Damn, I wish I'd put up a website 2 years ago when I thought of all this stuff. Then I'd be cool instead of just a viewer with fantasies. Read this an tell me I'm not a genius:
The next Star Trek series should take place before the James Kirk era. Smaller ships, smaller crews, more right-stuff attitude and less PC posturing. Transporters are experimental and unreliable, not used for people unless in dire emergencies. The Feds start with virtually no space weapons until they ran into Klingons, defending themselves at first with phasers designed to be cutting tools. Photon torpedoes come later. Everything evolves.
The ship's doctor should be a Vulcan woman (attended medical school on Earth to study humans, joined Starfleet to study our explore-and-conquer nature). Initially we don't know about the Vulcan mind-meld. The first time she does it (in a desperate situation) it weirds out the crew. Can she read our minds? What else can she do? Are they using us as puppets? For a while they treat her with animosity. I never thought of her being T'Pau -- that's kind of a cool idea.
Sounds like they have done some of those things. But my vision was along the lines of the original Christopher Pike pilot. Remember that Enterprise? Clunkier, bulkier, and everything looked like it was made out of metal. I think they even had the classic structural girders with big holes. The transporter was loud when they walked into the room, and got a lot louder when they energized it. Sounded like something really powerful and dangerous, as it should. That kind of souped-up Buck Rogers feel was what I was personally hoping for. Instead it seems that the Kirk-era designs were only a brief departure from a long-standing Federation neutral tone curvy office look. Hopefully they won't throw in technology that is clearly more advanced than in the other shows.
p.s. What should Klingons look like? A mixture of old and new. The Klingon Empire is in a state of stagnation after an initial surge of over-expansion. Klingons stationed on the frontier have interbred with locals for several generations. These half-breeds are naturally the first ones the Federation runs into. Even then there are rumblings of racial purity from the home planet. After Kirk's time the impure Klingons will be suppressed and mostly relegated to lesser positions, except for a distinguished few who in later life will be allowed to take genetic therapy to "purify" themselves (Kang's forehead conversion). The embarrassment is that the half-breeds tend to be smarter than pure Klingons; more organized, better administrators. They are probably what stabilizes the Empire, enabling a resurgence in Kirk's time which we will see has faltered again by Picard's time.
The article mentions that the inventor of the book machine might have intellectual property trouble because of a former partner who has, "a catch-all process patent... on the concept of a 'one book at a time' machine." Yikes! Does this really mean you can patent the idea for something without actually figuring out how to do it? Doesn't that sound remarkably like cyber-squatting? I guess I'll patent the following things and just sit back and wait:
Cold fusion
A pill that instantly sobers you up.
Removing material from an asteroid for commercial use.
A legal system that makes sense to anyone but lawyers.
Well ok, not the last one. To make money these would have to be things that might actually happen.
If you aren't familiar with Winamp plug-ins, here's how to set them up. Run the.exe's above to install both plug-ins. Then start Winamp, hit Ctrl-P for Preferences, and do the following:
In the Plug-ins section click on Input, and from the list select "innover's RealAudio plug-in".
For Plug-ins/Output select "Nullsoft MP3 Output plug-in".
Click the Configure button, select a directory where you want to save MP3 files, hit Ok.
When the next dialog comes up you can leave the "Save As" alone; by default it will save files under their original names with.MP3 added.
Select the MP3 sampling rate you want to use for recording, click Ok and close Preferences.
That's it. Now when you drag.RA or.RAM files to Winamp and play them, it will decode and save them as.MP3's in the directory you specified. You won't hear the sound as it is converting, but the visual indicators in Winamp will show that the file is playing.
To listen to MP3's you must go back to preferences and select the default plug-ins (input: Nullsoft MPEG, output: Nullsoft WAV).
You can convert RealAudio streams to MP3 by associating Winamp with RA and RAM files. In Winamp Preferences select "File Types" and highlight RA and RAM.
Sadly, Napster is now little more than a security test platform for the recording industry. I remember when on typical evenings there would be nearly a million files available. Now it tends to be under 40,000. A 95% drop in activity underscores the fact that Napster isn't really serving the public any more. Instead of developing better and better filtering techniques, which the record companies will own when they divvy up Napsters assets, it would be more in the public interest if they just closed up shop.
Okay, let's skip a few steps of the usual market-driven evolution process and jump right to the final product form. ISPs should filter out all non-business content that flows through their routers. The only bytes that should be allowed on the Internet are those whose purpose is to make money. Every word of content will automatically be copyrighted. Recipients will be charged a per-byte fee, with a flat percentage going to the various carriers along the line and the rest divided amongst the rights holders. Then I think the Internet will finally have achieved its golden, sacred purpose, and everybody wasting bandwidth engaging in non-profitable pursuits can go back to envelopes and stamps.
I guess Bill has forgotten the virtues of giving away free software. Or maybe there's just something evil about doing it for reasons less noble than profit.
Hey, weren't they the guys with the swords in The Big Lebowski? No wait, that was Nihilists. Never mind.
How many brooding tribal aliens do we need?
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 2
I'm sick to death of darkly brooding, overly simplified alien characters who are dominated by their need to struggle over their particular cultural/religious heritage. They are supposed to be complex and interesting because they have these complex, interesting ethnic problems. But whether it's Worf the brooding Klingon, or the brooding sword-wielding guy on Farscape, or the brooding guy on Andromeda always trying to out-macho Sorbo, they're just as boring as darkly brooding people in real life.
If I did have to choose an oversimplified alien from tv it would be Quark. He may have been predictable, but at least he wasn't brooding.
Re:Full text can be found in Discover Magazine
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
Right on. An actual article about this subject is available for free here at echelon.com.
Re:better article, 1998?
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 1
Is this the same experiment? NO, it's not even close. Read the damn article.
Here's more (better) info
on
Star In A Jar
·
· Score: 2
Interesting little teaser, but hardly worth a/. posting, let alone hundreds of comments. Echelon.com has a MUCH more informative and SPAM-free blurb about it.
Discover Mag is certainly a class act nowadays -- a credit card popup, a mini-webcam popup, and a phony message box saying "Click here to claim your prize!" Really inspires me to fling my dollars there way, by gosh.
Perhaps the best measure of FORTRAN's success is that it is still in use after nearly half a century. I coded in FORTRAN for my first programming job in 1979. An engineer friend of mine who designs scanheads for ultrasound machines uses FORTRAN today to do waveform analysis. It's still a number cruncher par excellence.
Excuse me, but we all have the right and responsibility to raise our kids according to our own principles. It doesn't matter if you agree, and nobody has to prove anything to you.
Yes, "someone who knew what they were doing" does indeed appear to have bought the satellites and infrastructure, but I wonder who they bought it from? The part of Iridium satellites and infrastructure I used to own (by buying stock in the normal way) has now become someone else's, through a mysterious process that did not involve actual payment to me. That must be what they mean by a "free" market.
1) Get an ISP.
2) Post a website with content that's forbidden in another country.
Examples: "Islam sucks!" "Australian businessmen raped my daughter."
[Safety tip: Avoid saying things that are illegal in your own country] 3) Wait for wacky results (court summons from Caracas, excommunication notice, gibberish-spouting gunmen in ski masks shoot up your minivan, etc.)
4) Write to your congressman, urging him/her to oppose that new extradition treaty with Libya.
Recasting personal rights, law and justice as global entities will happen, and in the brave new world the bravest are going to be those with the balls (and/or money) to duke these things out in court. Perhaps the Internet's greatest contribution to history will be that it created opportunities to break down international boundaries, by making them more and more inconvenient for the people with the big bucks.
Since there's no "investor relations" link on the Iridium page, I'll just ask the question here:
Is this Iridium:
a) the same Iridium in which I bought shares a couple years ago, or
b) a different Iridium with the same name and all the same assets but none of the debts, and now mysteriously owned by somebody else?
Well, I don't see how ignoring most of the commercial content on the web reflects a waning of the concept of shared cultural context, whatever that is. But you seem to be enjoying your vocabulary, and that's what counts.
I can't think of why does this story should be in this category, unless we're celebrating great strides in the right to take advantage of people who aren't as smart as you are. At any rate, I hereby announce my own lottery. Send me $1, and there is a small chance that I will send you $20 million.
Saying these 4 companies get half my clicks is like saying I live in a nicer house because my property taxes went up. Mergers and acquisitions have no effect on the friend sites, club sites, weird physics rant sites and so forth which I visit frequently. I don't care if ONE company owns all the sites I never look at, as long as the part of the Internet I actually USE is still available.
It's called Modern Medicine. The cures and therapies of the 20th Century have allowed millions of people with health problems and physical defects to survive long enough to reproduce. Thousands of previously self-weeding traits, from bad eyesight to a weak heart, have in effect been engineered into the population simply by keeping the average person alive longer.
In contrast, direct genetic manipulation holds the promise of fixing medical problems without also propagating them. It is a natural step forward in the evolution of medicine.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I wish I'd put up a website 2 years ago when I thought of all this stuff. Then I'd be cool instead of just a viewer with fantasies. Read this an tell me I'm not a genius:
The next Star Trek series should take place before the James Kirk era. Smaller ships, smaller crews, more right-stuff attitude and less PC posturing. Transporters are experimental and unreliable, not used for people unless in dire emergencies. The Feds start with virtually no space weapons until they ran into Klingons, defending themselves at first with phasers designed to be cutting tools. Photon torpedoes come later. Everything evolves.
The ship's doctor should be a Vulcan woman (attended medical school on Earth to study humans, joined Starfleet to study our explore-and-conquer nature). Initially we don't know about the Vulcan mind-meld. The first time she does it (in a desperate situation) it weirds out the crew. Can she read our minds? What else can she do? Are they using us as puppets? For a while they treat her with animosity. I never thought of her being T'Pau -- that's kind of a cool idea.
Sounds like they have done some of those things. But my vision was along the lines of the original Christopher Pike pilot. Remember that Enterprise? Clunkier, bulkier, and everything looked like it was made out of metal. I think they even had the classic structural girders with big holes. The transporter was loud when they walked into the room, and got a lot louder when they energized it. Sounded like something really powerful and dangerous, as it should. That kind of souped-up Buck Rogers feel was what I was personally hoping for. Instead it seems that the Kirk-era designs were only a brief departure from a long-standing Federation neutral tone curvy office look. Hopefully they won't throw in technology that is clearly more advanced than in the other shows.
p.s.
What should Klingons look like?
A mixture of old and new. The Klingon Empire is in a state of stagnation after an initial surge of over-expansion. Klingons stationed on the frontier have interbred with locals for several generations. These half-breeds are naturally the first ones the Federation runs into. Even then there are rumblings of racial purity from the home planet. After Kirk's time the impure Klingons will be suppressed and mostly relegated to lesser positions, except for a distinguished few who in later life will be allowed to take genetic therapy to "purify" themselves (Kang's forehead conversion). The embarrassment is that the half-breeds tend to be smarter than pure Klingons; more organized, better administrators. They are probably what stabilizes the Empire, enabling a resurgence in Kirk's time which we will see has faltered again by Picard's time.
- Cold fusion
- A pill that instantly sobers you up.
- Removing material from an asteroid for commercial use.
- A legal system that makes sense to anyone but lawyers.
Well ok, not the last one. To make money these would have to be things that might actually happen.All you have to do is get and install these two plug-ins from Winamp:
RealAudio input plug-in
MP3 output plug-in
That's it. Now when you drag .RA or .RAM files to Winamp and play them, it will decode and save them as .MP3's in the directory you specified. You won't hear the sound as it is converting, but the visual indicators in Winamp will show that the file is playing.
To listen to MP3's you must go back to preferences and select the default plug-ins (input: Nullsoft MPEG, output: Nullsoft WAV).
You can convert RealAudio streams to MP3 by associating Winamp with RA and RAM files. In Winamp Preferences select "File Types" and highlight RA and RAM.
Sadly, Napster is now little more than a security test platform for the recording industry. I remember when on typical evenings there would be nearly a million files available. Now it tends to be under 40,000. A 95% drop in activity underscores the fact that Napster isn't really serving the public any more. Instead of developing better and better filtering techniques, which the record companies will own when they divvy up Napsters assets, it would be more in the public interest if they just closed up shop.
Okay, let's skip a few steps of the usual market-driven evolution process and jump right to the final product form. ISPs should filter out all non-business content that flows through their routers. The only bytes that should be allowed on the Internet are those whose purpose is to make money. Every word of content will automatically be copyrighted. Recipients will be charged a per-byte fee, with a flat percentage going to the various carriers along the line and the rest divided amongst the rights holders. Then I think the Internet will finally have achieved its golden, sacred purpose, and everybody wasting bandwidth engaging in non-profitable pursuits can go back to envelopes and stamps.
Tons of information on Public Domain law here.
I guess Bill has forgotten the virtues of giving away free software. Or maybe there's just something evil about doing it for reasons less noble than profit.
Hey, weren't they the guys with the swords in The Big Lebowski? No wait, that was Nihilists. Never mind.
I'm sick to death of darkly brooding, overly simplified alien characters who are dominated by their need to struggle over their particular cultural/religious heritage. They are supposed to be complex and interesting because they have these complex, interesting ethnic problems. But whether it's Worf the brooding Klingon, or the brooding sword-wielding guy on Farscape, or the brooding guy on Andromeda always trying to out-macho Sorbo, they're just as boring as darkly brooding people in real life.
If I did have to choose an oversimplified alien from tv it would be Quark. He may have been predictable, but at least he wasn't brooding.
... there's also This.
Right on. An actual article about this subject is available for free here at echelon.com.
Is this the same experiment? NO, it's not even close. Read the damn article.
Interesting little teaser, but hardly worth a /. posting, let alone hundreds of comments. Echelon.com has a MUCH more informative and SPAM-free blurb about it.
Discover Mag is certainly a class act nowadays -- a credit card popup, a mini-webcam popup, and a phony message box saying "Click here to claim your prize!" Really inspires me to fling my dollars there way, by gosh.
Perhaps the best measure of FORTRAN's success is that it is still in use after nearly half a century. I coded in FORTRAN for my first programming job in 1979. An engineer friend of mine who designs scanheads for ultrasound machines uses FORTRAN today to do waveform analysis. It's still a number cruncher par excellence.
Excuse me, but we all have the right and responsibility to raise our kids according to our own principles. It doesn't matter if you agree, and nobody has to prove anything to you.
Yes, "someone who knew what they were doing" does indeed appear to have bought the satellites and infrastructure, but I wonder who they bought it from? The part of Iridium satellites and infrastructure I used to own (by buying stock in the normal way) has now become someone else's, through a mysterious process that did not involve actual payment to me. That must be what they mean by a "free" market.
Hapi, the god of flooding.
Is that irony or what?
It's easy! Just follow these simple steps:
1) Get an ISP.
2) Post a website with content that's forbidden in another country.
Examples: "Islam sucks!" "Australian businessmen raped my daughter."
[Safety tip: Avoid saying things that are illegal in your own country]
3) Wait for wacky results (court summons from Caracas, excommunication notice, gibberish-spouting gunmen in ski masks shoot up your minivan, etc.)
4) Write to your congressman, urging him/her to oppose that new extradition treaty with Libya.
Have fun!
Recasting personal rights, law and justice as global entities will happen, and in the brave new world the bravest are going to be those with the balls (and/or money) to duke these things out in court. Perhaps the Internet's greatest contribution to history will be that it created opportunities to break down international boundaries, by making them more and more inconvenient for the people with the big bucks.
Since there's no "investor relations" link on the Iridium page, I'll just ask the question here:
Is this Iridium:
a) the same Iridium in which I bought shares a couple years ago, or
b) a different Iridium with the same name and all the same assets but none of the debts, and now mysteriously owned by somebody else?
Well, I don't see how ignoring most of the commercial content on the web reflects a waning of the concept of shared cultural context, whatever that is. But you seem to be enjoying your vocabulary, and that's what counts.
I can't think of why does this story should be in this category, unless we're celebrating great strides in the right to take advantage of people who aren't as smart as you are. At any rate, I hereby announce my own lottery. Send me $1, and there is a small chance that I will send you $20 million.
Saying these 4 companies get half my clicks is like saying I live in a nicer house because my property taxes went up. Mergers and acquisitions have no effect on the friend sites, club sites, weird physics rant sites and so forth which I visit frequently. I don't care if ONE company owns all the sites I never look at, as long as the part of the Internet I actually USE is still available.
It's called Modern Medicine. The cures and therapies of the 20th Century have allowed millions of people with health problems and physical defects to survive long enough to reproduce. Thousands of previously self-weeding traits, from bad eyesight to a weak heart, have in effect been engineered into the population simply by keeping the average person alive longer.
In contrast, direct genetic manipulation holds the promise of fixing medical problems without also propagating them. It is a natural step forward in the evolution of medicine.
The ZDNet article mentions "application service providers" in the very first paragraph. It just isn't capitalize or bolded or anything.