It's just that SG-1 gets all the interesting missions...
"Tonight on Stargate: SG-9: In a desperate, last ditch attempt to initiate a scientific exchange program between the Tolin and the people of Earth, SG-9 works overtime and desperately search for a concession to attact the interest of the self-sufficient Tolin... you've never seen bargaining-table politics like this!"
[shot moves to a bargaining table] SG-9 Team Leader: "As you can see from paragraph 3, subparagraph one of our treaty, if we blah blah blah blah...."
The problem isn't so much the theme itself, IMHO, it's that in ten years, it will seem incredibly dated. (Actually, I'm willing to bet that it will seem dated in 2-4 years, but I'm being conservative here.)
Even TOS theme isn't that dated, though it does bear a certain '60s vibe.
Is that a crime? For any other show I'd say no. But for a sci-fi show (and this goes for damn near all of them, not just Star Trek), I don't want a theme that screams "Contemporary!!" In a subtle, yet real way, it pulls me out of the show and drops me back in the year 2001... where, I might add, I'm not much on pop, or light rock, or post-disco semi-calypso, or whatever the hell genre that fits in. (Like I said, I'm not much on it:-) )
I don't watch a whole lot of other alternative Sci-fi shows... my cable system doesn't run many. But I do get syndicated Stargate SG-1 (which I think is excellent)... same music as the movie. Granted, it takes place in the present time, but still, the theme doesn't drag me into Hip Culture.
In this day and age, psuedo-classical like the Voyager theme is very neutral to us; it probably wouldn't be if we could listen to our culture with truly fresh ears, but we are who we are. It doesn't take us to the universe of the show; but there's no music that could do that directly. It also doesn't firmly ground us in the early days of the millenium.
That said, your description: "conveys the theme and mood of the series quite well - we're explorers, and tired of being held back" can be equally well done in a more culturally neutral style, and in fact, probably better. (May be an unpopular opinion, but the style the credits are in now, whatever style that may be, is IMHO one of the least expressive styles imaginable. Plop in some sad words and flip the song to minor and you're a long way to "me and my baby broke up, but I'm screwing her sister so who really cares".)
All IMHO, but that might help clarify some people's reasons for disliking it.
Or they may just not care for that style of music.
Re:Idea after being mugged last year...
on
GPS Meets PCS
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If I may ask, exactly what do you expect that panic button to do? Transmit to the 911 operator your dying gasps? Scare the would-be mugger with a faint muffled voice saying "Hello, 911. Is anyone there? Hello?"? Unless you're being mugged in direct sight of a cop (and a near-by one at that), you're already SOL by the time you're being mugged.
Prevention might work. Deterrence might work (i.e., arm yourself, unpopular in some circles but effective). But no button can bring the cops to your side in anything less then five minutes... and usually much more then that.
".Net" is an umbrella iniative encompassing a wide variety of things, including the CLR, the new windows widget set, and a new IE that works with these things. In particular, Microsoft could create a Hailstorm service, built on their Passport authentication, that allows people to exchange money, in virtually the same manner as Pay Pal... except Microsoft would probably get it working internationally, too.
(And except for the horrible tie-in factor, this would actually be pretty cool. You'd be able to build a web-site where people could directly send you money, instead of running off-site to send the money, because you could simply include the MS-PayPal object on your server and let it do the work. Quite direct.)
At Microsoft, everything has something to do with.Net. (A slight stretch of the truth, but only slight.)
If patents actually worked to protect the little guy, we'd scream a little less (though we'd still scream for other good reasons). Rest assured that no number of patents would protect PayPal if Microsoft decides to roll that functionality into.Net. Go do a bit of research, the evidence is abundent.
In fact, it's hard to find a recent example of the little guy truly winning; in all instances I've ever seen, the only way the "little guy" wins is to sell his rights to a big guy who can afford the fight. Hardly an example of patents preventing little-guy abuse.
Continue the logic train in the article towards the end. 99.99% accuracy results in 9,999 false positives per positive for a 1 in a billion terrorist chance (reasonable; remember a single person who takes multiple flights counts as multiple fliers). Keep going. What does it take to get to, say, 9 false per 1 real, which is still a bit much, but reasonable?
99.999%? Not enough. 99.9999%? Getting there, but you've still got work. 99.99999% One more. 99.999999%. Ye gods.
What can't this work? HUMANS can't hope for that level of accuracy. At that level of accuracy, MOST PEOPLE will never have had a false positive. But you know for a fact that you've false-positived people before. You're accuracy is probably somewhere around 99.99%, which is the one Bruce used. (Might I add that if it was your job to be this airport system, A: Your accuracy would be worse then that (adverse conditions) and thus B: You'd adjust by declaring everybody negative, which, under the circumstances, is the most rational answer... even for a computer system.)
We're requiring a computer system to be vastly better then a human at a face-recognition task? Michael is right, and Bruce played soft-ball in more then one way; the simple fact of the matter is that system isn't just "impossible", it's impossible. The computer system that says "Nobody is a terrorists" is vastly more accurate then any conceivable system, even one with humans in the loop.
That was inexcusable! Archer should have known better. He should have watched the shows!
LOL! I have this fantasy where in Star Trek, any Star Trek, someone's digging around in the historical archives and comes across... Star Trek, the Television Show.
I also fantasize about somebody in the huge number of time-locked cartoon strips (Foxtrot, Kevin & Kell, Dilbert probably qualifies by now, Peanuts wasn't quite time-locked but time passed around 10x too slowly) discovering that time isn't progressing. (I also think it'd be cool to do a fan strip where a number of these strips get together to do something about it...)
But this is America. You're free to propose the DMCA. You're free to lobby your local Congresscritter to vote for it. It was subjected to an open debate. We dropped the ball entirely, but even if we hadn't, it might have passed. That's the way it works. No duress, no trickery, no truly unusualy chicanery. It may have been evil, but it wasn't terribly dishonest.
This bill has none of that. It's being promoted as a feel-good measure that restricts liberties and vastly expands governmental power, while being touted as merely a (implicitly temporary) terrorist control measure. It's not. That's why this is far more traitorous then merely passing the DMCA.
I'm not saying they could keep you in jail. But while you're in court, proving to the clueless judge that it was a virus you had no knowlege of, and that you had no intent to deny service to the White House web site, you're sitting in jail. Or putting up a quite-likely-huge bail. And you're certainly in court.
May not be life in prison, but it's impressive punishment nonetheless. Oh, and did I mention they've probably confiscated your computers and aren't in a hurry to give them back? And trashed your place in the process?
Too much power. I don't care who has it, this is just too much.
but this law doesn't effect me, because i don't hack into financial or government computers. Hell I don't hack any computers.
Excuse me, but you are quite likely to be wrong. Was your computer, or any computer in your possession, infected with Code Red or Nimda? If so, and if it scanned any computers outside of your state, then it's not really a stretch to say that you were outside of the law.
OK, so as a Slashdot reader, you are less likely to be affected by the above. But how many of your friends were?
Also, this bill will eliminate the statute of limitations on these crimes and allow retroactive prosecution. Therefore, anybody who got Code Red or Nimda can quite plausibly be put in jail for life.
Would they win on defense? Maybe, but they're in jail until the trial is over. And maybe they won't win on defense...
This law hands the power to imprison damn near anyone running Windows IIS over the US government, such that only a lawsuit (inevitably protracted) would get them out.
Who still believes this is about preventing terrorism? What a sick joke! Frankly, I think those proposing this bill are traitors to the United States.
The moderation on the parent comment, as I write this, is incorrect. It does not deserve "funny". What it really needs is "scary". "Interesting" would probably suffice.
Do you seriously think that cataloging everybody with the "skills" to commit one of these crimes is far behind?
People thought that was seriously whacked out and totally impossible back in the 1970's... boy is it starting to look not only possible, but inevitable...
This bring up an interesting potential strategy that could negate some significant advantages the terrorists have on their home turf. These things were probably expensive to build, but I bet they're relatively cheap to build.
The terrorists, on the other hand, no matter how well equipped they are, have a finite supply of anti-aircraft capability. Keep launching these things over their territory, float at a good height, and let them launch anti-aircraft missiles at them to their heart's content. (They have to try to shoot them down, the intel the unmanned aircraft gather are too valuable to their enemy to just ignore them.) Equip those things with a chaff dispenser in place of a missle or two, and you've got a great robotic attrition tool.
One of the worst things about guerilla warfare is your inability to wear down the enemy without taking vastly larger losses yourself. This stuff puts an interesting spin on that... bin Laden may have picked the wrong time to become a guerilla.
That clause is different. Read it more closely. You'll see that you can't develop software for life-and-death situations because the software has not been tested to such a level of reliability.
Such testing is one of the reasons software for things like the Space Shuttle is so expensive. I'm not trying to be funny, but you don't want to use Windows CE in a pacemaker; it's simply not rated for that.
Who cares that you don't care? Each person's opinions stand on their own merits, regardless. As either a developer, or a user, we can listen to anybody's opinions we want, and factor then in as we see fit. This is just the pompous posturing of a self-proclaimed wanna-be authority: "I SAY blah blah blah, and so it is true". Phgfftht.
'IANAL, but isn't there something in contract law that says that if you put a clause in a contract that is illegal, then the contract is null and void on its face. For example, I can't put a clause in a contract that says that you will become my slave if you agree to the contract. Slavery is illegal and no contract is allowed to supercede that (AFAIK).'
'So the fact that this exists, does it not render the license restrictions that MS is putting into place null and void? In other words, has MS just ceded their rights to control Front Page?'
IANAL, but you don't need to be a lawyer for this.
First, as one person pointed out, licenses invariably have clauses that say if one part is found invalid, then only that part is invalidated, not the whole thing. Second, even if what you said is true, then what is nullified is the license. That doesn't mean Microsoft has "ceded" their rights to FrontPage, it means that you no longer have the right to use it.
This is why contracts have those clauses. For any non-trivial contract, it would not be good that the whole contract was nullified for obvious reasons, for either side.
Finally, I am surprised this wasn't noticed in a reply, but in states where the UCITA or compatible varient has been passed, this clause is likely to be completely legal, merely a varient on the non-review clause.
Can the total drag of such a system exceed the total drag a simple unadorned building experiences? (My intuition says no, but I'd be very interested to hear I was wrong...)
Ship that worthless piece of crap to me, and I'll trade you a useful 133MHz Pentium. No skin off your nose, trading one piece of crap for another. I'll pay for shipping.
Slashdot Mirror
People love it when you explain the problem they are having with things.
It's just that SG-1 gets all the interesting missions...
"Tonight on Stargate: SG-9: In a desperate, last ditch attempt to initiate a scientific exchange program between the Tolin and the people of Earth, SG-9 works overtime and desperately search for a concession to attact the interest of the self-sufficient Tolin... you've never seen bargaining-table politics like this!"
[shot moves to a bargaining table] SG-9 Team Leader: "As you can see from paragraph 3, subparagraph one of our treaty, if we blah blah blah blah...."
"Brought to you by the United Nations."
The problem isn't so much the theme itself, IMHO, it's that in ten years, it will seem incredibly dated. (Actually, I'm willing to bet that it will seem dated in 2-4 years, but I'm being conservative here.)
:-) )
Even TOS theme isn't that dated, though it does bear a certain '60s vibe.
Is that a crime? For any other show I'd say no. But for a sci-fi show (and this goes for damn near all of them, not just Star Trek), I don't want a theme that screams "Contemporary!!" In a subtle, yet real way, it pulls me out of the show and drops me back in the year 2001... where, I might add, I'm not much on pop, or light rock, or post-disco semi-calypso, or whatever the hell genre that fits in. (Like I said, I'm not much on it
I don't watch a whole lot of other alternative Sci-fi shows... my cable system doesn't run many. But I do get syndicated Stargate SG-1 (which I think is excellent)... same music as the movie. Granted, it takes place in the present time, but still, the theme doesn't drag me into Hip Culture.
In this day and age, psuedo-classical like the Voyager theme is very neutral to us; it probably wouldn't be if we could listen to our culture with truly fresh ears, but we are who we are. It doesn't take us to the universe of the show; but there's no music that could do that directly. It also doesn't firmly ground us in the early days of the millenium.
That said, your description: "conveys the theme and mood of the series quite well - we're explorers, and tired of being held back" can be equally well done in a more culturally neutral style, and in fact, probably better. (May be an unpopular opinion, but the style the credits are in now, whatever style that may be, is IMHO one of the least expressive styles imaginable. Plop in some sad words and flip the song to minor and you're a long way to "me and my baby broke up, but I'm screwing her sister so who really cares".)
All IMHO, but that might help clarify some people's reasons for disliking it.
Or they may just not care for that style of music.
Prevention might work. Deterrence might work (i.e., arm yourself, unpopular in some circles but effective). But no button can bring the cops to your side in anything less then five minutes... and usually much more then that.
".Net" is an umbrella iniative encompassing a wide variety of things, including the CLR, the new windows widget set, and a new IE that works with these things. In particular, Microsoft could create a Hailstorm service, built on their Passport authentication, that allows people to exchange money, in virtually the same manner as Pay Pal... except Microsoft would probably get it working internationally, too.
(And except for the horrible tie-in factor, this would actually be pretty cool. You'd be able to build a web-site where people could directly send you money, instead of running off-site to send the money, because you could simply include the MS-PayPal object on your server and let it do the work. Quite direct.)
At Microsoft, everything has something to do with .Net. (A slight stretch of the truth, but only slight.)
Note that solution works every bit as well with hydrogen as with natural gas.
In fact, it's hard to find a recent example of the little guy truly winning; in all instances I've ever seen, the only way the "little guy" wins is to sell his rights to a big guy who can afford the fight. Hardly an example of patents preventing little-guy abuse.
99.999%? Not enough. 99.9999%? Getting there, but you've still got work. 99.99999% One more. 99.999999%. Ye gods.
What can't this work? HUMANS can't hope for that level of accuracy. At that level of accuracy, MOST PEOPLE will never have had a false positive. But you know for a fact that you've false-positived people before. You're accuracy is probably somewhere around 99.99%, which is the one Bruce used. (Might I add that if it was your job to be this airport system, A: Your accuracy would be worse then that (adverse conditions) and thus B: You'd adjust by declaring everybody negative, which, under the circumstances, is the most rational answer... even for a computer system.)
We're requiring a computer system to be vastly better then a human at a face-recognition task? Michael is right, and Bruce played soft-ball in more then one way; the simple fact of the matter is that system isn't just "impossible", it's impossible . The computer system that says "Nobody is a terrorists" is vastly more accurate then any conceivable system, even one with humans in the loop.
I call it a Conspiracy of Common Cause.
LOL! I have this fantasy where in Star Trek, any Star Trek, someone's digging around in the historical archives and comes across... Star Trek, the Television Show.
I also fantasize about somebody in the huge number of time-locked cartoon strips (Foxtrot, Kevin & Kell, Dilbert probably qualifies by now, Peanuts wasn't quite time-locked but time passed around 10x too slowly) discovering that time isn't progressing. (I also think it'd be cool to do a fan strip where a number of these strips get together to do something about it...)
Moderators, beware! That post decrypts to "fr15t p0st!!!" It's not a funny post, it's off-topic! Don't let your points be spent carelessly!
Then yours got modded up because it was humourous.
Then this one will get modded up because it's suitably self-referential and spans at least 3 meta-levels.
Plus the use of the word "meta" adds that gloss of intelligence.
But this is America. You're free to propose the DMCA. You're free to lobby your local Congresscritter to vote for it. It was subjected to an open debate. We dropped the ball entirely, but even if we hadn't, it might have passed. That's the way it works. No duress, no trickery, no truly unusualy chicanery. It may have been evil, but it wasn't terribly dishonest.
This bill has none of that. It's being promoted as a feel-good measure that restricts liberties and vastly expands governmental power, while being touted as merely a (implicitly temporary) terrorist control measure. It's not. That's why this is far more traitorous then merely passing the DMCA.
May not be life in prison, but it's impressive punishment nonetheless. Oh, and did I mention they've probably confiscated your computers and aren't in a hurry to give them back? And trashed your place in the process?
Too much power. I don't care who has it, this is just too much.
Excuse me, but you are quite likely to be wrong. Was your computer, or any computer in your possession, infected with Code Red or Nimda? If so, and if it scanned any computers outside of your state, then it's not really a stretch to say that you were outside of the law.
OK, so as a Slashdot reader, you are less likely to be affected by the above. But how many of your friends were?
Also, this bill will eliminate the statute of limitations on these crimes and allow retroactive prosecution. Therefore, anybody who got Code Red or Nimda can quite plausibly be put in jail for life.
Would they win on defense? Maybe, but they're in jail until the trial is over. And maybe they won't win on defense...
This law hands the power to imprison damn near anyone running Windows IIS over the US government, such that only a lawsuit (inevitably protracted) would get them out.
Who still believes this is about preventing terrorism? What a sick joke! Frankly, I think those proposing this bill are traitors to the United States.
Do you seriously think that cataloging everybody with the "skills" to commit one of these crimes is far behind?
People thought that was seriously whacked out and totally impossible back in the 1970's... boy is it starting to look not only possible, but inevitable...
The terrorists, on the other hand, no matter how well equipped they are, have a finite supply of anti-aircraft capability. Keep launching these things over their territory, float at a good height, and let them launch anti-aircraft missiles at them to their heart's content. (They have to try to shoot them down, the intel the unmanned aircraft gather are too valuable to their enemy to just ignore them.) Equip those things with a chaff dispenser in place of a missle or two, and you've got a great robotic attrition tool.
One of the worst things about guerilla warfare is your inability to wear down the enemy without taking vastly larger losses yourself. This stuff puts an interesting spin on that... bin Laden may have picked the wrong time to become a guerilla.
Such testing is one of the reasons software for things like the Space Shuttle is so expensive. I'm not trying to be funny, but you don't want to use Windows CE in a pacemaker; it's simply not rated for that.
Who cares that you don't care? Each person's opinions stand on their own merits, regardless. As either a developer, or a user, we can listen to anybody's opinions we want, and factor then in as we see fit. This is just the pompous posturing of a self-proclaimed wanna-be authority: "I SAY blah blah blah, and so it is true". Phgfftht.
'So the fact that this exists, does it not render the license restrictions that MS is putting into place null and void? In other words, has MS just ceded their rights to control Front Page?'
IANAL, but you don't need to be a lawyer for this.
First, as one person pointed out, licenses invariably have clauses that say if one part is found invalid, then only that part is invalidated, not the whole thing. Second, even if what you said is true, then what is nullified is the license. That doesn't mean Microsoft has "ceded" their rights to FrontPage, it means that you no longer have the right to use it.
This is why contracts have those clauses. For any non-trivial contract, it would not be good that the whole contract was nullified for obvious reasons, for either side.
Finally, I am surprised this wasn't noticed in a reply, but in states where the UCITA or compatible varient has been passed, this clause is likely to be completely legal, merely a varient on the non-review clause.
You remind me of an essay I wrote, Human Justice for Human Beings. Good point.
Can the total drag of such a system exceed the total drag a simple unadorned building experiences? (My intuition says no, but I'd be very interested to hear I was wrong...)
Ship that worthless piece of crap to me, and I'll trade you a useful 133MHz Pentium. No skin off your nose, trading one piece of crap for another. I'll pay for shipping.
A classic example of premature optimization. Formatting is the last step before printing. Trying to change that natural flow results in disaster.