The Enterprise didn't simply transport nukes for the same reason the U.S. didn't simply nuke Iraq. It's a dishonorable tactic reserved for a last resort.
Bull hooey. We didn't use nukes because they're so ridiculously indiscriminate, to say nothing of the bad publicity associated with using one. Meanwhile in Star Trek land, they have no problems firing a torpedo but would think twice before beaming one? Same weapon, same target, same goal, just a slightly different means of getting it there.
Star Trek, except in one Voyager expisode, always ignored the usefulness of the transporter against un-transporter-shielded opponents, and so does this analysis. Yes, the gallant crew of the Enterprise could beam an away team over to wreak some small amount of havoc, but why would they do that? I think dumping a major explosive (nuclear, antimatter, quantum, even a chemical MOAB for cryin' out loud) warhead into Nida's lap would brighten his day ever so much more. If the explosion goes from the inside out, uber-thick armor serves only to protect the other guy from the flying debris that used to be the inside of your ship.
But hey, don't even get me started on the poor widgetology found in the entire Trek universe. We'd be here till next week.
I don't ask that they bring spent an inordinate amount of time making sure every technology fit together utterly perfectly, but a plot device that depends on characters doing something that is blatantly stupid or ignorant makes me enjoy the show a great deal less.
I for one don't have too huge a problem with the loss of privacy. The cloak of anonymity we enjoy is largely a product of ultra-urbanization, whereby it becomes impossible to know more than a tiny fraction of people you see on the streets. Human history largely consists of smaller conglomerations where everyone knew everyone else and privacy was virtually unheard of. What I absolutely cannot tolerate is unequal information flow and losing the accountability we have over the government and it's minions. If Homeland Security wants to get information about me (i.e., more power over me), I will be for it only if We The People get additional abilities to watch what they do and curb their inevitable excesses. Cameras on the streets don't bother me, but publicly funded cameras that feed into a secret vault that only the rich, powerful, or well-connected can get into (Britain's approach of allowing you to pay $20 for a tape only if you are on it is pathetic) pisses me off.
I suggest you research the story of the Intel engineer who is being held incognito
The/. header for it read, "Intel Employee Disappeared by US", and someone responded by saying that that was a totally inappropriate tagline. He's only being held 'for questioning' and that fact is public knowledge, right? My first thought was, "This guy was grabbed from his home at night, has been tossed in a cell, has had no charges pressed, isn't allowed to see a lawyer or his family, and as far as we know, will not be released anytime soon. For all intents and purposes, he has dropped off the face of the planet. How is 'disappeared' not an accurate term?" Improving national security is a fine idea, but doing it with secret agencies conducting secret operations holding secret trials with not-so-secretly brutal results? They'd be totally out of control within a few years.
Better yet, how about we have a law saying the same thing about legislation. The problem is, the first time an unenforcable law _is_ passed and upheld, the "Anti-Unenforcable Law Act" itself becomes unenforceable, thus producing a legal paradox and Congress implodes, taking most of D.C. with it. Hmmm, not a bad idea, actually.
Uh, every 142nd. You use the suffix appropriate for the least significant digit. "Hundred and forty-twoth"?
Anyway, no I certainly don't want to increase the number. But given that our Beloved Leaders are perfectly happy with this figure and show few qualms about making everyone a criminal, I suspect things will get a bit worse before they get better. Note the DEA's willingness to use cheap tactics to get around state legalized marijuana laws. And has any politician ever gotten elected on a "Let's get rid of some of the godawfully stupid laws" platform?
if you're able to get a digital reproduction of the music, then you can reproduce it for free for anybody who's interested
That is absolutely correct. But what the RIAA simply refuses to accept is that short of undoing the past half century of computer development or turning the world into a high tech Orwellian nightmare, there's nothing they can do about it! If they want to stay in business, they simply have to market the things that they can beat P2P in. Quality, organization, reliability, and extras. They'll never actually beat free when it comes to price, so they must keep the aversion to expense minimal and offer products and services that can't be had, or gotten only with great difficulty, at a bazaar. But no, instead they try to own everyone's computers, call their customers criminals, and hit 4 students with a lawsuit for 0.25% of the GDP of the entire planet. It makes the business models of the dot-bombs look like masterpieces of management.
Heck, I've outlined a number of variations on a scheme that would allow music companies to sell unrestricted files online and still get paid for it. They generally revolved around their being able to reliably deliver uber-high quality recordings of basically every song in existence ($0.25 - $1 each; free uber-low quality versions for sampling) along with album covers, lyrics, behind the scenes with the band, etc, etc, that one normally never finds with P2P files. Basically stuff that lessens the price advantage of P2P while maximizing their own advantages over it. But will they ever do it? Ha!
Connotation is such a funny thing. In this context, "use" and "exploit" would mean basically the same thing, yet they chose to use the word that conjures sensations of being ripped off. Maybe that sort of thinking is just inherent to lawyers.
Very true, but the tactic of making a scarcity of information so that ordinary property law (or the variation of it that is copyright and patent) can be applied is becoming less and less effective. I agree, not being able to ensure that an originator of an idea is reimbursed is bad, but the alternative (forcing people at gunpoint to pay for something that, from their point of view, costs absolutely nothing) is looking worse. With modern electronics and telecommunications, the old way of handling copyright simply does not work. The sooner The Powers That Be get that through their skulls, the sooner we can find a solution that does work.
Remember, copyrights are themselves a fairly recent invention. They have not always been applied in history and it would be foolish to think that they always will be in the future.
Furthermore, let's assume the copyright holders' worst case scenario. Copyright dies and is buried beneath easy intercontinental copying. Nobody has monetary incentive to invent and anything they do is spread without the author's permission. Sound about right? It is important to note that this situation differs from the classic Tragedy of the Commons or the foolishness of Communism. This is not a building or a piece of land that constantly requires work by people (who of course receive nothing) to keep active and useful. The Information Commons does not suffer during a dearth of fresh blood. As you say, it 'merely' stagnates. Or does it? Industrial R&D would probably suffer (we'd see a dramatic rise in the Trade Secret approach to new products), but pure researchers would likely settle for getting their name stamped on the results. Music, movies, and novels might be added to only by the altruistic, though it's arguable that this is in many respects better than the corporatized version we get today. And there will always be incentive to go to movie theaters and to see live bands; the experience beats the hell out of home systems. Paintings and sculptures, of course, will never lack for artists with visions and people wanting to 'culture up' their homes with the real thing.
Compare that to Valenti's dream scenario, where every work is owned and totally controlled even after it leaves the store. With copyright lengths reaching into the centuries and beyond (forever minus a day?), unless someone is actively printing it, old works will languish in dusty bins and eventually die an ignomious death under the guise of Digital Rights Management. The Commons cannot survive being owned. I'm constantly hearing about people who search high and low for some 80-year old piece of work, but because the author's heir says no, nothing happens.
I'm not suggesting the false dichotomy that we will eventually be forced choose between these scenarios. The future will almost certainly be something in between, or even something wierder. But I say that if we were to have to choose one, life with excessive freedom is _infinitely_ superior to the alternative.
Well, we damned well better get used to the idea of infinite reproduction of stuff at little or no cost. Today it's information and certain corporations are ready to destroy the free market in an attempt to turn the clock back. In 30 or 50 or 100 years when we get those Star Trek replicators, what are we going to do? Do we try to enforce an artificial scarcity of any and all material objects just to keep a lucky few in positions of power? Do we keep legions of farmers and manufacturers and distributors in business by sheer force of law? Or do we use it to try and bring an unprecedented level of prosperity to everyone within reach?
Have you read the RIAA brief about this case? They act as though cracking down on "so-called Local Area Networks", a peculiar invention of criminal college students which are of course _only_ ever used to steal money from them, is a good thing.
See, right here's reality, over there's the RIAA mindset. In between is a distance one would normally measure in light years.
No, no, no. You start by turning 'citizens' into 'criminal that hasn't been caught yet'. And that stage has been underway for years, though they've recently picked up the pace. You would probably be shocked to know how many felonies you'd be found guilty of if law enforcement felt they wanted to enforce them.
Ah, but due to the wonderful ambiguity of the english language, "Your Rights Online" can be taken as "Your rights when you are online" or, "Your rights, described online in great detail." The "or lack thereof" applies to both, however.
Well, you're right about it being 5 dimensions total, but if the first four are all spatial, then the inside of the tesseract would be seem very bizarre to us, but not in a temporal sense. The geometry would be fiendishly difficult to figure out; you could go from one cube to the next in a straight line and still end up back where you started. Just as a 2-d person would be amazed that walking in a straight line on a sphere led back to his starting point.
As the post above yours describes, Duke allows you to do some really wierd things with the geometry of the map. I don't see any reason why one couldn't build a map that takes place in a 4-dimensional hypercube.
Well, everyone has a right to _make_ money. What certain organizations tend to forget is that they also have the right to _lose_ money, too. Hence the constant running to Congress and crying SOS (Save Our Stock).
Exactly. And rather than use their limited funds on stuff that government actually needs to do, they try and spread it over everything (just rack up huge debts). They aren't actually nixing useless agencies and programs, they just cut their funding to the point that what money they do get is totally wasted.
No money for schools, but obviously more than enough to fight wars and criminalize copyright violations and create giant new security agencies with unaccountable funding. How much did the DEA spend on the War on Drugs last year?
Good point. Ok, how about a car that is permeable to sounds in the normal range but not to hypersonic frequencies. Heck, a simple external microphone pickup that relays stuff to the inside would do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Bull hooey. We didn't use nukes because they're so ridiculously indiscriminate, to say nothing of the bad publicity associated with using one. Meanwhile in Star Trek land, they have no problems firing a torpedo but would think twice before beaming one? Same weapon, same target, same goal, just a slightly different means of getting it there.
But hey, don't even get me started on the poor widgetology found in the entire Trek universe. We'd be here till next week.
I don't ask that they bring spent an inordinate amount of time making sure every technology fit together utterly perfectly, but a plot device that depends on characters doing something that is blatantly stupid or ignorant makes me enjoy the show a great deal less.
I suggest you research the story of the Intel engineer who is being held incognito
The /. header for it read, "Intel Employee Disappeared by US", and someone responded by saying that that was a totally inappropriate tagline. He's only being held 'for questioning' and that fact is public knowledge, right? My first thought was, "This guy was grabbed from his home at night, has been tossed in a cell, has had no charges pressed, isn't allowed to see a lawyer or his family, and as far as we know, will not be released anytime soon. For all intents and purposes, he has dropped off the face of the planet. How is 'disappeared' not an accurate term?" Improving national security is a fine idea, but doing it with secret agencies conducting secret operations holding secret trials with not-so-secretly brutal results? They'd be totally out of control within a few years.
Better yet, how about we have a law saying the same thing about legislation. The problem is, the first time an unenforcable law _is_ passed and upheld, the "Anti-Unenforcable Law Act" itself becomes unenforceable, thus producing a legal paradox and Congress implodes, taking most of D.C. with it. Hmmm, not a bad idea, actually.
Anyway, no I certainly don't want to increase the number. But given that our Beloved Leaders are perfectly happy with this figure and show few qualms about making everyone a criminal, I suspect things will get a bit worse before they get better. Note the DEA's willingness to use cheap tactics to get around state legalized marijuana laws. And has any politician ever gotten elected on a "Let's get rid of some of the godawfully stupid laws" platform?
That is absolutely correct. But what the RIAA simply refuses to accept is that short of undoing the past half century of computer development or turning the world into a high tech Orwellian nightmare, there's nothing they can do about it! If they want to stay in business, they simply have to market the things that they can beat P2P in. Quality, organization, reliability, and extras. They'll never actually beat free when it comes to price, so they must keep the aversion to expense minimal and offer products and services that can't be had, or gotten only with great difficulty, at a bazaar. But no, instead they try to own everyone's computers, call their customers criminals, and hit 4 students with a lawsuit for 0.25% of the GDP of the entire planet. It makes the business models of the dot-bombs look like masterpieces of management.
Heck, I've outlined a number of variations on a scheme that would allow music companies to sell unrestricted files online and still get paid for it. They generally revolved around their being able to reliably deliver uber-high quality recordings of basically every song in existence ($0.25 - $1 each; free uber-low quality versions for sampling) along with album covers, lyrics, behind the scenes with the band, etc, etc, that one normally never finds with P2P files. Basically stuff that lessens the price advantage of P2P while maximizing their own advantages over it. But will they ever do it? Ha!
Connotation is such a funny thing. In this context, "use" and "exploit" would mean basically the same thing, yet they chose to use the word that conjures sensations of being ripped off. Maybe that sort of thinking is just inherent to lawyers.
Remember, copyrights are themselves a fairly recent invention. They have not always been applied in history and it would be foolish to think that they always will be in the future.
Furthermore, let's assume the copyright holders' worst case scenario. Copyright dies and is buried beneath easy intercontinental copying. Nobody has monetary incentive to invent and anything they do is spread without the author's permission. Sound about right? It is important to note that this situation differs from the classic Tragedy of the Commons or the foolishness of Communism. This is not a building or a piece of land that constantly requires work by people (who of course receive nothing) to keep active and useful. The Information Commons does not suffer during a dearth of fresh blood. As you say, it 'merely' stagnates. Or does it? Industrial R&D would probably suffer (we'd see a dramatic rise in the Trade Secret approach to new products), but pure researchers would likely settle for getting their name stamped on the results. Music, movies, and novels might be added to only by the altruistic, though it's arguable that this is in many respects better than the corporatized version we get today. And there will always be incentive to go to movie theaters and to see live bands; the experience beats the hell out of home systems. Paintings and sculptures, of course, will never lack for artists with visions and people wanting to 'culture up' their homes with the real thing.
Compare that to Valenti's dream scenario, where every work is owned and totally controlled even after it leaves the store. With copyright lengths reaching into the centuries and beyond (forever minus a day?), unless someone is actively printing it, old works will languish in dusty bins and eventually die an ignomious death under the guise of Digital Rights Management. The Commons cannot survive being owned. I'm constantly hearing about people who search high and low for some 80-year old piece of work, but because the author's heir says no, nothing happens.
I'm not suggesting the false dichotomy that we will eventually be forced choose between these scenarios. The future will almost certainly be something in between, or even something wierder. But I say that if we were to have to choose one, life with excessive freedom is _infinitely_ superior to the alternative.
Well, we damned well better get used to the idea of infinite reproduction of stuff at little or no cost. Today it's information and certain corporations are ready to destroy the free market in an attempt to turn the clock back. In 30 or 50 or 100 years when we get those Star Trek replicators, what are we going to do? Do we try to enforce an artificial scarcity of any and all material objects just to keep a lucky few in positions of power? Do we keep legions of farmers and manufacturers and distributors in business by sheer force of law? Or do we use it to try and bring an unprecedented level of prosperity to everyone within reach?
I'm not sure I've got room for that many zeros in the amount box!
See, right here's reality, over there's the RIAA mindset. In between is a distance one would normally measure in light years.
No, no, no. You start by turning 'citizens' into 'criminal that hasn't been caught yet'. And that stage has been underway for years, though they've recently picked up the pace. You would probably be shocked to know how many felonies you'd be found guilty of if law enforcement felt they wanted to enforce them.
Ah, but due to the wonderful ambiguity of the english language, "Your Rights Online" can be taken as "Your rights when you are online" or, "Your rights, described online in great detail." The "or lack thereof" applies to both, however.
Well, you're right about it being 5 dimensions total, but if the first four are all spatial, then the inside of the tesseract would be seem very bizarre to us, but not in a temporal sense. The geometry would be fiendishly difficult to figure out; you could go from one cube to the next in a straight line and still end up back where you started. Just as a 2-d person would be amazed that walking in a straight line on a sphere led back to his starting point.
As the post above yours describes, Duke allows you to do some really wierd things with the geometry of the map. I don't see any reason why one couldn't build a map that takes place in a 4-dimensional hypercube.
Well, everyone has a right to _make_ money. What certain organizations tend to forget is that they also have the right to _lose_ money, too. Hence the constant running to Congress and crying SOS (Save Our Stock).
Shit, man, I'm 23 and have no criminal record, but I had no trouble thinking up 4 'felonies' that I've committed.
My bad, you were right the first time. Yes, it'd be all but completely useless with 200 minutes.
Shit, I'm really on the ball today, aren't I? The Seiko is 80 hours, the Wristomo is indeed 200 minutes and therefore nearly useless.
The writeup is wrong. It's got 80 hours of standby.
Hey Dyolf, how about you RTFA next time? The writeup is wrong; is supports 80 hours of standby.
No money for schools, but obviously more than enough to fight wars and criminalize copyright violations and create giant new security agencies with unaccountable funding. How much did the DEA spend on the War on Drugs last year?
So I'd have to recharge this thing, at best, every 3 hours? Nuts to that.
Good point. Ok, how about a car that is permeable to sounds in the normal range but not to hypersonic frequencies. Heck, a simple external microphone pickup that relays stuff to the inside would do it.