I'd also draw back the range at the top. An announcement of first contact - or anything remotely resembling it - would not be left to mere "fellow"s. If that were on the talking-points sheet, even the Administrator of NASA would have a difficult time finagling a spot to stand on the podium, behind the Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, VPOTUS, and POTUS.
I just added Forbidden Planet to my Netflix queue, and noticed Empire was one of the "more like this...." features. Spooky. Was this because it also featured the work of a just-deceased person? Or did God just order up the same movie, and decided that he wanted "more like this" and took Kershner too? If it's the latter, then Bill Shatner and/or Leondard Nimoy may be in trouble, because The Search for Spock was suggested next to Empire; and Rod Taylor of the 1960 The Time Machine (also suggested to me) is getting on in years, and might want to be extra careful for a while as well.
One of things that made Nielsen so good as a comedic actor was his long history as a serious, dramatic actor. Especially in his comedic debut (Airplane!) the gravitas that he brought to his deadpan delivery is what made his performance work, something a more traditional "funny man" actor couldn't have pulled off. He then leveraged his new-found reputation as a comic actor to branch out into more overt buffoonery, which is something that most other "serious" actors couldn't have pulled off.
Arab political leaders go on and on about the very existence of Israel being unacceptable, but that's mostly posturing for domestic consumption. Privately they accept its existence, and could effectively declare "victory over Israel" to their people if Israel gave up enough occupied territory (among other concessions).
As much as I admire the success of "the Israeli method of securing airplanes" on a day-to-day basis, it has failed abysmally in the decade-to-decade time frame. Not because it has permitted planes to be hijacked or blown up, but because it is still in place after so much time. It (along with the quality of the Israeli armed forces, its nuclear arsenal, and the insufficiently qualified support of foreign governments) has served as a kind of "enabling behavior", making it possible for the Israeli government to maintain hostile relations with its neighbors and even so many of its (non-Jewish) subjects. I'm not saying that the political situation in the Middle East is entirely (or even mostly) their fault. But their ability to make a state of war tolerable enough to live with decade after decade has kept them from finding a real solution. (Obligatory geek reference: ST:TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon".) Likewise, the US government's efforts to make its "war on terror" tolerable for its people to live with - with no planes blowing up or other experiences of "war on US soil" - enable it to avoid dealing with the real root causes of this problem. Not Islam. Not Iraq or Iran. Not Israel. Running with the "i" theme I've got going here, I'd call it "industrial imperialism". If we want air travel to be safe - if we want our people to be safe - we need to look at that, not individuals' skin color or body cavities or religion.
"A less violent and more peaceful alternative is to DDOS the system, as it were, by having long lines of people opt out from the scanners in order to cause delays and make the entire thing unfeasible."
That's not going to (i.e. has already failed to) happen.
People suffering from your level of hypocrisy are generally unable to comprehend the nature of that hypocrisy, so I'll decline that invitation to explain.
But I'll state for the record that I did not describe your belief as "unacceptable". (That was probably you projecting your own psychosis onto me.) I just pointed out that it makes you no better than the people whose beliefs you wish to eradicate. I find it sad and unfortunate and probably more than a little sociopathic, but I'll defend at great length your right to have it. Because I'm not like you.
For example, if the use of the article is non-commercial and does not hurt the commercial value of the original, that's basically fair use. Understand that fair use is not a law;it's an affirmative defense in a copyright violation case. Therefore, there are few specifics as to what does and does not constitute fair use; whether a specific case is fair use depends entirely on the facts and circumstances of the case.
Saying that "fair use is not a law" is a strange statement, since it is codified in the Copyright Act of 1976. It spells out a four-part test, which includes "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole", which this example flunks pretty badly.
No, the direction they're heading is to broaden it from securing transportation to securing public places. Hijacking of airplanes is nothing new to the 21st century; people have been doing it for decades, but passengers didn't have to undergo the kind of scan/rape we endure now to get on planes in those days because no one had tried turning a passenger plane into a weapon capable of killing thousands. The FAA was only concerned about planes being diverted by a passenger who wanted to go somewhere, or maybe being blown up by a remote saboteur.... not being used as hand-piloted missiles. That's the underlying justification for these invasive searches: to protect the public from large-scale killing.
So when (not if) someone in the US commits a suicide bombing in a crowded public place like an airport or train station or sporting event or political rally, the authorities will start screening people just as invasively to get into those as well. They've already started with metal detectors and bag searches in some of these places, and it's just going to get worse. Step by step, we're moving toward becoming a search-and-surveillance society, in which the Fourth Amendment might keep you secure from search and seizure in your home (because that public-safety rationale doesn't apply there), but not when you venture out into public places.
(And it's all to treat the symptoms, rather than addressing the root causes of the disease.)
While POTS can't send and receive texts, there's no reason that the kind of telephony system used by a 911 call center couldn't be enhanced to handle SMS. Your response is like saying we shouldn't send someone to the moon because there's no air there to breathe.
Non-SLR digital cameras have gotten very good in recent years. As an old-school 35mm SLR user, there are times I'd love to have a DSLR, but a 10MP non-reflex camera with a 10X optical zoom lens (such as the one I have) can take pretty much the exact same photos, albeit with marginally lower image quality due to the optics. So they're accomplishing nothing except to require amateur photographers to use smaller and less expensive cameras.
Seriously? You don't think that stuffing aluminum foil into your pants would get you fast-tracked to the airport's office with no windows and a door that only opens from the outside?
Especially in a crisis situation, a college student whose friends all have SMS-enabled phones, and even their old-fashioned parents do, might not stop to consider that the people at 911 - who supposedly have state of the art technology - don't.
The more relevant question is: Is there any reason why 911 dispatchers should be unable to receive (and seemingly ignore) text messages?
Sure, an interactive phone conversation is ideal, but the nature of emergencies is that they are not ideal situations. The caller may not be able to talk. The caller may lose consciousness. The caller may be incoherent. They may have to immediately hang up. Dispatchers take the alert - whatever it consists of - and act based on what information they have. If someone sends a text message to 911 instead of calling, why shouldn't they be equipped to receive it (and respond to it)?
While it wasn't a feminist paradise, in the mid-20th-century the USSR was in many ways far more open for women than the US was, a by-product of Soviet political ideology. That was part of the cultural "evil" that it represented to conservative Americans.
It's like trying to rank the most "intelligent" people by IQ. OK, you can score them on that test, and you can sort that list of scores, but what does it tell you when there are so many other kinds of intelligence, ad so many other ways to measure it?
Slashdot Mirror
Arthur C. Clarke's ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter.
I'd also draw back the range at the top. An announcement of first contact - or anything remotely resembling it - would not be left to mere "fellow"s. If that were on the talking-points sheet, even the Administrator of NASA would have a difficult time finagling a spot to stand on the podium, behind the Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, VPOTUS, and POTUS.
There are a lot of other (and better) science fictions films in their library, so there's likely more to it than just a common genre.
I'm not superstitiously irrational.
I just added Forbidden Planet to my Netflix queue, and noticed Empire was one of the "more like this...." features. Spooky. Was this because it also featured the work of a just-deceased person? Or did God just order up the same movie, and decided that he wanted "more like this" and took Kershner too? If it's the latter, then Bill Shatner and/or Leondard Nimoy may be in trouble, because The Search for Spock was suggested next to Empire; and Rod Taylor of the 1960 The Time Machine (also suggested to me) is getting on in years, and might want to be extra careful for a while as well.
One of things that made Nielsen so good as a comedic actor was his long history as a serious, dramatic actor. Especially in his comedic debut (Airplane!) the gravitas that he brought to his deadpan delivery is what made his performance work, something a more traditional "funny man" actor couldn't have pulled off. He then leveraged his new-found reputation as a comic actor to branch out into more overt buffoonery, which is something that most other "serious" actors couldn't have pulled off.
Abdullah Atalar (and his parents) would definitely disagree about the lack of historical signficance to that day.
Arab political leaders go on and on about the very existence of Israel being unacceptable, but that's mostly posturing for domestic consumption. Privately they accept its existence, and could effectively declare "victory over Israel" to their people if Israel gave up enough occupied territory (among other concessions).
Rumors can be false or true. The term "rumors" itself does not specify (or even imply) one or the other, so "false rumors" is not redundant.
As much as I admire the success of "the Israeli method of securing airplanes" on a day-to-day basis, it has failed abysmally in the decade-to-decade time frame. Not because it has permitted planes to be hijacked or blown up, but because it is still in place after so much time. It (along with the quality of the Israeli armed forces, its nuclear arsenal, and the insufficiently qualified support of foreign governments) has served as a kind of "enabling behavior", making it possible for the Israeli government to maintain hostile relations with its neighbors and even so many of its (non-Jewish) subjects. I'm not saying that the political situation in the Middle East is entirely (or even mostly) their fault. But their ability to make a state of war tolerable enough to live with decade after decade has kept them from finding a real solution. (Obligatory geek reference: ST:TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon".) Likewise, the US government's efforts to make its "war on terror" tolerable for its people to live with - with no planes blowing up or other experiences of "war on US soil" - enable it to avoid dealing with the real root causes of this problem. Not Islam. Not Iraq or Iran. Not Israel. Running with the "i" theme I've got going here, I'd call it "industrial imperialism". If we want air travel to be safe - if we want our people to be safe - we need to look at that, not individuals' skin color or body cavities or religion.
"A less violent and more peaceful alternative is to DDOS the system, as it were, by having long lines of people opt out from the scanners in order to cause delays and make the entire thing unfeasible."
That's not going to (i.e. has already failed to) happen.
People suffering from your level of hypocrisy are generally unable to comprehend the nature of that hypocrisy, so I'll decline that invitation to explain.
But I'll state for the record that I did not describe your belief as "unacceptable". (That was probably you projecting your own psychosis onto me.) I just pointed out that it makes you no better than the people whose beliefs you wish to eradicate. I find it sad and unfortunate and probably more than a little sociopathic, but I'll defend at great length your right to have it. Because I'm not like you.
Saying that "fair use is not a law" is a strange statement, since it is codified in the Copyright Act of 1976. It spells out a four-part test, which includes "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole", which this example flunks pretty badly.
The disease is a desire by some people to dictate what other people may believe... a disease you seem to have yourself.
No, the direction they're heading is to broaden it from securing transportation to securing public places. Hijacking of airplanes is nothing new to the 21st century; people have been doing it for decades, but passengers didn't have to undergo the kind of scan/rape we endure now to get on planes in those days because no one had tried turning a passenger plane into a weapon capable of killing thousands. The FAA was only concerned about planes being diverted by a passenger who wanted to go somewhere, or maybe being blown up by a remote saboteur.... not being used as hand-piloted missiles. That's the underlying justification for these invasive searches: to protect the public from large-scale killing.
So when (not if) someone in the US commits a suicide bombing in a crowded public place like an airport or train station or sporting event or political rally, the authorities will start screening people just as invasively to get into those as well. They've already started with metal detectors and bag searches in some of these places, and it's just going to get worse. Step by step, we're moving toward becoming a search-and-surveillance society, in which the Fourth Amendment might keep you secure from search and seizure in your home (because that public-safety rationale doesn't apply there), but not when you venture out into public places.
(And it's all to treat the symptoms, rather than addressing the root causes of the disease.)
It's suspicious. Are you naive enough to think that only people actually doing something "illegal" ever get searched and interrogated?
While POTS can't send and receive texts, there's no reason that the kind of telephony system used by a 911 call center couldn't be enhanced to handle SMS. Your response is like saying we shouldn't send someone to the moon because there's no air there to breathe.
Non-SLR digital cameras have gotten very good in recent years. As an old-school 35mm SLR user, there are times I'd love to have a DSLR, but a 10MP non-reflex camera with a 10X optical zoom lens (such as the one I have) can take pretty much the exact same photos, albeit with marginally lower image quality due to the optics. So they're accomplishing nothing except to require amateur photographers to use smaller and less expensive cameras.
Seriously? You don't think that stuffing aluminum foil into your pants would get you fast-tracked to the airport's office with no windows and a door that only opens from the outside?
Especially in a crisis situation, a college student whose friends all have SMS-enabled phones, and even their old-fashioned parents do, might not stop to consider that the people at 911 - who supposedly have state of the art technology - don't.
The more relevant question is: Is there any reason why 911 dispatchers should be unable to receive (and seemingly ignore) text messages?
Sure, an interactive phone conversation is ideal, but the nature of emergencies is that they are not ideal situations. The caller may not be able to talk. The caller may lose consciousness. The caller may be incoherent. They may have to immediately hang up. Dispatchers take the alert - whatever it consists of - and act based on what information they have. If someone sends a text message to 911 instead of calling, why shouldn't they be equipped to receive it (and respond to it)?
You mean: by dismissing it as pretty much meaningless?
While it wasn't a feminist paradise, in the mid-20th-century the USSR was in many ways far more open for women than the US was, a by-product of Soviet political ideology. That was part of the cultural "evil" that it represented to conservative Americans.
It's like trying to rank the most "intelligent" people by IQ. OK, you can score them on that test, and you can sort that list of scores, but what does it tell you when there are so many other kinds of intelligence, ad so many other ways to measure it?
"The laptop is likely less expensive than the iPad."
Not that likely. NASA isn't buying netbooks and cheap-ass laptops to send up to ISS, so $500 iPads would probably be cheaper.