"A Taste of Armageddon" is one of classic Trek's occasional, obvious metaphors for the absurdity of the then-cold war between East and West. Gene Lyons stars as a Federation ambassador named Fox, who boards the Enterprise to reach the planet Eminiar VII, where he hopes to negotiate a peace treaty with the inhabitants. Instead the crew of the Enterprise gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war between Eminiar and neighboring planet Vendikar. The twist is that the war is being fought on computers, and compliant residents of those "destroyed" areas obediently report to disintegration chambers, where their "virtual" death is made literal. When the Enterprise is "hit" in one of these simulations, both the warlords of Eminiar VII and Ambassador Fox fully expect Capt. Kirk and crew to report to the disintegration center. The feisty Kirk has other plans, of course. And while the madness of this controlled Armageddon makes a suitably surreal satire of the arms race in the 1960s, the story also evoked the endless, daily reports of body counts during the Vietnam War, with no resolution in sight. Aside from its parable aspect, however, the episode gave Kirk one of his earliest and most compelling scenes of Kirkian preachiness in a bold monologue about peace, reportedly written and rewritten numerous times by series producer and indispensable creative hand Gene L. Coon. --Tom Keogh
You should be disqualified from writing or reporting on science if you cannot master the basics of the vocabulary. Scientists do not form theories. They form hypotheses. Then they experiment to test the hypotheses. Hypotheses which are not disproven by a body of observations may be promoted to theory.
For Christ's sake, if Peter Hotton kept calling a 2x4 a sheet of plywood, they'd fire his ass.
"Unfortunately, throwing more money at medical care won't fix the problems..."
Jesus Tapdancing Christ, I am so sick of this phrase. Did throwing money at the Manhattan Project get results? Did throwing money at the Pentagon get us the world's most powerful military? Did throwing money at the Apollo project get us to the moon?
Let's have a competition. Maybe TLC will turn it into a series. You get to solve a problem with no money, and I get to solve a problem given lots of money.
Turner: What the hell does Counter Intelligence care about a bunch of goddamned books! A book in Dutch! A book out of Venezuela! Atwood: Wait! Turner:...mystery stories in Arabic! What the hell is so important about...(he stops dead.Still.) Oil fields. This whole damn thing was about oil. Wasn't it? Atwood: Yes, it is! It still is!
A relative works for the FAA. I thought they might flash their ID at airports to get VIP treatment, but they said there is no way they ever let the security guys see the FAA ID. If security knows you are FAA, they will demonstrate their zeal by searching your baggage in great detail while you are bent over in another room auditioning to be the goatse guy understudy.
Meanwhile... had the fortune to fly out of Logan in October of 2001 aboard a 757 fully loaded with fuel for a long flight. Man, they had reps from every law enforcent agency there, packing heat plus. State troopers, Boston cops, National Guard. Get up in the air - not a one. Undercover agents with hidden Glocks? Maybe, but I would have felt a lot better if they had just lent me one of those Uzis they were flashing around on the ground. Sure, I felt safer in the airport, but who ever hijacked an airport?
Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.
Status: False.
Origins: No, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible for helping to create I also invented the microphone the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet. Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet -- in the sense offered by the media -- is just silly. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean the same thing: If they mean the same thing, then why have the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet when he never used that word? The answer is that the words don't mean the same thing, but by substituting one word for the other, commentators can make Gore's claim sound [more] ridiculous.)
However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet."
It's true that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet) and has introduced a few bills dealing with education and the Internet, but even though Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President Gore may always have been interested in and well-informed about information technology issues, that's a far cry from having taken an active, vital leadership role in bringing about those technologies. Even if Al Gore had never entered the political arena, we'd probably still be reading web pages via the Internet today.
Last updated: 27 September 2000
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm
I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful. - Jobs
Microsoft has been reasonably successful in forcing a subscription model on their customers, in the form of "Software Assurance". So has the cable TV industry. If you have a monopoly, you can do it.
Well, Christianity has only a 33% market share, worldwide.
Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests -- we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you... isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
Hold the broken rules, substitute profits for females, open source community for fraternity, and Darl for Dean Wormer.
Let's see - programmed by superior intelligence to repeat the same rhetoric over and over? Is it the doll or is it Ann herself?
Re:You already have several robots in your home
on
The Robots are Coming
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I think there is a world market for maybe five robots. I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that robotics is a fad that won't last out the year.
Is it unreasonable to think that the logical next step is for MS to demand payments from any and all developers of software written to run on the Windows platform? Can a Windows application run without needing to access or use any patented Windows code?
Watch for the tsunami of lawsuits to come out of this. Some of the 50,000 highway deaths are bound to be due to software failure. And when a Ford, say, equipped with Windows is involved in a fatality, the case will attract lawyers like some kind of legal black hole. Can you imagine the prospect of picking the deep pockets of Ford and Microsoft?
Software manufacturers have been immune from this before, because everyone "knows" that computers are unreliable and crash. A jury isn't going to care that your desktop burst into flame and lost all your data. That's state of the art in the zeitgeist. But juries drive cars and are more sympathetic to claims against their makers. Do you want to be defending Microsoft when the other side shows the birthday party videos of the little girl who was immolated in the fiery wreck caused by your software?
What we need are more examiners who read fewer applications in a narrower field of expertise with which they are conversant. Obtain 10,000 or more citizens who have demonstrable mastery of various fields. Send them electronic applications so they may search the relevant electronic databases and sources that they will already be using as part of their day job. Pay them per piece. Network them so if the application goes beyond the bound of their skills, they can call in help as needed.
I know that if I were to sit down and read applications that were narrowly tailored to be within the field I work in, I could quickly tell which were novel and where prior art if any might be found.
If you want to bring down this evil, then do this: take all your old poems, stories, song lyrics - in short, anything creative you have ever done, and send to the Copyright Office for registration. Send it as a collection so that you pay only $30 for the whole. Then wait for the first movie or song that infriges on your copyright and take advantage of the Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Get an injunction. Sue for damages.
Wouldn't you love to see every Bertney Speers release met with a shitstorm of infringement actions?
The easiest thing in the world is to look back and deride the losers while applauding the winners and point out why each is what it is. It's a little harder to pick them in advance.
What do you get out of reading this book? Unless it is some tools for making predictions, you might as well rip out the pages and wipe your ass with them.
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
Some time ago I was looking into the USPTO job openings. (Aside - They are always complaining that they can't get enough examiners, that they don't have enough money, they can't retain employees, etc.) It occurred to me that one of their main problems is that they require everyone they want to hire to be in the DC area and drive to work every day in that traffic.
Why not distribute the examination positions around the country? Submissions are mostly electronic now, at least at my company. I'd take some training - even if I had to travel to DC for it - to look over patents and applications in my specialty and be paid per piece. Maybe with thousands of part-time examiners to complement the regular staff, more specialists would be available to point out prior art way before it gets to the lawsuit stage.
Oh yeah - remember, this is my IP. It has no Unix code in it.
Why would you want to have a base on the moon? The moon is at the bottom of a gravity well. It takes energy to get down and energy to climb back out. And all the time you are at the bottom of the well, random space rocks are being accellerated at you without the benefit of an atmosphere to afford you some protection.
Slashdot Mirror
"A Taste of Armageddon" is one of classic Trek's occasional, obvious metaphors for the absurdity of the then-cold war between East and West. Gene Lyons stars as a Federation ambassador named Fox, who boards the Enterprise to reach the planet Eminiar VII, where he hopes to negotiate a peace treaty with the inhabitants. Instead the crew of the Enterprise gets caught in the middle of an interplanetary war between Eminiar and neighboring planet Vendikar. The twist is that the war is being fought on computers, and compliant residents of those "destroyed" areas obediently report to disintegration chambers, where their "virtual" death is made literal. When the Enterprise is "hit" in one of these simulations, both the warlords of Eminiar VII and Ambassador Fox fully expect Capt. Kirk and crew to report to the disintegration center. The feisty Kirk has other plans, of course. And while the madness of this controlled Armageddon makes a suitably surreal satire of the arms race in the 1960s, the story also evoked the endless, daily reports of body counts during the Vietnam War, with no resolution in sight. Aside from its parable aspect, however, the episode gave Kirk one of his earliest and most compelling scenes of Kirkian preachiness in a bold monologue about peace, reportedly written and rewritten numerous times by series producer and indispensable creative hand Gene L. Coon. --Tom Keogh
You should be disqualified from writing or reporting on science if you cannot master the basics of the vocabulary. Scientists do not form theories. They form hypotheses. Then they experiment to test the hypotheses. Hypotheses which are not disproven by a body of observations may be promoted to theory.
For Christ's sake, if Peter Hotton kept calling a 2x4 a sheet of plywood, they'd fire his ass.
At this very moment, Alton Brown - who never buys a kitchen gadget that has only one use - is coming up with more things to slice with this puppy.
Will W's store have them in stock?
"Unfortunately, throwing more money at medical care won't fix the problems..."
Jesus Tapdancing Christ, I am so sick of this phrase. Did throwing money at the Manhattan Project get results? Did throwing money at the Pentagon get us the world's most powerful military? Did throwing money at the Apollo project get us to the moon?
Let's have a competition. Maybe TLC will turn it into a series. You get to solve a problem with no money, and I get to solve a problem given lots of money.
Turner: What the hell does Counter Intelligence care about a bunch of goddamned books! A book in Dutch! A book out of Venezuela! ...mystery stories in Arabic! What the hell is so important about...(he stops dead.Still.) Oil fields. This whole damn thing was about oil. Wasn't it?
Atwood: Wait!
Turner:
Atwood: Yes, it is! It still is!
A relative works for the FAA. I thought they might flash their ID at airports to get VIP treatment, but they said there is no way they ever let the security guys see the FAA ID. If security knows you are FAA, they will demonstrate their zeal by searching your baggage in great detail while you are bent over in another room auditioning to be the goatse guy understudy.
Meanwhile... had the fortune to fly out of Logan in October of 2001 aboard a 757 fully loaded with fuel for a long flight. Man, they had reps from every law enforcent agency there, packing heat plus. State troopers, Boston cops, National Guard. Get up in the air - not a one. Undercover agents with hidden Glocks? Maybe, but I would have felt a lot better if they had just lent me one of those Uzis they were flashing around on the ground. Sure, I felt safer in the airport, but who ever hijacked an airport?
Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.
Status: False.
Origins: No,
Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The derisive "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs are misleading distortions of something he said (taken out of context) during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clearly, although Gore's phrasing was clumsy (and self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible for helping to create I also invented the microphone the environment (in an economic and legislative sense) that fostered the development of the Internet. Al Gore might not know nearly as much about the Internet and other technologies as his image would have us believe, and he certainly has been guilty of stretching (if not outright breaking) the truth before, but to believe that Gore seriously thought he could take credit for the "invention" of the Internet -- in the sense offered by the media -- is just silly. (To those who say the words "create" and "invent" mean the same thing: If they mean the same thing, then why have the media overwhelmingly and consistently cited Gore as having claimed he "invented" the Internet when he never used that word? The answer is that the words don't mean the same thing, but by substituting one word for the other, commentators can make Gore's claim sound [more] ridiculous.)
However, validating even the lesser claim Gore intended to make is problematic. Any statement about the "creation" or "beginning" of the Internet is difficult to evaluate, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity (it's a collection of computers, networks, protocols, standards, and application programs), nor did it all spring into being at once (the components that comprise the Internet were developed in various places at different times and are continuously being modified, improved, and expanded). Despite a spirited defense of Gore's claim by Vint Cerf (often referred to as the "father of the Internet") in which he stated "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it," many of the components of today's Internet came into being well before Gore's first term in Congress began in 1977, and it's hard to find any specific action of Gore's (such as his sponsoring a Congressional bill or championing a particular piece of legislation) that one could claim helped bring the Internet into being, much less validate Gore's statement of having taken the "initiative in creating the Internet."
It's true that Gore was popularizing the term "information superhighway" in the early 1990s (when few people outside academia or the computer/defense industries had heard of the Internet) and has introduced a few bills dealing with education and the Internet, but even though Congressman, Senator, and Vice-President Gore may always have been interested in and well-informed about information technology issues, that's a far cry from having taken an active, vital leadership role in bringing about those technologies. Even if Al Gore had never entered the political arena, we'd probably still be reading web pages via the Internet today.
Last updated: 27 September 2000
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.htm
I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model, and it might not be successful. - Jobs
Microsoft has been reasonably successful in forcing a subscription model on their customers, in the form of "Software Assurance". So has the cable TV industry. If you have a monopoly, you can do it.
Well, Christianity has only a 33% market share, worldwide.
"The good music companies do an amazing thing. They have people who can pick the person who's gonna be successful out of 5,000 candidates."
I would say that the successes are successful because they were picked.
Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests -- we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you ... isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
Hold the broken rules, substitute profits for females, open source community for fraternity, and Darl for Dean Wormer.
Let's see - programmed by superior intelligence to repeat the same rhetoric over and over? Is it the doll or is it Ann herself?
I think there is a world market for maybe five robots. I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that robotics is a fad that won't last out the year.
There is no reason for any individual to have a robot in his home.
Is it unreasonable to think that the logical next step is for MS to demand payments from any and all developers of software written to run on the Windows platform? Can a Windows application run without needing to access or use any patented Windows code?
Watch for the tsunami of lawsuits to come out of this. Some of the 50,000 highway deaths are bound to be due to software failure. And when a Ford, say, equipped with Windows is involved in a fatality, the case will attract lawyers like some kind of legal black hole. Can you imagine the prospect of picking the deep pockets of Ford and Microsoft?
Software manufacturers have been immune from this before, because everyone "knows" that computers are unreliable and crash. A jury isn't going to care that your desktop burst into flame and lost all your data. That's state of the art in the zeitgeist. But juries drive cars and are more sympathetic to claims against their makers. Do you want to be defending Microsoft when the other side shows the birthday party videos of the little girl who was immolated in the fiery wreck caused by your software?
What we need are more examiners who read fewer applications in a narrower field of expertise with which they are conversant. Obtain 10,000 or more citizens who have demonstrable mastery of various fields. Send them electronic applications so they may search the relevant electronic databases and sources that they will already be using as part of their day job. Pay them per piece. Network them so if the application goes beyond the bound of their skills, they can call in help as needed.
I know that if I were to sit down and read applications that were narrowly tailored to be within the field I work in, I could quickly tell which were novel and where prior art if any might be found.
Why can't this be done?
And then:
Microsoft releases MSN Music Club
SCO sues Apple
Microsoft releases Sparkle
SCO sues Macromedia
Microsoft ships new Xbox model
SCO sues Sony
Gates farts
SCO sues the dog
If you want to bring down this evil, then do this: take all your old poems, stories, song lyrics - in short, anything creative you have ever done, and send to the Copyright Office for registration. Send it as a collection so that you pay only $30 for the whole. Then wait for the first movie or song that infriges on your copyright and take advantage of the Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Get an injunction. Sue for damages.
Wouldn't you love to see every Bertney Speers release met with a shitstorm of infringement actions?
Mama mia! Thats a spicy
enterprise server.
The easiest thing in the world is to look back and deride the losers while applauding the winners and point out why each is what it is. It's a little harder to pick them in advance.
What do you get out of reading this book? Unless it is some tools for making predictions, you might as well rip out the pages and wipe your ass with them.
As for Netscape vs. Microsoft, well, if you can't figure out why that happened (clue: it had nothing to do with Andreessen being an idiot or deserving to die), then you have no business attempting to analyze more subtle corporate interactions.
You and many others have forgotten one of the fundamentals in life: Never get in a fight with someone who has less to lose than you.
Some time ago I was looking into the USPTO job openings. (Aside - They are always complaining that they can't get enough examiners, that they don't have enough money, they can't retain employees, etc.) It occurred to me that one of their main problems is that they require everyone they want to hire to be in the DC area and drive to work every day in that traffic.
Why not distribute the examination positions around the country? Submissions are mostly electronic now, at least at my company. I'd take some training - even if I had to travel to DC for it - to look over patents and applications in my specialty and be paid per piece. Maybe with thousands of part-time examiners to complement the regular staff, more specialists would be available to point out prior art way before it gets to the lawsuit stage.
Oh yeah - remember, this is my IP. It has no Unix code in it.
Does this mean the little yellow guy will be sporting an Adolf on his upper lip? Not that he has lips....
"dissected Microsoft's corporate culture to figure out Microsoft's financial success."
This is Ground Control to Major Clue.
Why would you want to have a base on the moon? The moon is at the bottom of a gravity well. It takes energy to get down and energy to climb back out. And all the time you are at the bottom of the well, random space rocks are being accellerated at you without the benefit of an atmosphere to afford you some protection.