But *should* we care what her views are? Consider that a judge's job is to interpret the law as it exists, not to apply their own viewpoint.
If a judge truly has integrity, they should be able to put aside their own views, and address the legal points brought before them -- whether they personally like or agree with those points or not.
I realise SCOTUS is a special case since it's the final word on any law of the land, but even so, I'd rather have a judge whose personal views I dislike but who I can trust to apply the law even-handedly, than one whose views I agree with but who applies the law to suit themselves.
[One of the saner viewpoints I've heard from a politician was to the effect of "I personally disagree with doing [x], but since [x] is legal, whether you do [x] is none of my damn business."]
Sorry, but this is crap. Doublespace *itself* was, in my extensive experience with it, 100% stable.
The problem arose when using DISK COMPRESSION along with MULTI-TASKING -- and it didn't matter whether the compression tool was DoubleSpace, Stacker, or one of the two competitors whose names I forget; nor whether the multitasker was Windows (in that era meaning Win3.x), Desqview, or some other multitasking environment. Sooner or later, the combination of the two WOULD eat a hole in the compressed volume file. (I personally knew two BBSs that got eaten by the combination of Stacker plus Desqview.)
However, this did NOT happen on systems that did NO multitasking.
The other major cause of data loss on compressed disks was using a disk tool that didn't speak disk compression, such as old versions of Norton Utilities or PC Tools. They saw the CVF as a corrupted drive and tried to "fix" it, with disastrous results.
But I never once saw Doublespace *itself* fail. Never. Not even when pushed to the limit (frex, a hard drive always full to the gills).
I always found it ironic that the same people who swore up and down how dreadful Doublespace was, would sing the praises of Stacker. Well, DS was just stolen Stacker code -- remember the lawsuit about that? and *that* was why we had DOS 6.1/6.2x, not because DS was bad. The diff was that Stacker had a more complex front end and more features, which of course looked better to the geek set of the day. But Stacker had the exact same vulnerability to corruption IF used in a multitasking environment -- so why single out Doublespace as a data-killing culprit?
As to performance, I benched DOS5 against DOS6, and on a variety of systems from XT thru 486, DOS6 was *consistently* 5% faster than DOS5 (and about 30% faster than DR/NovellDOS7, which was annoying because despite that M$DOS6 was considerably more stable, I really preferred DRDOS's feature set. DR/NWDOS7 would occasionally crash, mainly due to a buggy EMM386. MSDOS6.00 *never* crashed of itself, tho it could be crashed by bad RAM.)
If you compressed the disk, there was indeed a performance hit (somewhat more so with Stacker than with Doublespace). But M$DOS6 did NOT install compression by *default*, and in any event it's not fair to bench uncompressed DOS5 against Doublespaced DOS6. Add Stacker to a DOS5 system, and that would be equivalent.
Yes, M$'s marketing was overblown -- at best, disk compression got you 30% more usable space. And yes, they probably should have discovered the problem with a multitasker running on a compressed drive *before* releasing the product. But they're hardly the first company to toot their own horn louder than was good for 'em, or who failed to discover a major flaw prior to product release.
[laughing] I'd never heard of either until today, but I first saw your sig earlier today... what a small world!:)
Regardless of who first offered freebies this way (tho that was probably the Grateful Dead)... any band with the balls to do this gets my good wishes, whether I like their music or not.
Yeah, there'll probably be homepage jostling and ad revenue involved, but at least new users will be informed right up front that IE isn't their ONLY choice.
I vaguely recall someone said the wiki was down, yeah, tho right now all you see if you go there (I did, from whoever's posted link) is "service is unavailable".
opensuse.org itself is "normal" again as of this instant.
My own feeling is that it's not necessarily bad that it got hacked, because now they know what needs fixing or reconfiguring, whether it was in the OS, the webserver, or whatever was actually infiltrated. It would only be bad if it doesn't get fixed.
That's very true. Respect must be earned; it is not given "just because".
But today's schools try to give away "self-esteem" instead of letting kids EARN it, thus kids are taught that they should be respected just for breathing, not because they make an effort to be good and decent human beings. So the entire concept of "respect" is being eroded.
Combine this with the natural tendency of kids to do stupid things, and you may get more kids using P2P, shoplifting, and whatever, but it's not really any different than when kids of an earlier era stole the occasional watermelon. (See another post I made up above on that subject.)
Being lazy, I'll respond to your parent post here too: one could make the equally spurious point that modern music contributes to delinquency by inducing kids to illegally download music.;)
Upon RTFA, I find that it has nothing to do with "P2P causes criminal behaviour" but rather is just a laundry list of "stupid shit a lot of kids try, just because they are not adults yet".
Look at the ageframe for all the bullet points in the article. It's that time of life when kids are "demonstrating their independence", often by "sticking it to the man" (ie. trying to get away with whatever is handy to get away with at the moment). It's also the time of life when most kids have very little money, so they have an incentive of sorts not to spend it (since they don't have it).
This doesn't make theft "right" but it IS just ordinary human behaviour at a certain stage of personal development, not anything induced by P2P. In an earlier era, it would be kids filching watermelons, and the headline would read "Kids who steal watermelons are more likely to shoplift!" Now they're filching MP3s and omighod, "Kids who download MP3s are more likely to shoplift!"
Nothing has changed but the times. Kids are still kids much as they've always been, and that means some go through a stupid stage on their way to becoming adults. P2P has nothing to do with it.
I wonder how far that would hold up against a determined lawyer, tho. "But there was all this disk and connection activity you should have noticed, and you were aware you were infected with something, right?" and so forth.
While a sane court would throw out such an action, I wouldn't put it past the RIAAs of the world to try such tactics.
Copyright infringement is probably most akin to writing a bad check. If you write a bad check, the typical penalty is that you have to pay 3 times the amount of the original check (ie. the amount the other person was *directly* damaged for). You don't have to pay some arbitrarily high amount of *theoretical* damages for all the bad checks you might ever write, paid to everyone who you might ever write a check to (ie. all the files you might ever share, and all the people who might ever receive them).
Draconian penalties seem to be the order of the day, tho. Remember California's "three strikes" law, where even the most minor 3rd crime will get you a mandatory 25 year sentence. (There is one judge in Calif. who rigorously enforces it because he believes the only way to show how abusable it is, is to get enough people mad about it. So far that hasn't worked. If anything, it's become even more politically incorrect to be "soft on crime" by talking about the downside of this law. IIRC an amendment referendum failed, that would have made it apply, as originally intended, to only the most serious crimes.)
A Suitable Hack instantly occurred to me, and I'm sure it will to some Bright Young Coder as well:
Just apply a "license" to everything you wish to share (whether it belongs to you or not) in some way that LimeWire recognises as a "license".
Unfortunately, this will lead to further restrictions and prosecutions, most of which will have consequences that reach far beyond mere enforcement against the actually-guilty.
You make an interesting point about the "papers please" thing here being not only for people, but also for files (ie. property of a sort) -- but the principle remains equally scary. After adjusting my tinfoil hat, I was inspired to contemplate -- What if this becomes applied in the "Trusted Computing" chip such that you can't access your own documents without a license? (which the application-that-made-'em's vendor might be involved with, for a suitable fee)
And how long before it's not just files that are affected? As a parallel in meatspace, what if every time you want to drive your car, you had to present its ownership title to the Licensing Police before you could drive it, because you *might* be a car thief!! Actually, this is sortof coming to pass, with fingerprint ID required to operate some vehicles. Consider that these same vehicles can often communicate with their manufacturer, frex via Onstar extensions. This could easily be extended to communicating with law enforcement, to check whether you're "allowed" to drive today.
I want a different tinfoil hat. This one is giving me a headache.
I have two of their PSU in the parts pile. One is rated 350W, weighs a ton and has a big thick bundle of wires with enough plugs for the most ridiculously over-equipped system. The other is rated 150W, looks and feels like any typical cheap (if not bottom-end) PSU, ie. lightweight with a few thin wires and minimal plugs.
Haha! yep, the good old one-line ST escape hatch. And of course there's always "Please, not the red shirt! Anything but the red shirt!!"
As to BG.... I saw the premiere with a college group a few years younger than myself, and even in that ancient time, the uniform reaction from the audience was -- squirming in pain. We really WANTED to like it, but... It was stiff, contrived, predictable, looked plastic even to eyes not yet trained by 21st century SFX, and overall compared poorly to ST:TOS at its worst. Worst of all, it was BORING. But at the time, for SF fans it was the only TV available. -- A great deal of the initial ratings-making viewers were Lorne Greene groupies (he had a HUGE following among older adults), and I think those folks are largely what kept it on the air as long as it was.
Glen Larson (who is in the same ward as a friend here) got into trouble with the Mormon church over "revealing secrets", and has admitted that he really WAS trying to retell the Mormon mythos. And forcibly contriving people and plots to fit that mold can't have helped. A quick overview and links to other articles: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBW/is _1_44/ai_114478917
I could have lived with continuity no worse than say, ST:TOS (as you say, a lot of series -- and not just SF -- retrofit or outright ignore continuity as needed to fit the plot of the week), but that was a minor problem given the rest of BG.
Getting SF wrong isn't news with Larson, either (he does much better with mundane series, and one suspects, with leaving the people on the set more to their own devices). Remember Manimal? it had its good points, and the character was much more "human" than the plastic BG people, but it too was often painful to watch.
I haven't seen the remade BG, but one would hope it's better than the original if only because TV in general has become less simplistic.
DNA-ID testing for dogs is $35 minimum charge, but I understand that includes a hefty markup over the lab charge by the registries that require it. So, for a nice round number, let's peg the charge by the DNA lab at $20 apiece. Multiply that by the number of people arrested every year, and you've got a nice profit. Multiply it by the population of the U.S., and you've got a really tidy sum.
That's a good point, and will probably lead to stuff like, "Who cleaned my hairbrush? Where did I leave my toothbrush?"
Seriously, it would be trivially easy to leave someone else's DNA at a crime scene, all the better if you know it's someone with a record, so they're liable to be a suspect the moment their name comes up... thus reducing the risk that the cops will keep looking and find the real perp.
I always called Voyager "Lost In Trek" for exactly that reason. (And get a load of the comment a thread or two back, about their "magic reset button"! Dead on.) DS9 was the only one of the STs that didn't revolve around the Planet of the Week, which frankly had got old back in the 1970s.
I remember the original BG. Lordy, was that painful. Yeah, it got a bit better toward the end, but I'd still use it to anchor a "50 worst" list rather than a "50 best" list.
But this list was about visitor impressions and advertising dollars, not about SF. The list was clearly whatever several mundanes could recall off the top of their heads, somewhat tempered by their idea of which shows were the most popular, or which ones they remembered from their childhoods.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was SF in the same way that The Wild Wild West was (in fact they were very similar series, just set in different environments) -- in that both frequently had "futuristic" (with respect to the era the show is set in) villains, and futuristic villains' gadgetry.
So yeah, these shows are borderline by any standard, and don't fit the purist definition of SF. But under the broad definition of SF as any sort of non-mundane fiction ("we know it when we see it"), they both fit.
At the time I didn't see this, but in retrospect, I do. Perspective is a wonderful thing.:)
Great, now I feel old.... (I remember The Invaders first-run).... The Invaders was one of the very first SF series to achieve mainstream acceptance and commercial success, as it generated an audience among folk who normally only watched soaps and dramas.
I agree with someone above who said that this article was for the purpose of generating traffic, and the list was pretty much pulled out of their ass. That is, it's whatever shows they could remember offhand, with no research whatsoever, and probably by a mainstream TV type rather than a viewer who gravitates toward SF as such.
And mind you, I'm not a purist who says it has to have Science and Social Issues and can't have Fantasy or Whatever -- to me, "Science Fiction" is a broad enough umbrella to cover all these and many more, including a lot of fringe subgenres (yes, folks, The Original Wild Wild West was SF, despite initial appearances. Actually, there have been several SF series set in a Western environment.)
Side thought: one reason some SF series are dull is because they ARE "purist SF" and contain nothing but science and the future, without any concern for who *lives* there.
Slashdot Mirror
"...M$ should only be liable for data corruption that actually occured, not which might someday occur."
A parallel often variously stated hereabouts: "P2P should only be liable for IP thefts that actually occurred, not which might someday occur."
[BTW, see my post above about compression vs multitasking.]
But *should* we care what her views are? Consider that a judge's job is to interpret the law as it exists, not to apply their own viewpoint.
If a judge truly has integrity, they should be able to put aside their own views, and address the legal points brought before them -- whether they personally like or agree with those points or not.
I realise SCOTUS is a special case since it's the final word on any law of the land, but even so, I'd rather have a judge whose personal views I dislike but who I can trust to apply the law even-handedly, than one whose views I agree with but who applies the law to suit themselves.
[One of the saner viewpoints I've heard from a politician was to the effect of "I personally disagree with doing [x], but since [x] is legal, whether you do [x] is none of my damn business."]
Sorry, but this is crap. Doublespace *itself* was, in my extensive experience with it, 100% stable.
The problem arose when using DISK COMPRESSION along with MULTI-TASKING -- and it didn't matter whether the compression tool was DoubleSpace, Stacker, or one of the two competitors whose names I forget; nor whether the multitasker was Windows (in that era meaning Win3.x), Desqview, or some other multitasking environment. Sooner or later, the combination of the two WOULD eat a hole in the compressed volume file. (I personally knew two BBSs that got eaten by the combination of Stacker plus Desqview.)
However, this did NOT happen on systems that did NO multitasking.
The other major cause of data loss on compressed disks was using a disk tool that didn't speak disk compression, such as old versions of Norton Utilities or PC Tools. They saw the CVF as a corrupted drive and tried to "fix" it, with disastrous results.
But I never once saw Doublespace *itself* fail. Never. Not even when pushed to the limit (frex, a hard drive always full to the gills).
I always found it ironic that the same people who swore up and down how dreadful Doublespace was, would sing the praises of Stacker. Well, DS was just stolen Stacker code -- remember the lawsuit about that? and *that* was why we had DOS 6.1/6.2x, not because DS was bad. The diff was that Stacker had a more complex front end and more features, which of course looked better to the geek set of the day. But Stacker had the exact same vulnerability to corruption IF used in a multitasking environment -- so why single out Doublespace as a data-killing culprit?
As to performance, I benched DOS5 against DOS6, and on a variety of systems from XT thru 486, DOS6 was *consistently* 5% faster than DOS5 (and about 30% faster than DR/NovellDOS7, which was annoying because despite that M$DOS6 was considerably more stable, I really preferred DRDOS's feature set.
DR/NWDOS7 would occasionally crash, mainly due to a buggy EMM386. MSDOS6.00 *never* crashed of itself, tho it could be crashed by bad RAM.)
If you compressed the disk, there was indeed a performance hit (somewhat more so with Stacker than with Doublespace). But M$DOS6 did NOT install compression by *default*, and in any event it's not fair to bench uncompressed DOS5 against Doublespaced DOS6. Add Stacker to a DOS5 system, and that would be equivalent.
Yes, M$'s marketing was overblown -- at best, disk compression got you 30% more usable space. And yes, they probably should have discovered the problem with a multitasker running on a compressed drive *before* releasing the product. But they're hardly the first company to toot their own horn louder than was good for 'em, or who failed to discover a major flaw prior to product release.
[laughing] I'd never heard of either until today, but I first saw your sig earlier today... what a small world! :)
... any band with the balls to do this gets my good wishes, whether I like their music or not.
Regardless of who first offered freebies this way (tho that was probably the Grateful Dead)
And choice is good, yes?
Yeah, there'll probably be homepage jostling and ad revenue involved, but at least new users will be informed right up front that IE isn't their ONLY choice.
I vaguely recall someone said the wiki was down, yeah, tho right now all you see if you go there (I did, from whoever's posted link) is "service is unavailable".
opensuse.org itself is "normal" again as of this instant.
My own feeling is that it's not necessarily bad that it got hacked, because now they know what needs fixing or reconfiguring, whether it was in the OS, the webserver, or whatever was actually infiltrated. It would only be bad if it doesn't get fixed.
Just for reference... Netcraft says the site was running Apache/2.0.49 for Linux/SuSE.
Which part actually got hacked, the OS or the webserver itself??
That's very true. Respect must be earned; it is not given "just because".
But today's schools try to give away "self-esteem" instead of letting kids EARN it, thus kids are taught that they should be respected just for breathing, not because they make an effort to be good and decent human beings. So the entire concept of "respect" is being eroded.
Combine this with the natural tendency of kids to do stupid things, and you may get more kids using P2P, shoplifting, and whatever, but it's not really any different than when kids of an earlier era stole the occasional watermelon. (See another post I made up above on that subject.)
Being lazy, I'll respond to your parent post here too: one could make the equally spurious point that modern music contributes to delinquency by inducing kids to illegally download music.
Upon RTFA, I find that it has nothing to do with "P2P causes criminal behaviour" but rather is just a laundry list of "stupid shit a lot of kids try, just because they are not adults yet".
Look at the ageframe for all the bullet points in the article. It's that time of life when kids are "demonstrating their independence", often by "sticking it to the man" (ie. trying to get away with whatever is handy to get away with at the moment). It's also the time of life when most kids have very little money, so they have an incentive of sorts not to spend it (since they don't have it).
This doesn't make theft "right" but it IS just ordinary human behaviour at a certain stage of personal development, not anything induced by P2P. In an earlier era, it would be kids filching watermelons, and the headline would read "Kids who steal watermelons are more likely to shoplift!" Now they're filching MP3s and omighod, "Kids who download MP3s are more likely to shoplift!"
Nothing has changed but the times. Kids are still kids much as they've always been, and that means some go through a stupid stage on their way to becoming adults. P2P has nothing to do with it.
"Taxes: extortion by the biggest thugs that happen to live next to you." -- R.A. Heinlein
And if the owner dies, the canary starves to death.
I think I'll take my chances out in the snow.
I wonder how far that would hold up against a determined lawyer, tho. "But there was all this disk and connection activity you should have noticed, and you were aware you were infected with something, right?" and so forth.
While a sane court would throw out such an action, I wouldn't put it past the RIAAs of the world to try such tactics.
[brandishing cane] That's right, sonny!
And I even remember the sound of the "A Quinn Martin Production" voiceover during the lead credits!
Crap, now I feel so old, I think I'm probably dead!
As I've pointed out many a time -- we're headed back to the world described by that old Soviet jape:
All things not compulsory are forbidden.
So ... say some spamming trojan grabs copyright-bearing files and silently sends them to a few million email addresses.
... is the infected system "filesharing"??
Or... a trojan goes forth, finds systems with MP3s (or whatever) and broadband, and silently leeches them
How many people in these chains are now criminals because of the penalties on "innocent infringers"?
Copyright infringement is probably most akin to writing a bad check. If you write a bad check, the typical penalty is that you have to pay 3 times the amount of the original check (ie. the amount the other person was *directly* damaged for). You don't have to pay some arbitrarily high amount of *theoretical* damages for all the bad checks you might ever write, paid to everyone who you might ever write a check to (ie. all the files you might ever share, and all the people who might ever receive them).
Draconian penalties seem to be the order of the day, tho. Remember California's "three strikes" law, where even the most minor 3rd crime will get you a mandatory 25 year sentence. (There is one judge in Calif. who rigorously enforces it because he believes the only way to show how abusable it is, is to get enough people mad about it. So far that hasn't worked. If anything, it's become even more politically incorrect to be "soft on crime" by talking about the downside of this law. IIRC an amendment referendum failed, that would have made it apply, as originally intended, to only the most serious crimes.)
A Suitable Hack instantly occurred to me, and I'm sure it will to some Bright Young Coder as well:
Just apply a "license" to everything you wish to share (whether it belongs to you or not) in some way that LimeWire recognises as a "license".
Unfortunately, this will lead to further restrictions and prosecutions, most of which will have consequences that reach far beyond mere enforcement against the actually-guilty.
You make an interesting point about the "papers please" thing here being not only for people, but also for files (ie. property of a sort) -- but the principle remains equally scary. After adjusting my tinfoil hat, I was inspired to contemplate -- What if this becomes applied in the "Trusted Computing" chip such that you can't access your own documents without a license? (which the application-that-made-'em's vendor might be involved with, for a suitable fee)
And how long before it's not just files that are affected? As a parallel in meatspace, what if every time you want to drive your car, you had to present its ownership title to the Licensing Police before you could drive it, because you *might* be a car thief!! Actually, this is sortof coming to pass, with fingerprint ID required to operate some vehicles. Consider that these same vehicles can often communicate with their manufacturer, frex via Onstar extensions. This could easily be extended to communicating with law enforcement, to check whether you're "allowed" to drive today.
I want a different tinfoil hat. This one is giving me a headache.
Enermax apparently has two distinct lines.
I have two of their PSU in the parts pile. One is rated 350W, weighs a ton and has a big thick bundle of wires with enough plugs for the most ridiculously over-equipped system. The other is rated 150W, looks and feels like any typical cheap (if not bottom-end) PSU, ie. lightweight with a few thin wires and minimal plugs.
Haha! yep, the good old one-line ST escape hatch. And of course there's always "Please, not the red shirt! Anything but the red shirt!!"
.... I saw the premiere with a college group a few years younger than myself, and even in that ancient time, the uniform reaction from the audience was -- squirming in pain. We really WANTED to like it, but... It was stiff, contrived, predictable, looked plastic even to eyes not yet trained by 21st century SFX, and overall compared poorly to ST:TOS at its worst. Worst of all, it was BORING. But at the time, for SF fans it was the only TV available. -- A great deal of the initial ratings-making viewers were Lorne Greene groupies (he had a HUGE following among older adults), and I think those folks are largely what kept it on the air as long as it was.
s _1_44/ai_114478917
As to BG
Glen Larson (who is in the same ward as a friend here) got into trouble with the Mormon church over "revealing secrets", and has admitted that he really WAS trying to retell the Mormon mythos. And forcibly contriving people and plots to fit that mold can't have helped. A quick overview and links to other articles: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBW/i
I could have lived with continuity no worse than say, ST:TOS (as you say, a lot of series -- and not just SF -- retrofit or outright ignore continuity as needed to fit the plot of the week), but that was a minor problem given the rest of BG.
Getting SF wrong isn't news with Larson, either (he does much better with mundane series, and one suspects, with leaving the people on the set more to their own devices). Remember Manimal? it had its good points, and the character was much more "human" than the plastic BG people, but it too was often painful to watch.
I haven't seen the remade BG, but one would hope it's better than the original if only because TV in general has become less simplistic.
DNA-ID testing for dogs is $35 minimum charge, but I understand that includes a hefty markup over the lab charge by the registries that require it. So, for a nice round number, let's peg the charge by the DNA lab at $20 apiece. Multiply that by the number of people arrested every year, and you've got a nice profit. Multiply it by the population of the U.S., and you've got a really tidy sum.
That's a good point, and will probably lead to stuff like, "Who cleaned my hairbrush? Where did I leave my toothbrush?"
... thus reducing the risk that the cops will keep looking and find the real perp.
Seriously, it would be trivially easy to leave someone else's DNA at a crime scene, all the better if you know it's someone with a record, so they're liable to be a suspect the moment their name comes up
Good point. And if "community standards" are going to be the dividing line ... get your damn straights out of our sight!! ;)
The current political ideal seems to be modeled on that old Soviet jape, "All things not compulsory are forbidden."
I always called Voyager "Lost In Trek" for exactly that reason. (And get a load of the comment a thread or two back, about their "magic reset button"! Dead on.) DS9 was the only one of the STs that didn't revolve around the Planet of the Week, which frankly had got old back in the 1970s.
I remember the original BG. Lordy, was that painful. Yeah, it got a bit better toward the end, but I'd still use it to anchor a "50 worst" list rather than a "50 best" list.
But this list was about visitor impressions and advertising dollars, not about SF. The list was clearly whatever several mundanes could recall off the top of their heads, somewhat tempered by their idea of which shows were the most popular, or which ones they remembered from their childhoods.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was SF in the same way that The Wild Wild West was (in fact they were very similar series, just set in different environments) -- in that both frequently had "futuristic" (with respect to the era the show is set in) villains, and futuristic villains' gadgetry.
:)
So yeah, these shows are borderline by any standard, and don't fit the purist definition of SF. But under the broad definition of SF as any sort of non-mundane fiction ("we know it when we see it"), they both fit.
At the time I didn't see this, but in retrospect, I do. Perspective is a wonderful thing.
Great, now I feel old.... (I remember The Invaders first-run) .... The Invaders was one of the very first SF series to achieve mainstream acceptance and commercial success, as it generated an audience among folk who normally only watched soaps and dramas.
I agree with someone above who said that this article was for the purpose of generating traffic, and the list was pretty much pulled out of their ass. That is, it's whatever shows they could remember offhand, with no research whatsoever, and probably by a mainstream TV type rather than a viewer who gravitates toward SF as such.
And mind you, I'm not a purist who says it has to have Science and Social Issues and can't have Fantasy or Whatever -- to me, "Science Fiction" is a broad enough umbrella to cover all these and many more, including a lot of fringe subgenres (yes, folks, The Original Wild Wild West was SF, despite initial appearances. Actually, there have been several SF series set in a Western environment.)
Side thought: one reason some SF series are dull is because they ARE "purist SF" and contain nothing but science and the future, without any concern for who *lives* there.