Meanwhile the homosexual scenes in that other show *were* the plot.
Sorry, which show and which scene specifically?
Discovery had two guys brushing their teeth before bed. It was part of the plot, giving important character development and insight into how the ship runs.
In The Orville the same-sex aspect was just background to the gender issue, and some cheap laughs about how two men in a relationship have arguments just like opposite sex couples do.
Star Trek didnt make Kirk kissing Uhura the plot. Star Trek in fact *downplayed* its significance.
It was a huge deal at the time, getting a lot of press coverage. Roddenberry had great difficulty getting the executives to agree to it, and would have gone much further if he had been able to get away with it.
Nothing SJW about that.
So... Gender issues, not SJW, same-sex couples, SJW. I'm not liking where this is going.
Sure, not a dig at the religious liberals.
I was thinking more of the "clash of civilizations" bullshit and of course some straight up xenophobia with a thin veneer of reason we had from the Vulcans this week.
It's been established that things can be emitted at warp speed during warp travel, e.g. subspace messages are sent a superliminal speeds and continue to travel that fast after leaving the ship. I guess the issue is that the energy required is the product of the warp factor and the mass of the thing being accelerated... Maybe some kind of particle that pushes things out of the way, kind of like how photons can.
I remember that in TNG Riker noted that laser weapons wouldn't even penetrate the navigational shields, so I guess the deflector isn't the only protection.
What about Riker? He seems to fit the current definition of SJW. He is openly racist towards Ferengi and hates their culture, he tries to change that androgynous culture's ways and basically says they are awful and morally inferior.
Thinking about it more, what about Picard? Passing moral judgement on entire races and deeming them unfit to join the morally superior Federation. He interfered more than once when he found out that some culture was mistreating (in his eyes) one of their own, e.g. that princess and her arranged marriage.
The guys in skants (the name for those dresses) were just odd. Okay, gender equality for uniforms, but the issue was more that such a uniform isn't really suitable for working on a starship. Where are you supposed to clip your tricorder? It was pretty much the same issue as bikini/loincloth armour, totally impractical.
I'm speculating but I think the Klingons are going to explain the disparity between the different ones we have seen on screen and how such a war-like species ever managed to develop into the Klingon Empire we see in TNG.
We know that a considerable number of Klingons were affected by a virus that was accidentally created when they were trying to use Human augment technology to enhance themselves, which was covered on Enterprise. That resulted in the Klingons we saw on the Original Series, who lacked forehead ridges and looking more human than Klingon.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
There is also the possibility of Klingons surgically altering themselves to look human. CBS hasn't hidden this very well.
So I think they are working towards explaining all this and fitting in with existing canon. Something profound will happen to the Klingon Empire that makes them reject hard-core religion and unite to become what we know from TNG.
The idea isn't to make low fat pigs, it's to make low fat humans. If a similar technique can be used on people then they will be much less prone to obesity.
I think that would upset a lot of people around here who hate all the "touchy feely" crap. Just think about the SJW-Trek bullshit that The Orville has been putting out:
- Away teams consisting of three women, one man and one robot, and the women spend many minutes of screen time talking about their feelings
- Multiple domestic conflict situations, including an overtly gay couple and an episode where the captain and first officer spent most of the time together in an apartment talking about their relationship
- An entire episode about a society that thinks women are inferior and forces gender transitions on infants
- The old "religious zealots" plot line, an obvious dig at religious conservatives
Obviously because I am a notorious SJW I really enjoy The Orville, but we should keep Star Trek Discovery for the alphas who prefer action and reason over... Well, you know, typical Star Trek stuff.
This is always going to be a problem for Star Trek or any sci-fi series. The Enterprise of the 1960s looked futuristic, but today it's laughably primitive with it's big filament bulb indicators, mechanical buttons and ROBOT 9000 computer voice.
TNG actually stands up quite well in that respect because most of the displays are just backlit printed panels or animations superimposed into the image, but DS9 went back to using curved CRTs and looks dated now.
The main issue I have with tech on Discovery is the transparent screens. They will never, ever be a good idea.
Remember that really terrible Street Fighter The Movie? There was a scene where M. Bison promises some guy a million bucks... But it turns out to be in his brand new currency that is about to be huge when he takes over the world.
This was back in the 90s but apparently the movie was so bad no one watched it and now they are falling for the same scam.
The FBI investigation includes confessions of those behind GamerGate. One guy admitted to sending harassing emails and said he knew that it was a federal crime... But for some inexplicable reason they decided not to prosecute him. Perhaps they felt that he was just a kid "joking around" on the internet or something.
The FBI wrote that he "understood that it was a federal crime to send a threatening communication to anyone and will never do it again".
"Oh well, can't do anything about proxies, and it was just a joke anyway..." They had video and audio of another guy confessing to making 40 to 50 threatening phone calls, but did nothing about it.
In conclusion they wrote that "It is requested that this investigation be administratively closed due to lack of leads", hardly exonerating anyone.
Also, once again you profess to know what I believe and then prove otherwise. To be absolutely clear, I don't think women need to be coddled. You could at least apologise for suggesting I might be a rapist though. I'm all for robust, open debate but that was just nasty and uncalled for.
China is already well ahead in the EV market. BYD has cars with similar range to Tesla but costing a fraction as much, which they developed themselves. They have fully electric busses and commercial vehicles, while Tesla has yet to show their electric truck prototype.
Japan is getting very worried about it. Japanese manufacturers chose hybrid technology, thinking that batteries wouldn't be good enough for decades. There is a big scramble to develop not just fully electric cars, but for all the part manufacturers to pivot too. The guys making gearboxes are going to have a problem when cars don't have variable gears any more.
Europe is also now racing to adopt EV technology by partnering with China and importing Chinese technology.
I wonder if they are planning on using data from your car. In the UK you can opt to have a telemetry box installed in your car which monitors your driving. If you drive "badly" it reports you to the insurance company and they jack up your premium, otherwise you get a small discount. They are not very reliable - for example some cars with very small engines need full throttle to get slow up steep hills, which looks to the box like you are accelerating really hard.
Has anyone actually come up with a micropayment system where the payments are really micro? Like 1 cent or even less?
Bitcoin won't scale to that level. Perhaps you could have some kind of aggregation, like you pay â5 into a shared pot every month, your browser collects crypto tokens from sites you visit and then the system makes an anonymous payment based on the tokens collected by all users. It would need some kind of verification system though, so people don't just pretend to collect tokens while not paying/reporting.
I did a bit of research and I think that falling costs (disk space and bandwidth getting cheaper, CDNs pooling resources) and some newer crypto currencies that are more practical to mine in Javascript might make it feasible for some sites.
Sites that have other significant overheads, like a team of journalists or TV production costs, won't be able to survive off it. But sites with mostly textual user-generated content stand a chance.
Take Brexit, some really want it and think their wealth will be increased by it. Maybe the European market is too saturated for them and they want trade deals with other countries, maybe they want wages to be forced down further than austerity managed, maybe they are just idiots.
Others are shitting themselves about the potential consequences, already moving parts of their business to the continent, desperately trying to get the government to steer us away from the cliff edge.
The con was to make people think that they were all of one mind and were the enemy, the "so-called experts" and "political elite who brought mass immigration".
It doesn't hold true generally though. You can see it on a micro level by the way some people make generalizations about whole groups of people, until they actually meet some of those people and communicate with them, at which point they start to see them as human beings similar to themselves.
At a macro level, Europe deciding to use English and a common language was one of the key tools that helped build the EU and bring an unprecedented period of peace and integration.
Gates has skills. BASIC was a big deal back in the day, arguably one of the most important programming languages ever since it helped so many people learn. It wasn't just a toy either, back in the late 70s and 80s a lot of commercial software was written in BASIC. It made sense because as well as being very low cost to develop (no expensive workstation and cross-compiler/debug harness required) it allowed you to take advantage of extensive ROM routines on machines with very limited amounts of RAM.
As shitty as DOS and Windows were, they were not really sub-par for the time. Okay, you had Unix and Amiga OS doing full multitasking on relatively expensive hardware, but for the lower end that would typically run CP/M or BASIC such things were not common. Windows also ran on relatively low end hardware (192k RAM, less than the Amiga 1000's 256k + large ROMs) and crucially ran a lot of existing DOS software. It's contemporaries were things like GEM/TOS and the Apple Lisa, systems which were not really much better.
He's not a genius, but given the constraints at the time, both in terms of hardware and business needs, he demonstrated some technical ability back then.
Nobody is at all prepared to launch an attack to annihilate the U.S
I wouldn't be so sure about that. China won't appreciate having the US on its doorstep, especially a US that is willing to actually use nuclear weapons to resolve (up to that point) non-nuclear conflicts.
Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? It would be worse than that, especially since back then the US and Russian leaders had a relatively good relationship and good diplomatic skills. Apollo was nearly a join US-Russian mission. It's hard to see Shi and Trump resolving a similar situation.
Is that drop due to nuclear weapons or Europe's determination not to repeat the same mistakes?
After WW2 Europe was determined not to have more huge wars, and make further war in Europe basically impossible and utterly unthinkable. The US carried on with some proxy wars against communism, but basically the developed countries with the capability to fight wide ranging conflicts with high causality rates stopped fighting. They even started trying to keep the peace in developing nations.
Such things has been tried before, e.g. the League of Nations. But it was only after WW2, when European integration began and eventually developed into the EU, when the UN was created, that things started to improve. The backdrop of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction only undermined those efforts, because no-one was in any doubt that even a non-nuclear war between say the US and Russia would result in many millions of deaths and be basically unwinnable for both sides.
I don't think Kim would start anything, his behaviour is too rational for that. The main danger is that he is deposed and someone worse takes over, but ironically Trump has actually strengthened Kim's grip on power by handing him some easy PR wins.
Both Kim and Trump consider saving face to be of the utmost importance, but fortunately for Trump that often just means lying and pretending he is winning, rather than actually having to come out on top. To an extent Kim can do that too, but he cares more about how other countries behave rather than the superficial PR aspect.
At this point the best we can do is try to contain and control Trump while relying on the Chinese to provide Mutually Assured Destruction if he tries anything. Hopefully people in the US government and military would refuse if he did. Unfortunately we have Russia trolling the West at the moment, but hopefully NK is one area where they will restrain themselves.
This is an insight into the future where many news articles will be written by robots. The fact that it produces some odd output is useful data that we can learn from.
It's also interesting to see how much certain words and ideas crop up. Lots of people suing each other.
I'm sure datacentres are closely monitored. A VPN helps obfuscate the source of traffic, but it's not perfect. Even so, because it requires significant effort to de-anonymize the traffic flowing through the endpoint it prevents casual snooping and other abuses.
The other massive benefit to software tokens is that you can have as many as you want, for free and with zero weight, no sorting through tags on your keychain etc.
In fact with well designed ones you can't use the same token for more than one site, so a single token being compromised doesn't compromise your 2FA on other sites.
So while there are disadvantages to software keys, I'd say that on balance and human nature being what it is, they are probably a better solution for most people.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile the homosexual scenes in that other show *were* the plot.
Sorry, which show and which scene specifically?
Discovery had two guys brushing their teeth before bed. It was part of the plot, giving important character development and insight into how the ship runs.
In The Orville the same-sex aspect was just background to the gender issue, and some cheap laughs about how two men in a relationship have arguments just like opposite sex couples do.
Star Trek didnt make Kirk kissing Uhura the plot. Star Trek in fact *downplayed* its significance.
It was a huge deal at the time, getting a lot of press coverage. Roddenberry had great difficulty getting the executives to agree to it, and would have gone much further if he had been able to get away with it.
Nothing SJW about that.
So... Gender issues, not SJW, same-sex couples, SJW. I'm not liking where this is going.
Sure, not a dig at the religious liberals.
I was thinking more of the "clash of civilizations" bullshit and of course some straight up xenophobia with a thin veneer of reason we had from the Vulcans this week.
It's been established that things can be emitted at warp speed during warp travel, e.g. subspace messages are sent a superliminal speeds and continue to travel that fast after leaving the ship. I guess the issue is that the energy required is the product of the warp factor and the mass of the thing being accelerated... Maybe some kind of particle that pushes things out of the way, kind of like how photons can.
I remember that in TNG Riker noted that laser weapons wouldn't even penetrate the navigational shields, so I guess the deflector isn't the only protection.
What about Riker? He seems to fit the current definition of SJW. He is openly racist towards Ferengi and hates their culture, he tries to change that androgynous culture's ways and basically says they are awful and morally inferior.
Thinking about it more, what about Picard? Passing moral judgement on entire races and deeming them unfit to join the morally superior Federation. He interfered more than once when he found out that some culture was mistreating (in his eyes) one of their own, e.g. that princess and her arranged marriage.
The guys in skants (the name for those dresses) were just odd. Okay, gender equality for uniforms, but the issue was more that such a uniform isn't really suitable for working on a starship. Where are you supposed to clip your tricorder? It was pretty much the same issue as bikini/loincloth armour, totally impractical.
I'm speculating but I think the Klingons are going to explain the disparity between the different ones we have seen on screen and how such a war-like species ever managed to develop into the Klingon Empire we see in TNG.
We know that a considerable number of Klingons were affected by a virus that was accidentally created when they were trying to use Human augment technology to enhance themselves, which was covered on Enterprise. That resulted in the Klingons we saw on the Original Series, who lacked forehead ridges and looking more human than Klingon.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
There is also the possibility of Klingons surgically altering themselves to look human. CBS hasn't hidden this very well.
So I think they are working towards explaining all this and fitting in with existing canon. Something profound will happen to the Klingon Empire that makes them reject hard-core religion and unite to become what we know from TNG.
The idea isn't to make low fat pigs, it's to make low fat humans. If a similar technique can be used on people then they will be much less prone to obesity.
I think that would upset a lot of people around here who hate all the "touchy feely" crap. Just think about the SJW-Trek bullshit that The Orville has been putting out:
- Away teams consisting of three women, one man and one robot, and the women spend many minutes of screen time talking about their feelings
- Multiple domestic conflict situations, including an overtly gay couple and an episode where the captain and first officer spent most of the time together in an apartment talking about their relationship
- An entire episode about a society that thinks women are inferior and forces gender transitions on infants
- The old "religious zealots" plot line, an obvious dig at religious conservatives
Obviously because I am a notorious SJW I really enjoy The Orville, but we should keep Star Trek Discovery for the alphas who prefer action and reason over... Well, you know, typical Star Trek stuff.
This is always going to be a problem for Star Trek or any sci-fi series. The Enterprise of the 1960s looked futuristic, but today it's laughably primitive with it's big filament bulb indicators, mechanical buttons and ROBOT 9000 computer voice.
TNG actually stands up quite well in that respect because most of the displays are just backlit printed panels or animations superimposed into the image, but DS9 went back to using curved CRTs and looks dated now.
The main issue I have with tech on Discovery is the transparent screens. They will never, ever be a good idea.
Remember that really terrible Street Fighter The Movie? There was a scene where M. Bison promises some guy a million bucks... But it turns out to be in his brand new currency that is about to be huge when he takes over the world.
This was back in the 90s but apparently the movie was so bad no one watched it and now they are falling for the same scam.
Encryption works as designed.
The FBI investigation includes confessions of those behind GamerGate. One guy admitted to sending harassing emails and said he knew that it was a federal crime... But for some inexplicable reason they decided not to prosecute him. Perhaps they felt that he was just a kid "joking around" on the internet or something.
The FBI wrote that he "understood that it was a federal crime to send a threatening communication to anyone and will never do it again".
Take this excert, for example: https://cdn.businessinsider.nl...
"Oh well, can't do anything about proxies, and it was just a joke anyway..." They had video and audio of another guy confessing to making 40 to 50 threatening phone calls, but did nothing about it.
In conclusion they wrote that "It is requested that this investigation be administratively closed due to lack of leads", hardly exonerating anyone.
Also, once again you profess to know what I believe and then prove otherwise. To be absolutely clear, I don't think women need to be coddled. You could at least apologise for suggesting I might be a rapist though. I'm all for robust, open debate but that was just nasty and uncalled for.
China is already well ahead in the EV market. BYD has cars with similar range to Tesla but costing a fraction as much, which they developed themselves. They have fully electric busses and commercial vehicles, while Tesla has yet to show their electric truck prototype.
Japan is getting very worried about it. Japanese manufacturers chose hybrid technology, thinking that batteries wouldn't be good enough for decades. There is a big scramble to develop not just fully electric cars, but for all the part manufacturers to pivot too. The guys making gearboxes are going to have a problem when cars don't have variable gears any more.
Europe is also now racing to adopt EV technology by partnering with China and importing Chinese technology.
I wonder if they are planning on using data from your car. In the UK you can opt to have a telemetry box installed in your car which monitors your driving. If you drive "badly" it reports you to the insurance company and they jack up your premium, otherwise you get a small discount. They are not very reliable - for example some cars with very small engines need full throttle to get slow up steep hills, which looks to the box like you are accelerating really hard.
Has anyone actually come up with a micropayment system where the payments are really micro? Like 1 cent or even less?
Bitcoin won't scale to that level. Perhaps you could have some kind of aggregation, like you pay â5 into a shared pot every month, your browser collects crypto tokens from sites you visit and then the system makes an anonymous payment based on the tokens collected by all users. It would need some kind of verification system though, so people don't just pretend to collect tokens while not paying/reporting.
I did a bit of research and I think that falling costs (disk space and bandwidth getting cheaper, CDNs pooling resources) and some newer crypto currencies that are more practical to mine in Javascript might make it feasible for some sites.
Sites that have other significant overheads, like a team of journalists or TV production costs, won't be able to survive off it. But sites with mostly textual user-generated content stand a chance.
The "elites" aren't one group though.
Take Brexit, some really want it and think their wealth will be increased by it. Maybe the European market is too saturated for them and they want trade deals with other countries, maybe they want wages to be forced down further than austerity managed, maybe they are just idiots.
Others are shitting themselves about the potential consequences, already moving parts of their business to the continent, desperately trying to get the government to steer us away from the cliff edge.
The con was to make people think that they were all of one mind and were the enemy, the "so-called experts" and "political elite who brought mass immigration".
It doesn't hold true generally though. You can see it on a micro level by the way some people make generalizations about whole groups of people, until they actually meet some of those people and communicate with them, at which point they start to see them as human beings similar to themselves.
At a macro level, Europe deciding to use English and a common language was one of the key tools that helped build the EU and bring an unprecedented period of peace and integration.
Gates has skills. BASIC was a big deal back in the day, arguably one of the most important programming languages ever since it helped so many people learn. It wasn't just a toy either, back in the late 70s and 80s a lot of commercial software was written in BASIC. It made sense because as well as being very low cost to develop (no expensive workstation and cross-compiler/debug harness required) it allowed you to take advantage of extensive ROM routines on machines with very limited amounts of RAM.
As shitty as DOS and Windows were, they were not really sub-par for the time. Okay, you had Unix and Amiga OS doing full multitasking on relatively expensive hardware, but for the lower end that would typically run CP/M or BASIC such things were not common. Windows also ran on relatively low end hardware (192k RAM, less than the Amiga 1000's 256k + large ROMs) and crucially ran a lot of existing DOS software. It's contemporaries were things like GEM/TOS and the Apple Lisa, systems which were not really much better.
He's not a genius, but given the constraints at the time, both in terms of hardware and business needs, he demonstrated some technical ability back then.
If Gates was interested in getting even more rich he wouldn't be giving away most of his income and a part of his fortune.
Nobody is at all prepared to launch an attack to annihilate the U.S
I wouldn't be so sure about that. China won't appreciate having the US on its doorstep, especially a US that is willing to actually use nuclear weapons to resolve (up to that point) non-nuclear conflicts.
Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? It would be worse than that, especially since back then the US and Russian leaders had a relatively good relationship and good diplomatic skills. Apollo was nearly a join US-Russian mission. It's hard to see Shi and Trump resolving a similar situation.
Is that drop due to nuclear weapons or Europe's determination not to repeat the same mistakes?
After WW2 Europe was determined not to have more huge wars, and make further war in Europe basically impossible and utterly unthinkable. The US carried on with some proxy wars against communism, but basically the developed countries with the capability to fight wide ranging conflicts with high causality rates stopped fighting. They even started trying to keep the peace in developing nations.
Such things has been tried before, e.g. the League of Nations. But it was only after WW2, when European integration began and eventually developed into the EU, when the UN was created, that things started to improve. The backdrop of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction only undermined those efforts, because no-one was in any doubt that even a non-nuclear war between say the US and Russia would result in many millions of deaths and be basically unwinnable for both sides.
I don't think Kim would start anything, his behaviour is too rational for that. The main danger is that he is deposed and someone worse takes over, but ironically Trump has actually strengthened Kim's grip on power by handing him some easy PR wins.
Both Kim and Trump consider saving face to be of the utmost importance, but fortunately for Trump that often just means lying and pretending he is winning, rather than actually having to come out on top. To an extent Kim can do that too, but he cares more about how other countries behave rather than the superficial PR aspect.
At this point the best we can do is try to contain and control Trump while relying on the Chinese to provide Mutually Assured Destruction if he tries anything. Hopefully people in the US government and military would refuse if he did. Unfortunately we have Russia trolling the West at the moment, but hopefully NK is one area where they will restrain themselves.
This is an insight into the future where many news articles will be written by robots. The fact that it produces some odd output is useful data that we can learn from.
It's also interesting to see how much certain words and ideas crop up. Lots of people suing each other.
I'm sure datacentres are closely monitored. A VPN helps obfuscate the source of traffic, but it's not perfect. Even so, because it requires significant effort to de-anonymize the traffic flowing through the endpoint it prevents casual snooping and other abuses.
I've got about 15 I carry with me. I need to carry them so that, for example, I can log in from work or from home.
The other massive benefit to software tokens is that you can have as many as you want, for free and with zero weight, no sorting through tags on your keychain etc.
In fact with well designed ones you can't use the same token for more than one site, so a single token being compromised doesn't compromise your 2FA on other sites.
So while there are disadvantages to software keys, I'd say that on balance and human nature being what it is, they are probably a better solution for most people.