Ok.. I just updated Wikipedia. The Universe is now 13.5 billion years, it was at 13.7.
Hah, that's extra funny considering the summary's 13.5 billion number came from misquoting the Discovery article's link to an older article (by another group even) titled The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old. You and the submitter might hit it off nicely--you'd at least be able to talk about your remarkable lack of attention to detail.
I'm pretty sure you're joking about editing Wikipedia, but really you have no idea what you're talking about. Being confused by time dilation is for undergraduate physics majors. The world is unintuitive. You get over it after a while; all that matters is that you can make accurate predictions about it, and time dilation does not violate that ability no matter how much cognitive dissonance it causes you.
Yeah, it's a lame sentence. I forgot to criticize it in my haste to read the article and figure out what it might mean. I'm pretty sure the submitter just misunderstood the Discovery article. It uses the phrase "most precise measurements ever made" in the first paragraph and has a link to "ANALYSIS: The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old". Both say "precise", and a careless person might shove them together with a badly written sentence and a typo (13.5 instead of 13.75) to get the last half of the summary's first sentence. The 13.75 number isn't even from this study; the link was to a story from 2010 about a NASA study.
The title meant to say "BOSS: The Most Precise Measurement of the Universe". The other way round can mean these measurements are the most precise ever, which isn't even remotely true. For instance, the article says, "BOSS gives that distance to within 1.7 percent", whereas (to pick something out of a hat) the fine-structure constant has been measured to a precision of less than one part in a billion or within less than 0.0000001%.
Maybe a physicist can chime in here--how is the red shift actually measured in an experiment like this? You could of course measure the wavelength of incoming light, but how do you know what the wavelength "should" be? Are there some common spectral lines one can look for?
Also, is there any practical use to this experiment? I'm fine with pure research, but I was curious if maybe some of the techniques find application elsewhere. The article didn't mention any.
The screenplay taking a few liberties with reality isn't really the same as characters lacking depth. Jack's insight about where to be on the ship was a little magical, but it also fit with his general ingenuity (other examples: getting past the lice inspectors; getting Rose not to jump; picking Rose out of her touring party without getting noticed;...). As for locking Rose up, how would the mother explain that to Cal, Rose's supposed future husband? He might have just dumped Rose outright and the mother was deathly, irrationally afraid of ending up poor. She could have done a better job of chaperoning Rose, but meh, incompetence actually fits with her character.
To be clear it's not like I think the movie was perfect or anything. My biggest complaint was the overlong sequence in the bowels of the ship towards the end where somehow the water isn't freezing. But that's not a complaint about the character depth, which was your original point (and what I asked about).
Perhaps it's the part of me abused by seeing Wrath of the Titans recently that's talking, but how did the characters in Titanic lack depth? Even the ship's designer was more interesting than all the characters in Wrath put together. To be fair, that isn't saying much.
Really any shirtless/ripped shirt scenes involving Kirk in the next movie would be fine by me. The one I mentioned is pretty unique, though. I'm almost certain that ripping a shirt before giving a hypospray only occurs in that one scene.
As for Troi's sexiness, as I mentioned in another post, I'm gay and have trouble accurately judging female sexiness as it appears to straight men. It seems Troi was intended to be sexy but didn't really achieve that goal very well, at least with many (probably most) of the relevant fans.
Half-joke, half-serious. I don't view money as an end in itself, and I tend to care far more about ideas than things.
I want to have enough money to live comfortably. Billions is *way* more than I need for that. I wouldn't want to invest the time required to properly administer vast wealth either since I'm lucky enough to be able to pursue the things I care most about already. A yacht, entourage, cars, sports teams, or whatever other crap super rich people get doesn't interest me. I would like an excessively nice house, but again billions is far more than I would need for that. Give me, say, $5 million; that's probably more than I would ever spend anyway.
To be honest, I'm gay (completely; no bi), so my female sexiness detector is pretty buggy. Still, here's my reasoning.
* Troi was the only main character to wear a skirt for the first season or two. Tasha did not. Troi was also the only main character to use a non-standard and skin-tight uniform. Her job was often pretty superfluous considering none of the other shows included a counselor.
* I always thought Dax was supposed to provide some sort of adventuresome sexiness. Terry Farrell was more physically attractive (by my estimate) than any of the male actors on DS9 by far. None of Quark, Garak, Sisko, Odo, Worf, or Bashir approached model-looks whereas I think Terry Farrell did. I didn't think Ezri's actress was attractive, but that's probably just a bug on my part.
* Rand seemed to have no purpose plot-wise since all she did was carry trays of food and order padds. I figured she was just there to provide a pretty figure to look at.
* Uhura's skirt was ridiculously short and her legs were included in many a shot of her at her station. Still, I agree, she had lots more going for her than sex appeal.
* I agree with you about the Dabo girls. They were covered up pretty well much of the time, though IIRC there was some pretty prominent cleavage shown by some of them sometimes--maybe Rom's wife? They should have had Dabo boys though, and I imagine if the series were done today there would be at least one or two male Dabo attendants.
As for sexy male scenes, there really weren't many. By far the most gratuitous were the ones I mentioned, particularly Trip in Enterprise--he was the only male character in Star Trek who was regularly objectified aside from the weird shirtless Kirk scenes (William Shatner wasn't even really attractive; a hetero male almost certainly designed those scenes). Trip was reasonably hot, at least. The Edo planet episode was somewhat gratuitous in background shots, but the main male guest star was not at all attractive and his female companion was. It actually annoys me a little--they couldn't have gotten a decent male actor who also looked good in basically nothing when they did for the female? Really?
Q cuddling Picard in Tapestry? The many Klingon show of strength scenes with Worf in TNG / DS9? Picard nude in Cardasian custody in Chain of Command?
Q cuddling with Picard was just funny. Worf stayed fully, almost aggressively, clothed always (or neck-up in his mud bath scene) so none of that was terribly sexy. Patrick Stewart was pretty old and physically unattractive in his nude scene (which is fine, he's a great actor), though I would have loved seeing Trip in that one.
Damn, you just made me realize how little men have been objectified in Star Trek compared to women. I demand equality! Chris Pine needs to go shirtless the entire next movie to help make up for it.
Women:
* At least one major character per series whose job included being sexy: Counselor Troi (TNG), Yeoman Rand and Uhura (TOS), Seven of Nine (VOY), T'Pol (ENT), and Dax (DS9)
* Orion slave girls as in TOS: The Cage and ENT: Bound (three at once there)
* Kirk's various women
* Dabo girls throughout DS9
* Numerous other women in skimpy outfits, eg. Vanessa William's character in the horrible episode DS9: Let He Who Is Without Sin..., Tasha's seduction scene in TNG: The Naked Now, Uhura's sexy dance in the movie that does not exist,....
Men:
* Trip saving the ship in his underwear in ENT: Aquisition and a few other shirtless scenes, usually with T'Pol
* Several scenes with Kirk at least partly shirtless for very little reason in TOS
* Scattered shirtlessness as in the Edo episode (also had women in skimpy outfits), the horrible DS9 episode above (brief), Sulu in The Naked Time
* (Counts negative) Leonard Nimoy shirtless on Nazi-episode-planet
Actually, The Naked Time reminded me of something. There's a hilarious moment at the end of the episode after McCoy develops a serum to cure everyone. He goes around the bridge injecting people, and when he gets to Kirk, for no apparent reason he grabs Kirk's shoulder and rips his shirt open before injecting him like everyone else. It's so gratuitous--I would absolutely love a brief parody of that scene in the next movie.
Sigh. I suppose you didn't do well on your reading comprehension SATs--thanks for bringing the average down. Things you got wrong:
$8 bucks for an e-book version of a $100 book...
Nope, not an e-book version, it was "use[d]" and "If it were digital only, you can't buy used."
...and you're bitching about it?
Again, no. The GP never complained about the $8 price. They never really complained about anything, actually. They sort of implied $100 for a textbook is too much but rather than complaining they advocated community-grown free alternatives.
I think your rant...
Do you even know what a rant is? "rant (verb): 1. to speak or declaim extravagantly or violently; talk in a wild or vehement way; rave." Your post was a rant, the GP's was not.
... is less about having to pay anything at all than it is more about just sticking it to the "man" for the sake of it.
Talk about a misapplication of previous experience. The GP said nothing about sticking it to the "man" in any way. Their reason for wanting free alternatives was left vague ("If you want to usurp the textbook companies..."), but is most likely just a cost savings measure.
As I understand it, only institutions in the United States qualify for a.edu domain. A British institution would be.ac.uk, etc.
Thank you, I meant to say ".edu or similar domain" but didn't write it.
Can you figure out how to express, in Java, a capability that applies only to those files chosen with a file chooser? And can you figure out how to make code signing certificates as affordable as SSL certificates? Do individuals (as opposed to corporations or LLCs) even qualify for such certificates?
Good questions, and I do not know the answers, but none of the possibilities will get me to run the software. I would prefer a server-side setup like web mail attachments use for a test run over the current setup, so I can encrypt data I don't care about without giving access to my machine, just to try the service out. In the current incarnation they may as well have given us a download link and said, "here run this!"
There are too many oddities for me to try out the service, sorry.
1. The service isn't hosted on a.edu domain. 2. The about page makes a remarkably strong and vague claim for a group of scientists: "We are currently the strongest online encryption service available on the Internet." 3. The story was submitted anonymously rather than with a "full disclosure" warning. 4. There's no link on the web site to any supporting institutions, grants, or anything like that, even though the summary twice mentions the Max Planck Institute. 5. The unsigned software wants full access to my machine.
For all I know, this is an elaborate ruse to get a few poor saps to run untrusted code. I have nothing but the web site's word and the word of an anonymous commenter to go on balanced against the above weirdness, so I'm going to play it safe and move on.
As for you, "Konstantin," perhaps you're just a weird person, but there are way too many oddities for me to simply believe that you're the K. Kladko from the paper.
1. Your grammar and style are remarkably informal for an academic. You write like a teenager. 2. You use way too many smilies for a security researcher. 3. You sign your name while posting anonymously--just sign up for an account already. 4. You expect me to run untrusted code on my machine as a security researcher just because you say, "Please trust us". Seriously? Seriously? (It bears repeating.) 5. You're making lots of comments here. Usually scientists don't make any appearance on/. comments about their work, or if they do their posts are highly informative (eg. The Bad Astronomer).
My strong suspicion is that you're just rather young and naive and don't have enough supervision on this project. I'm not trying the software though.
How do you distinguish murder from sodomy? Both are prohibited in the Old Testament--does "grace" cover the penalty for murder, and if so, why do you (presumably) feel justified in punishing murderers but not homosexuals? In your parable, how is the woman's prostitution different from murder? (I have to admit, I do quite like some of the Jesus-related bits of the Bible, that story being one of them. I don't believe Jesus himself ever condemned homosexuals. I have a sneaking suspicion he was a radical in many ways ahead of his time who found a way to spread his message of love for one another by making it a religion that then got inevitably twisted.)
Also, are you aware that you're arguing that killing gay people was alright before Christ came along? That is, if we were having this discussion 2100 years ago, you would be completely justified in killing me, according to your arguments. I'm sorry, all I see in your arguments is an elaborate rationalization--you seem to be pretty alright with gay people on the whole, certainly you're not interested in killing us, but you also want to believe your holy book, so all that's left for you is to add a bunch of twisted interpretation to the Bible that allows you to keep both views simultaneously. (I don't mean to be insulting, just direct.)
I'm actually a mathematician, and I see the same basic pattern you're displaying in "crank" proofs. Cranks present (false) proofs of famous problems like this "proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem. The proof will typically be very long, vague, and/or hard to follow. Many of the individual steps are typically correct, though somewhere in the mass of details there's a faulty step or assumption. If the fault is pointed out, cranks either don't believe it or they do believe it only to make an even more complicated proof along the same lines whose faulty step or assumption is even more difficult to spot. In the case I linked, the faulty step occurs just after Figure 10, where it implicitly assumes an equation to hold that's equivalent to n=2. The contradiction later derived is merely a product of this faulty assumption; the methods employed are not nearly powerful enough to solve the actual problem, so the proof is essentially unfixable. He did get the first, infinitely simpler case right, though.
As I see it, you are doing many of the same things as a crank. You've got a conclusion--gay people are pretty alright and the Bible is completely true--there's a flaw in that conclusion--the Bible condemns homosexuality very strongly--you notice the flaw and make your reasoning more complicated to avoid it--the condemnation is covered by grace in this particular case--but that only pushes the flaw further back--killing gay people was alright in the past. Next you'll either ignore the flaw by saying that killing gay people really was alright in the past (you seem too empathetic to go this route), or you'll come up with some new interpretation to get around that flaw only to repeat the cycle (this is the one I expect to occur).
As for Christianity's part in persecuting gay people, why would God allow his own book to be so unclear as to allow such suffering for so long based on a misunderstanding? A single verse like, "and then Jesus said, 'Sodomy is sinful, but with my sacrifice comes grace. After I die, accept gay people as yourselves, do not persecute them, and let my father punish them (or not) as he chooses.'" It seems ludicrous.
you take care and have platonic (non sexual) love with a child abuser who once rape 30 times a 5yr girl/boy? Most people dont separate the sin from the human.
I would have to know the person on a case-by-case basis, but this reminds me a recent news story. A sex offender (rape I think) was being released and the local news used it as their top story of the night. I was furious: the offender had paid his debt and would have a hard enough time getting a job and a normal life with a felony on his record, but they felt the need to
The summary really was unclear. The Bill wants "ISPs and mobile operators to 'provide a service that excludes pornographic images'" (opt-in status being unclear) and that "The Bill follows efforts by one MP to make users "opt in" to access pornography" (opt-in again unclear; the previous effort was opt-in, but is the current one?).
Huh, how strange. In gay porn once in a while you'll get a top inserting too quickly or vigorously and obviously causing the bottom pain or discomfort, but that's reasonably rare, and as far as I can tell, it's a pretty big turn off for most guys (certainly for me). It never occurred to me how erotic both guys enjoying it is (as evidenced by essentially guaranteed orgasms and boners). Sometimes some guys don't seem terribly into it, which I imagine usually means they're gay for pay, but even then it's not as if they're bored or something--usually they're just sort of trying too hard.
Actually, no. The summary should have been clearer, but from the bill itself,
... they must ensure this service excludes pornographic images unless all the conditions of subsection (3) have been fulfilled.
(3) The conditions are—
(a) the subscriber opts-in to subscribe to a service that includes pornographic images;
(b) the subscriber is aged 18 or over; and
(c) the provider of the service has an age verification policy which has been used to confirm that the subscriber is aged 18 or over.
From (3a), the filtering is on by default and requires an opt-in to disable it, along with age verification.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling.
Actually no, and now I'm curious. Perhaps it's just the porn I tend to see (gay; no extreme fetishes), but the most violent thing I can recall is some very minor choking--really more like throat-grabbing. I read a story a few months ago about extremely violent (straight) porn that was the subject of an obscenity trial, but I figured it was a negligible minority situation. I dunno if there's a big gay/straight divide here or if I'm just out of the loop.
Seriously, I can't understand you US and UK people.
US person here.
Are you jealous when other people look sexier than you?
Hmm, I suppose a little? Mostly I'm just thinking, "wow, he's hot" and firing up my own imagination.
Still, I can bet that 99.99% of you wank.
Yup, just did a few minutes ago, to *gasp* gay porn even.
And did so as teen too.
Also yup.
Stop being so fucking jealous.
Hah, will do.
I have basically nothing against the porn I see. The guys know what they're doing, are of age, typically get paid--even going gay-for-pay is their own choice, so that's fine. Dangerous practices like barebacking (anal sex with no condom) start to trip my sense of "that's wrong" and I typically avoid depictions of them. Child porn is a definite "no", though actually I'm alright with a guy wanking to non-exploitative pictures of children so long as he doesn't do anything harmful to an actual person. If someone is somehow forced into making porn that's also a definite "no". My view is certainly skewed towards the types of porn I like and might be substantially incomplete. For instance, I don't know enough about straight porn to really have an opinion there, though I imagine it's similar.
I have no particularly extreme fetishes, so I don't really know how I feel about apparently controversial things like fisting (inserting a fist into an anus), pissing (on your partner), (gay) incest, bondage, etc. As a rule, so long as the people involved aren't being exploited in some way and nobody's getting hurt in any way they don't want, I'm fine with it (porn or other). Child porn is the only type I can think of that I support being illegal. Mandatory default filtering seems extremely problematic and simply not worthwhile--just watch your damn kids already, accept that they're sexual beings starting around puberty, and stop treating sex as inherently dirty. I don't really care what your holy book says in this regard since your kids are real and blindly applying ancient wisdom can really screw real people up.
In the US we unfortunately have a very vocal segment of extreme right-wing nutjobs (that's the technical term). They feel entitled to speak their mind because of a long tradition of protected speech, and so they do. Most of us ignore them, though there's no denying they have a large audience of willing idiots. I take a little comfort in the fact that many of them are getting old and will hopefully die soon (eg. Rush Limbaugh is 61; Pat Robertson is 82). Unfortunately up-and-comers like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin are pretty young, so I dunno how things will work out.
I quite liked your post; no mod points, but here's a symbolic +1 interesting. I don't agree with it all, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Porn is just an outward manifestation of a society that hasn't dealt with its emotional or cultural baggage.
There's a lot of truth to that, but I imagine even the most sexually open human society possible would have porn. There are exhibitionists, voyeurs, and couples with mismatched sex drives to consider, not to mention people will pay for whatever they like (ice cream, crappy movies,...) so companies will always want to provide porn.
I don't know what self-respecting geek would listen to FFA, since they couldn't possibly have seen Return of the Jedi and Princess Leia's bikini scene:
The films contained no profanity, no nudity and no sexual situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok.. I just updated Wikipedia. The Universe is now 13.5 billion years, it was at 13.7.
Hah, that's extra funny considering the summary's 13.5 billion number came from misquoting the Discovery article's link to an older article (by another group even) titled The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old. You and the submitter might hit it off nicely--you'd at least be able to talk about your remarkable lack of attention to detail.
I'm pretty sure you're joking about editing Wikipedia, but really you have no idea what you're talking about. Being confused by time dilation is for undergraduate physics majors. The world is unintuitive. You get over it after a while; all that matters is that you can make accurate predictions about it, and time dilation does not violate that ability no matter how much cognitive dissonance it causes you.
Yeah, it's a lame sentence. I forgot to criticize it in my haste to read the article and figure out what it might mean. I'm pretty sure the submitter just misunderstood the Discovery article. It uses the phrase "most precise measurements ever made" in the first paragraph and has a link to "ANALYSIS: The Universe is Precisely 13.75 Billion Years Old". Both say "precise", and a careless person might shove them together with a badly written sentence and a typo (13.5 instead of 13.75) to get the last half of the summary's first sentence. The 13.75 number isn't even from this study; the link was to a story from 2010 about a NASA study.
The title meant to say "BOSS: The Most Precise Measurement of the Universe". The other way round can mean these measurements are the most precise ever, which isn't even remotely true. For instance, the article says, "BOSS gives that distance to within 1.7 percent", whereas (to pick something out of a hat) the fine-structure constant has been measured to a precision of less than one part in a billion or within less than 0.0000001%.
Maybe a physicist can chime in here--how is the red shift actually measured in an experiment like this? You could of course measure the wavelength of incoming light, but how do you know what the wavelength "should" be? Are there some common spectral lines one can look for?
Also, is there any practical use to this experiment? I'm fine with pure research, but I was curious if maybe some of the techniques find application elsewhere. The article didn't mention any.
"Hey dude, want to take a ride on my space ship?"
FTFY :)
The screenplay taking a few liberties with reality isn't really the same as characters lacking depth. Jack's insight about where to be on the ship was a little magical, but it also fit with his general ingenuity (other examples: getting past the lice inspectors; getting Rose not to jump; picking Rose out of her touring party without getting noticed; ...). As for locking Rose up, how would the mother explain that to Cal, Rose's supposed future husband? He might have just dumped Rose outright and the mother was deathly, irrationally afraid of ending up poor. She could have done a better job of chaperoning Rose, but meh, incompetence actually fits with her character.
To be clear it's not like I think the movie was perfect or anything. My biggest complaint was the overlong sequence in the bowels of the ship towards the end where somehow the water isn't freezing. But that's not a complaint about the character depth, which was your original point (and what I asked about).
Perhaps it's the part of me abused by seeing Wrath of the Titans recently that's talking, but how did the characters in Titanic lack depth? Even the ship's designer was more interesting than all the characters in Wrath put together. To be fair, that isn't saying much.
Really any shirtless/ripped shirt scenes involving Kirk in the next movie would be fine by me. The one I mentioned is pretty unique, though. I'm almost certain that ripping a shirt before giving a hypospray only occurs in that one scene.
And there are many really bad ST episodes.
Indeed there are! I happen to have a list of my personal series-worsts right here:
* The Original Series (TOS): 3x06 Spock's Brain.
* The Animated Series (TAS): 1x05 More Tribbles, More Troubles.
* The Next Generation (TNG): 2x22 Shades of Grey (clip show); 2x12 The Royale; Wesley's part in 1x03 The Naked Now (also Wesley's most annoying part period).
* Deep Space 9 (DS9): 5x07 Let He Who Is Without Sin....
* Voyager (VOY): 2x15 Threshold. Threshold is probably the worst episode of Star Trek period. The writer later said, "Out of a hundred and some episodes, you're gonna have some stinkers! Unfortunately, that was a royal, steaming stinker."
* Enterprise (ENT): 2x11 Precious Cargo. The series finale, 4x22 These Are the Voyages..., is often deeply hated and is sometimes loved.
As for Troi's sexiness, as I mentioned in another post, I'm gay and have trouble accurately judging female sexiness as it appears to straight men. It seems Troi was intended to be sexy but didn't really achieve that goal very well, at least with many (probably most) of the relevant fans.
(Because really, what sort of homosexual man would be caught dead ANYWHERE near that show, other than, y'know, Sulu.)
*ahem* I love cocks and the men attached to them, Patrick Stewart as Picard, and Leonard Nimoy as Spock, in that order.
Half-joke, half-serious. I don't view money as an end in itself, and I tend to care far more about ideas than things.
I want to have enough money to live comfortably. Billions is *way* more than I need for that. I wouldn't want to invest the time required to properly administer vast wealth either since I'm lucky enough to be able to pursue the things I care most about already. A yacht, entourage, cars, sports teams, or whatever other crap super rich people get doesn't interest me. I would like an excessively nice house, but again billions is far more than I would need for that. Give me, say, $5 million; that's probably more than I would ever spend anyway.
To be honest, I'm gay (completely; no bi), so my female sexiness detector is pretty buggy. Still, here's my reasoning.
* Troi was the only main character to wear a skirt for the first season or two. Tasha did not. Troi was also the only main character to use a non-standard and skin-tight uniform. Her job was often pretty superfluous considering none of the other shows included a counselor.
* I always thought Dax was supposed to provide some sort of adventuresome sexiness. Terry Farrell was more physically attractive (by my estimate) than any of the male actors on DS9 by far. None of Quark, Garak, Sisko, Odo, Worf, or Bashir approached model-looks whereas I think Terry Farrell did. I didn't think Ezri's actress was attractive, but that's probably just a bug on my part.
* Rand seemed to have no purpose plot-wise since all she did was carry trays of food and order padds. I figured she was just there to provide a pretty figure to look at.
* Uhura's skirt was ridiculously short and her legs were included in many a shot of her at her station. Still, I agree, she had lots more going for her than sex appeal.
* I agree with you about the Dabo girls. They were covered up pretty well much of the time, though IIRC there was some pretty prominent cleavage shown by some of them sometimes--maybe Rom's wife? They should have had Dabo boys though, and I imagine if the series were done today there would be at least one or two male Dabo attendants.
As for sexy male scenes, there really weren't many. By far the most gratuitous were the ones I mentioned, particularly Trip in Enterprise--he was the only male character in Star Trek who was regularly objectified aside from the weird shirtless Kirk scenes (William Shatner wasn't even really attractive; a hetero male almost certainly designed those scenes). Trip was reasonably hot, at least. The Edo planet episode was somewhat gratuitous in background shots, but the main male guest star was not at all attractive and his female companion was. It actually annoys me a little--they couldn't have gotten a decent male actor who also looked good in basically nothing when they did for the female? Really?
Q cuddling Picard in Tapestry? The many Klingon show of strength scenes with Worf in TNG / DS9? Picard nude in Cardasian custody in Chain of Command?
Q cuddling with Picard was just funny. Worf stayed fully, almost aggressively, clothed always (or neck-up in his mud bath scene) so none of that was terribly sexy. Patrick Stewart was pretty old and physically unattractive in his nude scene (which is fine, he's a great actor), though I would have loved seeing Trip in that one.
Where, I am sure, some eccentric billionaire would buy it. I mean, it would be the ONLY life sized complete Enterprise in existence.
That's the first good reason I've heard for wanting to be filthy rich!
Damn, you just made me realize how little men have been objectified in Star Trek compared to women. I demand equality! Chris Pine needs to go shirtless the entire next movie to help make up for it.
Women: ....
* At least one major character per series whose job included being sexy: Counselor Troi (TNG), Yeoman Rand and Uhura (TOS), Seven of Nine (VOY), T'Pol (ENT), and Dax (DS9)
* Orion slave girls as in TOS: The Cage and ENT: Bound (three at once there)
* Kirk's various women
* Dabo girls throughout DS9
* Numerous other women in skimpy outfits, eg. Vanessa William's character in the horrible episode DS9: Let He Who Is Without Sin..., Tasha's seduction scene in TNG: The Naked Now, Uhura's sexy dance in the movie that does not exist,
Men:
* Trip saving the ship in his underwear in ENT: Aquisition and a few other shirtless scenes, usually with T'Pol
* Several scenes with Kirk at least partly shirtless for very little reason in TOS
* Scattered shirtlessness as in the Edo episode (also had women in skimpy outfits), the horrible DS9 episode above (brief), Sulu in The Naked Time
* (Counts negative) Leonard Nimoy shirtless on Nazi-episode-planet
Actually, The Naked Time reminded me of something. There's a hilarious moment at the end of the episode after McCoy develops a serum to cure everyone. He goes around the bridge injecting people, and when he gets to Kirk, for no apparent reason he grabs Kirk's shoulder and rips his shirt open before injecting him like everyone else. It's so gratuitous--I would absolutely love a brief parody of that scene in the next movie.
Sigh. I suppose you didn't do well on your reading comprehension SATs--thanks for bringing the average down. Things you got wrong:
$8 bucks for an e-book version of a $100 book...
Nope, not an e-book version, it was "use[d]" and "If it were digital only, you can't buy used."
Again, no. The GP never complained about the $8 price. They never really complained about anything, actually. They sort of implied $100 for a textbook is too much but rather than complaining they advocated community-grown free alternatives.
I think your rant...
Do you even know what a rant is? "rant (verb): 1. to speak or declaim extravagantly or violently; talk in a wild or vehement way; rave." Your post was a rant, the GP's was not.
Talk about a misapplication of previous experience. The GP said nothing about sticking it to the "man" in any way. Their reason for wanting free alternatives was left vague ("If you want to usurp the textbook companies..."), but is most likely just a cost savings measure.
As I understand it, only institutions in the United States qualify for a .edu domain. A British institution would be .ac.uk, etc.
Thank you, I meant to say ".edu or similar domain" but didn't write it.
Can you figure out how to express, in Java, a capability that applies only to those files chosen with a file chooser? And can you figure out how to make code signing certificates as affordable as SSL certificates? Do individuals (as opposed to corporations or LLCs) even qualify for such certificates?
Good questions, and I do not know the answers, but none of the possibilities will get me to run the software. I would prefer a server-side setup like web mail attachments use for a test run over the current setup, so I can encrypt data I don't care about without giving access to my machine, just to try the service out. In the current incarnation they may as well have given us a download link and said, "here run this!"
To be fair, using italics is never an indication of sarcasm on the internet. Neither are exclamation points! Or @!*%ing inappropriate expletives!1
1's are a dead give-away though.
There are too many oddities for me to try out the service, sorry.
1. The service isn't hosted on a .edu domain.
2. The about page makes a remarkably strong and vague claim for a group of scientists: "We are currently the strongest online encryption service available on the Internet."
3. The story was submitted anonymously rather than with a "full disclosure" warning.
4. There's no link on the web site to any supporting institutions, grants, or anything like that, even though the summary twice mentions the Max Planck Institute.
5. The unsigned software wants full access to my machine.
For all I know, this is an elaborate ruse to get a few poor saps to run untrusted code. I have nothing but the web site's word and the word of an anonymous commenter to go on balanced against the above weirdness, so I'm going to play it safe and move on.
As for you, "Konstantin," perhaps you're just a weird person, but there are way too many oddities for me to simply believe that you're the K. Kladko from the paper.
1. Your grammar and style are remarkably informal for an academic. You write like a teenager. /. comments about their work, or if they do their posts are highly informative (eg. The Bad Astronomer).
2. You use way too many smilies for a security researcher.
3. You sign your name while posting anonymously--just sign up for an account already.
4. You expect me to run untrusted code on my machine as a security researcher just because you say, "Please trust us". Seriously? Seriously? (It bears repeating.)
5. You're making lots of comments here. Usually scientists don't make any appearance on
My strong suspicion is that you're just rather young and naive and don't have enough supervision on this project. I'm not trying the software though.
How do you distinguish murder from sodomy? Both are prohibited in the Old Testament--does "grace" cover the penalty for murder, and if so, why do you (presumably) feel justified in punishing murderers but not homosexuals? In your parable, how is the woman's prostitution different from murder? (I have to admit, I do quite like some of the Jesus-related bits of the Bible, that story being one of them. I don't believe Jesus himself ever condemned homosexuals. I have a sneaking suspicion he was a radical in many ways ahead of his time who found a way to spread his message of love for one another by making it a religion that then got inevitably twisted.)
Also, are you aware that you're arguing that killing gay people was alright before Christ came along? That is, if we were having this discussion 2100 years ago, you would be completely justified in killing me, according to your arguments. I'm sorry, all I see in your arguments is an elaborate rationalization--you seem to be pretty alright with gay people on the whole, certainly you're not interested in killing us, but you also want to believe your holy book, so all that's left for you is to add a bunch of twisted interpretation to the Bible that allows you to keep both views simultaneously. (I don't mean to be insulting, just direct.)
I'm actually a mathematician, and I see the same basic pattern you're displaying in "crank" proofs. Cranks present (false) proofs of famous problems like this "proof" of Fermat's Last Theorem. The proof will typically be very long, vague, and/or hard to follow. Many of the individual steps are typically correct, though somewhere in the mass of details there's a faulty step or assumption. If the fault is pointed out, cranks either don't believe it or they do believe it only to make an even more complicated proof along the same lines whose faulty step or assumption is even more difficult to spot. In the case I linked, the faulty step occurs just after Figure 10, where it implicitly assumes an equation to hold that's equivalent to n=2. The contradiction later derived is merely a product of this faulty assumption; the methods employed are not nearly powerful enough to solve the actual problem, so the proof is essentially unfixable. He did get the first, infinitely simpler case right, though.
As I see it, you are doing many of the same things as a crank. You've got a conclusion--gay people are pretty alright and the Bible is completely true--there's a flaw in that conclusion--the Bible condemns homosexuality very strongly--you notice the flaw and make your reasoning more complicated to avoid it--the condemnation is covered by grace in this particular case--but that only pushes the flaw further back--killing gay people was alright in the past. Next you'll either ignore the flaw by saying that killing gay people really was alright in the past (you seem too empathetic to go this route), or you'll come up with some new interpretation to get around that flaw only to repeat the cycle (this is the one I expect to occur).
As for Christianity's part in persecuting gay people, why would God allow his own book to be so unclear as to allow such suffering for so long based on a misunderstanding? A single verse like, "and then Jesus said, 'Sodomy is sinful, but with my sacrifice comes grace. After I die, accept gay people as yourselves, do not persecute them, and let my father punish them (or not) as he chooses.'" It seems ludicrous.
you take care and have platonic (non sexual) love with a child abuser who once rape 30 times a 5yr girl/boy? Most people dont separate the sin from the human.
I would have to know the person on a case-by-case basis, but this reminds me a recent news story. A sex offender (rape I think) was being released and the local news used it as their top story of the night. I was furious: the offender had paid his debt and would have a hard enough time getting a job and a normal life with a felony on his record, but they felt the need to
The summary really was unclear. The Bill wants "ISPs and mobile operators to 'provide a service that excludes pornographic images'" (opt-in status being unclear) and that "The Bill follows efforts by one MP to make users "opt in" to access pornography" (opt-in again unclear; the previous effort was opt-in, but is the current one?).
Huh, how strange. In gay porn once in a while you'll get a top inserting too quickly or vigorously and obviously causing the bottom pain or discomfort, but that's reasonably rare, and as far as I can tell, it's a pretty big turn off for most guys (certainly for me). It never occurred to me how erotic both guys enjoying it is (as evidenced by essentially guaranteed orgasms and boners). Sometimes some guys don't seem terribly into it, which I imagine usually means they're gay for pay, but even then it's not as if they're bored or something--usually they're just sort of trying too hard.
You do know this is OPTIONAL right?
Actually, no. The summary should have been clearer, but from the bill itself,
(3) The conditions are—
(a) the subscriber opts-in to subscribe to a service that includes pornographic images;
(b) the subscriber is aged 18 or over; and
(c) the provider of the service has an age verification policy which has been used to confirm that the subscriber is aged 18 or over.
From (3a), the filtering is on by default and requires an opt-in to disable it, along with age verification.
Conversely, have you seen some of the absurdities they get up to in hardcore porn these days? Catering to private fantasies is one thing, but the amount of violence contaminating the general pool of smut at this point is pretty unsettling.
Actually no, and now I'm curious. Perhaps it's just the porn I tend to see (gay; no extreme fetishes), but the most violent thing I can recall is some very minor choking--really more like throat-grabbing. I read a story a few months ago about extremely violent (straight) porn that was the subject of an obscenity trial, but I figured it was a negligible minority situation. I dunno if there's a big gay/straight divide here or if I'm just out of the loop.
Seriously, I can't understand you US and UK people.
US person here.
Are you jealous when other people look sexier than you?
Hmm, I suppose a little? Mostly I'm just thinking, "wow, he's hot" and firing up my own imagination.
Still, I can bet that 99.99% of you wank.
Yup, just did a few minutes ago, to *gasp* gay porn even.
And did so as teen too.
Also yup.
Stop being so fucking jealous.
Hah, will do.
I have basically nothing against the porn I see. The guys know what they're doing, are of age, typically get paid--even going gay-for-pay is their own choice, so that's fine. Dangerous practices like barebacking (anal sex with no condom) start to trip my sense of "that's wrong" and I typically avoid depictions of them. Child porn is a definite "no", though actually I'm alright with a guy wanking to non-exploitative pictures of children so long as he doesn't do anything harmful to an actual person. If someone is somehow forced into making porn that's also a definite "no". My view is certainly skewed towards the types of porn I like and might be substantially incomplete. For instance, I don't know enough about straight porn to really have an opinion there, though I imagine it's similar.
I have no particularly extreme fetishes, so I don't really know how I feel about apparently controversial things like fisting (inserting a fist into an anus), pissing (on your partner), (gay) incest, bondage, etc. As a rule, so long as the people involved aren't being exploited in some way and nobody's getting hurt in any way they don't want, I'm fine with it (porn or other). Child porn is the only type I can think of that I support being illegal. Mandatory default filtering seems extremely problematic and simply not worthwhile--just watch your damn kids already, accept that they're sexual beings starting around puberty, and stop treating sex as inherently dirty. I don't really care what your holy book says in this regard since your kids are real and blindly applying ancient wisdom can really screw real people up.
In the US we unfortunately have a very vocal segment of extreme right-wing nutjobs (that's the technical term). They feel entitled to speak their mind because of a long tradition of protected speech, and so they do. Most of us ignore them, though there's no denying they have a large audience of willing idiots. I take a little comfort in the fact that many of them are getting old and will hopefully die soon (eg. Rush Limbaugh is 61; Pat Robertson is 82). Unfortunately up-and-comers like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin are pretty young, so I dunno how things will work out.
I quite liked your post; no mod points, but here's a symbolic +1 interesting. I don't agree with it all, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Porn is just an outward manifestation of a society that hasn't dealt with its emotional or cultural baggage.
There's a lot of truth to that, but I imagine even the most sexually open human society possible would have porn. There are exhibitionists, voyeurs, and couples with mismatched sex drives to consider, not to mention people will pay for whatever they like (ice cream, crappy movies, ...) so companies will always want to provide porn.
I don't know what self-respecting geek would listen to FFA, since they couldn't possibly have seen Return of the Jedi and Princess Leia's bikini scene:
The films contained no profanity, no nudity and no sexual situations.
Hell, there's two hell's and two damn's in A New Hope. Best to ignore them.