouldn't want to deny people the joy and wholesomeness of being charitable now do we ?
The point is that it shouldn't be charity, that it's a basic human right to get good medical treatment (it's even in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and the best way to guarantee the right to everyone is to socialize it.
Yes actually... I have a right to get healthcare, if I want it. Mandatory takes away that right of choice. I can choose to not have healthcare and die in a ditch if I want. Mandatory is the opposite of personal freedom.
Sorry to disappoint you but I live in a country with socialized medicine and I can go out and die in a ditch too if I want to. Let's be frank here for a second. As I see it you don't oppose healthcare you just don't want to be forced to pay for it either directly or through taxes, especially if there's a risk of you contributing for *gasp* someone less fortunates' healthcare (and nobody thinks they themselves will someday be in that position do they.) Fortunately there's a lot of people out there that realize that we're in this thing called life together and helping each other through it makes sense in the big picture. You could argue this takes away a little freedom, but the fact that you know you'll be cared for no matter what if need be is a lot more liberating (it frees you to concentrate on better things) than your idealized "freedoms."
"An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered. He will shout and rage. A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet. Or he cries. He knows he's there for a reason." From Das Leben der Anderen Of course it's a member of the Stasi speaking but generally people do assume that the innocent get angry and fight as opposed to settling.
Why is it that there seems to be no focus on going after those who actually CREATE the child porn? Nailing people for possession of bits and bytes does nothing to save the children. Oh, we can pretend it does, but we're supposed to be able to THINK.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...
They're either completely anonymous losers (abusive father/uncle only with a webcam) or making big bucks in parts of the world where that's all that matters and they can buy immunity. It also hard and costly.
Doesn't even need to be a picture board. Awhile back a belgian cardinal was involved in child pornography possession charges, turns out the picture was a cached thumbnail from the frontpage of a news site (it won some photography competition.) of course the whole discovery was blabbed to the press by the cops before they really knew what was going on and the news went around the world causing irreparable damage to the guys image. I wonder what would have happened if the person involved wasn't as high profile and the police didn't have to backpedal as quickly as they did.
It's so easy to get a file on someone else's computer I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time.
I haven't played Civ IV myself, having found Civ III to be a nice improvement over Civ II (man, can we just get a new Alpha Centauri already?!), but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop. The game got rid of some nice gameplay elements and expanded on others (diplomacy). That may be your kind of game-- after all, I loved the original Railroad Tycoon and intensely disliked the follow-up, but my opinion runs contrary to the masses there. But hopefully they've learned from their mistakes in Civ IV.
I'm still playing Alpha Centauri and for all its faults it blows Civ 3 & 4 out of the water. Didn't stop me from playing them though, my iMac screen actually got burn-in from Civ 4 UI elements (Apple replaced it though so it was all good.) I just wish they would concentrate on AI and gameplay instead of 3D effects. They are distracting, give me an isometric map and be done with it, it's a strategy game for fucks sake.
The Bible being infallible doesn't mean it is an unabridged compilation of all that is knowable. It simply means it is accurate on the subjects it addresses. The Bible primarily with things such as why are we here and how are we to treat each other. Apparently the existence or non-existence of aliens is not important to those questions. If we ever do discover aliens, it would be reasonable for Christians to conclude that God created them too, but their existence isn't something we need to know about to please God.
Aliens are problematic because : - they were not in the garden of Eden and so out goes the doctrine of original sin. - Jesus was crucified on earth for the sin of man (see above) would he have to be crucified on every planet, would he incarnate in every one of these races ? Where does that leave the trinity ? - God created man in his image and gave him dominion over all the rest of the animals. What happens if we encounter a more advanced alien race ? - etc, etc.
True faith is based on evidence, not opposed to evidence. If you look at the teachings of the apostles in Acts, for example, their message rested on the fact that there was a man who everyone had seen or heard of, who had done impressive miracles that many people have seen, was put to death in a very public fashion and then seen by many people alive afterwards.
It's not evidence any more than someone claiming to have tugged on Zeus' beard is evidence.
According to this Bloomberg story, the New York Times is only accurate in that Google and Verizon negotiated net neutrality on everything but mobile networks, and hence Verizon will be allowed to do traffic discrimination on those lines.
But I find it a little odd to write up that story as "Google and Verizon negotiating an end to net neutrality" rather than as "Google and Verizon negotiating to preserve net neutrality on most internet connections."
It's not ending net neutrality based on what type of client is connecting ? Are you serious ? This like being "mostly" a virgin. There's no such thing.
s far as I'm concerned the dev-team is a trusted source. These guys are doing amazing work and have been for some time. They are hackers in the true sense of the word. BTW they also released a tool that will warn you when a PDF tries to load so it can no longer be done surreptitiously and you are at least aware of the risk when opening a file.
I've posted this in other threads but it gets completely ignored in the "OMG HAX" hubbub : if you've jailbroken your iPhone you can install PDF Loading Warner which will warn you when PDF are opened that you are vulnerable and should only open files from a trusted source. This way you cannot be caught unawares.
You jest, but I have one bad eye so 3D is right out for me. If they force this gimmick on everyone I'll have to give up movies. Then there's the people will decent eyesight that get headaches from the 3D effect. It's a hack and a poor one at that.
But of the big 3 only 2 are actually in the business of building platforms : RIM and Apple. Will all those manufacturers that make Android phones stay in it for the long haul ? Will they update their phones to the latest Android versions ? (They can't even be arsed to ship a recent version with their phones now.) Will they work ceaselessly to improve their phones ? I hope so but experience says no. All these manufacturers keep chasing the next big thing and right now it's iPhone clones. Read this comment on the story :
"They did the same thing a few years ago when the Blackberry was first successful. They all came out with monoblock keyboard phones within a year (Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, Nokia E series, HTC Dash etc.) In fact, they all did this because operators called them and asked them to build Blackberry look-aline phones (I know this from experience)."
If these guys stay true to form in a couple of years there will be a big variety of Android devices all on different versions depending on the cost, different hardware, with varying form factors and ugly custom themes and crapware. What'll that do to Android as a platform ? Lowest common denominator software or risk not selling your app at all ?
With the way technology is going I imagine we're not far from an augmented reality app that would be able to overlay/blend pictures like this into live footage and display it. How eerie would that be ?
Slashdot Mirror
Turns out we're not the only animal that uses tools so there's no reason why it would have appeared recently in human evolution. What's more impressive is our ability to design tools to attain a certain objective by using only our imagination (abstract thought) rather than the ability to pick up a rock from the vicinity to carve up a carcass. That's likely much more recent.
Yeah, the emperor is the embodiment of the empire not the other way around. He has to act presidential, not show weakness and show the hordes at the gate the splendor and power of the empire. So we get the same power mongering bullshit as before.
The technology that annoyed me the most about Star Trek and TNG was cameras. Here you're sending people over to strange ships and planets and asking "What's going on? Can you describe to me what you see?" Give me a break! 400 years in the future and they can't envision wireless video, but wireless audio is everywhere.
There's video communication all over the place, just not to away teams. I always assumed they were limited by being on a planet surface and having to communicate with a ship in orbit using only low power communicators (the little badge things.) Most planets presumably not even having communication satellites for them to bounce their signals off.
On the topic of the PADD, I've been making my way through the various Star Trek series, and one of the things that's really struck me is how even though the Federation has access to advanced computing power and networking technology, crew members still physically hand each other PADDs to transfer information. In some cases, they'll end up with piles of PADDs on their desks if they're studying a particular topic in depth.
All the other comments are great for offering up technical explanations for this but also remember this is a TV show and so the audience needs a visual indication of information being exchanged and people working with lots of different sources at once. It's also visually a lot more interesting than showing a bare desk.
Sorry, can't resist :
"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.'" -- George Carlin
And he stated that "one of his staff sent [him] an internet".
What you've never gotten an internet before ?
You know private browsing wasn't exactly design to be a DOD level security feature. It is supposed to keep your browsing habits from the casual observer using the same computer. If you take security seriously you have to have other measures in place.
The good thing is that they are actually asking these questions in the first place. We all know other companies (not all) that wouldn't give some of these balancing ideals even a moment of reflection.
and no I'm not a Google fanboy
And what good fortune that such a soul-seeking document about the corporation torn (torn I say) between its golden heart and desire for profit should surface right now when they are in the spotlight for abandoning their principals ("No, no just a little compromise") on net neutrality. You see they're really good at heart, doesn't this introspection prove it ?
Where's the sarcasm tag ? You'd think that a society that sees so much of it in every area of business to politics would be used to this kind of misdirection and spin by now.
He also seems naive enough to think that upper management have anything to do with things like design details.
The guy who should be taking the fall is Jobs, for putting aethetics before technical considerations in the team's mindset
Nice job of contradicting yourself there. Still, it takes a potshot at Apple so it'll be modded insightful.
Sure, it's a great thing to help out the less fortunate. It's call charity and the US is among the (if not The) most charitable countries in the world.
It's a common claim: "but we're so charitable." Muslims use it too to justify harsh conditions under sharia law.
By taxing out the charity you only reduce the amount people are able to give to causes they think are noble. You take away the ability for someone to decide for themselves that they want to seriously help that family down the street that just just had a house fire. If you mandate insurance for all, you take away that sympathy. Now the person down the street is likely to say, "Oh well, they have insurance." You care less about your neighbors and your neighborhood because you start to assume that everyone gets the same as you... you even alienate those that might have given by forcing them to give.
Circular reasoning: if you take away the reason people need charity people won't feel obliged to be charitable. Of course since charity if such a great christian (and muslim, etc) value we wouldn't want to deny people the joy and wholesomeness of being charitable now do we ?
The point is that it shouldn't be charity, that it's a basic human right to get good medical treatment (it's even in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and the best way to guarantee the right to everyone is to socialize it.
Yes actually... I have a right to get healthcare, if I want it. Mandatory takes away that right of choice. I can choose to not have healthcare and die in a ditch if I want. Mandatory is the opposite of personal freedom.
Sorry to disappoint you but I live in a country with socialized medicine and I can go out and die in a ditch too if I want to. Let's be frank here for a second. As I see it you don't oppose healthcare you just don't want to be forced to pay for it either directly or through taxes, especially if there's a risk of you contributing for *gasp* someone less fortunates' healthcare (and nobody thinks they themselves will someday be in that position do they.) Fortunately there's a lot of people out there that realize that we're in this thing called life together and helping each other through it makes sense in the big picture. You could argue this takes away a little freedom, but the fact that you know you'll be cared for no matter what if need be is a lot more liberating (it frees you to concentrate on better things) than your idealized "freedoms."
"An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered. He will shout and rage. A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet. Or he cries. He knows he's there for a reason." From Das Leben der Anderen Of course it's a member of the Stasi speaking but generally people do assume that the innocent get angry and fight as opposed to settling.
Why is it that there seems to be no focus on going after those who actually CREATE the child porn? Nailing people for possession of bits and bytes does nothing to save the children. Oh, we can pretend it does, but we're supposed to be able to THINK.
Sorry, I expect too much of the human race...
They're either completely anonymous losers (abusive father/uncle only with a webcam) or making big bucks in parts of the world where that's all that matters and they can buy immunity. It also hard and costly.
Doesn't even need to be a picture board. Awhile back a belgian cardinal was involved in child pornography possession charges, turns out the picture was a cached thumbnail from the frontpage of a news site (it won some photography competition.) of course the whole discovery was blabbed to the press by the cops before they really knew what was going on and the news went around the world causing irreparable damage to the guys image. I wonder what would have happened if the person involved wasn't as high profile and the police didn't have to backpedal as quickly as they did.
It's so easy to get a file on someone else's computer I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time.
I haven't played Civ IV myself, having found Civ III to be a nice improvement over Civ II (man, can we just get a new Alpha Centauri already?!), but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop. The game got rid of some nice gameplay elements and expanded on others (diplomacy). That may be your kind of game-- after all, I loved the original Railroad Tycoon and intensely disliked the follow-up, but my opinion runs contrary to the masses there. But hopefully they've learned from their mistakes in Civ IV.
I'm still playing Alpha Centauri and for all its faults it blows Civ 3 & 4 out of the water. Didn't stop me from playing them though, my iMac screen actually got burn-in from Civ 4 UI elements (Apple replaced it though so it was all good.) I just wish they would concentrate on AI and gameplay instead of 3D effects. They are distracting, give me an isometric map and be done with it, it's a strategy game for fucks sake.
Great, I'll take two pints then.
The Bible being infallible doesn't mean it is an unabridged compilation of all that is knowable. It simply means it is accurate on the subjects it addresses. The Bible primarily with things such as why are we here and how are we to treat each other. Apparently the existence or non-existence of aliens is not important to those questions. If we ever do discover aliens, it would be reasonable for Christians to conclude that God created them too, but their existence isn't something we need to know about to please God.
Aliens are problematic because :
- they were not in the garden of Eden and so out goes the doctrine of original sin.
- Jesus was crucified on earth for the sin of man (see above) would he have to be crucified on every planet, would he incarnate in every one of these races ? Where does that leave the trinity ?
- God created man in his image and gave him dominion over all the rest of the animals. What happens if we encounter a more advanced alien race ?
- etc, etc.
True faith is based on evidence, not opposed to evidence. If you look at the teachings of the apostles in Acts, for example, their message rested on the fact that there was a man who everyone had seen or heard of, who had done impressive miracles that many people have seen, was put to death in a very public fashion and then seen by many people alive afterwards.
It's not evidence any more than someone claiming to have tugged on Zeus' beard is evidence.
A tweet from Google PR no less. I'd take the opinion of an AC before that of a PR man.
According to this Bloomberg story, the New York Times is only accurate in that Google and Verizon negotiated net neutrality on everything but mobile networks, and hence Verizon will be allowed to do traffic discrimination on those lines.
But I find it a little odd to write up that story as "Google and Verizon negotiating an end to net neutrality" rather than as "Google and Verizon negotiating to preserve net neutrality on most internet connections."
It's not ending net neutrality based on what type of client is connecting ? Are you serious ?
This like being "mostly" a virgin. There's no such thing.
s far as I'm concerned the dev-team is a trusted source. These guys are doing amazing work and have been for some time. They are hackers in the true sense of the word. BTW they also released a tool that will warn you when a PDF tries to load so it can no longer be done surreptitiously and you are at least aware of the risk when opening a file.
I've posted this in other threads but it gets completely ignored in the "OMG HAX" hubbub : if you've jailbroken your iPhone you can install PDF Loading Warner which will warn you when PDF are opened that you are vulnerable and should only open files from a trusted source. This way you cannot be caught unawares.
You jest, but I have one bad eye so 3D is right out for me. If they force this gimmick on everyone I'll have to give up movies. Then there's the people will decent eyesight that get headaches from the 3D effect. It's a hack and a poor one at that.
You can upgrade to the latest model every few years. As long as you can afford it.
But of the big 3 only 2 are actually in the business of building platforms : RIM and Apple. Will all those manufacturers that make Android phones stay in it for the long haul ? Will they update their phones to the latest Android versions ? (They can't even be arsed to ship a recent version with their phones now.) Will they work ceaselessly to improve their phones ? I hope so but experience says no. All these manufacturers keep chasing the next big thing and right now it's iPhone clones. Read this comment on the story :
"They did the same thing a few years ago when the Blackberry was first successful. They all came out with monoblock keyboard phones within a year (Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, Nokia E series, HTC Dash etc.) In fact, they all did this because operators called them and asked them to build Blackberry look-aline phones (I know this from experience)."
If these guys stay true to form in a couple of years there will be a big variety of Android devices all on different versions depending on the cost, different hardware, with varying form factors and ugly custom themes and crapware. What'll that do to Android as a platform ? Lowest common denominator software or risk not selling your app at all ?
With the way technology is going I imagine we're not far from an augmented reality app that would be able to overlay/blend pictures like this into live footage and display it. How eerie would that be ?