Those holograms weren't Federation holograms. My point was that the Federation wasn't oppressive and that the stars of the shows weren't living on the benefits of the oppressed. The EMH-turned-waste-extraction holograms featured in Author, Author weren't seen again, IIRC. But yeah, hologram rights in general was a major theme throughout the psycho hologram episodes. There were some other episodes that touched on The Doctor's rights. For a long time the crew didn't really see him as sentient, so they kept shutting him off when he got annoying, or not shutting him off after visiting sick bay. But the exception proves the rule.
Do you have any evidence that Business Insider ran this story as an advertisement for CBS Interactive's app? Maybe it's an innocent story. I enjoyed it, though I'm a big fan of Star Trek.
PADDs have been used on-screen to open doors, take inventory, sign contracts, read text, watch video with audio, display diagrams, activate site-to-site transports, compose a novel, and download information wirelessly from other computers. It's not clear to me that they could run arbitrary code, though it certainly fits. Mostly they're used for data entry and retrieval, and they also make a convenient place to put buttons that do plot-related things. See the Memory Alpha article for more.
Wesley with tractor beam was The Naked Now (which was a dreadful episode and firmly established hatred for Wesley). I can't think of any episodes where the whole ship was controlled via a PADD. My knowledge of TNG episodes is pretty encyclopedic, so there probably isn't one. There is an episode where Picard pilots a shuttle which in turn pilots the Enterprise, but he uses the usual shuttle controls, and at one point his commands are relayed by voice and entered into one of the consoles on the bridge.
You have no idea what Star Trek is about, do you? There's a scene from TNG: Time's Arrow, Part 2 that directly addresses your point. Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) is briefly brought to the future for complicated reasons. He and Troi have the following conversation:
CLEMENS: Oh? I'm not so impressed with this future... huge starships... weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities... military conquest as a way of life.
She looks sidelong at him.
TROI: Is that what you see here?
CLEMENS: Oh, I know what you say... this is a vessel of exploration... your mission is to, discover new worlds...
The Turbolift arrives. A strange alien EXITS. Clemens reacts, stares after him. They ENTER the Turbolift.
TROI: Deck thirty-six.
CLEMENS: That's what the Spanish said... and the Dutch, and the Portuguese. It's what all conquerors say... (beat) I'm sure it's what you told that blue skinned fellow I just saw... before you brought him here to serve you.
TROI: He's one of thousands of species we've encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with many of them... the people you see are here by choice.
Clemens ponders this for a moment.
CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few... who serve on these ships, living in luxury, wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them...
TROI: Poverty was eliminated a long time ago. And a lot of things disappeared with it: hopelessness... despair... cruelty... war...
He regards her solemnly. He's beginning to realize that his dark view is misplaced.
CLEMENS: I come from a time when men achieve wealth and power by standing on the backs of the poor... when prejudice and intolerance are commonplace... when power is an end unto itself... (beat) And you're telling me... that isn't how it is anymore?
TROI: That's right.
CLEMENS: (with a sigh) Maybe it is worth giving up cigars for, after all...
Troi smiles... the Turbolift door opens and they EXIT.
There's an episode of Voyager, Author, Author that does explore issues of the oppressed living in the Federation, but the oppressed are holograms and are obviously a stand-in for an arbitrary oppressed minority. They had to use holograms because it would have been unbelievable if they had used people whose rights were clearly established. This is also a very brief plot line that (as far as I recall) appeared only in that one episode. By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series. Really, you have no idea what you're talking about.
You never actually mentioned what my hypocrisy was. You seem to have been offended by my implicit insult, so you lashed out without having anything more than bluster ("Oh, the hypocrisy. And I didn't even have to pull out the ellipsis for that little gem.") to back it up. I know this is again somewhat insulting, and I apologize if it makes you defensive. If I've been hypocritical I'd honestly like to know how. The points I raised were definitely not the first things that popped into my mind (which was that the asker's time management skills were poor). I also make it a point to study people carefully in general.
As a coder, I can tell you that when someone comes to me with a vague problem (as the OP did), I'll start throwing out vague answers and trying to make assumptions to force their hand. That'll teach the stupid git to be vague.
This isn't quite the same as a one-on-one meeting, so it's not clear to me "trying to make assumptions to force their hand" is helpful here. In any case, why not mark your assumptions as assumptions, instead of saying them with perfect certainty (as the person I was replying to did)?
I'm not sure how the rest of your reply relates to my post. It seems to be addressed to me; otherwise I might ignore it. You seem to have read into it more than is there. For instance, "Now, I'll grant you, maybe quitting the Internet altogether is not a bad idea for the OP, or even just taking a vacation from it"--I never voiced an opinion on whether or not quitting the Internet is good or bad for this person. My post is most likely useless to the asker in regards to their question, since it didn't offer any advice whatsoever. I don't have the experience needed to answer their questions [the things followed by ?'s; not the implied things people are reading in], so I didn't try. My post just tried to correct something I saw as an error in someone else's reply, and it allowed me to vent slightly.
If the planet can control jellyfish to send us a message... why doesn't it just control us? People don't go far enough when idealizing their world. "In a perfect world, I could have both steak and pasta!" No, in a perfect world, even if you still needed to eat, you wouldn't need to limit yourself to just those two choices. Since it's perfect, you wouldn't make the mistake of limiting yourself either.
You seem to know an awful lot about this person. Maybe wasting time isn't the issue--all we get is "I've decided that the internet is no longer a positive influence on my life". I would say their writing style suggests they posses discipline rather than lack it. They included four clear and mostly specific questions. They wrote carefully and included non-standard but descriptive words (eg. forgoing; thus; nuisances). Time wasting is somewhat low on my list of probable reasons this person wants to get rid of their home internet.
Some other explanations that come to mind (not necessarily in any order): they're sick of wading through garbage online; they want to save money (low probability); they got burned by participating in some online community (high probability; fits the sentence I quoted and perhaps the discipline I noted); they have some internet-related non-time-wasting addiction (eg. porn; gambling).
In any case, people are usually more complex than the first thing that pops into your mind. I often don't like coders because they're such a poor judge of people. They're used to telling computers exactly what to do and being exactly right about cause and effect in that arena. Then they transfer those reactions to real life and act like idiots because of it. Mathematicians do the same thing, though maybe a bit less often (per capita).
I briefly consider sticking them in a folder called "email I already read and don't know what to do with but better not delete in case one day I really need it." But then isn't "inbox" just a more elegant way of saying the same thing?
Since he's using Gmail, the big Archive button does the same thing, but better.
Comments on the internet divide into "stupid", "troll", "funny", and "useful". Sometimes I wish I had the option of rating every comment/forum thread/forum post/review/article everywhere according to these categories, but the stupid people or trolls might win then. More sites are using some type of rating scheme, so maybe a really good one will get invented and take over in a few years.
Yeah, I said "annoying" instead of "useless" essentially for that reason. Even my own post was somewhat emotional, since I used an extreme and emotionally-charged example ("drag queen", etc.), and since I used rhetoric (eg. saying "Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.", implying it is a clearly universal truth without needing more discussion, elaboration, or qualification).
I hope that, with enough small nudges, society will someday notice how horrible decision-making based on emotional appeals is. The day I stop seeing amber waves of grain in political ads will be both a happy day on Earth and a cold day in Hell.
I would I could mod this funny. By "mistake", I meant the incredibly low quality of the final image was a mistake. In retrospect that usage is a bit non-standard.
Oh, ok. Come to think of it, I'd say the frowny face's existence was used as a flag to say "I'm not stupid; this is a joke; I know this state is impossible to reach on a solvable cube", since without it the original post might just have been an honest mistake. The frowny face also has another meaning: (feigned) confusion used to support the joking atmosphere of the comment. Humor is often a social thing--if people around you find something funny, you'll find it funny--which is self-reinforcing. You can replace "funny" with many emotions. That helps explain why crowds need to be "warmed up" at concerts. But back to the comment, if the poster found it funny, that could help the reader find it funny. At least, I imagine that's the (probably partly unconscious) reasoning behind the emoticon's placement.
I wasn't commenting on whether or not the airport system needs reform (to be honest, I feel too uninformed to voice an opinion). I was commenting on the emotional appeal the author of the article made, and how that kind of thinking is dangerous. I'm not sure why you would wish that my wife be groped unless I was saying that the airport system does not need reform, which in any case I didn't say.
That person is in the second real picture from the article. He seems to have really visited the site. I don't see how that bit of editing is any different from modifying the background. The overall image shows that the three visited the road, which takes both of the other pictures to get across.
A fast enough series of right clicks worked for me, though I think it took more than 2. The key seemed to be speed. It's gone now, but this happened to me a day or two ago.
The men did in fact visit the road, as evidenced by a couple of real pictures in the article. It really seems to be an honest mistake by someone terrible at image editing.
if "doing it by the book" involves [...] telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives [...], then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten.
That the person is 90, a woman, or a breast cancer survivor shouldn't matter. Perhaps the "book" should be rewritten so that a 20-year-old bra-wearing drag queen otherwise in the same situation shouldn't have to remove his bra, just like the old woman shouldn't have to. Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.
"Suppose someone takes a solved 20x20x20 Rubik's cube and makes five moves - can you figure out [from that scrambled state] what those five moves were?" he asks. In other words, can you solve it in five moves? He suspects that you cannot, but has yet to prove it. "We don't know."
Of course you can solve this cube in five moves--use brute force. It's getting little things like this wrong that makes me dislike journalists so much. If they misinterpret such an apparently simple comment, how wrong is the stuff I can't easily verify or refute?
You definitely don't have to drink to be fun to be around. As far as I can tell, everything else you said or implied was perfectly rigorous and used flawlessly written English, both of which I appreciate. I'm curious about your confusion over the emoticon's placement. Isn't it clear that it's just adding the emotion of confusion to the post explicitly, and that putting it at the end is only done for the sake of convenience?
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, thanks for bringing up that scene.
Those holograms weren't Federation holograms. My point was that the Federation wasn't oppressive and that the stars of the shows weren't living on the benefits of the oppressed. The EMH-turned-waste-extraction holograms featured in Author, Author weren't seen again, IIRC. But yeah, hologram rights in general was a major theme throughout the psycho hologram episodes. There were some other episodes that touched on The Doctor's rights. For a long time the crew didn't really see him as sentient, so they kept shutting him off when he got annoying, or not shutting him off after visiting sick bay. But the exception proves the rule.
I think they meant "starred". It's a stupid comment anyway (as I detailed in the other reply).
Do you have any evidence that Business Insider ran this story as an advertisement for CBS Interactive's app? Maybe it's an innocent story. I enjoyed it, though I'm a big fan of Star Trek.
After watching all 727 episodes and 11 movies, many several times, that isn't my impression.
PADDs have been used on-screen to open doors, take inventory, sign contracts, read text, watch video with audio, display diagrams, activate site-to-site transports, compose a novel, and download information wirelessly from other computers. It's not clear to me that they could run arbitrary code, though it certainly fits. Mostly they're used for data entry and retrieval, and they also make a convenient place to put buttons that do plot-related things. See the Memory Alpha article for more.
Wesley with tractor beam was The Naked Now (which was a dreadful episode and firmly established hatred for Wesley). I can't think of any episodes where the whole ship was controlled via a PADD. My knowledge of TNG episodes is pretty encyclopedic, so there probably isn't one. There is an episode where Picard pilots a shuttle which in turn pilots the Enterprise, but he uses the usual shuttle controls, and at one point his commands are relayed by voice and entered into one of the consoles on the bridge.
CLEMENS: Oh? I'm not so impressed with this future... huge starships... weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities... military conquest as a way of life.
She looks sidelong at him.
TROI: Is that what you see here?
CLEMENS: Oh, I know what you say... this is a vessel of exploration... your mission is to, discover new worlds...
The Turbolift arrives. A strange alien EXITS. Clemens reacts, stares after him. They ENTER the Turbolift.
TROI: Deck thirty-six.
CLEMENS: That's what the Spanish said... and the Dutch, and the Portuguese. It's what all conquerors say... (beat) I'm sure it's what you told that blue skinned fellow I just saw... before you brought him here to serve you.
TROI: He's one of thousands of species we've encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with many of them... the people you see are here by choice.
Clemens ponders this for a moment.
CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few... who serve on these ships, living in luxury, wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them...
TROI: Poverty was eliminated a long time ago. And a lot of things disappeared with it: hopelessness... despair... cruelty... war...
He regards her solemnly. He's beginning to realize that his dark view is misplaced.
CLEMENS: I come from a time when men achieve wealth and power by standing on the backs of the poor... when prejudice and intolerance are commonplace... when power is an end unto itself... (beat) And you're telling me... that isn't how it is anymore?
TROI: That's right.
CLEMENS: (with a sigh) Maybe it is worth giving up cigars for, after all...
Troi smiles... the Turbolift door opens and they EXIT.
There's an episode of Voyager, Author, Author that does explore issues of the oppressed living in the Federation, but the oppressed are holograms and are obviously a stand-in for an arbitrary oppressed minority. They had to use holograms because it would have been unbelievable if they had used people whose rights were clearly established. This is also a very brief plot line that (as far as I recall) appeared only in that one episode. By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series. Really, you have no idea what you're talking about.
You never actually mentioned what my hypocrisy was. You seem to have been offended by my implicit insult, so you lashed out without having anything more than bluster ("Oh, the hypocrisy. And I didn't even have to pull out the ellipsis for that little gem.") to back it up. I know this is again somewhat insulting, and I apologize if it makes you defensive. If I've been hypocritical I'd honestly like to know how. The points I raised were definitely not the first things that popped into my mind (which was that the asker's time management skills were poor). I also make it a point to study people carefully in general.
As a coder, I can tell you that when someone comes to me with a vague problem (as the OP did), I'll start throwing out vague answers and trying to make assumptions to force their hand. That'll teach the stupid git to be vague.
This isn't quite the same as a one-on-one meeting, so it's not clear to me "trying to make assumptions to force their hand" is helpful here. In any case, why not mark your assumptions as assumptions, instead of saying them with perfect certainty (as the person I was replying to did)?
I'm not sure how the rest of your reply relates to my post. It seems to be addressed to me; otherwise I might ignore it. You seem to have read into it more than is there. For instance, "Now, I'll grant you, maybe quitting the Internet altogether is not a bad idea for the OP, or even just taking a vacation from it"--I never voiced an opinion on whether or not quitting the Internet is good or bad for this person. My post is most likely useless to the asker in regards to their question, since it didn't offer any advice whatsoever. I don't have the experience needed to answer their questions [the things followed by ?'s; not the implied things people are reading in], so I didn't try. My post just tried to correct something I saw as an error in someone else's reply, and it allowed me to vent slightly.
If the planet can control jellyfish to send us a message... why doesn't it just control us? People don't go far enough when idealizing their world. "In a perfect world, I could have both steak and pasta!" No, in a perfect world, even if you still needed to eat, you wouldn't need to limit yourself to just those two choices. Since it's perfect, you wouldn't make the mistake of limiting yourself either.
You mean The Sphere. The Core has no jellyfish scene that I can remember.
You seem to know an awful lot about this person. Maybe wasting time isn't the issue--all we get is "I've decided that the internet is no longer a positive influence on my life". I would say their writing style suggests they posses discipline rather than lack it. They included four clear and mostly specific questions. They wrote carefully and included non-standard but descriptive words (eg. forgoing; thus; nuisances). Time wasting is somewhat low on my list of probable reasons this person wants to get rid of their home internet.
Some other explanations that come to mind (not necessarily in any order): they're sick of wading through garbage online; they want to save money (low probability); they got burned by participating in some online community (high probability; fits the sentence I quoted and perhaps the discipline I noted); they have some internet-related non-time-wasting addiction (eg. porn; gambling).
In any case, people are usually more complex than the first thing that pops into your mind. I often don't like coders because they're such a poor judge of people. They're used to telling computers exactly what to do and being exactly right about cause and effect in that arena. Then they transfer those reactions to real life and act like idiots because of it. Mathematicians do the same thing, though maybe a bit less often (per capita).
I briefly consider sticking them in a folder called "email I already read and don't know what to do with but better not delete in case one day I really need it." But then isn't "inbox" just a more elegant way of saying the same thing?
Since he's using Gmail, the big Archive button does the same thing, but better.
Comments on the internet divide into "stupid", "troll", "funny", and "useful". Sometimes I wish I had the option of rating every comment/forum thread/forum post/review/article everywhere according to these categories, but the stupid people or trolls might win then. More sites are using some type of rating scheme, so maybe a really good one will get invented and take over in a few years.
Yeah, I said "annoying" instead of "useless" essentially for that reason. Even my own post was somewhat emotional, since I used an extreme and emotionally-charged example ("drag queen", etc.), and since I used rhetoric (eg. saying "Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.", implying it is a clearly universal truth without needing more discussion, elaboration, or qualification).
I hope that, with enough small nudges, society will someday notice how horrible decision-making based on emotional appeals is. The day I stop seeing amber waves of grain in political ads will be both a happy day on Earth and a cold day in Hell.
I would I could mod this funny. By "mistake", I meant the incredibly low quality of the final image was a mistake. In retrospect that usage is a bit non-standard.
Oh, ok. Come to think of it, I'd say the frowny face's existence was used as a flag to say "I'm not stupid; this is a joke; I know this state is impossible to reach on a solvable cube", since without it the original post might just have been an honest mistake. The frowny face also has another meaning: (feigned) confusion used to support the joking atmosphere of the comment. Humor is often a social thing--if people around you find something funny, you'll find it funny--which is self-reinforcing. You can replace "funny" with many emotions. That helps explain why crowds need to be "warmed up" at concerts. But back to the comment, if the poster found it funny, that could help the reader find it funny. At least, I imagine that's the (probably partly unconscious) reasoning behind the emoticon's placement.
I wasn't commenting on whether or not the airport system needs reform (to be honest, I feel too uninformed to voice an opinion). I was commenting on the emotional appeal the author of the article made, and how that kind of thinking is dangerous. I'm not sure why you would wish that my wife be groped unless I was saying that the airport system does not need reform, which in any case I didn't say.
This is a right click, not a left click, so OS-specific double click timing is irrelevant.
That person is in the second real picture from the article. He seems to have really visited the site. I don't see how that bit of editing is any different from modifying the background. The overall image shows that the three visited the road, which takes both of the other pictures to get across.
A fast enough series of right clicks worked for me, though I think it took more than 2. The key seemed to be speed. It's gone now, but this happened to me a day or two ago.
The men did in fact visit the road, as evidenced by a couple of real pictures in the article. It really seems to be an honest mistake by someone terrible at image editing.
if "doing it by the book" involves [...] telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives [...], then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten.
That the person is 90, a woman, or a breast cancer survivor shouldn't matter. Perhaps the "book" should be rewritten so that a 20-year-old bra-wearing drag queen otherwise in the same situation shouldn't have to remove his bra, just like the old woman shouldn't have to. Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.
"Suppose someone takes a solved 20x20x20 Rubik's cube and makes five moves - can you figure out [from that scrambled state] what those five moves were?" he asks. In other words, can you solve it in five moves? He suspects that you cannot, but has yet to prove it. "We don't know."
Of course you can solve this cube in five moves--use brute force. It's getting little things like this wrong that makes me dislike journalists so much. If they misinterpret such an apparently simple comment, how wrong is the stuff I can't easily verify or refute?
You definitely don't have to drink to be fun to be around. As far as I can tell, everything else you said or implied was perfectly rigorous and used flawlessly written English, both of which I appreciate. I'm curious about your confusion over the emoticon's placement. Isn't it clear that it's just adding the emotion of confusion to the post explicitly, and that putting it at the end is only done for the sake of convenience?