Viruses are natural vectors for genes to cross species. Are you more comfortable with this happening at random in the wild or when it's watched and monitored in a lab?
It's ridiculous to assume that the mechanisms of selective breeding, where the changes originate in random mutations -- often accelerated by the use of mutagens -- plus random viral- and bacterial-vectored transgenic splicing, is somehow safer than deliberately-engineered splicing. It's like expecting that a bridge created by a fallen tree is more trustworthy than a manmade construct.
The tone sounds like you're disagreeing him but it sounds like you're actually agreeing with him and debating my point.
Whatever the source of "natural" evolution (selective breeding, random mutation, horizontal gene transfer) we've been dealing with it for thousands of years and understand the risks. To use your example it's pretty easy to evaluate the safety of a fallen tree bridge. But with manmade bridges it took a while before we learned to avoid things like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
and out of the top 10 sites not one had actual problems that were caused by GMO foods
Lot of might and could be, but no actually. No "Killer corn ate my baby "
So How bout labeling foods that are produced from selective breeding genetically engineered as well ?
I think the labelling thing is nonsense since I don't think health risks are a big concern but I am a bit more cautious about the long term environmental effects as I suspect we're underestimating the probability of black swan events.
I think of selective breeding vs GMOs is a bit like traditional medicine vs modern medicine. Traditional medicine generally ranges from slightly beneficial to mildly harmful, you're not going to do yourself much harm, but you're not going to help much either. By contrast modern medicine is devastatingly effective in good ways and bad.
Right now you'd be a fool to choose traditional medicine over modern medicine, especially if you have a serious health issue, the benefits are too strong and we know how to manage the nasty side effects.
But at the dawn of modern medicine? You're probably better off dealing with the traditional stuff, a lot of people died because modern medicine was an incredibly powerful tool and people didn't know enough about that tool to use it safely.
I worry we're at that stage with GMOs and the environment. We don't really understand what it does to the ecosystem when we introduce new traits at that speed and effectiveness. We really can't know until we've done it a while. I'm sure GMO crops are the answer for the future, but I'm worried our capabilities are outstripping our knowledge.
Wouldn't it be easier to run Windows 8 in a virtual machine like VM Ware on a Linux computer? Why go through WINE and possible incompatibility issues? Or buy a gaming laptop for gaming on windows? I'm sure you geeks make $30 an hour and can afford two computers.
I do a fairly limited amount of gaming but if I do any I'll do it on my the Linux desktop I built myself.
I have no interest in buying a copy of Windows just for gaming so install on a VM, it's not even a question of principal, I just can't be bothered to go through that much effort for a crappy solution.
Your making this into a binary situation when it's more subtle than that.
Should it be illegal? No.
Does it make people uncomfortable? Yes.
Why does it make them uncomfortable? Because the added possibility of a surreptitious recording makes them a little more cautious than they would have been otherwise (even in public). It's not about appropriate vs inappropriate, I know I wouldn't feel comfortable having a connected conversation about my feelings with a potentially global audience. You've never passively eavesdropped on a couple's conversation? What about the people who think that conversation is so interesting they'll start recording and post it to facebook saying "check out this fascinating conversation I overheard".
I'm still not saying ban it, but there are social consequences we need to consider.
Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.
TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"
The thing that comes closest to a philosophical masterpiece of Trek is probably the snoozefest that is TMP. Trek's answer to 2001, only not really.
Kirk punched people out and had sex with green slave girls. The only thing that the new Trek got wrong about all that is that their portrayal of sex was presented stylistically as fan service, and they made Kirk into a frat boy instead of a red-blooded macho hero-type.
I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.
Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.
Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.
In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.
Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.
But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds.
It was also terrible because it was terrible.
Well not quite terrible but completely forgettable in the way that generic sci-fi action flicks are.
Then you have Khan. Perfectly good movie. And you had nerds raging because herpaderpawhiteguynamedKhanNoonienSingh.
I didn't hear that, though in retrospect it would have been cool to have a non-standard ethnicity in the role.
Either way I just re-watched the new Khan movie a few days ago, it was better, but still a fairly generic and forgettable action flick.
Abrams will do fine. He probably won't do Empire-level excellence, but I have no doubt it won't be the complete clusterfuck that was sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and IT GETS EVERYWHERE. DO NOT WANT.
He'll do fine in the sense that it will be another generic and forgettable action flick.
I don't really understand why Abrams is getting all these franchises, he did some good TV series but I haven't found his film work to be particularly exceptional.
That being said I think he's a far better choice for Star Wars than he was for Star Trek. Star Trek was always about exploring the philosophy, something Abrams has never really shown any particular talent for.
Star Wars on the other hand is more about the myth, which is really the strong point of his best work. Maybe he will make something great with this one.
You can stand on the street in front of my house if you wish but my door is on my property. What you do not get is that are creeped out because they MIGHT be recording you. Not that they are recording you. So do you demand that no one takes out a cell phone in public? They MIGHT be recording you... Horrors. Get a grip... You are probably really not that interesting.
You've never seen a viral video of an ordinary person doing something really stupid? I can think of many.
Someone wearing Google Glass (and constantly recording) catches you saying or doing something that sounds incredibly funny/offensive/strange, they post it online, it goes viral, and suddenly your life is different.
Sure it's unlikely but the threat is there. I'm not going to be nearly as comfortable having a conversation in a restaurant when I know people are recording because there's an extra filter all my words have to pass through.
That's stretching it a bit. While touring New Orleans to speak about his opposition the Stelly tax plan, he spoke once to a small EURO contingent, hours before the actual convention, not at the actual convention, one stop among many. Guilty by brief association?
The snopes article doesn't quite back you up. It's possible that he spoke to a related gathering a few hours before the convention, not knowing it was EURO related nor that there were a few white supremacists in attendance. But it's also possible that he did address the EURO convention with full knowledge of who they were, either because he wanted their support (or non-opposition) and/or he was sympathetic to their beliefs.
The truth is there's insufficient information to know what really happened.
Star trek is not and has never been anything about speculative fiction any more than star wars is. The have technospeak. They are deliberately not even trying.
You're confusing hard science fiction with speculative fiction.
Star Trek is not hard science fiction and I don't think anyone ever claimed it to be, the technology presented is not only scientifically unrealistic but internally inconsistent.
But it's definitely speculative fiction. Regular moral quandaries over the Prime Directive, questions about the actions and motivations of all-powerful beings, when to resort to military force, conflicts between respecting individual rights and respecting other cultures, etc. There's a lot of serious issues they tackled head-on.
Star wars by contrast is essentially a fantasy adventure, it's fun as hell (when done right), but never really strays from the basic good vs evil narrative.
The first movie in the reboot series was passable. The second was flat-out some of the laziest writing I've ever seen; I'm still raging about the "cold fusion" bomb.
Hopefully this means the writing will improve somewhat. Granted, it's not exactly a tall order but I'll take what I can get.
Will it really fix things though?
I'm sure it will improve the humour, but that wasn't really why the movies sucked.
Star Trek at its best was speculative fiction with a bit of action thrown in.
The new movies are action films with a bit of speculative fiction thrown in.
The focus of the TV series and even the first movies were philosophically interesting problems. The focus of the new movies are big FX action sequences.
You've almost got to completely re-reinvent the franchise again, even if it were possible with the current cast I'm not sure Pegg, as a writer, would really have authority to do that.
Saying whether or not climate change is real, is not real, or is unknown is not a statement for non-subject-matter experts to make until/unless there is enough evidence that it is clearly real or clearly not real to the layman. If either one were the case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
In other words, every Senator who isn't either a subject-matter expert or an arrogant person and who doesn't want people to think he is in one of those two groups must abstain if this comes to a vote.
Can you explain why E=mc^2 is clearly real?
I can see the principal in saying that politicians shouldn't hold votes affirming some scientific theory, but if you are going to allow votes of that matter than somewhere where there is a clear scientific consensus, such as climate change, are valid.
You still keep using that word without knowing what it means. Private restaurant? Privately owned maybe and the owner could request people not wear glass in the restaurant but it is still in public. You have NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY. Here is a good way to determine if it is a public vs private space. Can you exclude other members of the public from entering legally? If the answer is no then it is not a private space.
You seem to be conflating the law and morality.
I have a proposal to make, I stand outside your door with a video camera, I film you the entire day while you're in a public space, and then I post the video online for everyone to see. Ignoring the stalking, if this prospect makes you uncomfortable than you must acknowledge that it's not as simple as you imply.
There is such thing as privacy in public places, we've just lacked the technology to seriously violate that privacy outside of some narrow cases like stalking. As such it was simply to simply declare that there legally was no expectation of privacy.
But Google glass is a new technology, it changes that equation. It's entirely appropriate to question both the morality and whether laws should be rewritten.
Instead you'll get atheist or "the wrong religion(tm)" posts being flagged as false. Plus, not all political messages are such that "false will probably do". Which of the following political statements should be marked false?
"The economy was hit hard by the housing crisis"
"Unchecked human industry is negatively impacting the environment"
"Medical expenses are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in America"
"The US constitution prohibits establishment of religion by congress"
I think all of them are true, but not everyone will agree.
They can take that into account.
I'll mark them true which means we probably agree on a lot of things, so if I mark other things false you'll probably agree they're false and FB shouldn't give them much weight.
But if someone else thinks they're false you probably disagree on a lot, so if that other person flags other things false it shouldn't carry much weight as to whether it's shown to you.
I don't know if that's the plan but it would be a nice way to create an information bubble.
So the average person spends most of their day walking around with a GPS recording their every movement, I have to imagine this is already having a pretty big effect on the criminal court system. Sure most people committing a premeditated crime would be smart enough to leave their phone at home (or give it to a fake alibi), but this seems to greatly simplify the standard TV question of "where were you between the times of X and Y last night?"
As for TFA? Sadly Pottering is another one that MSFT and Apple really should send a fruit basket to, because its him and the devs of his ilk that keep Linux in the backroom instead of the showroom and the reason why is simple...they will NEVER EVER let Linux become fucking stable! I swear these devs and their "itch scratching" are from bizarro world, they are like "Oh noes, things am stable and most stuff am working! This is no good, users am happy and can update without breakage! Quick lets change enough internals that many devices am broken and stability worse than Win2K, that will make users miserable!".
I mean for fucks sake you had MSFT being run by STEVE "Buzzword McBingo" BALMER and you STILL can't gain share, ever wonder why? Well you had the DE devs help out MSFT by taking a steaming dump on the UI with the barely alpha quality KDE 4 release, The Gnome 3 mess, or yeah and Linus made sure to fiddle with the kernel just enough to cause serious driver issues, not to mention the Mickey Mouse Pulse audio which to this very day is usually the most crash prone part of any Linux build. Then you had the whole "What is gonna replace the shitty X Server" mess, Mozilla having to disable hardware acceleration in Linux (which frankly is still piss poor and a decade behind Windows), not to mention here it is 2015 and Linux STILL doesn't have a simple GUI for rolling back drivers or the system if an update takes a steamer on the system (something Windows has had for a decade and a half) and the driver situation is still such a mess hardware OEMs can't just put a penguin on the box and a Linux driver on a CD because hey, what works now may not work 6 months from now!
Sadly at the end of the day Linux is never gonna get any better, its just gonna get different. This is why Linux is getting its ass handed to it by "other" because at the end of the day the devs would rather crank out a new version with new bugs and new problems than fix what they have. Cranking out new software is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than bug fixing, regression testing, writing docs, hell this is the real reason why Linus won't allow Linux to have a stable driver ABI, something every. other. OS. has. because it might mean he couldn't just tweak and twiddle with the kernel like its still 1993 and Linux was only a hobbyist project!
I think you have it backwards.
The stability you're arguing for is a feature for servers, an area where Linux traditionally does well.
To get the penetration into userland you want you need the new features, you need attempts to support buggy new hardware that was written to work under Windows and has weird behaviour in other places.
As for the topic at hand Systemd helps fix the problems you're talking about. Part of the bugginess is from different systems interacting and the amount of complexity those devs have to deal with. Systemd takes a chunk of that complexity away from those systems and moves it down one level. Even if the critics are right and this is a disaster for servers it should still improve stability in userland.
but in principle I agree with what Google is doing. In effect they are trying to destroy the market for zero day exploits and forcing the companies involved to not site on their hands and hope nobody uses them.. like cybercriminals and the various three letter agencies.
From the article:
In the bug tracker for the impersonation vulnerability, Google said it had queried Microsoft on Wednesday, asking when the flaw would be patched and reminding its rival that the 90 days were about to expire.
"Microsoft informed us that a fix was planned for the January patches but [had] to be pulled due to compatibility issues," the bug tracker stated. "Therefore the fix is now expected in the February patches."
The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for Feb. 10.
So 90 days is an appropriate time to wait but not 106 days?
It's not like MS was sitting on their hands, they made a patch but found problems in QA and had to do more work to get it working properly. I don't see the rationale for Google maintaining the hard 90 day deadline, maybe extensions allow some complacency on the part of the developer, but you're still not going to see them sitting on issues for months or even years on end. Meanwhile by publishing now Google has created one of two scenarios. 1) Users are going to be left vulnerable to unpatched zero-day expoilts, or 2) users are going to break their systems by installing broken patches.
It's not clear to me how this is better than sitting on the issue for anther 26 days.
So, Bitcoin wil be subject to volatility, like every other currency and precious metal in history, and that will cause troubles for the people who actually extract the stuff. Who (aside from anyone in the mining business) knew?
Other currencies have their prices backed by the underlying economies. When the ruble fell all of Russia effectively went on sale, so when you're deciding whether to buy or sell the ruble you merely need to figure out how many rubles Russia may print in the future and how well their economy is going to perform. You can't be certain but you know it isn't going to outperform the US and you know they won't close up shop and move to Mongolia.
But how do you establish the price for bitcoin? If the value goes up or down everyone just adjusts their prices to match real dollars. There's no nation using bitcoin as an economy, with millions of people earning bitcoins as income and spending bitcoins at stores that don't change their prices much. The bulk of the value of bitcoin is from speculation that at some point in the future it will become an established currency. They may be right which is why bitcoins have value, but it also might be wrong, which is why a bitcoin isn't worth billions of dollars.
The other big issue I've always worried about is deflation.
Inflation is good for an economy because it means that your money sitting under your mattress is slowly losing value, so you have to spend that money via economic activity or investment. If the money supply is fixed then it gains more value sitting under your mattress than being saved. People stop spending and the economy suffers. This is one of the big reasons that leaving the gold standard was considered to be a good thing.
Though the really fascinating thing is that this is taking advantage of the ant's scouting behaviour, which not only an advanced cognitive process "I found a good food source and will return to it later" but is an advanced social process "hey friends, come check out this food source I found!"
There's obviously no actual thought involved but it's a pretty impressive feat of tricking the ants to draw them into a trap.
I have no idea why Uber would be so blatant/stupid - any legal advice or even common sense would have told them that this kind of behavior gets a lot of attention very fast - and not the good, loving kind of attention either.
Unless they are really trying to get governments to make it hard for smaller "ridesharing" companies to compete. Burning the bridge after you cross? Does that make any sense?
Well they are worth $40 billion so they're evidently doing something right.
I think they're willing to ride out the fines, even if the fines are big enough so they're losing money they've got the bank to do it for a while. And in the meantime people are reading about them in the papers, drivers are coming to work for them, and people are installing their app.
If and when Australia updates its laws all those competitors who obeyed the law will step in to find that Uber has a huge first mover advantage. Unless Australia and other districts find a way to actually shut them down this is going to be one of those cases where crime does pay.
Not disagreeing with 'quality of governance,' but what on earth does size and wealth have to do with it, in terms of *helping*?
I guess I expect that if any country should have the resources with which to build a competent government it should be the US. Then again I can see it going the other way as the extra size & wealth creates niches for the crazy to prosper.
What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas.
That doesn't makes sense. Sure you could imagine companies wanting to make off-shoring easier, but what possible motivation does a group of senators have for shipping US jobs overseas?
The US system is horribly designed so incentive wise you actually have it backwards.
The public can't really tell who's fault is what when both sides point fingers, nor can they readily distinguish between the President and his party in congress. So they hold him accountable for everything that happens in government and every election is basically a referendum on whether the country is doing well.
So when the congress is controlled by another party it's actually in that congress's best interest to misgovern. Because the worse things get the more dissatisfied voters get, and more dissatisfied the voters the more they'll punish the President by voting the opposing party into congress.
There's a reason the Daily Show and Colbert Report could be so good by simply showing clips of politicians talking for large portions of the show. For a country of your size and wealth the quality of your governance is shockingly bad.
I'd prefer to have a complete non-scientist who is a supreme communicator be given a script written by good script writers from material handed to them by the hard core scientists behind the scenes - than to rely on a lower-tier scientist (or a high-tier scientist with poor communications skills) to do the entire job.
I see three problems with this.
The first is trust, and science is all about trust and credibility. It doesn't matter how good the actor is, if the audience knows they're just reading a script then they're not going to have the same credibility as a real scientist who really understands what they're talking about. I mean Morgan Freeman is a great actor with an unreal voice, but I don't think he could have done Cosmos as well as Tyson.
The second problem is that actor is useless outside the show, one of the advantages of giving people like Tyson and Sagan a public profile is they're in a position to speak on behalf of science outside the show. Your actor can narrate a documentary, but you're never going to be able to train them well enough to match go up against a kook on a panel show.
Finally if you invest enough scientific credibility into that actor you really need to vet the actor since they don't have a scientific career to fall back on when the show is over. Do you really want that pretty face you've taught millions to trust to start shilling magic water when they're in desperate need of a paycheck?
It's still doable and useful in some situations, but for a mass outreach scientific show I think a real scientist is preferable.
Slashdot Mirror
Viruses are natural vectors for genes to cross species. Are you more comfortable with this happening at random in the wild or when it's watched and monitored in a lab?
It's ridiculous to assume that the mechanisms of selective breeding, where the changes originate in random mutations -- often accelerated by the use of mutagens -- plus random viral- and bacterial-vectored transgenic splicing, is somehow safer than deliberately-engineered splicing. It's like expecting that a bridge created by a fallen tree is more trustworthy than a manmade construct.
The tone sounds like you're disagreeing him but it sounds like you're actually agreeing with him and debating my point.
Whatever the source of "natural" evolution (selective breeding, random mutation, horizontal gene transfer) we've been dealing with it for thousands of years and understand the risks. To use your example it's pretty easy to evaluate the safety of a fallen tree bridge. But with manmade bridges it took a while before we learned to avoid things like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.
I googled for "GMO Hazards"
https://www.google.com/search?...
and out of the top 10 sites not one had actual problems that were caused by GMO foods
Lot of might and could be, but no actually. No "Killer corn ate my baby "
So How bout labeling foods that are produced from selective breeding genetically engineered as well ?
I think the labelling thing is nonsense since I don't think health risks are a big concern but I am a bit more cautious about the long term environmental effects as I suspect we're underestimating the probability of black swan events.
I think of selective breeding vs GMOs is a bit like traditional medicine vs modern medicine. Traditional medicine generally ranges from slightly beneficial to mildly harmful, you're not going to do yourself much harm, but you're not going to help much either. By contrast modern medicine is devastatingly effective in good ways and bad.
Right now you'd be a fool to choose traditional medicine over modern medicine, especially if you have a serious health issue, the benefits are too strong and we know how to manage the nasty side effects.
But at the dawn of modern medicine? You're probably better off dealing with the traditional stuff, a lot of people died because modern medicine was an incredibly powerful tool and people didn't know enough about that tool to use it safely.
I worry we're at that stage with GMOs and the environment. We don't really understand what it does to the ecosystem when we introduce new traits at that speed and effectiveness. We really can't know until we've done it a while. I'm sure GMO crops are the answer for the future, but I'm worried our capabilities are outstripping our knowledge.
Wouldn't it be easier to run Windows 8 in a virtual machine like VM Ware on a Linux computer? Why go through WINE and possible incompatibility issues? Or buy a gaming laptop for gaming on windows? I'm sure you geeks make $30 an hour and can afford two computers.
I do a fairly limited amount of gaming but if I do any I'll do it on my the Linux desktop I built myself.
I have no interest in buying a copy of Windows just for gaming so install on a VM, it's not even a question of principal, I just can't be bothered to go through that much effort for a crappy solution.
Your making this into a binary situation when it's more subtle than that.
Should it be illegal? No.
Does it make people uncomfortable? Yes.
Why does it make them uncomfortable? Because the added possibility of a surreptitious recording makes them a little more cautious than they would have been otherwise (even in public). It's not about appropriate vs inappropriate, I know I wouldn't feel comfortable having a connected conversation about my feelings with a potentially global audience. You've never passively eavesdropped on a couple's conversation? What about the people who think that conversation is so interesting they'll start recording and post it to facebook saying "check out this fascinating conversation I overheard".
I'm still not saying ban it, but there are social consequences we need to consider.
Sorry, but while TOS did do a lot of exploring philosophy and some groundbreaking stuff, it was full of glorious almost campy action throughout. That's because Roddenberry actually hadn't forgotten what audiences wanted to see on TV.
TNG was preachy at the beginning and then they fixed it. TNG was never horrible, but the first season was sort of blah and I think it only really made it because "ZOMG HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TREK BACK AND PATRICK STEWART AND THE ENTERPRISE-D, FUCK YEAH!"
The thing that comes closest to a philosophical masterpiece of Trek is probably the snoozefest that is TMP. Trek's answer to 2001, only not really.
Kirk punched people out and had sex with green slave girls. The only thing that the new Trek got wrong about all that is that their portrayal of sex was presented stylistically as fan service, and they made Kirk into a frat boy instead of a red-blooded macho hero-type.
I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.
Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.
Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.
In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.
Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.
But then you have to just remember how awful JJ's Star Trek movies were.
Really? The first one was terrible because nothing can live up to the expectations of angry nerds.
It was also terrible because it was terrible.
Well not quite terrible but completely forgettable in the way that generic sci-fi action flicks are.
Then you have Khan. Perfectly good movie. And you had nerds raging because herpaderpawhiteguynamedKhanNoonienSingh.
I didn't hear that, though in retrospect it would have been cool to have a non-standard ethnicity in the role.
Either way I just re-watched the new Khan movie a few days ago, it was better, but still a fairly generic and forgettable action flick.
Abrams will do fine. He probably won't do Empire-level excellence, but I have no doubt it won't be the complete clusterfuck that was sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and IT GETS EVERYWHERE. DO NOT WANT.
He'll do fine in the sense that it will be another generic and forgettable action flick.
I don't really understand why Abrams is getting all these franchises, he did some good TV series but I haven't found his film work to be particularly exceptional.
That being said I think he's a far better choice for Star Wars than he was for Star Trek. Star Trek was always about exploring the philosophy, something Abrams has never really shown any particular talent for.
Star Wars on the other hand is more about the myth, which is really the strong point of his best work. Maybe he will make something great with this one.
You can stand on the street in front of my house if you wish but my door is on my property.
What you do not get is that are creeped out because they MIGHT be recording you. Not that they are recording you. So do you demand that no one takes out a cell phone in public? They MIGHT be recording you... Horrors.
Get a grip... You are probably really not that interesting.
You've never seen a viral video of an ordinary person doing something really stupid? I can think of many.
Someone wearing Google Glass (and constantly recording) catches you saying or doing something that sounds incredibly funny/offensive/strange, they post it online, it goes viral, and suddenly your life is different.
Sure it's unlikely but the threat is there. I'm not going to be nearly as comfortable having a conversation in a restaurant when I know people are recording because there's an extra filter all my words have to pass through.
That's stretching it a bit. While touring New Orleans to speak about his opposition the Stelly tax plan, he spoke once to a small EURO contingent, hours before the actual convention, not at the actual convention, one stop among many. Guilty by brief association?
http://www.snopes.com/politics...
The snopes article doesn't quite back you up. It's possible that he spoke to a related gathering a few hours before the convention, not knowing it was EURO related nor that there were a few white supremacists in attendance. But it's also possible that he did address the EURO convention with full knowledge of who they were, either because he wanted their support (or non-opposition) and/or he was sympathetic to their beliefs.
The truth is there's insufficient information to know what really happened.
Star trek is not and has never been anything about speculative fiction any more than star wars is. The have technospeak. They are deliberately not even trying.
You're confusing hard science fiction with speculative fiction.
Star Trek is not hard science fiction and I don't think anyone ever claimed it to be, the technology presented is not only scientifically unrealistic but internally inconsistent.
But it's definitely speculative fiction. Regular moral quandaries over the Prime Directive, questions about the actions and motivations of all-powerful beings, when to resort to military force, conflicts between respecting individual rights and respecting other cultures, etc. There's a lot of serious issues they tackled head-on.
Star wars by contrast is essentially a fantasy adventure, it's fun as hell (when done right), but never really strays from the basic good vs evil narrative.
The first movie in the reboot series was passable. The second was flat-out some of the laziest writing I've ever seen; I'm still raging about the "cold fusion" bomb.
Hopefully this means the writing will improve somewhat. Granted, it's not exactly a tall order but I'll take what I can get.
Will it really fix things though?
I'm sure it will improve the humour, but that wasn't really why the movies sucked.
Star Trek at its best was speculative fiction with a bit of action thrown in.
The new movies are action films with a bit of speculative fiction thrown in.
The focus of the TV series and even the first movies were philosophically interesting problems. The focus of the new movies are big FX action sequences.
You've almost got to completely re-reinvent the franchise again, even if it were possible with the current cast I'm not sure Pegg, as a writer, would really have authority to do that.
Saying whether or not climate change is real, is not real, or is unknown is not a statement for non-subject-matter experts to make until/unless there is enough evidence that it is clearly real or clearly not real to the layman. If either one were the case, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
In other words, every Senator who isn't either a subject-matter expert or an arrogant person and who doesn't want people to think he is in one of those two groups must abstain if this comes to a vote.
Can you explain why E=mc^2 is clearly real?
I can see the principal in saying that politicians shouldn't hold votes affirming some scientific theory, but if you are going to allow votes of that matter than somewhere where there is a clear scientific consensus, such as climate change, are valid.
You still keep using that word without knowing what it means.
Private restaurant? Privately owned maybe and the owner could request people not wear glass in the restaurant but it is still in public. You have NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY.
Here is a good way to determine if it is a public vs private space. Can you exclude other members of the public from entering legally?
If the answer is no then it is not a private space.
You seem to be conflating the law and morality.
I have a proposal to make, I stand outside your door with a video camera, I film you the entire day while you're in a public space, and then I post the video online for everyone to see. Ignoring the stalking, if this prospect makes you uncomfortable than you must acknowledge that it's not as simple as you imply.
There is such thing as privacy in public places, we've just lacked the technology to seriously violate that privacy outside of some narrow cases like stalking. As such it was simply to simply declare that there legally was no expectation of privacy.
But Google glass is a new technology, it changes that equation. It's entirely appropriate to question both the morality and whether laws should be rewritten.
Instead you'll get atheist or "the wrong religion(tm)" posts being flagged as false. Plus, not all political messages are such that "false will probably do". Which of the following political statements should be marked false?
"The economy was hit hard by the housing crisis"
"Unchecked human industry is negatively impacting the environment"
"Medical expenses are the number 1 cause of bankruptcy in America"
"The US constitution prohibits establishment of religion by congress"
I think all of them are true, but not everyone will agree.
They can take that into account.
I'll mark them true which means we probably agree on a lot of things, so if I mark other things false you'll probably agree they're false and FB shouldn't give them much weight.
But if someone else thinks they're false you probably disagree on a lot, so if that other person flags other things false it shouldn't carry much weight as to whether it's shown to you.
I don't know if that's the plan but it would be a nice way to create an information bubble.
Google Maps — on every Android phone, and on many iPhones as well. If you use it — and many people do — here is, what Google knows about where you've been.
So the average person spends most of their day walking around with a GPS recording their every movement, I have to imagine this is already having a pretty big effect on the criminal court system. Sure most people committing a premeditated crime would be smart enough to leave their phone at home (or give it to a fake alibi), but this seems to greatly simplify the standard TV question of "where were you between the times of X and Y last night?"
As for TFA? Sadly Pottering is another one that MSFT and Apple really should send a fruit basket to, because its him and the devs of his ilk that keep Linux in the backroom instead of the showroom and the reason why is simple...they will NEVER EVER let Linux become fucking stable! I swear these devs and their "itch scratching" are from bizarro world, they are like "Oh noes, things am stable and most stuff am working! This is no good, users am happy and can update without breakage! Quick lets change enough internals that many devices am broken and stability worse than Win2K, that will make users miserable!".
I mean for fucks sake you had MSFT being run by STEVE "Buzzword McBingo" BALMER and you STILL can't gain share, ever wonder why? Well you had the DE devs help out MSFT by taking a steaming dump on the UI with the barely alpha quality KDE 4 release, The Gnome 3 mess, or yeah and Linus made sure to fiddle with the kernel just enough to cause serious driver issues, not to mention the Mickey Mouse Pulse audio which to this very day is usually the most crash prone part of any Linux build. Then you had the whole "What is gonna replace the shitty X Server" mess, Mozilla having to disable hardware acceleration in Linux (which frankly is still piss poor and a decade behind Windows), not to mention here it is 2015 and Linux STILL doesn't have a simple GUI for rolling back drivers or the system if an update takes a steamer on the system (something Windows has had for a decade and a half) and the driver situation is still such a mess hardware OEMs can't just put a penguin on the box and a Linux driver on a CD because hey, what works now may not work 6 months from now!
Sadly at the end of the day Linux is never gonna get any better, its just gonna get different. This is why Linux is getting its ass handed to it by "other" because at the end of the day the devs would rather crank out a new version with new bugs and new problems than fix what they have. Cranking out new software is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than bug fixing, regression testing, writing docs, hell this is the real reason why Linus won't allow Linux to have a stable driver ABI, something every. other. OS. has. because it might mean he couldn't just tweak and twiddle with the kernel like its still 1993 and Linux was only a hobbyist project!
I think you have it backwards.
The stability you're arguing for is a feature for servers, an area where Linux traditionally does well.
To get the penetration into userland you want you need the new features, you need attempts to support buggy new hardware that was written to work under Windows and has weird behaviour in other places.
As for the topic at hand Systemd helps fix the problems you're talking about. Part of the bugginess is from different systems interacting and the amount of complexity those devs have to deal with. Systemd takes a chunk of that complexity away from those systems and moves it down one level. Even if the critics are right and this is a disaster for servers it should still improve stability in userland.
but in principle I agree with what Google is doing. In effect they are trying to destroy the market for zero day exploits and forcing the companies involved to not site on their hands and hope nobody uses them.. like cybercriminals and the various three letter agencies.
From the article:
In the bug tracker for the impersonation vulnerability, Google said it had queried Microsoft on Wednesday, asking when the flaw would be patched and reminding its rival that the 90 days were about to expire.
"Microsoft informed us that a fix was planned for the January patches but [had] to be pulled due to compatibility issues," the bug tracker stated. "Therefore the fix is now expected in the February patches."
The next Patch Tuesday is scheduled for Feb. 10.
So 90 days is an appropriate time to wait but not 106 days?
It's not like MS was sitting on their hands, they made a patch but found problems in QA and had to do more work to get it working properly. I don't see the rationale for Google maintaining the hard 90 day deadline, maybe extensions allow some complacency on the part of the developer, but you're still not going to see them sitting on issues for months or even years on end. Meanwhile by publishing now Google has created one of two scenarios. 1) Users are going to be left vulnerable to unpatched zero-day expoilts, or 2) users are going to break their systems by installing broken patches.
It's not clear to me how this is better than sitting on the issue for anther 26 days.
So, Bitcoin wil be subject to volatility, like every other currency and precious metal in history, and that will cause troubles for the people who actually extract the stuff. Who (aside from anyone in the mining business) knew?
Other currencies have their prices backed by the underlying economies. When the ruble fell all of Russia effectively went on sale, so when you're deciding whether to buy or sell the ruble you merely need to figure out how many rubles Russia may print in the future and how well their economy is going to perform. You can't be certain but you know it isn't going to outperform the US and you know they won't close up shop and move to Mongolia.
But how do you establish the price for bitcoin? If the value goes up or down everyone just adjusts their prices to match real dollars. There's no nation using bitcoin as an economy, with millions of people earning bitcoins as income and spending bitcoins at stores that don't change their prices much. The bulk of the value of bitcoin is from speculation that at some point in the future it will become an established currency. They may be right which is why bitcoins have value, but it also might be wrong, which is why a bitcoin isn't worth billions of dollars.
The other big issue I've always worried about is deflation.
Inflation is good for an economy because it means that your money sitting under your mattress is slowly losing value, so you have to spend that money via economic activity or investment. If the money supply is fixed then it gains more value sitting under your mattress than being saved. People stop spending and the economy suffers. This is one of the big reasons that leaving the gold standard was considered to be a good thing.
Bitcoin addresses this argument though I'm not sure I buy their explanation.
Though the really fascinating thing is that this is taking advantage of the ant's scouting behaviour, which not only an advanced cognitive process "I found a good food source and will return to it later" but is an advanced social process "hey friends, come check out this food source I found!"
There's obviously no actual thought involved but it's a pretty impressive feat of tricking the ants to draw them into a trap.
Because that's how you get legislation.
I have no idea why Uber would be so blatant/stupid - any legal advice or even common sense would have told them that this kind of behavior gets a lot of attention very fast - and not the good, loving kind of attention either.
Unless they are really trying to get governments to make it hard for smaller "ridesharing" companies to compete. Burning the bridge after you cross? Does that make any sense?
Well they are worth $40 billion so they're evidently doing something right.
I think they're willing to ride out the fines, even if the fines are big enough so they're losing money they've got the bank to do it for a while. And in the meantime people are reading about them in the papers, drivers are coming to work for them, and people are installing their app.
If and when Australia updates its laws all those competitors who obeyed the law will step in to find that Uber has a huge first mover advantage. Unless Australia and other districts find a way to actually shut them down this is going to be one of those cases where crime does pay.
Not disagreeing with 'quality of governance,' but what on earth does size and wealth have to do with it, in terms of *helping*?
I guess I expect that if any country should have the resources with which to build a competent government it should be the US. Then again I can see it going the other way as the extra size & wealth creates niches for the crazy to prosper.
What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas.
That doesn't makes sense. Sure you could imagine companies wanting to make off-shoring easier, but what possible motivation does a group of senators have for shipping US jobs overseas?
Let’s face it Obama could cure cancer and a sizeable portion of the population led by Fox News would accuse him of putting doctors out of work.
Authoritarian Communist just wants to kill growth!!
The US system is horribly designed so incentive wise you actually have it backwards.
The public can't really tell who's fault is what when both sides point fingers, nor can they readily distinguish between the President and his party in congress. So they hold him accountable for everything that happens in government and every election is basically a referendum on whether the country is doing well.
So when the congress is controlled by another party it's actually in that congress's best interest to misgovern. Because the worse things get the more dissatisfied voters get, and more dissatisfied the voters the more they'll punish the President by voting the opposing party into congress.
There's a reason the Daily Show and Colbert Report could be so good by simply showing clips of politicians talking for large portions of the show. For a country of your size and wealth the quality of your governance is shockingly bad.
I'd prefer to have a complete non-scientist who is a supreme communicator be given a script written by good script writers from material handed to them by the hard core scientists behind the scenes - than to rely on a lower-tier scientist (or a high-tier scientist with poor communications skills) to do the entire job.
I see three problems with this.
The first is trust, and science is all about trust and credibility. It doesn't matter how good the actor is, if the audience knows they're just reading a script then they're not going to have the same credibility as a real scientist who really understands what they're talking about. I mean Morgan Freeman is a great actor with an unreal voice, but I don't think he could have done Cosmos as well as Tyson.
The second problem is that actor is useless outside the show, one of the advantages of giving people like Tyson and Sagan a public profile is they're in a position to speak on behalf of science outside the show. Your actor can narrate a documentary, but you're never going to be able to train them well enough to match go up against a kook on a panel show.
Finally if you invest enough scientific credibility into that actor you really need to vet the actor since they don't have a scientific career to fall back on when the show is over. Do you really want that pretty face you've taught millions to trust to start shilling magic water when they're in desperate need of a paycheck?
It's still doable and useful in some situations, but for a mass outreach scientific show I think a real scientist is preferable.