> Better stop using your iPhone or Android device because, guaranteed you have some app that is phoning home telemetry.
1- My phone isn't my desktop, and they don't do the same things. 2- Phone suck at privacy, that's not a reason for a desktop to start sucking too. Just because one thing sucks doesn't mean more things have to suck. That's retarded. 3- You guarantee, eh? Well, lets talk about my iphone for a second. What's sending telemetry? Does my notes app? Does it send telemetry every time I launch an app? Like, which app is doing it? Is it the OS doing it? Is it at all reasonable to compare "ios and every possible ios application" to "a baseline Windows 10 install that alerts microsoft every time you run notepad"?
> the GNU/Linux market is not entirely free of privacy intrusions
Whereas the Windows market consists of nothing but.
There's a ton of distros. The top one by desktop numbers is (probably) Mint, which has no such drama. If you point to ONE distro with ONE issue (and a really easy one to disable, by the way), what does that mean? Call me when there's a hundred windows distros to pick from and the Windows 10 crap is happening to just ONE of them.
> You can block the spying if you put 100+ of the domains that Windows phones to....
I think this is an experiment to see how many hoops Windows users will jump through. A third party firewall to block over a hundred domains? What about when it requests by IP address directly? Everyone is like "run this giant script that we hopefully will maintain". It's nuts.
Look at the OSes that Microsoft Windows competes with- the Wii U dashboard and the PS4 dashboard. Granted, they don't spy as much, but they have very similar policies otherwise.
My point is that your phrasing implies that politicians in other places are better. "Except for the cases where I've first eaten caviar, I can't punch through an iron block" is logically true, but if I then point out that I've never eaten caviar and was just trying to not exclude the case where caviar gives me iron punching powers.... well, you see the point.
> It gets harder and harder for me to understand why so many people stay on Microsoft operating systems.
Other OSes are no better.
Look at Microsoft's Windows competitors:
1- The PS4 OS only allows you to install certain pre approved apps from a store. Now, it doesn't log keystrokes like Windows 10, but that's probably just because so few users play keyboard games. You also can't even play most of the games online unless you have the latest version of everything. On top of that, there's no good way to get a compiler!
2- The Wii U controls very sharply which games you can play, and also has a built in app store. It's just as locked down as the PS4 or the Windows!
Well, that's it for Windows competitors. But really, what's the big deal? All the OSes like Windows are pretty similar these days.
I'm so glad you can make some argument based on principle, and show by equivalence that you could, in theory, have a problem with violent Christian extremists, violet environmental extremists, and so on down the list. But why don't you go by something like "body count" and figure out which of these things is actually a real problem?
One thing that ticks me off in political debates goes like this:
Person A: George Bush sucks, because X. Person B: I disagree, because Al Gore sucks, because Y.
Two things wrong with this: Obviously, Person B isn't addressing the question. And more importantly, if you replace "Al Gore" with "John Kerry", you now see the problem- not only is the issue not being addressed, but now the argument is only even understandable if you realize who is running AGAINST someone. If someone claims Hillary Clinton has shitty policies, and your first impression is to go look to see who the Republican frontrunner is so you can formulate an attack against them, you're so far from rational debate that you'll need to pray to the wind gods to ever see those fair lands again.
The mirror shows up here: "The problem with violent Islam is X" -> "Oh, well, in theory, any religion can be violent, and in practice, others have been. "
Don't reframe. If a billion peasants were screaming Deus Vult and stabbing Muslims, then your equivalence argument might have some weight- instead it's just a worthless apologetic so you can reframe it to a general attack on religions, or people who believe strongly in something. LOOK AROUND YOU
> Clowns to the left and jokers to the right sounds like a succinct summary of politics in every English speaking country.
Curious, what languages do you speak besides English? Like, are you just saying that politics in English speaking countries suck because you can understand them and know they are full of crap, or is there some other language where politicians don't lie? Is it, like, a secret language, like Druidic?
> It isn't like there has never been a modern Christian terrorist movement. The IRA comes to mind.
Oh, the IRA comes to mind, does it?
First, the IRA has killed less than 2000 people since the 1960s. Al Qaeda killed over 2500 just on September 11th, and that's only part of AQ, which is itself only a part of all Islamist terrorism. Second, the IRA isn't waging some kind of religious war- there is a big difference between religious people doing a bad thing based on some political goal, and religious people doing a bad thing based on some religious goal. Third, the majority of Islamist terrorism is to disrupt and kill peaceful Muslims- the mirror of that would be the IRA (though again, vastly less in scope). But while the majority of Islamist terror, it's only *part*- the IRA didn't go shooting up Paris, as a great example.
The fact that, in principle, someone might kill you for a religious reason, should not disrupt the reality that not every religion behaves in the way that the radical Islamists do. The numbers involved, the money involved, and the highly sophisticated recruitment methods involved should also not be discounted.
Well, I doubt all weaponry would be dedicated to killing the very few people who were "the guardians and peace and justice" for "over a thousand generations". The blasters are meant to be scary and deadly, and anyone hit with one is just pretty much dead instantly.
I don't really believe that the stormtroopers are shitty, even against the heroes. The only scenes that stretch the scariness of the stormtroopers are the ones versus the Ewoks, and even that fight is "the stormtroopers are generally unstoppable" up until Chewie hijacks an AT-ST and makes them run for their lives into traps. The earlier scenes where the stormtroopers seemingly can't hit are followed immediately by Vader revealing that he has a homing device on the ship, or whatever- it's a trap! Etc.
While this theory has some traction with some of the EU authors, I really feel it misses the point of the Jedi. The Jedi are wizard space knights, right? So they know how to deal with weaponry. The story is about blasters because they are scary and more deadly than regular guns. The blasters, while apparently slower than regular projectiles, are still too fast for you to see and respond to, even if your reflexes were instant. The whole point is that the Jedi know where the blast is going to be- the fact that they have some kind of battle prescience shows up pretty well in Holy Trilogy, and is in most of the other material as well.
So if a rifleman was shooting a Jedi, he'd parry the bullet because he'd know where the guy was aiming with his space wizard powers, same as a laser. Scattershot he'd probably gather up into a ball with his space wizard powers, and parry that too. Maybe he'd be able to bounce the shots too. It's silly to think that the guys shooting them are choosing bad weapons for the task, or that real world firearms would somehow be more effective. The weapons that the force users are attacked with, they have methods of dealing with- because they are space wizard knights. The story isn't about people who are ineffective against shotguns but blissfully and thankfully don't have to deal with any, or whatever.
Well, you can still look up the numbers for (a) (and obviously guns are deadly IRL, but they are not one hit one kill in most cases), and for (b) it is important to note that with the blasters, we see instant (and conveniently bloodless) deaths. No medical attention can save those poor science fiction mooks that are instantly killed!
Also the army in Holy Trilogy are assuredly not clones- they are all different heights and widths and have different voices. The clone thing in the prequels obviously wasn't thought of yet, and even given that, there's no reason to assume that the troopers are anything but normal men.
I think that part of the thing with the NATO ammo is that there are rules about what you can and can't use in a warzone, and they are choosing within that set.
> To claim that, means claiming a plasma in slow motion, also not realistic.
We don't really know the physics of the blasters. Certainly the movies aren't concerned about them. The general idea is that they are plasma somehow contained in some magnetic field, but the details of that- and what technical restrictions might affect such a thing- could be used to get you to the comparably slow but powerful and generally endlessly able to fire blasters and blaster rifles in the movies.
The asteroids and such pretty much have no parallel- if we take them on the square, we are at best assuming that their galaxy is profoundly different than ours, given the many orders of magnitude of differences involved. It is clear that great liberties are required to permit their existence.
> . If the blaster shot hits bare skin -- say Princess Leia's arm on Endor
I always saw that as the blaster hitting the metal, and she is injured by the force of the near miss. You did make me go check frame by frame, and I'll still stand by that interpretation- I see the blaster bolt special effect in one frame as flying at the space where her arm is adjacent to the metal wall, and the next frame has the spark explosion thing with an apparent center point that looks, to me, to originate from the door. But it's a close thing. If you want to see what I'm looking at, it's around 1:47:09 in the despecialized Jedi.
> In real life a bullet is also pretty much one-and-done.
This is definitely not true. Assuming we are talking about rounds like you might see from a battle rifle, there's still plenty of survivors, and even in the case of burst fire, it's entirely possible to be struck by one, but not the others, or for the bullets to strike you somewhere that injures or maims but does not kill. If we are talking about other types of firearms, the odds go way up.
Bullets are nowhere close to a one shot kill, and even when they strike mortally, the death is not usually instant.
There's another part that's important in this comparison- you are assuming a shot that strikes some part of the body where it's possible to bleed out. That's a reasonable concern in the real world- everyone knows that taking a bullet to your finger will likely cost you a finger, but will not cost you your life as a first order effect (you may get some infection or something)- but even minor hits with blasters in Star Wars, if they strike flesh, are fatal or nearly so.
Anyway, I definitely disagree with your statements on lethality of individual rounds, and even you seem to- after all, you immediately assume that you'll get hit by more than one bullet, and be struck in an artery or organ or something.
> (2) Science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields.
This is actually pretty reasonable in most presentations. The big name here is Star Trek, though much sci fi has this trope.
The thing is, how many giant space ships are there, relative to population? And is it considered a noble calling, etc.? The Starfleet officers generally are of the opinion that there's nothing better than Starfleet, and they all struggle mightily to be the best. How many Federation spaceships are there, relative to population?
I'm sure that somewhere there are numbers for this, but that's not really important- what is important is that the skies are not thick with giant spaceships, but everywhere they go there are nearby planets that are settled. Without saying a single number, it's pretty obvious that giant spaceships are very rare relative to the total massive population.
So picking top tier geniuses for these positions is entirely plausible- and it's doubly so when you remember that the idea of this risky, high intellect, public service job being considered the *top position to be aspired to* is core to the show.
They are slower than ballistic ammo, but they seem to explode a lot of things that they hit. Perhaps not the interior of some military installations. They also don't seem to follow a ballistic arc, and they are vastly more deadly than bullets- anyone hit with a blaster is pretty much fucked, it seems. There is also the apparent ease of recharge- we don't know how the blasters are recharged, but we definitely don't see everyone lugging around a hundred pounds of ammo or battery in most cases.
> Columbian coffee. Canadian bacon. Irish whiskey.
I think you really nail it here. Canadian bacon is the best example: it's not bacon, and it's not from Canada, but the name sticks. I think the problem is when people hang out *with Romulans* and talk about "Romulan ale"- the Romulans would, of course, know better, as would some ale aficionado. But in the general case, it's very safe to say "Earth Sugardrink" when talking about whatever the most popular human soda is. Sure, *we'd* know better, but the aliens might not, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
> Better stop using your iPhone or Android device because, guaranteed you have some app that is phoning home telemetry.
1- My phone isn't my desktop, and they don't do the same things.
2- Phone suck at privacy, that's not a reason for a desktop to start sucking too. Just because one thing sucks doesn't mean more things have to suck. That's retarded.
3- You guarantee, eh? Well, lets talk about my iphone for a second. What's sending telemetry? Does my notes app? Does it send telemetry every time I launch an app? Like, which app is doing it? Is it the OS doing it? Is it at all reasonable to compare "ios and every possible ios application" to "a baseline Windows 10 install that alerts microsoft every time you run notepad"?
> That can be minimized.
The inability to disable telemetry is a giant problem. Windows even sends telemetry about its telemetry settings. It's absolutely ludicrous.
Wait, hold on. Is this a comparison between Windows and OS X, or a comparison between Windows and ios?
Unimportant difference and irrelevant point.
You can disable the spying in Windows 7 / 8. You cannot in Windows 10.
> the GNU/Linux market is not entirely free of privacy intrusions
Whereas the Windows market consists of nothing but.
There's a ton of distros. The top one by desktop numbers is (probably) Mint, which has no such drama. If you point to ONE distro with ONE issue (and a really easy one to disable, by the way), what does that mean? Call me when there's a hundred windows distros to pick from and the Windows 10 crap is happening to just ONE of them.
You have to block the domains at the router, and the IPs at the router I think too.
> You can block the spying if you put 100+ of the domains that Windows phones to....
I think this is an experiment to see how many hoops Windows users will jump through. A third party firewall to block over a hundred domains? What about when it requests by IP address directly? Everyone is like "run this giant script that we hopefully will maintain". It's nuts.
Logically, if you get tricked into downloading a thing, you are now an Original Equipment Manufacturer. This is simple, people, come on.
But how is this different from any other OS?
Look at the OSes that Microsoft Windows competes with- the Wii U dashboard and the PS4 dashboard. Granted, they don't spy as much, but they have very similar policies otherwise.
My point is that your phrasing implies that politicians in other places are better. "Except for the cases where I've first eaten caviar, I can't punch through an iron block" is logically true, but if I then point out that I've never eaten caviar and was just trying to not exclude the case where caviar gives me iron punching powers.... well, you see the point.
I want you to be modded "+5 Sad Truth"
> It gets harder and harder for me to understand why so many people stay on Microsoft operating systems.
Other OSes are no better.
Look at Microsoft's Windows competitors:
1- The PS4 OS only allows you to install certain pre approved apps from a store. Now, it doesn't log keystrokes like Windows 10, but that's probably just because so few users play keyboard games. You also can't even play most of the games online unless you have the latest version of everything. On top of that, there's no good way to get a compiler!
2- The Wii U controls very sharply which games you can play, and also has a built in app store. It's just as locked down as the PS4 or the Windows!
Well, that's it for Windows competitors. But really, what's the big deal? All the OSes like Windows are pretty similar these days.
I'm so glad you can make some argument based on principle, and show by equivalence that you could, in theory, have a problem with violent Christian extremists, violet environmental extremists, and so on down the list. But why don't you go by something like "body count" and figure out which of these things is actually a real problem?
One thing that ticks me off in political debates goes like this:
Person A: George Bush sucks, because X.
Person B: I disagree, because Al Gore sucks, because Y.
Two things wrong with this: Obviously, Person B isn't addressing the question. And more importantly, if you replace "Al Gore" with "John Kerry", you now see the problem- not only is the issue not being addressed, but now the argument is only even understandable if you realize who is running AGAINST someone. If someone claims Hillary Clinton has shitty policies, and your first impression is to go look to see who the Republican frontrunner is so you can formulate an attack against them, you're so far from rational debate that you'll need to pray to the wind gods to ever see those fair lands again.
The mirror shows up here: "The problem with violent Islam is X" -> "Oh, well, in theory, any religion can be violent, and in practice, others have been. "
Don't reframe. If a billion peasants were screaming Deus Vult and stabbing Muslims, then your equivalence argument might have some weight- instead it's just a worthless apologetic so you can reframe it to a general attack on religions, or people who believe strongly in something. LOOK AROUND YOU
> Clowns to the left and jokers to the right sounds like a succinct summary of politics in every English speaking country.
Curious, what languages do you speak besides English? Like, are you just saying that politics in English speaking countries suck because you can understand them and know they are full of crap, or is there some other language where politicians don't lie? Is it, like, a secret language, like Druidic?
> It isn't like there has never been a modern Christian terrorist movement. The IRA comes to mind.
Oh, the IRA comes to mind, does it?
First, the IRA has killed less than 2000 people since the 1960s. Al Qaeda killed over 2500 just on September 11th, and that's only part of AQ, which is itself only a part of all Islamist terrorism.
Second, the IRA isn't waging some kind of religious war- there is a big difference between religious people doing a bad thing based on some political goal, and religious people doing a bad thing based on some religious goal.
Third, the majority of Islamist terrorism is to disrupt and kill peaceful Muslims- the mirror of that would be the IRA (though again, vastly less in scope). But while the majority of Islamist terror, it's only *part*- the IRA didn't go shooting up Paris, as a great example.
The fact that, in principle, someone might kill you for a religious reason, should not disrupt the reality that not every religion behaves in the way that the radical Islamists do. The numbers involved, the money involved, and the highly sophisticated recruitment methods involved should also not be discounted.
> I was born on this planet and I'm pretty sure I'd spit out any Earth Sugardrink
Hey guys, I found the Reptile Overlord!
Man, that was easy. Where do I pick up my conspiracy guy paycheck?
Well, I doubt all weaponry would be dedicated to killing the very few people who were "the guardians and peace and justice" for "over a thousand generations". The blasters are meant to be scary and deadly, and anyone hit with one is just pretty much dead instantly.
I don't really believe that the stormtroopers are shitty, even against the heroes. The only scenes that stretch the scariness of the stormtroopers are the ones versus the Ewoks, and even that fight is "the stormtroopers are generally unstoppable" up until Chewie hijacks an AT-ST and makes them run for their lives into traps. The earlier scenes where the stormtroopers seemingly can't hit are followed immediately by Vader revealing that he has a homing device on the ship, or whatever- it's a trap! Etc.
While this theory has some traction with some of the EU authors, I really feel it misses the point of the Jedi. The Jedi are wizard space knights, right? So they know how to deal with weaponry. The story is about blasters because they are scary and more deadly than regular guns. The blasters, while apparently slower than regular projectiles, are still too fast for you to see and respond to, even if your reflexes were instant. The whole point is that the Jedi know where the blast is going to be- the fact that they have some kind of battle prescience shows up pretty well in Holy Trilogy, and is in most of the other material as well.
So if a rifleman was shooting a Jedi, he'd parry the bullet because he'd know where the guy was aiming with his space wizard powers, same as a laser. Scattershot he'd probably gather up into a ball with his space wizard powers, and parry that too. Maybe he'd be able to bounce the shots too. It's silly to think that the guys shooting them are choosing bad weapons for the task, or that real world firearms would somehow be more effective. The weapons that the force users are attacked with, they have methods of dealing with- because they are space wizard knights. The story isn't about people who are ineffective against shotguns but blissfully and thankfully don't have to deal with any, or whatever.
Well, you can still look up the numbers for (a) (and obviously guns are deadly IRL, but they are not one hit one kill in most cases), and for (b) it is important to note that with the blasters, we see instant (and conveniently bloodless) deaths. No medical attention can save those poor science fiction mooks that are instantly killed!
Also the army in Holy Trilogy are assuredly not clones- they are all different heights and widths and have different voices. The clone thing in the prequels obviously wasn't thought of yet, and even given that, there's no reason to assume that the troopers are anything but normal men.
I think that part of the thing with the NATO ammo is that there are rules about what you can and can't use in a warzone, and they are choosing within that set.
> To claim that, means claiming a plasma in slow motion, also not realistic.
We don't really know the physics of the blasters. Certainly the movies aren't concerned about them. The general idea is that they are plasma somehow contained in some magnetic field, but the details of that- and what technical restrictions might affect such a thing- could be used to get you to the comparably slow but powerful and generally endlessly able to fire blasters and blaster rifles in the movies.
The asteroids and such pretty much have no parallel- if we take them on the square, we are at best assuming that their galaxy is profoundly different than ours, given the many orders of magnitude of differences involved. It is clear that great liberties are required to permit their existence.
> . If the blaster shot hits bare skin -- say Princess Leia's arm on Endor
I always saw that as the blaster hitting the metal, and she is injured by the force of the near miss. You did make me go check frame by frame, and I'll still stand by that interpretation- I see the blaster bolt special effect in one frame as flying at the space where her arm is adjacent to the metal wall, and the next frame has the spark explosion thing with an apparent center point that looks, to me, to originate from the door. But it's a close thing. If you want to see what I'm looking at, it's around 1:47:09 in the despecialized Jedi.
> In real life a bullet is also pretty much one-and-done.
This is definitely not true. Assuming we are talking about rounds like you might see from a battle rifle, there's still plenty of survivors, and even in the case of burst fire, it's entirely possible to be struck by one, but not the others, or for the bullets to strike you somewhere that injures or maims but does not kill. If we are talking about other types of firearms, the odds go way up.
Bullets are nowhere close to a one shot kill, and even when they strike mortally, the death is not usually instant.
There's another part that's important in this comparison- you are assuming a shot that strikes some part of the body where it's possible to bleed out. That's a reasonable concern in the real world- everyone knows that taking a bullet to your finger will likely cost you a finger, but will not cost you your life as a first order effect (you may get some infection or something)- but even minor hits with blasters in Star Wars, if they strike flesh, are fatal or nearly so.
Anyway, I definitely disagree with your statements on lethality of individual rounds, and even you seem to- after all, you immediately assume that you'll get hit by more than one bullet, and be struck in an artery or organ or something.
> (2) Science officers with Ph.D. levels of expertise in dozens of fields.
This is actually pretty reasonable in most presentations. The big name here is Star Trek, though much sci fi has this trope.
The thing is, how many giant space ships are there, relative to population? And is it considered a noble calling, etc.? The Starfleet officers generally are of the opinion that there's nothing better than Starfleet, and they all struggle mightily to be the best. How many Federation spaceships are there, relative to population?
I'm sure that somewhere there are numbers for this, but that's not really important- what is important is that the skies are not thick with giant spaceships, but everywhere they go there are nearby planets that are settled. Without saying a single number, it's pretty obvious that giant spaceships are very rare relative to the total massive population.
So picking top tier geniuses for these positions is entirely plausible- and it's doubly so when you remember that the idea of this risky, high intellect, public service job being considered the *top position to be aspired to* is core to the show.
They are slower than ballistic ammo, but they seem to explode a lot of things that they hit. Perhaps not the interior of some military installations. They also don't seem to follow a ballistic arc, and they are vastly more deadly than bullets- anyone hit with a blaster is pretty much fucked, it seems. There is also the apparent ease of recharge- we don't know how the blasters are recharged, but we definitely don't see everyone lugging around a hundred pounds of ammo or battery in most cases.
> Columbian coffee. Canadian bacon. Irish whiskey.
I think you really nail it here. Canadian bacon is the best example: it's not bacon, and it's not from Canada, but the name sticks. I think the problem is when people hang out *with Romulans* and talk about "Romulan ale"- the Romulans would, of course, know better, as would some ale aficionado. But in the general case, it's very safe to say "Earth Sugardrink" when talking about whatever the most popular human soda is. Sure, *we'd* know better, but the aliens might not, etc.