There were some occasional missteps, and it really declined after Roddenberry was gone
I have to disagree with this. Roddenberry was much like Lucas: good at high-level ideas, terrible at execution. When Roddenberry was most involved in Star Trek, we got near-disasters like Wesley Crusher and the whole first season of TNG. Even the first season of TOS was really rough. Both those shows improved enormously after other people took the reigns from Gene (in TNG, it was when Rick Berman took over in season 3).
Of course, Berman later made big mistakes too, namely Janeway. But Enterprise was pretty good aside from that stupid Xindi arc in season 3, and some roughness in the first season (and also that horrible, horrible theme song in the beginning).
But overall I do agree about Star Wars vs. Star Trek with JJ: the bar is lower with SW, because it's only supposed to be simple, mindless fun, not highly philosophical sci-fi like Trek, so SW definitely suits JJ's style better.
This isn't about America. Power generated in the Sahara would be used mostly in Europe. Have you forgotten that there's many other countries full of people out there who use electricity?
No one's going to put a transmission line across the Atlantic. The very thought of that is simply stupid.
Oh please, you're worried about possible climate change due to changed albedo? It's a desert: the sunlight is normally reflected back out to space. Maybe a little of that gets captured by the atmosphere.
However, you have to compare it to the status quo, which is tons of nasty, coal-fired power plants. How much climate change is caused by an equivalent megawatt-supplying amount of coat plants?
Any power source is going to have some effect on the environment. The goal is to minimize this. Solar (thermal or PV) probably does this better than anything else, with wind probably #2. You can't entirely eliminate it without eliminating all electric power and therefore all civilization.
Long-term, fundamentalism fails. Remember how the Christian Church used to be?
What are you talking about? Fundamentalist Christianity is alive and well all across the US right now. Maybe you don't see too much of it in San Francisco, but here in the rest of the country we're constantly being told about how the "end times" are here. The fundies even have movies at Redbox about this craziness.
You are? Last I checked, the GOP controlled both houses of Congress and most of the state legislatures and governorships. The only thing they don't control is the White House.
Polling data is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is actual votes, and the GOP has been winning electoral races left and right.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Democratic Party keeps pushing crappy candidates like Hillary on us, and when they do gain power they push things like the TPP for their buddies in the media industries.
Thank you, that's pretty much what I had in mind, but a little more extreme: I *want* to see MS push their customers away so that they'll be finally forced to abandon MS, or get burnt so badly by sticking with them that their competition drives them out of business.
I'd rather see a world where all these "IT companies" as you put it are actually mostly in control over their own destinies (at least with the IT stuff), rather than all of them being on the MS bandwagon.
I thought "AAA" games were ones which were pretty cutting-edge and resource-intensive. As such, that's the last kind of application you want to run inside a VM; the performance will probably be crap.
If you just used Windows for some not-so-high-performance office applications or stuff like that, then yes, that's a good approach.
Hopefully this is one of those features Microsoft will allow you to turn off in the Enterprise SKU.
No, hopefully not. I'd rather see MS force their corporate customers to link their AD servers to MS's, and send all their encryption keys to MS's servers.
Yeah, that was my point there. Blacks didn't actually get to exercise that right for almost a century, so having it on paper was really quite worthless.
Have you been taking an extended break from this site? You've been here long enough that you should know better than almost anyone how much it's gone down the toilet in recent years.
The voters do, obviously. There's no evidence that our elections are highly rigged, aside from a few irregularities and concerns (electronic voting machines in some districts, hanging chads in Florida in 2000, etc.).
The problem is that the voters are presented with a very limited number of choices, and those candidates are filtered by various powers-that-be: the media, the RNC and DNC, etc.
Instead of the overt choosing of leaders as in China by the elites, here the elites have various mechanisms to influence elections. However, influence does not equate to a cabal, just like "wage slavery" is not nearly the same thing as real slavery.
Your argument essentially amounts to "it's not awful, because the last one was worse." Just because the last one was worse doesn't mean the current one isn't bad.
The problem is that they're ALL bad. There's no such thing as a good government anywhere, so it's pointless to single them out as "awful" unless they're really that far below the average (like, say, North Korea).
Compared to governments worldwide, China is NOT that bad. Just compare it to NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most African nations, many central and south American nations, and it really isn't all that bad.
You remind me a lot of all the liberals constantly screaming about how "awful" Donald Trump is, while obviously forgetting about the other people he's running against in the GOP race who are all even worse.
I still disagree. From your perspective, it IS awful. From the perspective of a Chinese person, it might not be awful at all.
Do you think the American government is good? I'm sure many people in Norway and Sweden and Switzerland would disagree, and say it's "awful". They can point to all kinds of human rights violations and other things. Cops murdering black people. Gitmo, just to name couple. So why are you singling out the Chinese government for being "awful" when your own government is crap too?
I never said it was a great government, just that it has served its population better than many other governments, and better than governments which came before it.
If you picked 1000 random Chinese citizens and asked them what they thought of their government, what do you think they'd say? (Make sure to pick across the age spectrum, as older ones will remember what it was like before the current capitalist-ish government.) If they all like it, then who are you to tell them they're all wrong?
And how is their government any worse than the government of Saudi Arabia? I'd say the Chinese government is far better in most ways. But Americans love the government of Saudi Arabia, because they continue to vote for a government which backs the Saudi government at every turn.
I'll give you Tibet maybe, but again that was many decades ago, when China's government was rather different from its current incarnation. That was back in the Maoist days before they embraced capitalism and a market economy. I'm not talking about China's government since the revolution of 1949 (IIRC the year correctly), I'm talking about only since they morphed into am authoritarian capitalist government that just calls itself "communist".
India? That doesn't ring any bells at all, and is probably around the time of Tibet, and probably involved border disputes, not wholesale invasion and occupation like Germany did to Poland, France, etc. Vietnam I don't recall at all; I do remember that China was involved in *arming* the sides in the north and probably helping them in other ways, but I certainly don't recall Chinese troops in action in Vietnam, like they were in Korea. China arming and assisting a government is no different from what the USA has been doing for most of the last century, except the US has been doing a LOT more of it, and a lot more recently too. Again, Vietnam was still before China's government adopted capitalism. Nixon didn't go to China until the 70s.
The big difference is that in the USA, the general populace is allowed to choose the leader out of the ones which the elites of society have hand-picked for us to choose from. In China, only the elites get to make the final choice.
Maybe you're thinking of chop-shops and the like. Yes, they do exist for cars. And yes, computer components used to be the target of theft. I remember when $1000 486 CPUs in PCs used to be easily removed because they started using ZIF sockets, and a lot of name-brand PCs (Gateway, etc.) had easily-opened cases, so pretty quickly universities and other places where PCs were publicly accessible started having big problems with these chips mysteriously disappearing, because apparently no one ever thought that someone might just pop the top up, lift a level, and swipe a $1000 part that fits in your hand. Of course they started locking cases after that.
These days, however, computers are dirt cheap. You can spend a bunch on some high-end rig, but not many people do, usually only gamers. Laptop theft used to be a big problem too; again, not any more since you can get laptops for dirt cheap. Apple owners might still need to be careful (since their laptops are both very easily distinguished and very overpriced), but for everyone else it just isn't a big factor any more. Laptops and computers just aren't valuable enough any more to support a big black market in stolen goods. You're much more likely to have your phone stolen.
When was the last time you heard about thieves breaking into offices to "taff" RAM? (I'm guessing that's some silly Britishism for "steal".) Probably back when RAM was really expensive, like 10+ years ago. I could totally see that back in the days of RAMBUS memory with the P4; that stuff was ridiculously expensive. These days, why would anyone go to the effort of swiping $20 worth of RAM?
Oh definitely, that's probably the best way to make a building with present technology. I'm just pointing out that concrete-only buildings like you see in various third-world nations are not a good construction technique.
No, actually they didn't. South Korea is basically a clone of Japan: they both had huge involvement from the Americans and with their own hard work combined with the huge influx of money and other resources from the US government as well as lots of hand-holding (Japan's constitution was partially written by General MacArthur), they got to their present state. China didn't have any of that outside assistance; they had to do everything themselves. And they did a pretty terrible job of it too, while Mao was in power. Eventually the Communist Party slowly changed direction until it became what it is now: a party interested in industrialization and freer markets and trade and capitalism (though still with a lot of state-owned industries, but lots of European nations have those too; even the US has some such as the USPS and various transit companies plus most water utilities).
This is definitely wrong. Landowners could NOT vote for the Senate at all. You must have forgotten the 17th Amendment: only state legislatures could vote for Senators. Citizens could not. The 17A changed that in the late 1800s.
Nazi Germany was different in two very large ways:
1) Nazi Germany invaded a bunch of other countries and committed all kinds of atrocities to the people of those countries.
2) Nazi Germany didn't take a backwards third-world agrarian nation and turn it into a major economic power. Germany was *already* a major economic, industrial, and technological power long before the Nazis, but they were going through a depression when the Nazis took advantage of that opportunity.
China hasn't invaded any other countries (unless you count the intervention in Korea, but that was a *long* time ago, and was requested by one of the sides in that civil war), and China was not an industrial power before the last few decades. So my point is, if you look at things from the perspective of Chinese people, their government has been a net benefit to them for the last few decades. Maybe they're not doing things the way *you'd* like, and maybe they haven't managed to turn it into the equivalent of Germany circa 2015, but compared to what they had before (i.e. the way things were after Mao's disastrous Great Leap Backwards), they've made a lot of progress.
The early USA had a government that resembled China's more than it does today's government. Remember, back then, only white male landowners were allowed to vote. That effectively kept a good portion of the population away from the voting booth, so that only the elites could choose the governmental leaders. It wasn't until later that non-landowners were allowed to vote, and later women, and later black people (the last one didn't really happen until the late 1960s).
Remember, China isn't a dictatorship, it's basically a cabal. The elites of society are the ones who run the "Communist" Party, and they choose the leaders. Not that different from the early USA.
If the thieves knew what all is in it, they would steal it just to cannibalize the components.
No, they wouldn't. Thieves don't care about components, and don't want to spend time trying to sell technical items on Ebay. They want something they can hock quickly, which means something that has a high resale value at consumer places, and that means Apples.
This is merely the nature of niche-market stuff versus mass-market shiny consumer crap. There's lots of very expensive industrial equipment, for instance, which easily costs 6 or 7 figures, but isn't in much danger of being stolen because thieves wouldn't know what to do with it. Lots of engineering workplaces have oscilloscopes and other test equipment costing high-5 figures or more; how often does that stuff get stolen? Never; they're in much more danger of their $2k Apple laptops getting stolen.
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But even the crappiest soap operas have better dialog and acting than the SW Prequels.
There were some occasional missteps, and it really declined after Roddenberry was gone
I have to disagree with this. Roddenberry was much like Lucas: good at high-level ideas, terrible at execution. When Roddenberry was most involved in Star Trek, we got near-disasters like Wesley Crusher and the whole first season of TNG. Even the first season of TOS was really rough. Both those shows improved enormously after other people took the reigns from Gene (in TNG, it was when Rick Berman took over in season 3).
Of course, Berman later made big mistakes too, namely Janeway. But Enterprise was pretty good aside from that stupid Xindi arc in season 3, and some roughness in the first season (and also that horrible, horrible theme song in the beginning).
But overall I do agree about Star Wars vs. Star Trek with JJ: the bar is lower with SW, because it's only supposed to be simple, mindless fun, not highly philosophical sci-fi like Trek, so SW definitely suits JJ's style better.
This isn't about America. Power generated in the Sahara would be used mostly in Europe. Have you forgotten that there's many other countries full of people out there who use electricity?
No one's going to put a transmission line across the Atlantic. The very thought of that is simply stupid.
Oh please, you're worried about possible climate change due to changed albedo? It's a desert: the sunlight is normally reflected back out to space. Maybe a little of that gets captured by the atmosphere.
However, you have to compare it to the status quo, which is tons of nasty, coal-fired power plants. How much climate change is caused by an equivalent megawatt-supplying amount of coat plants?
Any power source is going to have some effect on the environment. The goal is to minimize this. Solar (thermal or PV) probably does this better than anything else, with wind probably #2. You can't entirely eliminate it without eliminating all electric power and therefore all civilization.
Long-term, fundamentalism fails. Remember how the Christian Church used to be?
What are you talking about? Fundamentalist Christianity is alive and well all across the US right now. Maybe you don't see too much of it in San Francisco, but here in the rest of the country we're constantly being told about how the "end times" are here. The fundies even have movies at Redbox about this craziness.
You are? Last I checked, the GOP controlled both houses of Congress and most of the state legislatures and governorships. The only thing they don't control is the White House.
Polling data is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is actual votes, and the GOP has been winning electoral races left and right.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Democratic Party keeps pushing crappy candidates like Hillary on us, and when they do gain power they push things like the TPP for their buddies in the media industries.
and there's a huge potential for abuse (if such a button existed, I bet a lot of us would click on it for sony.com and so on).
That's not "abuse", that's a public service.
Thank you, that's pretty much what I had in mind, but a little more extreme: I *want* to see MS push their customers away so that they'll be finally forced to abandon MS, or get burnt so badly by sticking with them that their competition drives them out of business.
I'd rather see a world where all these "IT companies" as you put it are actually mostly in control over their own destinies (at least with the IT stuff), rather than all of them being on the MS bandwagon.
I thought "AAA" games were ones which were pretty cutting-edge and resource-intensive. As such, that's the last kind of application you want to run inside a VM; the performance will probably be crap.
If you just used Windows for some not-so-high-performance office applications or stuff like that, then yes, that's a good approach.
Hopefully this is one of those features Microsoft will allow you to turn off in the Enterprise SKU.
No, hopefully not. I'd rather see MS force their corporate customers to link their AD servers to MS's, and send all their encryption keys to MS's servers.
Yeah, that was my point there. Blacks didn't actually get to exercise that right for almost a century, so having it on paper was really quite worthless.
Have you been taking an extended break from this site? You've been here long enough that you should know better than almost anyone how much it's gone down the toilet in recent years.
The voters do, obviously. There's no evidence that our elections are highly rigged, aside from a few irregularities and concerns (electronic voting machines in some districts, hanging chads in Florida in 2000, etc.).
The problem is that the voters are presented with a very limited number of choices, and those candidates are filtered by various powers-that-be: the media, the RNC and DNC, etc.
Instead of the overt choosing of leaders as in China by the elites, here the elites have various mechanisms to influence elections. However, influence does not equate to a cabal, just like "wage slavery" is not nearly the same thing as real slavery.
Your argument essentially amounts to "it's not awful, because the last one was worse." Just because the last one was worse doesn't mean the current one isn't bad.
The problem is that they're ALL bad. There's no such thing as a good government anywhere, so it's pointless to single them out as "awful" unless they're really that far below the average (like, say, North Korea).
Compared to governments worldwide, China is NOT that bad. Just compare it to NK, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most African nations, many central and south American nations, and it really isn't all that bad.
You remind me a lot of all the liberals constantly screaming about how "awful" Donald Trump is, while obviously forgetting about the other people he's running against in the GOP race who are all even worse.
I still disagree. From your perspective, it IS awful. From the perspective of a Chinese person, it might not be awful at all.
Do you think the American government is good? I'm sure many people in Norway and Sweden and Switzerland would disagree, and say it's "awful". They can point to all kinds of human rights violations and other things. Cops murdering black people. Gitmo, just to name couple. So why are you singling out the Chinese government for being "awful" when your own government is crap too?
I never said it was a great government, just that it has served its population better than many other governments, and better than governments which came before it.
If you picked 1000 random Chinese citizens and asked them what they thought of their government, what do you think they'd say? (Make sure to pick across the age spectrum, as older ones will remember what it was like before the current capitalist-ish government.) If they all like it, then who are you to tell them they're all wrong?
And how is their government any worse than the government of Saudi Arabia? I'd say the Chinese government is far better in most ways. But Americans love the government of Saudi Arabia, because they continue to vote for a government which backs the Saudi government at every turn.
I'll give you Tibet maybe, but again that was many decades ago, when China's government was rather different from its current incarnation. That was back in the Maoist days before they embraced capitalism and a market economy. I'm not talking about China's government since the revolution of 1949 (IIRC the year correctly), I'm talking about only since they morphed into am authoritarian capitalist government that just calls itself "communist".
India? That doesn't ring any bells at all, and is probably around the time of Tibet, and probably involved border disputes, not wholesale invasion and occupation like Germany did to Poland, France, etc. Vietnam I don't recall at all; I do remember that China was involved in *arming* the sides in the north and probably helping them in other ways, but I certainly don't recall Chinese troops in action in Vietnam, like they were in Korea. China arming and assisting a government is no different from what the USA has been doing for most of the last century, except the US has been doing a LOT more of it, and a lot more recently too. Again, Vietnam was still before China's government adopted capitalism. Nixon didn't go to China until the 70s.
The big difference is that in the USA, the general populace is allowed to choose the leader out of the ones which the elites of society have hand-picked for us to choose from. In China, only the elites get to make the final choice.
Maybe you're thinking of chop-shops and the like. Yes, they do exist for cars. And yes, computer components used to be the target of theft. I remember when $1000 486 CPUs in PCs used to be easily removed because they started using ZIF sockets, and a lot of name-brand PCs (Gateway, etc.) had easily-opened cases, so pretty quickly universities and other places where PCs were publicly accessible started having big problems with these chips mysteriously disappearing, because apparently no one ever thought that someone might just pop the top up, lift a level, and swipe a $1000 part that fits in your hand. Of course they started locking cases after that.
These days, however, computers are dirt cheap. You can spend a bunch on some high-end rig, but not many people do, usually only gamers. Laptop theft used to be a big problem too; again, not any more since you can get laptops for dirt cheap. Apple owners might still need to be careful (since their laptops are both very easily distinguished and very overpriced), but for everyone else it just isn't a big factor any more. Laptops and computers just aren't valuable enough any more to support a big black market in stolen goods. You're much more likely to have your phone stolen.
When was the last time you heard about thieves breaking into offices to "taff" RAM? (I'm guessing that's some silly Britishism for "steal".) Probably back when RAM was really expensive, like 10+ years ago. I could totally see that back in the days of RAMBUS memory with the P4; that stuff was ridiculously expensive. These days, why would anyone go to the effort of swiping $20 worth of RAM?
Oh definitely, that's probably the best way to make a building with present technology. I'm just pointing out that concrete-only buildings like you see in various third-world nations are not a good construction technique.
No, actually they didn't. South Korea is basically a clone of Japan: they both had huge involvement from the Americans and with their own hard work combined with the huge influx of money and other resources from the US government as well as lots of hand-holding (Japan's constitution was partially written by General MacArthur), they got to their present state. China didn't have any of that outside assistance; they had to do everything themselves. And they did a pretty terrible job of it too, while Mao was in power. Eventually the Communist Party slowly changed direction until it became what it is now: a party interested in industrialization and freer markets and trade and capitalism (though still with a lot of state-owned industries, but lots of European nations have those too; even the US has some such as the USPS and various transit companies plus most water utilities).
This is definitely wrong. Landowners could NOT vote for the Senate at all. You must have forgotten the 17th Amendment: only state legislatures could vote for Senators. Citizens could not. The 17A changed that in the late 1800s.
Nazi Germany was different in two very large ways:
1) Nazi Germany invaded a bunch of other countries and committed all kinds of atrocities to the people of those countries.
2) Nazi Germany didn't take a backwards third-world agrarian nation and turn it into a major economic power. Germany was *already* a major economic, industrial, and technological power long before the Nazis, but they were going through a depression when the Nazis took advantage of that opportunity.
China hasn't invaded any other countries (unless you count the intervention in Korea, but that was a *long* time ago, and was requested by one of the sides in that civil war), and China was not an industrial power before the last few decades. So my point is, if you look at things from the perspective of Chinese people, their government has been a net benefit to them for the last few decades. Maybe they're not doing things the way *you'd* like, and maybe they haven't managed to turn it into the equivalent of Germany circa 2015, but compared to what they had before (i.e. the way things were after Mao's disastrous Great Leap Backwards), they've made a lot of progress.
The early USA had a government that resembled China's more than it does today's government. Remember, back then, only white male landowners were allowed to vote. That effectively kept a good portion of the population away from the voting booth, so that only the elites could choose the governmental leaders. It wasn't until later that non-landowners were allowed to vote, and later women, and later black people (the last one didn't really happen until the late 1960s).
Remember, China isn't a dictatorship, it's basically a cabal. The elites of society are the ones who run the "Communist" Party, and they choose the leaders. Not that different from the early USA.
If the thieves knew what all is in it, they would steal it just to cannibalize the components.
No, they wouldn't. Thieves don't care about components, and don't want to spend time trying to sell technical items on Ebay. They want something they can hock quickly, which means something that has a high resale value at consumer places, and that means Apples.
This is merely the nature of niche-market stuff versus mass-market shiny consumer crap. There's lots of very expensive industrial equipment, for instance, which easily costs 6 or 7 figures, but isn't in much danger of being stolen because thieves wouldn't know what to do with it. Lots of engineering workplaces have oscilloscopes and other test equipment costing high-5 figures or more; how often does that stuff get stolen? Never; they're in much more danger of their $2k Apple laptops getting stolen.