Bethesda has been churning games out by the bucketfuls since they got the license. ST: Legacy was quite good. ST: Encounters, which this new game looks most like, was alright. Tactical Assault and Conquest were underwhelming.
Armada 2 is still one of my favorite RTS and the one I turn to when I want a break from Starcraft.
I'd say the hit-miss rate of Trek games is at least as good as for games in general. I say that as a confessed die-hard Trekkie, mind. =)
The rest of your reasoning seems to flow from this initial assumption, and it's this assumption that I think is so dangerous about biometrics. (I grant that, if this were true, your reasoning holds)
There are different ways of analyzing your fingerprint and distilling that down to what is essentially a hash that can be compared against. A simple skin pattern shape analysis is the most familiar, but as every spy movie in the last three decades has shown that can be compromised as easily as posing as a cute waitress and getting your drinking glass away from you.
There are more advanced systems that use an analysis of the blood flow patterns through the fingertip to defeat that simple hack, but it's not at all outlandish to imagine a determined attacker creating a synthetic model that has close enough to the same properties to fool a print scanner.
A basic assumption I always try to start from when designing a security model is that there is _nothing_ that is impossible to compromise, there never will be, so just design your system to be as resistant and adaptable to that fact as you can. When viewed in that light, any and all biometric authentication systems have the fatal flaw that you cannot change your authentication token even if you know for certain that it's been compromised.
> The 'consensus' has been wrong before and they will be wrong again.
And in this case, if we follow the consensus and it turns out they're wrong, the consequences of that are what?
We've dramatically cleaned up our environment, achieved energy independence, freed ourselves from the political constraints of fossil fuels and massively bolstered our economy with a whole new class of green businesses.
> We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
The fact that there is a nonzero number of users for Netflix's streaming service proves that's not true. Yeah, I could get everything off Bittorrent, but instead I'm an outspoken enthusiast for Netflix's instant streaming. Why would I, when it's cheaper and easier to just grab the torrent?
Because not everyone who downloads is the {MP,RI}AA caricature you seem to have bought into. We very much _want_ to "go legit", and we're waiting on the much-vaunted free market to deliver a solution that isn't 3 orders of magnitude more stressful to deal with than the Bittorrent method.
As a further example; since Amazon started selling non-DRM'd MP3 files that could be accessed from a Linux browser, I haven't gotten a single song that was available from them through any other channel, and every song that I've listened to from my pre-existing collection, I've gone back and purchased from them.
(Some) people want, very much, to support a legitimate online content delivery mechanism. We're still waiting on the free market to come up with one that isn't awful.
You must have some vastly different hardware than anything I've used in years. For a concrete example; I am a devotee of Lenovo Thinkpads, especially the T series. Linux installs on these like a dream. To install Windows on them, you have to go into the BIOS, set the SATA controller to compatibility mode, do the install, get a very hard to find disk from Lenovo's site since Windows will not try to re-detect the root volume's storage controller if it changes (it will blue-screen with INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE, if memory serves), and then go BACK into the BIOS to set it back to SATA mode.
In Linux, you just install and go. Windows has a long way to go to catch up with Linux in terms of ease of use and ease of install.
This conversation started glibly, but if you want to have a real conversation about gun control, I'm game.
I see two arguments in your post. The first is that guns should be unregulated because the U.S. Constitution says so. I've always found this a puzzling suggestion; the Constitution I'm reading is pretty clear that, with respect to firearms, they are to be unrestricted _explicitly_ within the context of a _well regulated_ militia. How this has come to mean "anybody can have any kind of weapon anywhere at any time and do anything with it they choose" has always been perplexing to me.
The second argument I see is that if firearms are unrestricted, robberies are more likely to be thwarted by violence. Having been robbed myself, I can say I'm glad that I didn't have a firearm available to me at the time... but even putting that aside and assuming that shooting robbers is a desirable outcome, I've never seen anything to convince me that a proliferation of firearms won't create more violent altercations than it prevents.
Call me when a Bat'Leth is 12 times more likely to accidentally kill the owner or a member of the owner's family than to serve it's intended purpose; then we'll talk.
> I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.
Then your kids will likely grow up with the same confusion and shame about sex that has poisoned western civilization for centuries. Congratulations, I guess.
I would suggest that once your planet's metabolism comes up with entities that reproduce in such a way as to pass on their properties to their offspring (i.e. what we think of as "life"), the eventual emergence of technology is a foregone conclusion. It's just too useful an adaptation. If "we" (homo sapiens) hadn't developed a technology culture, eventually some other species would have and they'd be the dominant species on Earth.
Probably the dolphins, although inventing chemistry would have been a bitch...
> So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic > projects that have marginal long-term benefit.
-shrug- If I were going to start a company that could benefit from a super-modern tech infrastructure and a tech-savvy and well-connected work force, this move would float South Korea that much closer to the top of the list for where I would set up shop.
Would the economic boost be enough to offset the cost? I guess we'll see.
Good point... it wasn't until Gran Turismo and Forza that I really grokked the relationship between accelerating, braking, and turning and that they all draw from a common pool of traction. I'm a much better driver in normal highway situations because of the fundamentals I picked up playing driving sims.
You misunderstand me. My point is, we can let the climatologists and the politicians keep scrapping over whether climate change is man-made, whether we can affect it through our behavior, and for that matter whether we even want to change the course. But no matter where we all eventually land on those questions, if we can just agree as well-intentioned people on both sides that we prefer clean air to dirty air, clean water to filthy water, non-polluting renewable power sources to fossil fuels, then we can go ahead and get to work on 99% of the issues that environmental weenies like me care about while we wait for the science to get to the bottom of what's really going on.
The problem I have with the vehement opponents of the man-made climate change theory is not having a healthy debate with them; it's that their movement comes bundled with a package of policies that lead to more pollution and more dependence on filthy non-renewable energy resources.
Slashdot Mirror
-nod- I think GP was thinking of the inertial dampeners.
You should just repeat to yourself "It's just a show. I should probably just relax".
> Prove me wrong
Spiderman 2.
Bethesda has been churning games out by the bucketfuls since they got the license. ST: Legacy was quite good. ST: Encounters, which this new game looks most like, was alright. Tactical Assault and Conquest were underwhelming.
Armada 2 is still one of my favorite RTS and the one I turn to when I want a break from Starcraft.
I'd say the hit-miss rate of Trek games is at least as good as for games in general. I say that as a confessed die-hard Trekkie, mind. =)
> A fingerprint cannot be compromised.
The rest of your reasoning seems to flow from this initial assumption, and it's this assumption that I think is so dangerous about biometrics. (I grant that, if this were true, your reasoning holds)
There are different ways of analyzing your fingerprint and distilling that down to what is essentially a hash that can be compared against. A simple skin pattern shape analysis is the most familiar, but as every spy movie in the last three decades has shown that can be compromised as easily as posing as a cute waitress and getting your drinking glass away from you.
There are more advanced systems that use an analysis of the blood flow patterns through the fingertip to defeat that simple hack, but it's not at all outlandish to imagine a determined attacker creating a synthetic model that has close enough to the same properties to fool a print scanner.
A basic assumption I always try to start from when designing a security model is that there is _nothing_ that is impossible to compromise, there never will be, so just design your system to be as resistant and adaptable to that fact as you can. When viewed in that light, any and all biometric authentication systems have the fatal flaw that you cannot change your authentication token even if you know for certain that it's been compromised.
> I disagree, biometrics are great for both.
Any authenticating factor that cannot be changed in the event it is compromised is _not_ great.
The Science Directorate has stated that faster-than-light travel is not possible...
> if they wanted aggregates to link to their content I would think hulu would have provided an API to allow it.
They did. It's called the hypertext transfer protocol.
Which would you rather get?
GINORMOUS !
> The 'consensus' has been wrong before and they will be wrong again.
And in this case, if we follow the consensus and it turns out they're wrong, the consequences of that are what?
We've dramatically cleaned up our environment, achieved energy independence, freed ourselves from the political constraints of fossil fuels and massively bolstered our economy with a whole new class of green businesses.
Explain again why you're so against this?
> Im all for conservation and greener technologies.
> But this is not what is driving the Global Warming folks.
Speak for yourself. That's _exactly_ why I'm in so strongly favor of listening to the overwhelming consensus of climatologists.
> We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it.
The fact that there is a nonzero number of users for Netflix's streaming service proves that's not true. Yeah, I could get everything off Bittorrent, but instead I'm an outspoken enthusiast for Netflix's instant streaming. Why would I, when it's cheaper and easier to just grab the torrent?
Because not everyone who downloads is the {MP,RI}AA caricature you seem to have bought into. We very much _want_ to "go legit", and we're waiting on the much-vaunted free market to deliver a solution that isn't 3 orders of magnitude more stressful to deal with than the Bittorrent method.
As a further example; since Amazon started selling non-DRM'd MP3 files that could be accessed from a Linux browser, I haven't gotten a single song that was available from them through any other channel, and every song that I've listened to from my pre-existing collection, I've gone back and purchased from them.
(Some) people want, very much, to support a legitimate online content delivery mechanism. We're still waiting on the free market to come up with one that isn't awful.
You must have some vastly different hardware than anything I've used in years. For a concrete example; I am a devotee of Lenovo Thinkpads, especially the T series. Linux installs on these like a dream. To install Windows on them, you have to go into the BIOS, set the SATA controller to compatibility mode, do the install, get a very hard to find disk from Lenovo's site since Windows will not try to re-detect the root volume's storage controller if it changes (it will blue-screen with INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE, if memory serves), and then go BACK into the BIOS to set it back to SATA mode.
In Linux, you just install and go. Windows has a long way to go to catch up with Linux in terms of ease of use and ease of install.
This conversation started glibly, but if you want to have a real conversation about gun control, I'm game.
I see two arguments in your post. The first is that guns should be unregulated because the U.S. Constitution says so. I've always found this a puzzling suggestion; the Constitution I'm reading is pretty clear that, with respect to firearms, they are to be unrestricted _explicitly_ within the context of a _well regulated_ militia. How this has come to mean "anybody can have any kind of weapon anywhere at any time and do anything with it they choose" has always been perplexing to me.
The second argument I see is that if firearms are unrestricted, robberies are more likely to be thwarted by violence. Having been robbed myself, I can say I'm glad that I didn't have a firearm available to me at the time... but even putting that aside and assuming that shooting robbers is a desirable outcome, I've never seen anything to convince me that a proliferation of firearms won't create more violent altercations than it prevents.
Care to elaborate? When the facts support my position, it's hardly distortion for me to list them. =)
Call me when a Bat'Leth is 12 times more likely to accidentally kill the owner or a member of the owner's family than to serve it's intended purpose; then we'll talk.
> I'd be unhappy if there were kids watching it with me.
Then your kids will likely grow up with the same confusion and shame about sex that has poisoned western civilization for centuries. Congratulations, I guess.
> Iraq (to UN): "We are evicting your WMD inspectors!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxdKlIZVDTQ
6m16s.
Who was he telling to leave??
I would suggest that once your planet's metabolism comes up with entities that reproduce in such a way as to pass on their properties to their offspring (i.e. what we think of as "life"), the eventual emergence of technology is a foregone conclusion. It's just too useful an adaptation. If "we" (homo sapiens) hadn't developed a technology culture, eventually some other species would have and they'd be the dominant species on Earth.
Probably the dolphins, although inventing chemistry would have been a bitch...
> So they invest huge amounts of money into basically symbolic
> projects that have marginal long-term benefit.
-shrug- If I were going to start a company that could benefit from a super-modern tech
infrastructure and a tech-savvy and well-connected work force, this move would float
South Korea that much closer to the top of the list for where I would set up shop.
Would the economic boost be enough to offset the cost? I guess we'll see.
Good point... it wasn't until Gran Turismo and Forza that I really grokked the relationship between accelerating, braking, and turning and that they all draw from a common pool of traction. I'm a much better driver in normal highway situations because of the fundamentals I picked up playing driving sims.
> 'cause SSD's don't cost $300-$500 more than their spindle counterparts, yep yep.
Hint: Enterprise storage purchasing often looks at dollars/IOPS rather than dollars/GB.
> However the 7 pounds of lead in a 15 pound computer is complete BS. First
> most CRTs weigh about 30 pounds so this 15 pound number is perverse.
15" means it's a 15 inch monitor, not 15 pounds.
You misunderstand me. My point is, we can let the climatologists and the politicians keep scrapping over whether climate change is man-made, whether we can affect it through our behavior, and for that matter whether we even want to change the course. But no matter where we all eventually land on those questions, if we can just agree as well-intentioned people on both sides that we prefer clean air to dirty air, clean water to filthy water, non-polluting renewable power sources to fossil fuels, then we can go ahead and get to work on 99% of the issues that environmental weenies like me care about while we wait for the science to get to the bottom of what's really going on.
The problem I have with the vehement opponents of the man-made climate change theory is not having a healthy debate with them; it's that their movement comes bundled with a package of policies that lead to more pollution and more dependence on filthy non-renewable energy resources.