I don't care how good the actual program is, any more than I care how good an RIAA-backed CD is. It may be ad hominem (ad corporatem?) but if they want to take their ball and go home I'm not going to follow begging.
Give me a fucking break! They aren't CHARGING YOU FOR THIS. THEY ARE GIVING IT AWAY. There is no way in hell that you can compare them wanting videos removed from Youtube while GIVING AWAY THE CONTENT FOR FREE to the bullshit that RIAA is trying to pull.
Either I watch on YouTube, or I don't watch at all. I'm not bookmarking 5,000,000 video sites to do casual browsing. That's stupid.
Again, grow the hell up. It's really that much harder to do a Google search for 'The Daily Show' and following the first link as opposed to doing a search on YouTube for 'The Daily Show'? If you owned the content would you want YouTube raking in the ad dollars for something THAT YOU CREATED?
I think it's a good business decision provided they can keep up with the demand.
And if they can't keep up with the demand then they can always partner with Google/Youtube and have them foot the bandwidth bill. And Viacom would still get get a slice of the revenue because it's their content.
Although something tells me that Viacom won't have major problems paying the bandwidth bill or hiring people smart enough to manage this for them.
Uhhh, yeah, I'm all about "sticking it to the man" too and I get rather pissed off when media outfits try to use DRM to lock down content that I've paid for, but what exactly is the problem with this?
They are putting the entire archive of a fairly popular TV show online, at no expense. Even if you have to watch commercials with it (do you? You did on their old site, but TFA seems to suggest you won't) how can you complain about that?
I would love to see an online archive of Babylon 5, Star Trek:TNG, Law & Order, 24, or any of the other TV shows that I watch. If I could go back and watch my favorite episode at the click of a button and the only downside was a few ads (that I'd see on TV anyway) how am I losing?
some companies might consider blocking all text in email as a matter of course
You got +5 funny, but you really deserved +5 insightful.
Seriously. Since when did it become my job as a network admin to "take a proactive stance against illegal file sharing". As long as my users aren't bogging down my network I DON'T CARE WHAT THEY ARE DOING. If they are doing something illegal then I would assume that law enforcement will catch up to them sooner or later.
Blocking MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of email for illegal file sharing
Yes, cuz e-mail has displaced P2P/bittorrent as the preferred method for sharing songs and warez. Give me a fucking break! I would suspect that less then one percent of copyright infringement (as it relates to music) takes part over e-mail.
I can make XP croak as well copying huge files from a CD or floppy which is handles very very badly (see 98). And my biggest drive is 20G (albeit a damn fast one). It seems to do ok copying big files from hard disk to hard disk but even with SCSI RAID with huge caches and the correct drivers you can't expect much left of your CPU when its doing this. Do two at once and you may as well go rebuild your transmission while you're waiting. Apparantly DMA and interrupts are unknown concepts at Redmond; PDP-11's did this just fine (unless you turned off DMA and interrupts in which case it was no faster than a 4Mhz Z-80 CP/M system)
Actually, a lot of the problems I've noticed with XP is related to the stupid fucking way that Windows handles it's file cache. It will literally swap out PROGRAMS YOU ARE ACTIVELY USING to expand the file cache during a large copy/read operation.
Anybody that has ever tried to alt-tab while copying huge files knows about this.... then you sit and wait for the pages to be swapped back into memory. And you might as well get some coffee, cuz with the hard drive already being pegged for the copy operation, it's gonna take awhile. Oh, and once it's finally done and you need to alt-tab back to the original program.... well, hope you need more coffee.
Lately I've been playing with a program called CachemanXP. Google it. It seems to give you more control over the memory and process management functions of Windows. It also lets you do a 'kill -9' equiv, which (as far as I'm aware) even Task Manager won't do, as it insists on trying to do a graceful shutdown first.
The other is a government trying to save the lives of its population from those who want an oppressive religion based world government.
Oh, give me a fucking break.
For starters, cough up some evidence that the "terrorists" want this world based Government you are talking about. And which "terrorists"? Many movements that our Government considers to be "terrorists" have no interest in the United States beyond our meddling in their affairs for whatever reason.
And once you've done that, convince me that we really need to sign away our rights to stop the "terrorists". You realize we have a few thousand nuclear weapons that can be delivered anywhere on Earth, less then an hour after we decide to do it, right? Given that fact, I'm not real worried about the United States (or the Western World for that matter) falling to the new Caliphate...... hell, like Christians, the Muslims are too busy fighting each other to unite and try and take over the World. Hell, they can't even put aside their differences long enough to unite against the US and force us out of Iraq.
But you're obviously aware of how the situation turns out differently when professionals handle it.
Well, again, where I work, the objective is to calm the situation WITHOUT having to use force. We are all trained in various take-downs and physical restraints (even the non direct-care people such as myself). But it's considered a failure if you have to use one of them.
Granted, it's a different story if you are dealing with somebody high on PCPs. I wouldn't even blink if the cops pulled out the taser in that scenario. But one punk college kid? They should have been able to bring that situation to a resolution without having to use weapons.
Any space war would comprise opposing forces each destroying the other's home planet.
Umm, and who is to say that you wouldn't have a DEFENSIVE fleet around your home planet and thus have a battle between opposing fleets? Granted, it's not a deep space battle, that part I'd tend to agree with you about. Bab 5 always had it's battles around areas of importance (planets or the station), not deep space.
Note that we do not envisage similar battles with aircraft today, due to the same energy restrictions.
Uhh, again, says who? Dogfighting isn't as common as it once was, but it still happens. Most of the air-to-air engagements in the Falklands were within visual range. And I would make the argument that the only reason you haven't had dogfighting happen in modern combat is we haven't fought anybody with our level of technology. We've had the luxury of picking them off from outside their own weapons range. I'm sure a large enough aerial engagement involving two first world powers would stand a decent chance of closing to visual range once the long range weapons had been expended.
Even the F-22 still retains the ability to use short range IR missiles (Sidewinders) and still has a gun.
The strategic manoeveuring we see for the big battles are copied from the Naval battles of WWI and WW2 - such as Jutland.
WW1 is a better point. By the time WW2 rolled around you didn't have sea battles anymore, you had air-sea battles involving aircraft and ships. But even at that, you still had ship to ship engagements. Look at the Bismarck. Look at the night fighting around Guadalcanal. Look at some of the engagements in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
A better question to ask about space combat is do fighters really serve a purpose at all or are they just eye candy for the big screen and something to make it one-on-one for the main characters? One argument says that there's no line of sight issues in space and fighters would be pointless. Another argument says that fighters can probably accelerate faster, get close to the big ships and strip them of weapons and sensors (even if they lack the firepower to destroy them outright).
Until, of course, they hit a Jump Gate- or had jump engines accelerate them- at which point without some form of IDF, they would have all ended up jelly anyway.
At the risk of getting into a pointless debate about fictional technology, I would have to disagree with you. In the Bab 5 universe NOTHING exceeded the speed of light. The only point to hyperspace was that distances in real space were mapped into a smaller space in hyperspace. So you could travel at sub C speeds and cover interstellar distances. The mere act of going into a jump gate does not imply acceleration in the Bab 5 universe. Nor does leaving hyperspace imply deceleration.
Which wouldn't necessarily mean *NO* IDF, just IDF that doesn't react very quickly to extreme maneuvers or changes in direction.
Now you are really reaching. Find me one example of a character in Bab 5 stating they aren't subject to the laws of physics the same as you or I are. Like I said, with the possible exception of the Minbari, none of the younger races had anything approaching IDF type technology in their fighters or capital ships. And even the Minbari are suspect, since we don't know how fast their fighters really accelerate, because JMS was purposefully vague when it came to details like that.
Human beings already have a primative form of IDF- anti-blackout pants, that our current jet fighter pilots use to pump blood back out of the legs and towards the brain during high-G maneuvers. But it's already possible to fly faster than those can react.
I wouldn't call g-suits IDF technology. But regardless, I don't see how that helps prove your case that humans (never mind the other races) in Bab 5 had IDF style technology. You could say that the pressure suits worn by Starfury pilots worked like g-suits. For all we know they did. But that's not Star Trek style IDF technology.
and IDF generators is incapable of keeping highly trained personnel from being blown up by their consoles is beyond me
Actually, as much as I love Star Trek, and have never really been as big a fan of Star Wars, one of the old ST vs. SW sites, by a pro Star Wars person put it best: Apparently in the 24th century they lack the necessary technology to make fancy devices like circuit breakers......
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by mainstream, but my wife who is not really a sci-fi person
By mainstream I mean it's something that almost anybody would recognize. I suspect that if you stopped 100 random people on the street and showed them a picture of the Enterprise-D they'd think of TNG. Or if you asked them what role comes to mind when they think of Patrick Stewart, most would probably say Jean-Luc Picard. By contrast, I doubt nearly as many would peg to stuff from any of the series that you mentioned. Of course, to be fair, even though Bab 5 is one of my favorites, most people on the street probably wouldn't know what a Starfury is either.
TNG was the closest thing to a water cooler show that Sci-Fi has ever had. Even people who didn't particularly like Star Trek were at least somewhat familiar with it. I'm glad it ended when it did, because Season 7 was starting to show some of the stuff that made Voyager unwatchable (tech babble to the extreme and bad science), but even at that, TNG had a MUCH better send-off with "All Good Things" then any other Trek series.
Even Babylon 5 had inertial dampeners of various effectiveness
Umm, MAYBE the Minbari had them, since we saw characters in their fighters without seat belts functioning quite effectively, but none of the younger races had anything remotely like them. Earthforce pilots were strapped in and the capital ships moved slowly enough that G-forces weren't an issue.
In fact, I seem to recall Sheridan telling his people that Centauri pilots (a race MORE advanced then Earth) were still subject to blacking out during extreme maneuvers.
I've never understood why some people think their memories of some sort of media will be ruined if a new product, one they don't have to go see or experience, is released.
Beyond that though, I'm just disgusted at low Star Trek has gone. Seriously. We've gone from the golden age of TV Sci-Fi, with shows like TNG, DS9, Babylon 5 and SeaQuest all airing new episodes, to Paramount milking the cash cow that is Star Trek, putting out one crap release after another, banking on the "Star Trek" name to sell it.
You realize that Stephen Hawking of all people took TNG seriously enough that he made a tour of the set, asked to sit in Picard's chair and even did a cameo? You find me something on TV today that even comes close to what TNG was it's hayday. Or Babylon 5 for that matter. Yes, both had their downpoints (TNG Seasons 1-2 and 7, Babylon 5's last season and parts of the first), but I don't think you can find something on TV today that's anywhere near as good as either of them on a bad day.
And don't come back with Firefly, the standard/. answer. It's not in production anymore, who knows how good or bad it would have been if it had remained, and I don't consider it Sci-Fi like Bab 5 or TNG. It's more like a western in space. And before the Firefly fans all rush to click "reply" and flame me, I liked Serenity and the back story to Firefly. I just don't think you can point at a show that didn't even make one season as justification for why modern Sci-Fi doesn't suck.
And Battlestar Galactica, while an awesome show, is no where near as mainstream as TNG or even Bab 5. And while that's not entirely a bad thing, it doesn't exactly help make the case for Sci-Fi on TV either.
And if you go by all things holy then Enterprise, like Voyager and Star Trek V, never really happened.... at best it was a Holodeck malfunction.
In fact, come to recall, the lame ass series finale of Enterprise was literally a holodeck program on the Enterprise-D! I find it very easy to think that Voyager, Enterprise, and every TNG movie were just horrible holonovels written by somebody with a sick and twisted mind. It's the only thing keeping me from losing ALL faith in Star Trek....
Hey, Wars fans, is this how you felt when the prequels came out? I'm sorry for mocking you.... I just didn't understand at the time:(
I've never seen an ISP do this yet, what makes you think they're actually going to start doing this anytime in the future?
He was probably referring to doing stuff like blocking port 25 to silence spam bots, or blocking the Windows file sharing ports to prevent worms. Many ISPs do this and similar stuff.
I would also argue that there are things that any responsible system administrator (particularly at an ISP) should do as a public service to the rest of the internet. For example, if your edge router allows packets to leave your network that have source addresses that are obviously forged (source addresses in IP ranges you don't own for example), then you aren't doing the internet community any favors. If your mail server allows obvious viruses that could be blocked with one line of configuration into your users mailboxes then you aren't doing them any favors either....
You'll never be able to stop everything nor should you try. But there are very simple steps you can take to protect your users from some threats -- and to protect the internet as a whole. I'm not even in the ISP business anymore, but I've taken steps to prevent trojans, worms and the like from leaving my network, should I be unlucky enough to have one of my machines infected. I also sit in the NTP pool project. It's a little bit of "give back" to the internet community and reminds me of the old days before it became all about the corporations.
Whatever you think about tasers, I think we can all agree that at the very least non-lethal does not in any way imply non-painful. For non-violent confrontations, it's frequently in everyone's best interest to just keep it in its holster and try something else.
The worst part about the "don't tase me bro!" kid, IMHO, is that FOUR cops really should have been able to remove him without even needing to touch him. Cops are trained to be intimidating by nature. I've watched old-timers in law enforcement able to diffuse a nasty situation with a few words and the right body language. Are you telling me that four cops really couldn't handle one college student without using the taser (or pressure points, night-sticks, etc, etc)?
IMHO, the taser should be used as a replacement for deadly force, not as a new level of force used to compel people to do what the cops want. Recently our local cops shot and killed a mentally distributed individual who pulled a knife on them and refused to drop them. That sounds like the perfect scenario for a taser. Not some college kid that refuses to willingly leave a room. DRAG HIM OUT KICKING AND SCREAMING if you must, but I fail to see how a taser is justified in that scenario.
I work a mental health facility for seriously emotionally disturbed children and teenagers, some of whom are violent and bigger then a lot of the staff working here. And somehow we manage to control them and remain safe without using tasers, chemical restraints, or what have you.
so i wouldn't hesitate to tase someone who i thought was going to turn violent on me either
So when a judge out in California orders a defendant shocked because he refused to shut up when ordered to do so, that's ok?
Re:It doesn't "remotely shut down vehicles"
on
Stalling Cars Via OnStar
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Hes not arguing that tasers are more deadly than a gun, hes arguing that when tasers were first released they were positioned as an alternative to deadly force - as in used in the same situation a gun would be used. In practice, we see them used as a quick effortless way to subdue someone for whatever reason, be they violent or nonviolent
Thank you! I made this same point back in the discussion about the "don't tase me bro!" kid. The problem is tasers isn't the 1 person out of 10,000,000 that's going to die as a result of being tased. The problem is that the taser has lowered the standard of when to use force.
Forgot about the gun v. taser debate. Would a cop have been willing to use his nightstick on that kid? Yes, he was being a jerk and didn't go prone for them. But would they really have whipped out nightsticks and used them? Not likely. The image of four cops beating up a single college kid with nightsticks wouldn't play very well, now would it?
Ah! But the taser! We can use the taser. It's lowered the standard for when force can be used. And that's a bad thing, imho.
Another taser story that sticks out in my mind was a judge out in California ordering his court officers to tase a defendant who refused to stop speaking when ordered to. Yeah, throw him back in jail for contempt of court, but TASE someone for speaking? Not even screaming and yelling. Speaking! That's bullshit. If I walk up to Dick Cheney and tell him to go "fuck yourself" in a normal tone of voice is that really grounds for his USSS guards to tase you?
Next up: Vonage vs Verizon in a net neutrality battle. With that pesky net neutrality out of the way, Verizon customers will receive high QOS. Vonage packets will get there. Eventually.
This packet from Amazon and this packet from Google, they get through very easily. But this packet, from fucktimewarner.org, it gets routed a little differently..... *riiiiiiiiiiiiiiip*
It's a good thing so many criminals are dumb. It's the smart ones that you have to worry more about.
One would hope that the "smart" criminals can think of better things to do with their talents then sexually abusing children. A "smart" criminal that manages to pull off an Oceans 11 style heist from your least favorite bank or company may become a public icon. Hell, even some of the Mafia Dons in New York became public figures and had a certain measure of respect.
But someone who abuses children? They deserve and will get nothing but contempt. Contempt from society, contempt from law enforcement ("Yeah, I had to shoot him ten times, he was resisting arrest"), and contempt from the other inmates once they are convicted and sent up the river.
This is one of the few times that I would wish prison rape on someone. Enjoy being your cell-mates bitch and worrying about that shank in the back for the rest of your life, asshole. Death is too good for you.
As far as I noticed, TFA never comes out and says what a gPhone is going to bring to the market that will win over consumers. Brand name? Features? Function?
I don't know about TFA, because like most people around here I didn't bother to read it, but I do have a bit of a background in the wireless industry. And ANYTHING that ANYBODY can do to loosen the tight grip that the carriers have on our collective balls is a good thing.
Right now the carriers control what types of phones you can use on their networks. They want to lock out anything that might compete with their own content offerings. It's bad enough that Microsoft can make all their own services (MSN Search and IE come to mind) the default in Windows. Now imagine if they made it outright impossible to install other software or content that didn't come from them. Because that's what the cellular carriers do!
There is no reason that there shouldn't be a wireless version of carterfone. This document provides an interesting read into the current state of affairs. Consumers on Verizon and Sprint are screwed. AT&T and T-Mobile customers fare a little better, since they always have the option of buying unbranded/unlocked GSM phones. But even at that the carriers are attempting to impose artificial limitations -- like T-Mobile's claim (false, but they still sell this to the unwashed masses) that MyFaves won't work on a non-MyFaves phone.
All the power to Google if they can open up this market just a little bit. I won't ever be owning an ad-sponsored phone. But maybe they will bring something similar to carterfone to the market. They certainly have nothing to fear from the carriers, unlike the equipment makers (Mororola, Nokia, etc) that are afraid to speak up for fear of losing that carriers business.
To what end? You realize that sets up debt slavery. What happens if you simply can't pay? They get a judgment that never expires and continue to pile up the 29.9% default APR? Everything in our history, from the common law to the Old Testament advocates debt forgiveness after a certain amount of time.
A lender took a risk when they decided to loan you money. If you can't repay and have to file BK that's their bad luck. It hits their bottom line, not the taxpayers. This has nothing to do with socialism. The Government didn't force Citi or Chase to hand out so many credit card lines. They made a calculation that they could make more in profits then they lose in defaults. To a large extent this is true. I don't see any of them doing anything other then reporting record earnings, year after year. I have zero pity for them if somebody gets in over their head and has to file bankruptcy.
I hope you never have the misfortune of going through any of this. But let me explain how it works anyway. You stop paying your credit card bills. The first thing they do is assign it to a collection agency. If that collection agency collects payment, the creditor gets the bulk of the money (the agency takes a commission). But let's say you can't make payment at this stage. After six months they are required by law to charge off your debt. Now they get a tax credit for taking this 'loss'. So what do they do now? They sell your debt to a debt buyer for pennies on the dollar (less then 5%). That debt buyer is now going to come after you for 150-200% of the original amount owed, thanks to the miracle of the 29.99-34.99% default APR rate.
I'm sorry, but when I got healthy I took stock of my finances. Then I realized that even if I could repay my debts (explain to me how you repay debts that total 300% of your income) the original creditors that I borrowed the money from would receive ZERO DOLLARS. I should have lived as a debt slave for the next 15 years to repay NCO, Arrow Financial, etc, etc money that I never even borrowed from them in the first place?
My actual final answer to your question is yes, if you can't obtain financing or pay up front for what you need, you don't get it
That's all well and good if the thing you "need" is a car, computer or house. But if your life depends on it then I think you have a realistic exception of help from society. The world that you are advocating is a dog eat dog world, where debtors prisons would flourish and children with medical problems and poor parents would be shit-out-of-luck. I'd like to think that we've advanced beyond the 19th century.
Good theory. The problem is that your main hard drive would probably still have some sort of evidence on it. Recently opened documents, cached.torrent files in Azureus, system logs of any programs that crashed while they had "illegal" files opened, etc, etc.
Can anybody (even a/. geek) have enough trust in themselves to be sure that they clean away all the fingerprints in this scenario? Much safer to dispose of/reformat/whatever the entire thing.
. However, if your debt was 'discharged', who ultimately paid your medical bills? The provider? Or were they paid by the state, i.e. society? In either event, how is that fair?
It's not fair, but do you have a better solution? Debtor prison? Should I have to work for the hospital and/or credit card company for free until the debts are repaid? What's the solution besides when somebody winds up so deeply in debt that they will never be able to pay it off?
If you receive the benefit of treatment, but escape the cost of that benefit, that's also not fair; Someone else, who did not receive the benefit, has to pay the cost. It's not free.
Again, what's your better solution? If people can't afford to pay for medical treatment up front should they just not receive it? One of the advantages of living in a society as opposed to living in caves is that society will take care of you when are unable to do so for yourself. I'm not advocating welfare here for people that can pull their own weight -- but if you have a legitimate problem and you can't solve it on your own then what should happen?
Hell, even some types of animals (wolfs, lions, etc) will take care of injured members of the pack that can't pull their own weight. This is a random musing, but I was watching some show on animal planet, and they showed a pride of lions. One of the lionesses had a broken leg and couldn't contribute to the hunt. The others still let her take her place when it came time to eat.
Slashdot Mirror
Give me a fucking break! They aren't CHARGING YOU FOR THIS. THEY ARE GIVING IT AWAY. There is no way in hell that you can compare them wanting videos removed from Youtube while GIVING AWAY THE CONTENT FOR FREE to the bullshit that RIAA is trying to pull.
Either I watch on YouTube, or I don't watch at all. I'm not bookmarking 5,000,000 video sites to do casual browsing. That's stupid.
Again, grow the hell up. It's really that much harder to do a Google search for 'The Daily Show' and following the first link as opposed to doing a search on YouTube for 'The Daily Show'? If you owned the content would you want YouTube raking in the ad dollars for something THAT YOU CREATED?
And if they can't keep up with the demand then they can always partner with Google/Youtube and have them foot the bandwidth bill. And Viacom would still get get a slice of the revenue because it's their content.
Although something tells me that Viacom won't have major problems paying the bandwidth bill or hiring people smart enough to manage this for them.
Uhhh, yeah, I'm all about "sticking it to the man" too and I get rather pissed off when media outfits try to use DRM to lock down content that I've paid for, but what exactly is the problem with this?
They are putting the entire archive of a fairly popular TV show online, at no expense. Even if you have to watch commercials with it (do you? You did on their old site, but TFA seems to suggest you won't) how can you complain about that?
I would love to see an online archive of Babylon 5, Star Trek:TNG, Law & Order, 24, or any of the other TV shows that I watch. If I could go back and watch my favorite episode at the click of a button and the only downside was a few ads (that I'd see on TV anyway) how am I losing?
You got +5 funny, but you really deserved +5 insightful.
Seriously. Since when did it become my job as a network admin to "take a proactive stance against illegal file sharing". As long as my users aren't bogging down my network I DON'T CARE WHAT THEY ARE DOING. If they are doing something illegal then I would assume that law enforcement will catch up to them sooner or later.
Blocking MP3s, or at least quarantining until requested by the user, can be a good way for a company to take a proactive stance against the use of email for illegal file sharingYes, cuz e-mail has displaced P2P/bittorrent as the preferred method for sharing songs and warez. Give me a fucking break! I would suspect that less then one percent of copyright infringement (as it relates to music) takes part over e-mail.
Actually, a lot of the problems I've noticed with XP is related to the stupid fucking way that Windows handles it's file cache. It will literally swap out PROGRAMS YOU ARE ACTIVELY USING to expand the file cache during a large copy/read operation.
Anybody that has ever tried to alt-tab while copying huge files knows about this.... then you sit and wait for the pages to be swapped back into memory. And you might as well get some coffee, cuz with the hard drive already being pegged for the copy operation, it's gonna take awhile. Oh, and once it's finally done and you need to alt-tab back to the original program.... well, hope you need more coffee.
Lately I've been playing with a program called CachemanXP. Google it. It seems to give you more control over the memory and process management functions of Windows. It also lets you do a 'kill -9' equiv, which (as far as I'm aware) even Task Manager won't do, as it insists on trying to do a graceful shutdown first.
Oh, give me a fucking break.
For starters, cough up some evidence that the "terrorists" want this world based Government you are talking about. And which "terrorists"? Many movements that our Government considers to be "terrorists" have no interest in the United States beyond our meddling in their affairs for whatever reason.
And once you've done that, convince me that we really need to sign away our rights to stop the "terrorists". You realize we have a few thousand nuclear weapons that can be delivered anywhere on Earth, less then an hour after we decide to do it, right? Given that fact, I'm not real worried about the United States (or the Western World for that matter) falling to the new Caliphate...... hell, like Christians, the Muslims are too busy fighting each other to unite and try and take over the World. Hell, they can't even put aside their differences long enough to unite against the US and force us out of Iraq.
Well, again, where I work, the objective is to calm the situation WITHOUT having to use force. We are all trained in various take-downs and physical restraints (even the non direct-care people such as myself). But it's considered a failure if you have to use one of them.
Granted, it's a different story if you are dealing with somebody high on PCPs. I wouldn't even blink if the cops pulled out the taser in that scenario. But one punk college kid? They should have been able to bring that situation to a resolution without having to use weapons.
Umm, and who is to say that you wouldn't have a DEFENSIVE fleet around your home planet and thus have a battle between opposing fleets? Granted, it's not a deep space battle, that part I'd tend to agree with you about. Bab 5 always had it's battles around areas of importance (planets or the station), not deep space.
Note that we do not envisage similar battles with aircraft today, due to the same energy restrictions.Uhh, again, says who? Dogfighting isn't as common as it once was, but it still happens. Most of the air-to-air engagements in the Falklands were within visual range. And I would make the argument that the only reason you haven't had dogfighting happen in modern combat is we haven't fought anybody with our level of technology. We've had the luxury of picking them off from outside their own weapons range. I'm sure a large enough aerial engagement involving two first world powers would stand a decent chance of closing to visual range once the long range weapons had been expended.
Even the F-22 still retains the ability to use short range IR missiles (Sidewinders) and still has a gun.
The strategic manoeveuring we see for the big battles are copied from the Naval battles of WWI and WW2 - such as Jutland.WW1 is a better point. By the time WW2 rolled around you didn't have sea battles anymore, you had air-sea battles involving aircraft and ships. But even at that, you still had ship to ship engagements. Look at the Bismarck. Look at the night fighting around Guadalcanal. Look at some of the engagements in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
A better question to ask about space combat is do fighters really serve a purpose at all or are they just eye candy for the big screen and something to make it one-on-one for the main characters? One argument says that there's no line of sight issues in space and fighters would be pointless. Another argument says that fighters can probably accelerate faster, get close to the big ships and strip them of weapons and sensors (even if they lack the firepower to destroy them outright).
At the risk of getting into a pointless debate about fictional technology, I would have to disagree with you. In the Bab 5 universe NOTHING exceeded the speed of light. The only point to hyperspace was that distances in real space were mapped into a smaller space in hyperspace. So you could travel at sub C speeds and cover interstellar distances. The mere act of going into a jump gate does not imply acceleration in the Bab 5 universe. Nor does leaving hyperspace imply deceleration.
Which wouldn't necessarily mean *NO* IDF, just IDF that doesn't react very quickly to extreme maneuvers or changes in direction.Now you are really reaching. Find me one example of a character in Bab 5 stating they aren't subject to the laws of physics the same as you or I are. Like I said, with the possible exception of the Minbari, none of the younger races had anything approaching IDF type technology in their fighters or capital ships. And even the Minbari are suspect, since we don't know how fast their fighters really accelerate, because JMS was purposefully vague when it came to details like that.
Human beings already have a primative form of IDF- anti-blackout pants, that our current jet fighter pilots use to pump blood back out of the legs and towards the brain during high-G maneuvers. But it's already possible to fly faster than those can react.I wouldn't call g-suits IDF technology. But regardless, I don't see how that helps prove your case that humans (never mind the other races) in Bab 5 had IDF style technology. You could say that the pressure suits worn by Starfury pilots worked like g-suits. For all we know they did. But that's not Star Trek style IDF technology.
Actually, as much as I love Star Trek, and have never really been as big a fan of Star Wars, one of the old ST vs. SW sites, by a pro Star Wars person put it best: Apparently in the 24th century they lack the necessary technology to make fancy devices like circuit breakers......
By mainstream I mean it's something that almost anybody would recognize. I suspect that if you stopped 100 random people on the street and showed them a picture of the Enterprise-D they'd think of TNG. Or if you asked them what role comes to mind when they think of Patrick Stewart, most would probably say Jean-Luc Picard. By contrast, I doubt nearly as many would peg to stuff from any of the series that you mentioned. Of course, to be fair, even though Bab 5 is one of my favorites, most people on the street probably wouldn't know what a Starfury is either.
TNG was the closest thing to a water cooler show that Sci-Fi has ever had. Even people who didn't particularly like Star Trek were at least somewhat familiar with it. I'm glad it ended when it did, because Season 7 was starting to show some of the stuff that made Voyager unwatchable (tech babble to the extreme and bad science), but even at that, TNG had a MUCH better send-off with "All Good Things" then any other Trek series.
Umm, MAYBE the Minbari had them, since we saw characters in their fighters without seat belts functioning quite effectively, but none of the younger races had anything remotely like them. Earthforce pilots were strapped in and the capital ships moved slowly enough that G-forces weren't an issue.
In fact, I seem to recall Sheridan telling his people that Centauri pilots (a race MORE advanced then Earth) were still subject to blacking out during extreme maneuvers.
Well, for starters, this guy had a very good point.
Beyond that though, I'm just disgusted at low Star Trek has gone. Seriously. We've gone from the golden age of TV Sci-Fi, with shows like TNG, DS9, Babylon 5 and SeaQuest all airing new episodes, to Paramount milking the cash cow that is Star Trek, putting out one crap release after another, banking on the "Star Trek" name to sell it.
You realize that Stephen Hawking of all people took TNG seriously enough that he made a tour of the set, asked to sit in Picard's chair and even did a cameo? You find me something on TV today that even comes close to what TNG was it's hayday. Or Babylon 5 for that matter. Yes, both had their downpoints (TNG Seasons 1-2 and 7, Babylon 5's last season and parts of the first), but I don't think you can find something on TV today that's anywhere near as good as either of them on a bad day.
And don't come back with Firefly, the standard /. answer. It's not in production anymore, who knows how good or bad it would have been if it had remained, and I don't consider it Sci-Fi like Bab 5 or TNG. It's more like a western in space. And before the Firefly fans all rush to click "reply" and flame me, I liked Serenity and the back story to Firefly. I just don't think you can point at a show that didn't even make one season as justification for why modern Sci-Fi doesn't suck.
And Battlestar Galactica, while an awesome show, is no where near as mainstream as TNG or even Bab 5. And while that's not entirely a bad thing, it doesn't exactly help make the case for Sci-Fi on TV either.
And if you go by all things holy then Enterprise, like Voyager and Star Trek V, never really happened.... at best it was a Holodeck malfunction.
In fact, come to recall, the lame ass series finale of Enterprise was literally a holodeck program on the Enterprise-D! I find it very easy to think that Voyager, Enterprise, and every TNG movie were just horrible holonovels written by somebody with a sick and twisted mind. It's the only thing keeping me from losing ALL faith in Star Trek....
Hey, Wars fans, is this how you felt when the prequels came out? I'm sorry for mocking you.... I just didn't understand at the time :(
Wanna tell me exactly how that fits into the OP saying we need "Newtonian-physics-accurate battle scenes"?
He was probably referring to doing stuff like blocking port 25 to silence spam bots, or blocking the Windows file sharing ports to prevent worms. Many ISPs do this and similar stuff.
I would also argue that there are things that any responsible system administrator (particularly at an ISP) should do as a public service to the rest of the internet. For example, if your edge router allows packets to leave your network that have source addresses that are obviously forged (source addresses in IP ranges you don't own for example), then you aren't doing the internet community any favors. If your mail server allows obvious viruses that could be blocked with one line of configuration into your users mailboxes then you aren't doing them any favors either....
You'll never be able to stop everything nor should you try. But there are very simple steps you can take to protect your users from some threats -- and to protect the internet as a whole. I'm not even in the ISP business anymore, but I've taken steps to prevent trojans, worms and the like from leaving my network, should I be unlucky enough to have one of my machines infected. I also sit in the NTP pool project. It's a little bit of "give back" to the internet community and reminds me of the old days before it became all about the corporations.
The worst part about the "don't tase me bro!" kid, IMHO, is that FOUR cops really should have been able to remove him without even needing to touch him. Cops are trained to be intimidating by nature. I've watched old-timers in law enforcement able to diffuse a nasty situation with a few words and the right body language. Are you telling me that four cops really couldn't handle one college student without using the taser (or pressure points, night-sticks, etc, etc)?
IMHO, the taser should be used as a replacement for deadly force, not as a new level of force used to compel people to do what the cops want. Recently our local cops shot and killed a mentally distributed individual who pulled a knife on them and refused to drop them. That sounds like the perfect scenario for a taser. Not some college kid that refuses to willingly leave a room. DRAG HIM OUT KICKING AND SCREAMING if you must, but I fail to see how a taser is justified in that scenario.
I work a mental health facility for seriously emotionally disturbed children and teenagers, some of whom are violent and bigger then a lot of the staff working here. And somehow we manage to control them and remain safe without using tasers, chemical restraints, or what have you.
So when a judge out in California orders a defendant shocked because he refused to shut up when ordered to do so, that's ok?
Thank you! I made this same point back in the discussion about the "don't tase me bro!" kid. The problem is tasers isn't the 1 person out of 10,000,000 that's going to die as a result of being tased. The problem is that the taser has lowered the standard of when to use force.
Forgot about the gun v. taser debate. Would a cop have been willing to use his nightstick on that kid? Yes, he was being a jerk and didn't go prone for them. But would they really have whipped out nightsticks and used them? Not likely. The image of four cops beating up a single college kid with nightsticks wouldn't play very well, now would it?
Ah! But the taser! We can use the taser. It's lowered the standard for when force can be used. And that's a bad thing, imho.
Another taser story that sticks out in my mind was a judge out in California ordering his court officers to tase a defendant who refused to stop speaking when ordered to. Yeah, throw him back in jail for contempt of court, but TASE someone for speaking? Not even screaming and yelling. Speaking! That's bullshit. If I walk up to Dick Cheney and tell him to go "fuck yourself" in a normal tone of voice is that really grounds for his USSS guards to tase you?
This packet from Amazon and this packet from Google, they get through very easily. But this packet, from fucktimewarner.org, it gets routed a little differently..... *riiiiiiiiiiiiiiip*
One would hope that the "smart" criminals can think of better things to do with their talents then sexually abusing children. A "smart" criminal that manages to pull off an Oceans 11 style heist from your least favorite bank or company may become a public icon. Hell, even some of the Mafia Dons in New York became public figures and had a certain measure of respect.
But someone who abuses children? They deserve and will get nothing but contempt. Contempt from society, contempt from law enforcement ("Yeah, I had to shoot him ten times, he was resisting arrest"), and contempt from the other inmates once they are convicted and sent up the river.
This is one of the few times that I would wish prison rape on someone. Enjoy being your cell-mates bitch and worrying about that shank in the back for the rest of your life, asshole. Death is too good for you.
I don't know about TFA, because like most people around here I didn't bother to read it, but I do have a bit of a background in the wireless industry. And ANYTHING that ANYBODY can do to loosen the tight grip that the carriers have on our collective balls is a good thing.
Right now the carriers control what types of phones you can use on their networks. They want to lock out anything that might compete with their own content offerings. It's bad enough that Microsoft can make all their own services (MSN Search and IE come to mind) the default in Windows. Now imagine if they made it outright impossible to install other software or content that didn't come from them. Because that's what the cellular carriers do!
There is no reason that there shouldn't be a wireless version of carterfone. This document provides an interesting read into the current state of affairs. Consumers on Verizon and Sprint are screwed. AT&T and T-Mobile customers fare a little better, since they always have the option of buying unbranded/unlocked GSM phones. But even at that the carriers are attempting to impose artificial limitations -- like T-Mobile's claim (false, but they still sell this to the unwashed masses) that MyFaves won't work on a non-MyFaves phone.
All the power to Google if they can open up this market just a little bit. I won't ever be owning an ad-sponsored phone. But maybe they will bring something similar to carterfone to the market. They certainly have nothing to fear from the carriers, unlike the equipment makers (Mororola, Nokia, etc) that are afraid to speak up for fear of losing that carriers business.
To what end? You realize that sets up debt slavery. What happens if you simply can't pay? They get a judgment that never expires and continue to pile up the 29.9% default APR? Everything in our history, from the common law to the Old Testament advocates debt forgiveness after a certain amount of time.
A lender took a risk when they decided to loan you money. If you can't repay and have to file BK that's their bad luck. It hits their bottom line, not the taxpayers. This has nothing to do with socialism. The Government didn't force Citi or Chase to hand out so many credit card lines. They made a calculation that they could make more in profits then they lose in defaults. To a large extent this is true. I don't see any of them doing anything other then reporting record earnings, year after year. I have zero pity for them if somebody gets in over their head and has to file bankruptcy.
I hope you never have the misfortune of going through any of this. But let me explain how it works anyway. You stop paying your credit card bills. The first thing they do is assign it to a collection agency. If that collection agency collects payment, the creditor gets the bulk of the money (the agency takes a commission). But let's say you can't make payment at this stage. After six months they are required by law to charge off your debt. Now they get a tax credit for taking this 'loss'. So what do they do now? They sell your debt to a debt buyer for pennies on the dollar (less then 5%). That debt buyer is now going to come after you for 150-200% of the original amount owed, thanks to the miracle of the 29.99-34.99% default APR rate.
I'm sorry, but when I got healthy I took stock of my finances. Then I realized that even if I could repay my debts (explain to me how you repay debts that total 300% of your income) the original creditors that I borrowed the money from would receive ZERO DOLLARS. I should have lived as a debt slave for the next 15 years to repay NCO, Arrow Financial, etc, etc money that I never even borrowed from them in the first place?
My actual final answer to your question is yes, if you can't obtain financing or pay up front for what you need, you don't get itThat's all well and good if the thing you "need" is a car, computer or house. But if your life depends on it then I think you have a realistic exception of help from society. The world that you are advocating is a dog eat dog world, where debtors prisons would flourish and children with medical problems and poor parents would be shit-out-of-luck. I'd like to think that we've advanced beyond the 19th century.
Good theory. The problem is that your main hard drive would probably still have some sort of evidence on it. Recently opened documents, cached .torrent files in Azureus, system logs of any programs that crashed while they had "illegal" files opened, etc, etc.
Can anybody (even a /. geek) have enough trust in themselves to be sure that they clean away all the fingerprints in this scenario? Much safer to dispose of/reformat/whatever the entire thing.
It's not fair, but do you have a better solution? Debtor prison? Should I have to work for the hospital and/or credit card company for free until the debts are repaid? What's the solution besides when somebody winds up so deeply in debt that they will never be able to pay it off?
If you receive the benefit of treatment, but escape the cost of that benefit, that's also not fair; Someone else, who did not receive the benefit, has to pay the cost. It's not free.Again, what's your better solution? If people can't afford to pay for medical treatment up front should they just not receive it? One of the advantages of living in a society as opposed to living in caves is that society will take care of you when are unable to do so for yourself. I'm not advocating welfare here for people that can pull their own weight -- but if you have a legitimate problem and you can't solve it on your own then what should happen?
Hell, even some types of animals (wolfs, lions, etc) will take care of injured members of the pack that can't pull their own weight. This is a random musing, but I was watching some show on animal planet, and they showed a pride of lions. One of the lionesses had a broken leg and couldn't contribute to the hunt. The others still let her take her place when it came time to eat.