I wonder if most people know the real story behind the "I Have a Scream" speech. As Dean himself later acknowledged, it wasn't exactly a Presidential moment for him regardless of the crowd noise the major networks didn't broadcast, but it probably shouldn't have been a campaign-killer for him either.
To be clear, I'm a Dean supporter only in the sense that I'm a Nader supporter...the better either of them do as Independents, the more weight my Bush vote carries (shameless journal plug: Bush Did Not Lie).
Ah, someone who only superficially knows what was going on in that case!
The bigwigs at FNC knew from the get-go they were going to lose the case (multi-billion dollar companies usually have access to a lawyer or two before they bring a highly public case like this). They did it as a symbolic gesture in the hopes of making the point that they are opposed to hit'n'run commentators like Franken that are highly partisan, highly motivated by ideology, and willing to play fast and loose with facts to convert people to their way of thinking. They were also not against the idea of sucking up a few of Al's dollars fighting the battle in the process.
Of course, the money didn't really matter to Al. It does matter to other people who might try the same thing, though, as they are not as well off as Al. And that, my friend, is the real story.
Yes, it really doesn't make sense that the Weird One would risk his livelihood in this one circumstance by angering the original artist. Why do you think he's so contrite about the whole affair? He wants other artists to work with him in the future. To those who don't get what I'm saying: think about it....yes....think...that's good....ok, now you get it!
What would they sue for anyway, even if suing was allowed in their belief system? They were offended by the song and that gives them legal cause how, exactly?
I'm offended by lots of stuff I see everyday...the enormously obese, for instance. And in my mind, they are subjecting me to needless emotional distress by searing their lard-laden bodies into my visual cortex. I have not filed suit, though, not because it's against my belief system, but rather because I simply wouldn't win.
Even if it was due to a misunderstanding, I would say once he went ahead and did the work to make the song, provided it was in good faith, he deserves to be rewarded for that work in the way of bolstering ticket sales, selling CDs, etc...unless the law steps in and settles the issue in Coolio's favor.
Most people are ok with letting Weird Al parody their songs. If The Weird One hits, it nearly always gives a second boost to the original.
To be fair, to live a 19th Century lifestyle doesn't require much more education than 8th grade. Think about it...what percentage of our population went to college even in the early 20th Century? My grandfather made quite a good living and he never graduated the 8th grade. I would say everything changed with the technology push surrounding WWII...after that, we became advanced to the point where we simply needed more time to learn everything that's necessary to make one's way in the modern world.
If the most intellectually challenging thing I was ever going to do is raise a barn, I wouldn't require more than an 8th grade education either. On the other hand, I might still be knowledgable in terms of facts about the world, but I certainly wouldn't consider myself as having been exposed to advanced concepts. For instance, the author of the parent post says these Amish kids knew all about Pakistan and India. But what are the chances any of those kids will ever grow to understand the situation well enough to be a diplomat and do something about it? Probably zero.
The Amish way of understanding the world seems to me to be based on the idea that there's value in useless trivia. Knowledge gained for the purpose of serving one's fellow human and bettering everyone's condition requires much more heart and soul than being able to rattle off recent world events.
(Incidentally, where did these Amish kids get their knowledge of current events in India and Pakistan? A newspaper, printed on a printing press? A book, which is another product of modern technology? Or was it all word-of-mouth from outside the community...from people that did get their facts from books, newspapers, TVs, radios, etc?)
To be honest, I've heard of case after case where the Amish typically shun modern technology...until it suits them. In life and death situations, all of their beliefs about electricity, ambulances, much of modern medicine, etc, goes right out the window. I wonder if there are any Amish that require kidney dialysis on a continuing basis, for instance, and what choice that person made.
It always piques my interest just a bit when such a seemingly stringent belief system is so liberal in certain situations. Is it a principled stance, or not? I suppose it doesn't really offend me, the underlying core of inconsistency ("hypocrisy" seems a bit harsh, but maybe it's more on the mark), but I would like to make the point that the Amish communities have carved out a little niche in the modern world where they are benefit from, and are even indirectly dependent upon, modern technology. The upshot is, those members of our society could be making a real contribution to our economy and way of life--after all, they benefit from it--but they choose not to. That sort of rubs me the rub way.
Any teens out there that progressed with technology to the point where they're reading/. in their experimental phase? What do you say?
You managed to completely miss nuggetman's point. I think he was saying that a culture most Westerners perceive as "primitive" is actually much more advanced on fronts other than technology. In other words: What's that thing that just went flying over your head?
I hardly think a couple of years of independent freedom, while still surrounded by the Amish culture, up against a lifetime of living in a particular environment is a free and independent choice. And if the kids leave the Amish community during this few years, they're even more out of their element and likely to come back to what's familiar.
Also, don't forget that kids who choose to go modern must leave the community permanently and forgo all contact with their families and that Amish community. This isn't really a choice about beliefs and technology, it's more of a whitewash that claims to present the kids with a choice. Like most other religions, this is a ritualistic ceremony that simply serves to bolster the faith in the eyes of the community members, nothing more. (As the great Seinfeld once said: "Not that there's anything wrong with that..." Let's just not pretend it's something it isn't, that's my only point.)
Since it's a game, and most game consoles have an always-on Internet connection these days (that's true, isn't it?), these companies could make ads that were actually useful to the player. Maybe people wouldn't mind these so much, and if they did significantly bring down the cost of the game, I think people would be even more for it (the game companies really ought to publicize what thier customers are saving due to these ads.)
So imagine this. You're playing Real Baseball 2004 or whatever and you see a Pizza Hut billboard. You click on it and the game goes into "Pizza Selection Mode". You build a pizza, enter your information, and order it for delivery. They place a confirmation call to your house and send out your pizza. Neat? I think so. Useful? To some people, at least. Profitable for the company? Yup. Where's the downside?
I don't know about wealth distribution...I think you probably should have went with the light bulb example. For those of you who don't know this, this will be an interesting contribution to this OT discussion.:)
When you buy a light bulb, the packaging says, "average lifetime 1000 hours". Are you likely to get 1000 hours out of your light bulb, then? No, in fact it is very unlikely. Why's that?
As it happens, light bulb filaments are finicky creatures. They will virtually burn forever if there are no microscopic defects in them and the amount of air inside the bulb is below a certain amount. Slight imperfections in the filament cause hot spots, and those hot spots in the presence of even a slightly higher-than-normal amount of air burn several times hotter than the rest of the filament, significantly shortening the life time of the bulb. When a "freak" comes out that is nearly microscopically perfect, the heat is evenly distributed across the entire filament and the lifetime can be hundreds or thousands of times longer than the lowest 99%. So, by including these outliers in the averages that only make up 1%, but live potentially thousands of times longer, the bulb companies are able to say that the average lifespan of the bulb is 1000 hours when actually it's probably closer to 600 hours, and it's completely true.
Not even a little bit, actually. I'm not describing a framework where plugins could do "whatever". And I'm not describing a system that has a definite boundary of responsibility that separates it from other code, as an OS and applications currently have. I'm simply talking about applications themselves.
Again, look at eclipse or firefox as examples. Both of these apps support plugins that serve a set of particular specific purposes. For example, eclipse supports a plugin that performs revision control. This kind of a plug-in wouldn't really make sense for another kind of application (say, a web browser). The idea is, an application becomes simply an assembly of particular functionalities, but the code implementing those functionalities is left to plug-ins and the application framework simply specifies a standard protocol for interacting with such plug-ins.
There's no reason this approach couldn't be used for OSes either, assuming that top-notch performance isn't an issue (actually, even performance may not be an issue...along the framework vein, you could simply adopt plug-ins that are extremely performant if that was most important to you). For example, an OS could define a protocol for communicating with a file system...the OS hands a set of information that can be used to locate a file, the file system plug-in hands back a file handle. The specifics of how and where it retrieves that file (could be from disk, CD, internet, a database...any freaky place you can think of) is left to the implemetation of the FS plug-in to decide. Or the OS could specify to the thread management plug-in that it wants a thread scheduled with a specified priority. The thread scheduling plug-in could use round robin, shared timeslice, efficient distribution, or fair-priority algorithms for determining when the scheduled threads get to run.
I actually wrote an OS in this vein in college with 7 or 8 other guys as an independent study project, so I've done a bit of thinking about this. But you still can't have a situation where you simply establish a protocol for working with a generic plug-in. You'd have no idea what information needs to be passed to the plug-in for it to do its job, so that would be quite impossible. However, a framework itself has a specific, well-known job which is to coordinate traffic among the different plug-ins that it supports and for which it itself knows the protocols intimately...so you could build a framework framework that would provide an easy means of writing new frameworks and wiring plug-ins together by establishing a sort of "super protocol", something very generic and open-ended.
Of course, the advantage to doing all this is that any part of the application (which is defined as the framework plus a core set of plug-ins that provide the basic functionality of the application) can be replaced with a different plug-in that does things differently if you, the user, so desire. All you have to do is write/find a plug-in that fits the bill. This is a particularly good idea for open source because it allows users to configure their applications in any way they want...no one has to agree on a standard way of doing any particular thing in any application (this is already sort of how the Linux distros work). Another advantage this provides open source is that if the protocols are open and well-known for a particular plug-in, anyone with the time and motivation can write one.
In any case, I would argue that the way an OS interacts with particular applications is completely different from what I'm talking about. Then again, in a sense, I suppose the OS only cares about applications insofar as they are "applications"...it doesn't really care what particular functionality they provide the user so long as they follow the rules established by the OS for being an application. In that sense, I suppose the OS could view applications not as applications but simply as "plug-ins" of a kind.
Having said all that, I think it's important to not forget exactly what an operating
It's amazing to me that neither one of you bothered to actually click the link and read the entire entry. How am I supposed to educate the teeming masses if a click is too much to expect?
Ok, so I'll repost this link again, right here, for your easy access. Now that's like 6 times it shows up in this thread. No excuse not to read it.
By the way, your examples of US vs. UK usage are incorrect. You must use the singular verb form in all of the cases you presented. Only when the individual entities referred to by the collective noun must maintain their individuality within the context of the sentence is the plural verb form correct usage. See the example about the jury arguing in THIS HERE LINK RIGHT HERE.
Did you click on the link and read up on how and to what extent you're wrong? Go ahead, click it. It won't bite. I'll even repost the link here so you have no excuse not to educate yourself.
Well, I don't know about that, but I can point to what's currently happening with applications. It seems several major applications are now no longer applications in the traditional sense--instead, the original "app" developer writes a plug-in framework and then develops the bulk of the application itself as hot-swappable plug-ins.
To wit: eclipse, the framework application that is an IDE. Firefox, the framework application that is a web browser. Someday, someone will have the idea for a platform-independent (Java?) "framework framework" in which any application can be developed in this way. Wait a minute, that day is here...I just had that idea!
Seriously, though, it's a great idea. Look at how extensible Firefox is as an example. Every app developed in this way has to come with a standard core set of plug-ins that allow the app to do its basic job, like Firefox requires a plug-in that shows a window with a menu bar, a plug-in that determines what's in the menu bar, a plug-in that loads web pages into the main pane of the window, etc. The main advantage is that these things can be replaced, and can themselves be frameworks for more layers of plug-ins...again, as in the case of Firefox, where the main browser window supports plug-ins for neat features like right-click dictionary lookup.
It's kind of funny to me that such an article would show up on/., of all places, as if it was just like any other article. News, politics, patent law...virtual girlfriend! Why not!?
What about deposits? The runners put down the $40 deposit, and then they get $38 of it back (administrative costs, you know) when they give the chip back.
Oh come off it! She's a complete wuss! As if I'm supposed to be impressed by a series of only 23--as opposed to 26.4--5:35 miles.
Just kidding, of course. I was amazed to learn that the average mile in the women's marathon is somewhere around the 5:30 mark. That's pretty incredible given that I can't run a single mile under 6:45, much less 26 of them. My buddy is training for a marathon now (just to finish) and he told me the record for men is actually over 2 hours (I didn't believe him until I looked it up...I'd thought it was in the 3 hour neighborhood). Again, I don't know if I can even sprint at 13 mph, much less maintain it for a marathon. Why aren't more of these people spontaneously combusting on this course?
I wonder what happened with ol' Paula anyway...the only other person I've seen just toss in the towel in an event was Gail Devers, and that was apparently due to her left calf cramping up. Was there some injury that kicked in on Paula that she just knew would be terminal [ed. note: this is hyperbole] if she kept going?
This is truly a great leap forward. I've always had trouble deciding when to use aluminum foil and when to use plastic wrap. Now I don't have to decide!
Except that you're forgetting that the computer tracks individuals through their individual biorhythms, other life signs, and transponder locations and cross-check that data with the voice data vector coordinates. So a recording would easily be found out by the computer, and it would definitely reject the password.
Besides, don't Star Trek computers use voice fingerprinting that can tell the difference between recordings anyway? (Maybe not 30th Century recordings, I'll grant you.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh! Yay! I can hardly wait for the VHS vs. Betamax-style format wars to begin!
I wonder if most people know the real story behind the "I Have a Scream" speech. As Dean himself later acknowledged, it wasn't exactly a Presidential moment for him regardless of the crowd noise the major networks didn't broadcast, but it probably shouldn't have been a campaign-killer for him either.
To be clear, I'm a Dean supporter only in the sense that I'm a Nader supporter...the better either of them do as Independents, the more weight my Bush vote carries (shameless journal plug: Bush Did Not Lie ).
Ah, someone who only superficially knows what was going on in that case!
The bigwigs at FNC knew from the get-go they were going to lose the case (multi-billion dollar companies usually have access to a lawyer or two before they bring a highly public case like this). They did it as a symbolic gesture in the hopes of making the point that they are opposed to hit'n'run commentators like Franken that are highly partisan, highly motivated by ideology, and willing to play fast and loose with facts to convert people to their way of thinking. They were also not against the idea of sucking up a few of Al's dollars fighting the battle in the process.
Of course, the money didn't really matter to Al. It does matter to other people who might try the same thing, though, as they are not as well off as Al. And that, my friend, is the real story.
Yes, it really doesn't make sense that the Weird One would risk his livelihood in this one circumstance by angering the original artist. Why do you think he's so contrite about the whole affair? He wants other artists to work with him in the future. To those who don't get what I'm saying: think about it....yes....think...that's good....ok, now you get it!
What would they sue for anyway, even if suing was allowed in their belief system? They were offended by the song and that gives them legal cause how, exactly?
I'm offended by lots of stuff I see everyday...the enormously obese, for instance. And in my mind, they are subjecting me to needless emotional distress by searing their lard-laden bodies into my visual cortex. I have not filed suit, though, not because it's against my belief system, but rather because I simply wouldn't win.
Even if it was due to a misunderstanding, I would say once he went ahead and did the work to make the song, provided it was in good faith, he deserves to be rewarded for that work in the way of bolstering ticket sales, selling CDs, etc...unless the law steps in and settles the issue in Coolio's favor.
Most people are ok with letting Weird Al parody their songs. If The Weird One hits, it nearly always gives a second boost to the original.
99% of hick Americans, maybe. They're definitely not smarter, on the average, than 99% of *all* Americans, now are they?
To be fair, to live a 19th Century lifestyle doesn't require much more education than 8th grade. Think about it...what percentage of our population went to college even in the early 20th Century? My grandfather made quite a good living and he never graduated the 8th grade. I would say everything changed with the technology push surrounding WWII...after that, we became advanced to the point where we simply needed more time to learn everything that's necessary to make one's way in the modern world.
If the most intellectually challenging thing I was ever going to do is raise a barn, I wouldn't require more than an 8th grade education either. On the other hand, I might still be knowledgable in terms of facts about the world, but I certainly wouldn't consider myself as having been exposed to advanced concepts. For instance, the author of the parent post says these Amish kids knew all about Pakistan and India. But what are the chances any of those kids will ever grow to understand the situation well enough to be a diplomat and do something about it? Probably zero.
The Amish way of understanding the world seems to me to be based on the idea that there's value in useless trivia. Knowledge gained for the purpose of serving one's fellow human and bettering everyone's condition requires much more heart and soul than being able to rattle off recent world events.
(Incidentally, where did these Amish kids get their knowledge of current events in India and Pakistan? A newspaper, printed on a printing press? A book, which is another product of modern technology? Or was it all word-of-mouth from outside the community...from people that did get their facts from books, newspapers, TVs, radios, etc?)
To be honest, I've heard of case after case where the Amish typically shun modern technology...until it suits them. In life and death situations, all of their beliefs about electricity, ambulances, much of modern medicine, etc, goes right out the window. I wonder if there are any Amish that require kidney dialysis on a continuing basis, for instance, and what choice that person made.
It always piques my interest just a bit when such a seemingly stringent belief system is so liberal in certain situations. Is it a principled stance, or not? I suppose it doesn't really offend me, the underlying core of inconsistency ("hypocrisy" seems a bit harsh, but maybe it's more on the mark), but I would like to make the point that the Amish communities have carved out a little niche in the modern world where they are benefit from, and are even indirectly dependent upon, modern technology. The upshot is, those members of our society could be making a real contribution to our economy and way of life--after all, they benefit from it--but they choose not to. That sort of rubs me the rub way.
Any teens out there that progressed with technology to the point where they're reading /. in their experimental phase? What do you say?
You managed to completely miss nuggetman's point. I think he was saying that a culture most Westerners perceive as "primitive" is actually much more advanced on fronts other than technology. In other words: What's that thing that just went flying over your head?
I hardly think a couple of years of independent freedom, while still surrounded by the Amish culture, up against a lifetime of living in a particular environment is a free and independent choice. And if the kids leave the Amish community during this few years, they're even more out of their element and likely to come back to what's familiar.
Also, don't forget that kids who choose to go modern must leave the community permanently and forgo all contact with their families and that Amish community. This isn't really a choice about beliefs and technology, it's more of a whitewash that claims to present the kids with a choice. Like most other religions, this is a ritualistic ceremony that simply serves to bolster the faith in the eyes of the community members, nothing more. (As the great Seinfeld once said: "Not that there's anything wrong with that..." Let's just not pretend it's something it isn't, that's my only point.)
Since it's a game, and most game consoles have an always-on Internet connection these days (that's true, isn't it?), these companies could make ads that were actually useful to the player. Maybe people wouldn't mind these so much, and if they did significantly bring down the cost of the game, I think people would be even more for it (the game companies really ought to publicize what thier customers are saving due to these ads.)
So imagine this. You're playing Real Baseball 2004 or whatever and you see a Pizza Hut billboard. You click on it and the game goes into "Pizza Selection Mode". You build a pizza, enter your information, and order it for delivery. They place a confirmation call to your house and send out your pizza. Neat? I think so. Useful? To some people, at least. Profitable for the company? Yup. Where's the downside?
I don't know about wealth distribution...I think you probably should have went with the light bulb example. For those of you who don't know this, this will be an interesting contribution to this OT discussion. :)
When you buy a light bulb, the packaging says, "average lifetime 1000 hours". Are you likely to get 1000 hours out of your light bulb, then? No, in fact it is very unlikely. Why's that?
As it happens, light bulb filaments are finicky creatures. They will virtually burn forever if there are no microscopic defects in them and the amount of air inside the bulb is below a certain amount. Slight imperfections in the filament cause hot spots, and those hot spots in the presence of even a slightly higher-than-normal amount of air burn several times hotter than the rest of the filament, significantly shortening the life time of the bulb. When a "freak" comes out that is nearly microscopically perfect, the heat is evenly distributed across the entire filament and the lifetime can be hundreds or thousands of times longer than the lowest 99%. So, by including these outliers in the averages that only make up 1%, but live potentially thousands of times longer, the bulb companies are able to say that the average lifespan of the bulb is 1000 hours when actually it's probably closer to 600 hours, and it's completely true.
Not even a little bit, actually. I'm not describing a framework where plugins could do "whatever". And I'm not describing a system that has a definite boundary of responsibility that separates it from other code, as an OS and applications currently have. I'm simply talking about applications themselves.
Again, look at eclipse or firefox as examples. Both of these apps support plugins that serve a set of particular specific purposes. For example, eclipse supports a plugin that performs revision control. This kind of a plug-in wouldn't really make sense for another kind of application (say, a web browser). The idea is, an application becomes simply an assembly of particular functionalities, but the code implementing those functionalities is left to plug-ins and the application framework simply specifies a standard protocol for interacting with such plug-ins.
There's no reason this approach couldn't be used for OSes either, assuming that top-notch performance isn't an issue (actually, even performance may not be an issue...along the framework vein, you could simply adopt plug-ins that are extremely performant if that was most important to you). For example, an OS could define a protocol for communicating with a file system...the OS hands a set of information that can be used to locate a file, the file system plug-in hands back a file handle. The specifics of how and where it retrieves that file (could be from disk, CD, internet, a database...any freaky place you can think of) is left to the implemetation of the FS plug-in to decide. Or the OS could specify to the thread management plug-in that it wants a thread scheduled with a specified priority. The thread scheduling plug-in could use round robin, shared timeslice, efficient distribution, or fair-priority algorithms for determining when the scheduled threads get to run.
I actually wrote an OS in this vein in college with 7 or 8 other guys as an independent study project, so I've done a bit of thinking about this. But you still can't have a situation where you simply establish a protocol for working with a generic plug-in. You'd have no idea what information needs to be passed to the plug-in for it to do its job, so that would be quite impossible. However, a framework itself has a specific, well-known job which is to coordinate traffic among the different plug-ins that it supports and for which it itself knows the protocols intimately...so you could build a framework framework that would provide an easy means of writing new frameworks and wiring plug-ins together by establishing a sort of "super protocol", something very generic and open-ended.
Of course, the advantage to doing all this is that any part of the application (which is defined as the framework plus a core set of plug-ins that provide the basic functionality of the application) can be replaced with a different plug-in that does things differently if you, the user, so desire. All you have to do is write/find a plug-in that fits the bill. This is a particularly good idea for open source because it allows users to configure their applications in any way they want...no one has to agree on a standard way of doing any particular thing in any application (this is already sort of how the Linux distros work). Another advantage this provides open source is that if the protocols are open and well-known for a particular plug-in, anyone with the time and motivation can write one.
In any case, I would argue that the way an OS interacts with particular applications is completely different from what I'm talking about. Then again, in a sense, I suppose the OS only cares about applications insofar as they are "applications"...it doesn't really care what particular functionality they provide the user so long as they follow the rules established by the OS for being an application. In that sense, I suppose the OS could view applications not as applications but simply as "plug-ins" of a kind.
Having said all that, I think it's important to not forget exactly what an operating
It's amazing to me that neither one of you bothered to actually click the link and read the entire entry. How am I supposed to educate the teeming masses if a click is too much to expect?
Ok, so I'll repost this link again, right here, for your easy access. Now that's like 6 times it shows up in this thread. No excuse not to read it.
By the way, your examples of US vs. UK usage are incorrect. You must use the singular verb form in all of the cases you presented. Only when the individual entities referred to by the collective noun must maintain their individuality within the context of the sentence is the plural verb form correct usage. See the example about the jury arguing in THIS HERE LINK RIGHT HERE.
Did you click on the link and read up on how and to what extent you're wrong? Go ahead, click it. It won't bite. I'll even repost the link here so you have no excuse not to educate yourself.
Well, I don't know about that, but I can point to what's currently happening with applications. It seems several major applications are now no longer applications in the traditional sense--instead, the original "app" developer writes a plug-in framework and then develops the bulk of the application itself as hot-swappable plug-ins.
To wit: eclipse, the framework application that is an IDE. Firefox, the framework application that is a web browser. Someday, someone will have the idea for a platform-independent (Java?) "framework framework" in which any application can be developed in this way. Wait a minute, that day is here...I just had that idea!
Seriously, though, it's a great idea. Look at how extensible Firefox is as an example. Every app developed in this way has to come with a standard core set of plug-ins that allow the app to do its basic job, like Firefox requires a plug-in that shows a window with a menu bar, a plug-in that determines what's in the menu bar, a plug-in that loads web pages into the main pane of the window, etc. The main advantage is that these things can be replaced, and can themselves be frameworks for more layers of plug-ins...again, as in the case of Firefox, where the main browser window supports plug-ins for neat features like right-click dictionary lookup.
So, typing dir will actually yield ls -las?
It's kind of funny to me that such an article would show up on /., of all places, as if it was just like any other article. News, politics, patent law...virtual girlfriend! Why not!?
Who's the 1% you've included that can't even get the virtual girl?
...that Coke Halliburton sent to Iraq was so expensive...
Seriously, which would you choose, a beverage that cost $1 which you had to refrigerate, or a beverage that costs $20 which you don't?
What about deposits? The runners put down the $40 deposit, and then they get $38 of it back (administrative costs, you know) when they give the chip back.
Oh come off it! She's a complete wuss! As if I'm supposed to be impressed by a series of only 23--as opposed to 26.4--5:35 miles.
Just kidding, of course. I was amazed to learn that the average mile in the women's marathon is somewhere around the 5:30 mark. That's pretty incredible given that I can't run a single mile under 6:45, much less 26 of them. My buddy is training for a marathon now (just to finish) and he told me the record for men is actually over 2 hours (I didn't believe him until I looked it up...I'd thought it was in the 3 hour neighborhood). Again, I don't know if I can even sprint at 13 mph, much less maintain it for a marathon. Why aren't more of these people spontaneously combusting on this course?
I wonder what happened with ol' Paula anyway...the only other person I've seen just toss in the towel in an event was Gail Devers, and that was apparently due to her left calf cramping up. Was there some injury that kicked in on Paula that she just knew would be terminal [ed. note: this is hyperbole] if she kept going?
This is truly a great leap forward. I've always had trouble deciding when to use aluminum foil and when to use plastic wrap. Now I don't have to decide!
Except that you're forgetting that the computer tracks individuals through their individual biorhythms, other life signs, and transponder locations and cross-check that data with the voice data vector coordinates. So a recording would easily be found out by the computer, and it would definitely reject the password.
Besides, don't Star Trek computers use voice fingerprinting that can tell the difference between recordings anyway? (Maybe not 30th Century recordings, I'll grant you.)