We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process
If that's not an admission that they made mistakes, what is?
Deceleration means "a decrease in speed". If the probe is traveling directly away from the sun, and there are no other contributions to the probe's acceleration, a sunward acceleration causes a decrease in speed, and a decrease in speed causes a sunward acceleration. For deceleration to occur, you need the speed to actively decrease. If, for instance, there was a component of acceleration away from the sun overwhelming the sunward component, there would be no decrease in speed [as long as the velocity vector worked out correctly], so deceleration wouldn't make sense. I imagine the probe isn't traveling radially outward from our solar system, and that there are other contributions to the acceleration, so it's not clear to me if deceleration makes sense in this context.
There were 51 contestants. 48 said that evolution should be taught. 2 said that evolution should not be taught. The remaining contestant didn't voice an opinion. Of the 48 contestants who said that evolution should be taught, 19 said that both it and creationism should be taught. The question was ambiguous, so it's hard to tell (without sketchy inferences) how many of the remaining 29 contestants who said that evolution should be taught also believe that creationism should be taught. I don't find this terrible, considering these girls were pandering to the crowd for votes, and the sample is non-representative. I do find their generally low level of intelligence troubling. See below for more details of my analysis.
I rated each response on what they said should be taught and what they believe. The question was "Should evolution be taught in schools?" Many literally said that evolution should be taught and left out any mention of teaching creationism; these ratings include only what the contestant literally said, instead of what they implied. Some of these were still hard to call, depending on how you interpreted the answer given. Many were also vague about creationism being the "other side" they wanted taught, but I hope that's a safe assumption. Here are my rating breakdowns:
26 said evolution should be taught and didn't mention their own beliefs.
1 said evolution should be taught and that she believed in it.
2 said evolution should be taught and that she believed in creationism.
18 said both evolution and creationism should be taught and didn't mention their own beliefs.
1 said both evolution and creationism should be taught and that she believed in creationism.
1 said evolution should not be taught and that she did not believe in it.
1 said evolution should not be taught and didn't mention her own beliefs.
1 didn't say what should be taught and didn't mention her own beliefs.
Setting aside statistics, most of those girls were idiots. One used the word "creationtism." Many clearly weren't certain in their beliefs (stammering; trying to make profound statements everyone can agree on; laughing; flashing an almost flirtatious smile). These were generally trying to project confidence, which made for even stupider answers. Many of them implied that all beliefs are equal, and what you believe doesn't matter so long as we all get along in the end. There was exactly one contestant who professed a belief in evolution, and she gave a focused and succinct answer. My impression is that she was (by a ways) the smartest of the bunch, because of her answer's clarity and the speed at which she formulated it.
It depends on what the odds of the services suddenly becoming unavailable are, and how important those services are to you. Does the convenience of using a single provider that works fine for millions of people with extremely high uptime outweigh an apparently tiny chance of having those services suddenly disabled? For most people, yup. To use a similar example, most people don't have their own generators, even though they rely on a single power company.
You had said it's "always important," when it's really not. Sorry if I've taken you too literally.
Your P.S. made me wonder if that result used the axiom of choice. It doesn't have to--it can instead use the Cantor-Bernstein-Schroeder theorem (ref). More interestingly, I stumbled across the Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem, which says "A non-empty Hausdorff topological space is a continuous image of the unit interval if and only if it is a compact, connected, locally connected second-countable space." Second-countable can be replaced with metrizable. Since any eg. unit hypercube in Euclidean n-space has the required properties, there is a surjective (continuous, even) function from the unit interval onto it. However, inverting it to give an injective function from the hypercube to the unit interval would need to use the axiom of choice (or more assumptions on the type of function HM gives; in the link above they leverage the explicit form of the Hilbert curve to avoid the issue). Still, it's interesting, and I think I believe AC anyway.
Google [had] a score of 80 out of 100, although that is down from 86 last year. Microsoft’s Bing search engine "makes a strong first showing with a score of 77," according to the report. It was followed by Yahoo (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).
These don't match the press release from the second link at all:
All major competitors improve, with Google in the lead, jumping 4% to 83. While Google remains below its all-time high of 86 from 2008 and 2009, its present score is the highest among all e-business websites. One year ago, Google plunged 7% in ACSI, but the company now appears to have a better handle on its expanding range of Internet services. Microsoft’s search engine Bing, however, is close behind Google with a score of 82 following its 7% surge.
Surpassing even Bing’s sharp upswing, the 10% gain posted by Ask.com is the largest in e-business. With an ACSI score of 80, Ask.com is chased closely by Yahoo! and MSN—both showing sizeable ACSI advances of 4% to 79 and 78, respectively. Unlike other search engines and portals, Ask.com offers a question-and-answer format that garners a smaller, but increasingly loyal, following. As Ask.com, Yahoo!, and MSN rise, AOL is left behind, gaining a mere 1% to an ACSI score of 75.
Perhaps they used numbers from a year or two ago for the Inc.com article. In any case, is there, somewhere, a discussion of the methodology used and a summary of results that's not spoon fed to the press? These are almost arbitrary numbers to me, with a surprisingly small spread: 66% to 83% is the range from very low satisfaction to very high, out of 100%?
To be fair, Mathematica is a hugely complex computer algebra system and numerical solver. That functionality could not be replicated in HTML/JS reasonably. The article isn't clear if there are restrictions on the complexity of the backend in the format--for instance, can you type in different initial conditions and numerically (heck, symbolically!) solve a system of PDE's, graphing the result? That would be a nightmare to implement in HTML/JS.
Good point, though his name worked for his image instead of against it: he was the tough German (Austrian really, but close enough) who starred in action movies and did some bodybuilding. Germanotta doesn't seem to work for an American pop star. I can't think of other examples of singers/movie stars with particularly foreign names, though I admit I haven't tried very hard. I briefly looked through the Wikipedia American pop singers category. Of the names I recognized, Christina Aguilera had the "strangest", though it also works for her: it's Latin and rhythmic. Germanotta doesn't have much going for it that I can see. Lots of consonants, it's longish, and it doesn't evoke some convenient cultural stereotype that a pop star might want to leverage.
Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team. It's like walking into a half-built building and finding many rooms have no way in or out, there are windows missing, the cold-water faucet shocks you, the kitchen appliances run on diesel, and you're encouraged to invite your family and friends to join you there.
Could you be more explicit? I've barely touched Facebook and haven't looked at Google+ at all
Actually, the blog post does say something about programming skill: "It's official: developers get better with age." That's in the title. It never supports this conclusion, but it does assert it.
The only meaningful piece of data the blog post presents to support the claim that developers get "better" with age is that upvotes per post on Stack Overflow is essentially constant as age varies. Of course, this doesn't support the conclusion at all--it refutes it. What a piece of garbage article. The blog post's title, "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer." is catchy, but wrong. The blog post says it best:
So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality.
Is a person who asks fewer questions and answers more a higher quality coder? It's unclear--and the blog post doesn't even discuss it.
[There are other warning flags. He calls something "a textbook example of a bell distribution curve", but I hope no stats book would ever use it as such: the tail on the right is way too long. "A 40-year old coder provides about 100 answers, roughly double the answers of his half younger colleague": yes, but there is a peak at 40 years, and a dip at 20 years, so this is a poor example to give. It equates posting on Stack Overflow with being a professional developer, and in general assumes that it has a representative sample, which is far from certain.]
To be fair, the GP did say random numbers generated "programmatically" aren't strictly random. Maybe they meant to discount hardware random number generation this way. It's unclear where eg. keyboard input lies, then. Perhaps they meant something like "a fixed Turing machine given as input only how many random integers in a fixed range it should produce--call it n--will only give pseudorandom ones for sufficiently large n".
Quantum mechanics does not "dance" around the question of the existence of randomness--it very explicitly predicts the probability distribution of various measurements. From that it's just a matter of some calculus to produce random numbers according to virtually any distribution you might want. Measurements of quantum mechanical effects are not terribly difficult, either. Try using a Starn-Gerlach device to get a random stream of bits. I suppose it could be debated whether or not these results are philosophically random (eg. what if one day God offers to predict any quantum measurement before it occurs; is the result still "random"?).
I wish there was a physics competency test required as a prerequisite before you're allowed to philosophize about the universe. So much garbage (like bits of the above) would be avoided. I'm sorry if I'm misreading you, but you seem to have a superficial knowledge of quantum mechanics and an interest in philosophy. It might be worthwhile to put philosophy aside for a bit and work through a textbook on introductory quantum mechanics.
I find nighttime TV (~11pm to ~6am) better than daytime TV (~7am to ~4pm) anymore. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is decent much of the night, depending on how much you like their shows. Now there's Netflix and the like too.
"I'll go ahead and drop you off at that"--what? Your statements include more rhetoric than content, and they can be hard to parse.
I never said "if it's for a good reason it's not oppression". I said "You might say Kirk hassles the researcher". "hassle" != "oppress" to me; oppression is reserved for much more severe cases, like enslavement or years of constant "hassling". Oppression might be justified sometimes too. I imagine you wouldn't suggest all criminals everywhere be let out of jail immediately, just because keeping them in jail is oppressive. Really, you're an idiot with poor arguments and badly thought-out opinions. I won't respond anymore.
I think you mean "The Man Trap", which was the 5th episode of season 1 of TOS (using the Memory Alpha numbering scheme, or the production ordering minus The Cage; it's episode 1 using the airing order; perhaps it follows The Cage on a DVD?). I wonder if you're just trolling, since your description of that episode is so poor. The alien murdered Nancy Crater years before and the researcher was covering it up. The researcher also lets crewman Darnell be murdered by the alien (which he knows is dangerous) while he gets his medical exam, not to mention the other pre-redshirt deaths on the planet. Kirk goes into some detail describing how medical examinations are required for research personnel on alien planets--presumably this person is "funded" by the Federation, so that's pretty reasonable. People end up dead because the researcher doesn't let Kirk know the truth until it's too late.
You might say Kirk hassles the researcher, but for good reason: the researcher presumably agreed to periodic medical exams already, and later one of Kirk's crew dies under mysterious circumstances that throw suspicion on the researcher and his companion.
In any case, what does it matter? Kirk isn't living on the backs of the oppressed even in your crazy summary.
They've never been very clear on that, but it seems to be a combination of highly abundant energy somehow aided by warp reactors and some sort of optimistic outlook that pervades humanity for some reason. From Star Trek First Contact (the 8th movie), [setup: the crew of the Enterprise has again traveled back in time, this time to just after World War 3, and they meet the inventor of warp drive before he tests his ship]:
RIKER: It is one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor. You get to make first contact with an alien race, and after you do, everything begins to change.
LAFORGE: Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built and mankind to start exploring the Galaxy.
TROI: It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible when they realise they're not alone in the universe. Poverty, disease, war. They'll all be gone within the next fifty years.
Star Trek takes a deeply optimistic view of the future. It's a conceit to not deal with apathy or incompetence, but we get so much of that from reality and other shows that I'm fine with the omission. Star Trek also presents humanity as having grown out of most social problems. That optimism is a key tenant of the various series, and is part of why it's been so popular for so long.
Uh, what? Kool-Aid is a brand, not a generic type of drink. "respective brands of koolaid" doesn't make sense. Punch is a type of drink that you might have been going for. Even then, what?
My best interpretation of the mangled garbage I'm replying to is that you don't believe a single example conversation is enough to establish that the stars of the Star Trek shows didn't live on the backs of the oppressed. You're right, but as I mentioned, "By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series." You're not worth the time it would take to provide more explicit proof--just like some asshat saying 15+20 = 924 isn't worth arguing with. Have you even seen the show?
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Federation would essentially thoughtlessly enslave a population, even (especially) if it's a non-standard population. It's very unclear why hologram labor is helpful, though there are several mines throughout the series that use humanoid labor (the one in Star Trek VI; the one the Duras sisters used with that one alien who got shafted). To be fair, TNG used essentially the same plot point in The Measure of a Man, where Data's rights were questioned. One late DS9 episode I really liked was In the Pale Moonlight (season 6, episode 19). It's so morally ambiguous, and it challenges the regular view of the Federation as perfectly fair and benevolent without using the Section 31 "we don't condone their actions" excuse, or the Equinox "they're totally disobeying our principles!" excuse.
I can't think of any situations where PADDs were used without a computer nearby (shuttlecraft, starbase, starship). All onboard computers aren't down very often at all, though they ran backups quite a bit. There may have been away missions that used PADDs, but none come to mind--tricorders were certainly preferred. My impression is that a PADD has a small amount of on-board processing power and interfaces with nearby computers when available. In TOS, interfacing with the main computer was a big deal, so it would have been strange if the PADDs were just a wireless terminal. In Generations, there is a PADD-like control device that controls the missile launcher. It would be strange if the missile launcher provided the PADD's interface, though it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
We’ve noticed that many violations of the Google+ common name policy were in fact well-intentioned and inadvertent and for these users our process can be frustrating and disappointing. So we’re currently making a number of improvements to this process
If that's not an admission that they made mistakes, what is?
Deceleration means "a decrease in speed". If the probe is traveling directly away from the sun, and there are no other contributions to the probe's acceleration, a sunward acceleration causes a decrease in speed, and a decrease in speed causes a sunward acceleration. For deceleration to occur, you need the speed to actively decrease. If, for instance, there was a component of acceleration away from the sun overwhelming the sunward component, there would be no decrease in speed [as long as the velocity vector worked out correctly], so deceleration wouldn't make sense. I imagine the probe isn't traveling radially outward from our solar system, and that there are other contributions to the acceleration, so it's not clear to me if deceleration makes sense in this context.
There were 51 contestants. 48 said that evolution should be taught. 2 said that evolution should not be taught. The remaining contestant didn't voice an opinion. Of the 48 contestants who said that evolution should be taught, 19 said that both it and creationism should be taught. The question was ambiguous, so it's hard to tell (without sketchy inferences) how many of the remaining 29 contestants who said that evolution should be taught also believe that creationism should be taught. I don't find this terrible, considering these girls were pandering to the crowd for votes, and the sample is non-representative. I do find their generally low level of intelligence troubling. See below for more details of my analysis.
I rated each response on what they said should be taught and what they believe. The question was "Should evolution be taught in schools?" Many literally said that evolution should be taught and left out any mention of teaching creationism; these ratings include only what the contestant literally said, instead of what they implied. Some of these were still hard to call, depending on how you interpreted the answer given. Many were also vague about creationism being the "other side" they wanted taught, but I hope that's a safe assumption. Here are my rating breakdowns:
Setting aside statistics, most of those girls were idiots. One used the word "creationtism." Many clearly weren't certain in their beliefs (stammering; trying to make profound statements everyone can agree on; laughing; flashing an almost flirtatious smile). These were generally trying to project confidence, which made for even stupider answers. Many of them implied that all beliefs are equal, and what you believe doesn't matter so long as we all get along in the end. There was exactly one contestant who professed a belief in evolution, and she gave a focused and succinct answer. My impression is that she was (by a ways) the smartest of the bunch, because of her answer's clarity and the speed at which she formulated it.
It depends on what the odds of the services suddenly becoming unavailable are, and how important those services are to you. Does the convenience of using a single provider that works fine for millions of people with extremely high uptime outweigh an apparently tiny chance of having those services suddenly disabled? For most people, yup. To use a similar example, most people don't have their own generators, even though they rely on a single power company.
You had said it's "always important," when it's really not. Sorry if I've taken you too literally.
Your P.S. made me wonder if that result used the axiom of choice. It doesn't have to--it can instead use the Cantor-Bernstein-Schroeder theorem (ref). More interestingly, I stumbled across the Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem, which says "A non-empty Hausdorff topological space is a continuous image of the unit interval if and only if it is a compact, connected, locally connected second-countable space." Second-countable can be replaced with metrizable. Since any eg. unit hypercube in Euclidean n-space has the required properties, there is a surjective (continuous, even) function from the unit interval onto it. However, inverting it to give an injective function from the hypercube to the unit interval would need to use the axiom of choice (or more assumptions on the type of function HM gives; in the link above they leverage the explicit form of the Hilbert curve to avoid the issue). Still, it's interesting, and I think I believe AC anyway.
Google [had] a score of 80 out of 100, although that is down from 86 last year. Microsoft’s Bing search engine "makes a strong first showing with a score of 77," according to the report. It was followed by Yahoo (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).
These don't match the press release from the second link at all:
All major competitors improve, with Google in the lead, jumping 4% to 83. While Google remains below its all-time high of 86 from 2008 and 2009, its present score is the highest among all e-business websites. One year ago, Google plunged 7% in ACSI, but the company now appears to have a better handle on its expanding range of Internet services. Microsoft’s search engine Bing, however, is close behind Google with a score of 82 following its 7% surge.
Surpassing even Bing’s sharp upswing, the 10% gain posted by Ask.com is the largest in e-business. With an ACSI score of 80, Ask.com is chased closely by Yahoo! and MSN—both showing sizeable ACSI advances of 4% to 79 and 78, respectively. Unlike other search engines and portals, Ask.com offers a question-and-answer format that garners a smaller, but increasingly loyal, following. As Ask.com, Yahoo!, and MSN rise, AOL is left behind, gaining a mere 1% to an ACSI score of 75.
Perhaps they used numbers from a year or two ago for the Inc.com article. In any case, is there, somewhere, a discussion of the methodology used and a summary of results that's not spoon fed to the press? These are almost arbitrary numbers to me, with a surprisingly small spread: 66% to 83% is the range from very low satisfaction to very high, out of 100%?
To be fair, Mathematica is a hugely complex computer algebra system and numerical solver. That functionality could not be replicated in HTML/JS reasonably. The article isn't clear if there are restrictions on the complexity of the backend in the format--for instance, can you type in different initial conditions and numerically (heck, symbolically!) solve a system of PDE's, graphing the result? That would be a nightmare to implement in HTML/JS.
Good point, though his name worked for his image instead of against it: he was the tough German (Austrian really, but close enough) who starred in action movies and did some bodybuilding. Germanotta doesn't seem to work for an American pop star. I can't think of other examples of singers/movie stars with particularly foreign names, though I admit I haven't tried very hard. I briefly looked through the Wikipedia American pop singers category. Of the names I recognized, Christina Aguilera had the "strangest", though it also works for her: it's Latin and rhythmic. Germanotta doesn't have much going for it that I can see. Lots of consonants, it's longish, and it doesn't evoke some convenient cultural stereotype that a pop star might want to leverage.
Who would want to sell records under the name Stefani Germanotta? "Oh, I love that song! Who sings it?" "Stefani Germa--something with a G, I think?"
Google+ seems to have inherited several of these problems. And it provides no means for pointing them out to the development team. It's like walking into a half-built building and finding many rooms have no way in or out, there are windows missing, the cold-water faucet shocks you, the kitchen appliances run on diesel, and you're encouraged to invite your family and friends to join you there.
Could you be more explicit? I've barely touched Facebook and haven't looked at Google+ at all
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103
[Posted by Theovon earlier, but I prefer a clickable link.]
In any case they seem to contribute a factor of 3 less than other major players.
Yes, let's use this as another opportunity to bash Microsoft. We don't get nearly enough of those around here.
Actually, the blog post does say something about programming skill: "It's official: developers get better with age." That's in the title. It never supports this conclusion, but it does assert it.
The only meaningful piece of data the blog post presents to support the claim that developers get "better" with age is that upvotes per post on Stack Overflow is essentially constant as age varies. Of course, this doesn't support the conclusion at all--it refutes it. What a piece of garbage article. The blog post's title, "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer." is catchy, but wrong. The blog post says it best:
So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality.
Is a person who asks fewer questions and answers more a higher quality coder? It's unclear--and the blog post doesn't even discuss it.
[There are other warning flags. He calls something "a textbook example of a bell distribution curve", but I hope no stats book would ever use it as such: the tail on the right is way too long. "A 40-year old coder provides about 100 answers, roughly double the answers of his half younger colleague": yes, but there is a peak at 40 years, and a dip at 20 years, so this is a poor example to give. It equates posting on Stack Overflow with being a professional developer, and in general assumes that it has a representative sample, which is far from certain.]
Whoops, I should have included a length k (for fixed k) binary string in the input to that Turing machine, along with n.
To be fair, the GP did say random numbers generated "programmatically" aren't strictly random. Maybe they meant to discount hardware random number generation this way. It's unclear where eg. keyboard input lies, then. Perhaps they meant something like "a fixed Turing machine given as input only how many random integers in a fixed range it should produce--call it n--will only give pseudorandom ones for sufficiently large n".
Quantum mechanics does not "dance" around the question of the existence of randomness--it very explicitly predicts the probability distribution of various measurements. From that it's just a matter of some calculus to produce random numbers according to virtually any distribution you might want. Measurements of quantum mechanical effects are not terribly difficult, either. Try using a Starn-Gerlach device to get a random stream of bits. I suppose it could be debated whether or not these results are philosophically random (eg. what if one day God offers to predict any quantum measurement before it occurs; is the result still "random"?).
I wish there was a physics competency test required as a prerequisite before you're allowed to philosophize about the universe. So much garbage (like bits of the above) would be avoided. I'm sorry if I'm misreading you, but you seem to have a superficial knowledge of quantum mechanics and an interest in philosophy. It might be worthwhile to put philosophy aside for a bit and work through a textbook on introductory quantum mechanics.
Nighttime TV sucks.
I find nighttime TV (~11pm to ~6am) better than daytime TV (~7am to ~4pm) anymore. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is decent much of the night, depending on how much you like their shows. Now there's Netflix and the like too.
encyclopedic/ensklpdik/Adjective 1. Comprehensive in terms of information: "an almost encyclopedic knowledge of food".
"I'll go ahead and drop you off at that"--what? Your statements include more rhetoric than content, and they can be hard to parse.
I never said "if it's for a good reason it's not oppression". I said "You might say Kirk hassles the researcher". "hassle" != "oppress" to me; oppression is reserved for much more severe cases, like enslavement or years of constant "hassling". Oppression might be justified sometimes too. I imagine you wouldn't suggest all criminals everywhere be let out of jail immediately, just because keeping them in jail is oppressive. Really, you're an idiot with poor arguments and badly thought-out opinions. I won't respond anymore.
I think you mean "The Man Trap", which was the 5th episode of season 1 of TOS (using the Memory Alpha numbering scheme, or the production ordering minus The Cage; it's episode 1 using the airing order; perhaps it follows The Cage on a DVD?). I wonder if you're just trolling, since your description of that episode is so poor. The alien murdered Nancy Crater years before and the researcher was covering it up. The researcher also lets crewman Darnell be murdered by the alien (which he knows is dangerous) while he gets his medical exam, not to mention the other pre-redshirt deaths on the planet. Kirk goes into some detail describing how medical examinations are required for research personnel on alien planets--presumably this person is "funded" by the Federation, so that's pretty reasonable. People end up dead because the researcher doesn't let Kirk know the truth until it's too late.
You might say Kirk hassles the researcher, but for good reason: the researcher presumably agreed to periodic medical exams already, and later one of Kirk's crew dies under mysterious circumstances that throw suspicion on the researcher and his companion.
In any case, what does it matter? Kirk isn't living on the backs of the oppressed even in your crazy summary.
RIKER: It is one of the pivotal moments in human history, Doctor. You get to make first contact with an alien race, and after you do, everything begins to change.
LAFORGE: Your theories on warp drive allow fleets of starships to be built and mankind to start exploring the Galaxy.
TROI: It unites humanity in a way no one ever thought possible when they realise they're not alone in the universe. Poverty, disease, war. They'll all be gone within the next fifty years.
Star Trek takes a deeply optimistic view of the future. It's a conceit to not deal with apathy or incompetence, but we get so much of that from reality and other shows that I'm fine with the omission. Star Trek also presents humanity as having grown out of most social problems. That optimism is a key tenant of the various series, and is part of why it's been so popular for so long.
Uh, what? Kool-Aid is a brand, not a generic type of drink. "respective brands of koolaid" doesn't make sense. Punch is a type of drink that you might have been going for. Even then, what?
My best interpretation of the mangled garbage I'm replying to is that you don't believe a single example conversation is enough to establish that the stars of the Star Trek shows didn't live on the backs of the oppressed. You're right, but as I mentioned, "By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series." You're not worth the time it would take to provide more explicit proof--just like some asshat saying 15+20 = 924 isn't worth arguing with. Have you even seen the show?
Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch to think that the Federation would essentially thoughtlessly enslave a population, even (especially) if it's a non-standard population. It's very unclear why hologram labor is helpful, though there are several mines throughout the series that use humanoid labor (the one in Star Trek VI; the one the Duras sisters used with that one alien who got shafted). To be fair, TNG used essentially the same plot point in The Measure of a Man, where Data's rights were questioned. One late DS9 episode I really liked was In the Pale Moonlight (season 6, episode 19). It's so morally ambiguous, and it challenges the regular view of the Federation as perfectly fair and benevolent without using the Section 31 "we don't condone their actions" excuse, or the Equinox "they're totally disobeying our principles!" excuse.
I can't think of any situations where PADDs were used without a computer nearby (shuttlecraft, starbase, starship). All onboard computers aren't down very often at all, though they ran backups quite a bit. There may have been away missions that used PADDs, but none come to mind--tricorders were certainly preferred. My impression is that a PADD has a small amount of on-board processing power and interfaces with nearby computers when available. In TOS, interfacing with the main computer was a big deal, so it would have been strange if the PADDs were just a wireless terminal. In Generations, there is a PADD-like control device that controls the missile launcher. It would be strange if the missile launcher provided the PADD's interface, though it's possible.