You have 7 broadband providers to choose from? My envy is yours! Where do you live?
I am limited to Comcast cable, or Qwest DSL -- the proverbial Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich -- and it was 2001 when I swore I would never do business with Qwest again. If it were in my power, I would see every single person who has ever worked for them ground into a fine paste and cast into the fires of an erupting volcano.
Long story.
Why can't I get fiber to the premises? Why, damn it, Why?
Chase, for several years now, but that isn't an endorsement of them or anything. They just haven't fucked up yet. There are enough credit card companies to choose from, and my credit is good enough, that I can afford to have a zero tolerance fuck-up policy. If one of them ever inconveniences me in the slightest, they lose me -- account closed.
I only wish I could take the same position with my broadband provider.
More likely they just continued to charge the old number, and MasterCard "helpfully" added the charges to your new account.
Several years back I had a problem with unauthorized charges showing up on my MasterCard -- they came in once a month, like clockwork, from AT&T's Wireless division in the Netherlands (I am in the US). What apparently had happened is that someone set up automatic billing for their wireless phone bill, and someone at AT&T keyed in the wrong card number or something. I was able to dispute the charges, but the next month a new one would just show up.
I tried calling AT&T Netherlands, but that was useless of course, since I didn't have an account with them and didn't know whose account was using my card. They would not just check all their automatic billing accounts for my credit card number and remove it, because I'd have to be the account holder to change the payment information -- even if they were using my damn credit card number.
So finally I had the credit card company cancel my card and issue me a new one, with a new number. I was very clear when I explained to them why I was doing this. The next month an AT&T Netherlands charge showed up again on my new account. I called the credit card company again, and found out that they automatically apply new charges posted against the old number directly to my new account. It's a "convenience" so you don't have to contact everyone you have set up automatic billing with.
And that is why I no longer do business with MBNA.
Putting "may" or "might" in there doesn't make it any less false. It is simply not true that you may have already won. There is ZERO chance that you have already won. It would be accurate to say "You may win, just as soon as you click here," no matter how slim the chance is, but you absolutely have not "already won" if you haven't clicked on the banner yet.
Unless you seriously believe that they have created their list of winners beforehand, and just need your information to check against this established list.
And if you believe that. . . well, um. . . Good! Because you may already have won the Zenaku Cash Prize for Exceptional Cleverness! Just give me your real name, social security number, date and place of birth, and the middle names of your parents and grandparents so I can open the top secret "Envelope of Winners" and see if YOUR name is inside!
I'm still not sure what that has to do with it. I think the "penis gene" comes from the male, and unlike your partner's eggs, your sperm is always brand new.
Regardless of whether McCain is the best man for the job of President, his clear anti-torture stance - which went against the general Republican stance at the time - was something he should be admired for.
I disagree. A politician doesn't get any admiration from me just for not being pro-torture.
That's like saying "I really admire and respect the way so-and-so refuses to rape schoolchildren, and I'm very impressed with the fact that he doesn't abduct prostitutes and bludgeon them to death with a hammer." Anybody with an ounce of moral fiber would stand up against torture. That doesn't make him praiseworthy, it just means I have no reason to revile him based on that particular issue.
The sad fact that so many Republicans signed on to the Fuck-Yeah-Let's-Electrocute-Us-Some-Testicles platform makes those Republicans monsters. But merely failing to support such an evil policy doesn't elevate someone in my eyes -- if you admire the guy for that, it just means you've lowered the bar a lot on what you consider admirable. He only looks good on this front when compared to really bad people.
And now consider the relative likelihood of those two possibilities. One candidate is 47 with no known health problems, while the other is 72 and has a history of cancer.
Even if the two VP candidates were equally undesirable (which I don't belive it is), their impact on my decision making process would not be.
Too bad your vision of what universal health care would look like has no resemblance to the actual proposals put forth by ANY candidate.
Government run health-care like the Europeans use would never work here, and nobody is pushing it, except perhaps Michael Moore. It's a bogeyman argument brought up by people who want to win elections by misleading people.
In truth, universal health care comes down to two things -- making sure that every person is allowed to buy insurance, and making sure everyone can afford to buy insurance. McCain's plan, for example, tries to address this by allowing insurance companies to operate across state-lines, hopefully fostering competition. Obama's tries to address it by allowing anyone who doesn't already buy insurance through their employer's plan to buy it through the same plan government employees use.
Neither of these proposals has jack shit to do with changing how one obtains medical care. The "DMV of Doctors" is bullshit. In fact, I wish they would stop talking about this issue as "health care." The issue is really about health insurance.
But would there not still be many customers for whom the interface is a candidate route? I understand that they could use that to discard packets from IP addresses that are obviously spoofed, but there still isn't a one-to-one relationship between a packet's true source and the interface it arrives on. There could be hundreds of IP addresses to stick in the packet header that would still pass muster as being plausible, right?
I don't have any trouble understanding that measures like these can reduce the scope of the problem, but unless I am misunderstanding something at a very basic level, it is not possible to truly verify that an IP packet came from where it says it came from, as the post I was responding to seemed to imply. Certainly it isn't trivial, at least.
Or am I, in fact, misunderstanding something at a very basic level?
It has been a long time since my network engineering classes, so do regard this as a genuine question from someone who simply doesn't know, and correct my impression if I am mistaken about the basics.
But I'm not clear on how exactly an ISP could prevent its customers from spoofing the source address in their packets. I thought the inherent security flaw in the IP protocol was the fact that you pretty much have to take each packets word for where it came from. What alternate mechanism do you see them using to verify the "real" source of a given packet?
It is not like they have a single dedicated physical line from their router to each customer's house, where traffic coming in on a given physical port can only have come from one place. (But hey, if they did, I bet my bandwidth would be a lot better)!
I know I'm piling on, and I deserve a redundant mod if I get it, but I have to agree that he is not being remotely picky. You have twice rephrased your statement in ways that dramatically change its meaning.
* Everyone has a right to health care. * Everyone has the right to purchase health care. * Everyone has the right to request that someone allow them to purchase health care.
If you can't see how different those three things are, your brain is defective. And if you can, and want to be understood, then for crying out loud say what you mean!
I had a friend get one of his post-dated cheques cashed months before the date (with extra-salty fees attached of course). The depositor did not even falsify the date!
Your friend was completely misinformed if he thought that post-dating a check meant it wouldn't be valid until that date. The date written on a check has no affect on its validity. It's mostly just their for your own record-keeping.
If a human teller happens to look at the check, he or she might refuse to process it, just because they can, and may not know whether it is valid or not, but there is no law obliging them to treat is as invalid.
And how often these days is a human teller the one processing a check?
Lesson: Don't write checks your account can't cover.
That definition makes winning pretty close to impossible, I'd say. We've installed the democratic government -- now we just have to stay until the voters of Iraq stop electing the "wrong" leaders, right?
A democratic Iraq is a threat to our allies by definition. Our continued presence isn't going to make all those Iraqi voters suddenly fall in love with Israel.
If the U.S. wanted a democracy in Iraq, it is done. If they wanted a pro-America government in Iraq, they should have installed a pro-America dictator.
I'm getting sick of the claim that Obama's plan gives rebates to people who don't pay federal income taxes. While it is technically true that they don't pay income taxes, the people who keep bringing it up are deliberately specifying income taxes to mislead people into thinking that those folks don't pay any federal taxes at all, which is bullshit. They still pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes, which amount to 15% of income. The fact that the IRS doesn't classify those as income taxes is just a convenient technicality the McCain people are latching onto to make it sound like giveaway instead of a tax cut.
I'm not an astrophysicist either, but as far as I can tell nothing about this hypothesis contradicts the idea that once matter crosses the event horizon it doesn't come out again, except as radiation. They aren't saying that the black hole begins "ejecting" gas, just that at that mass it gives off enough radiation to prevent any more gas from falling in.
I'm not sure I buy that as setting an upper limit on the size of a black hole. It just means the rate of growth would slow, and potentially reach equilibrium with regards to the surrounding gas. If something denser, like a star were to fall in, I doubt that the radiation pressure would push it away.
The ACLU is making their point very effectively, but I think they drew up this map of theirs rather indiscriminately. I agree with their stance, but. . . their reasoning is sloppy.
I question the total coverage of Michigan, as they appear to be treating the shores of all the great lakes, including Lake Michigan, as a "costal border," even though Lake Michigan lies entirely within the United State. And they are including much more of Minnesota and Wisconsin than they should as well, again by treating the lake shores as a border. Pop over to google maps and see where the actual border going through Lake Superior is. . . it's nowhere near the US shore.
You're incorrect. The criminals would replace the phone number of an approved contractor with their own number, and then pose as that company when the customer with goods to ship called them up to arrange a contract. They'd then turn around and, still posing as the legitimate trucking company, subcontract the job to someone else who would actually pickup the goods and deliver them.
Thus, the customer pays the criminals to move the goods, and the criminals get the subcontractor to do it, then they just don't pay the subcontractor. If the subcontractor wants to complain, he just ends up talking to the company that the criminals were impersonating, who has not been involved at all up to that point.
The "real contractors" never show up to ship anything -- they are just the "fall guy" who the customer and subcontractor both thought they were dealing with.
The ultimate weapon for the state in this case is that state can legally declare all gambling debts unenforcable.
The state declaring it won't make it so. Gambling debts will still be enforced by large men in very nice suits, who carry heavy objects and know a great deal about the anatomy of the human knee.
Wow. You are clearly thinking way to much about this. But just for fun, I figure I'll join you for a while, just to play devil's advocate. I don't think most of your points are worth singling out, given what I would call principals of good fiction -- artistic license is allowed, after all.
*Atmospheric coloration (if it's not blue, I shouldn't have my helmet open) What if the atmosphere is an oxygen helium mix? What if the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen but on a dry planet with no water vapor? What if the system's star radiates no light in that end of the spectrum? This is really just about artistic license, but I'm sure that theoretically there are a lot of parameters one can change to get a different color sky without it being unbreathable -- our own sky is all kinds of shades of red and purple at sunrise and sunset, when the light strikes at a different angle.
*Sound in space Nearly every piece of sci-fi ever made gets this wrong. Deliberately wrong. For aesthetic reasons. It doesn't seem worth nitpicking, since it's not a "mistake," so much as a narrative device.
*The Asari having no explanation to counter the Red Queen hypothesis The Red Queen hypothesis attempts to explain why sexual reproduction is adaptive. That does not in any way preclude the development of asexual life forms. Just because a trait can be adaptive does not mean every species must develop that trait.
*How did the alien races manage to overcome their innate desire to conquer the universe (required for advancement to the space stage) and instead work in harmony with one another? Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this one. First, required by whom? What scientific evidence have you that all species must have an innate desire to conquer the universe in order to advance to the space stage? Is that a fact because you read it in some other piece of science fiction? To my knowledge we have only one data point, as we know of only one species that has achieved space travel, and only to LEO and their own moon at that. Second, even if we assume that all spacefaring species have an innate desire to conquer the universe, why is it necessary that an explanation of how it was overcome be provided? Should the game also provide an explanation for how primitive man overcame his own innate desire to war with other tribes?
*I also remember a number of errors in solar system creation, where you'd have a gas giant orbiting waaay to close to a sun. Our current theories about planet formation are very, very young. We don't really know what is and isn't possible yet. And besides, haven't just about all of the extrasolar planets found to date been gas supergiants orbiting very close to their stars?
Hey, while we're on the subject, the relative sizes of the planets, stars, and distances between them are also waaaay off. It isn't supposed to be a mathematically correct depiction of a star system. It is supposed to be a navigational system, allowing you to decide where to go. It is not to scale.
*GELFs were far too rare, were these banned? Is there a "scientific" theory that says every conceivable future must involve the proliferation of genetic engineering? A fictional universe in which one theoretically possible technology doesn't happen to be prevalent or important hardly seems like getting the science wrong. That's like asking, "where were the food replicators?"
*There didn't seem to be any checks in place to keep VIs from becoming AIs (and they could, remember the mission to Luna? The briefing for the Luna mission made it extremely clear that it was not an AI. It was a VI designed for live fire combat training that had malfunctioned and could not be shut off. Even if it was an AI (which given the self-defense reaction is plausible despite Hackett's claims), a government failing to set up adequate safeguards is likewise not an error of science. It just means your fictional government hasn't set up adequate
I'm happy to see someone else point that out, it has always been an element of the game universe that bugged me as being poorly thought out or incomplete. The story makes a big deal about the Asari being mono-gendered and all appearing female, and yet never explains why you can travel all over the galaxy and never see a single Turian or Salarian that isn't male. Or Volus, or Elcor for that matter. Female Krogans are at least mentioned, though none ever appear.
Asking a non-technical cop, "Here's the IP address that he is using, please subpoena Comcast to find out his name and address," is like asking the sun not to shine. It's just not going to happen and your item isn't a big enough ticket for them.
Your insistance that it is "just not going to happen" is somehow unconvincing to me in light of my actual experience with it happening.
Are you calling me a liar, or did you just not read the part where I mentioned that I've actually been through this?
I will grant you, I did have to explain TCP/IP 101 to the officer over the phone. That's why it was a 15 minute conversation, rather than a five minute one. But if you are seriously arguing that a non-technical cop won't understand that you can trace an IP address, but will easily grok how you've located your laptop via SSID lookups, wardriving and signal triangulation, you are delusional. You're going to have to explain just as much about how networks work as I have to, and at the end of the day I've given him a lead that he can follow up on through known channels (the courts and a large company), while you've just given him your word that you know where your laptop is. I don't think he'll be able to get a search warrant with that.
I'll also grant you that the IP may belong to a coffee shop, an unsuspecting neighbor of the perp, or whatnot, and I made that perfectly clear to the officer I spoke to. In my case, I was logging dozens of connections from the stolen laptop, throughout all hours of the day, and every one of them was from the same IP, so that was fairly unlikely. It is at least as good as narrowing it down to a few houses.
But hey, for all I know your method might work too. I at least acknowledge that I haven't tried it, and that I'm only speculating as to how well it would work. Tell you what, when your laptop gets stolen and you get it back in the manner you've described, then let's discuss it again. Until then, please stop being so dismissive of the demonstrated fact that getting the IP address can be enough, and GO STICK YOUR HEAD IN A PIG.
3a and 3b aren't all that difficult. My Macbook Pro was stolen back in April and once I had the IP address, all it took was a 15 minute conversation with the investigating officer, who then got a subpoena to get the address from Comcast. How is driving around to triangulate the signal and narrow it down to a few locations easier than that?
I'm pretty sure if I had gone to the cops with "Here's the house I traced my laptop's radio transmissions to!" instead of "Here's the IP address that he is using, please subpoena Comcast to find out his name and address," they'd have just thought I was some crackpot.
Maybe because those religious broadcasts only occur on Sunday mornings? It sounds to me like a couple of churches that broadcast their weekly services so members who are confined to the nursing home can tune in.
Obviously this explanation fails if you have tuned into these stations throughout the week -- you weren't specific in that regard. But it sound to me like Sunday morning just might be the only time they are transmitting.
Slashdot Mirror
You have 7 broadband providers to choose from? My envy is yours! Where do you live?
I am limited to Comcast cable, or Qwest DSL -- the proverbial Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich -- and it was 2001 when I swore I would never do business with Qwest again. If it were in my power, I would see every single person who has ever worked for them ground into a fine paste and cast into the fires of an erupting volcano.
Long story.
Why can't I get fiber to the premises? Why, damn it, Why?
Chase, for several years now, but that isn't an endorsement of them or anything. They just haven't fucked up yet. There are enough credit card companies to choose from, and my credit is good enough, that I can afford to have a zero tolerance fuck-up policy. If one of them ever inconveniences me in the slightest, they lose me -- account closed.
I only wish I could take the same position with my broadband provider.
More likely they just continued to charge the old number, and MasterCard "helpfully" added the charges to your new account.
Several years back I had a problem with unauthorized charges showing up on my MasterCard -- they came in once a month, like clockwork, from AT&T's Wireless division in the Netherlands (I am in the US). What apparently had happened is that someone set up automatic billing for their wireless phone bill, and someone at AT&T keyed in the wrong card number or something. I was able to dispute the charges, but the next month a new one would just show up.
I tried calling AT&T Netherlands, but that was useless of course, since I didn't have an account with them and didn't know whose account was using my card. They would not just check all their automatic billing accounts for my credit card number and remove it, because I'd have to be the account holder to change the payment information -- even if they were using my damn credit card number.
So finally I had the credit card company cancel my card and issue me a new one, with a new number. I was very clear when I explained to them why I was doing this. The next month an AT&T Netherlands charge showed up again on my new account. I called the credit card company again, and found out that they automatically apply new charges posted against the old number directly to my new account. It's a "convenience" so you don't have to contact everyone you have set up automatic billing with.
And that is why I no longer do business with MBNA.
Feeding the Anonymous troll, but. . .
Putting "may" or "might" in there doesn't make it any less false. It is simply not true that you may have already won. There is ZERO chance that you have already won. It would be accurate to say "You may win, just as soon as you click here," no matter how slim the chance is, but you absolutely have not "already won" if you haven't clicked on the banner yet.
Unless you seriously believe that they have created their list of winners beforehand, and just need your information to check against this established list.
And if you believe that. . . well, um. . . Good! Because you may already have won the Zenaku Cash Prize for Exceptional Cleverness! Just give me your real name, social security number, date and place of birth, and the middle names of your parents and grandparents so I can open the top secret "Envelope of Winners" and see if YOUR name is inside!
The Anhiliatrix. End of Discussion.
I'm still not sure what that has to do with it. I think the "penis gene" comes from the male, and unlike your partner's eggs, your sperm is always brand new.
Regardless of whether McCain is the best man for the job of President, his clear anti-torture stance - which went against the general Republican stance at the time - was something he should be admired for.
I disagree. A politician doesn't get any admiration from me just for not being pro-torture.
That's like saying "I really admire and respect the way so-and-so refuses to rape schoolchildren, and I'm very impressed with the fact that he doesn't abduct prostitutes and bludgeon them to death with a hammer." Anybody with an ounce of moral fiber would stand up against torture. That doesn't make him praiseworthy, it just means I have no reason to revile him based on that particular issue.
The sad fact that so many Republicans signed on to the Fuck-Yeah-Let's-Electrocute-Us-Some-Testicles platform makes those Republicans monsters. But merely failing to support such an evil policy doesn't elevate someone in my eyes -- if you admire the guy for that, it just means you've lowered the bar a lot on what you consider admirable. He only looks good on this front when compared to really bad people.
And now consider the relative likelihood of those two possibilities. One candidate is 47 with no known health problems, while the other is 72 and has a history of cancer.
Even if the two VP candidates were equally undesirable (which I don't belive it is), their impact on my decision making process would not be.
Too bad your vision of what universal health care would look like has no resemblance to the actual proposals put forth by ANY candidate.
Government run health-care like the Europeans use would never work here, and nobody is pushing it, except perhaps Michael Moore. It's a bogeyman argument brought up by people who want to win elections by misleading people.
In truth, universal health care comes down to two things -- making sure that every person is allowed to buy insurance, and making sure everyone can afford to buy insurance. McCain's plan, for example, tries to address this by allowing insurance companies to operate across state-lines, hopefully fostering competition. Obama's tries to address it by allowing anyone who doesn't already buy insurance through their employer's plan to buy it through the same plan government employees use.
Neither of these proposals has jack shit to do with changing how one obtains medical care. The "DMV of Doctors" is bullshit. In fact, I wish they would stop talking about this issue as "health care." The issue is really about health insurance.
Thanks for the informative response.
But would there not still be many customers for whom the interface is a candidate route? I understand that they could use that to discard packets from IP addresses that are obviously spoofed, but there still isn't a one-to-one relationship between a packet's true source and the interface it arrives on. There could be hundreds of IP addresses to stick in the packet header that would still pass muster as being plausible, right?
I don't have any trouble understanding that measures like these can reduce the scope of the problem, but unless I am misunderstanding something at a very basic level, it is not possible to truly verify that an IP packet came from where it says it came from, as the post I was responding to seemed to imply. Certainly it isn't trivial, at least.
Or am I, in fact, misunderstanding something at a very basic level?
It has been a long time since my network engineering classes, so do regard this as a genuine question from someone who simply doesn't know, and correct my impression if I am mistaken about the basics.
But I'm not clear on how exactly an ISP could prevent its customers from spoofing the source address in their packets. I thought the inherent security flaw in the IP protocol was the fact that you pretty much have to take each packets word for where it came from. What alternate mechanism do you see them using to verify the "real" source of a given packet?
It is not like they have a single dedicated physical line from their router to each customer's house, where traffic coming in on a given physical port can only have come from one place. (But hey, if they did, I bet my bandwidth would be a lot better)!
I know I'm piling on, and I deserve a redundant mod if I get it, but I have to agree that he is not being remotely picky. You have twice rephrased your statement in ways that dramatically change its meaning.
* Everyone has a right to health care.
* Everyone has the right to purchase health care.
* Everyone has the right to request that someone allow them to purchase health care.
If you can't see how different those three things are, your brain is defective. And if you can, and want to be understood, then for crying out loud say what you mean!
I had a friend get one of his post-dated cheques cashed months before the date (with extra-salty fees attached of course). The depositor did not even falsify the date!
Your friend was completely misinformed if he thought that post-dating a check meant it wouldn't be valid until that date. The date written on a check has no affect on its validity. It's mostly just their for your own record-keeping.
If a human teller happens to look at the check, he or she might refuse to process it, just because they can, and may not know whether it is valid or not, but there is no law obliging them to treat is as invalid.
And how often these days is a human teller the one processing a check?
Lesson: Don't write checks your account can't cover.
That definition makes winning pretty close to impossible, I'd say. We've installed the democratic government -- now we just have to stay until the voters of Iraq stop electing the "wrong" leaders, right?
A democratic Iraq is a threat to our allies by definition. Our continued presence isn't going to make all those Iraqi voters suddenly fall in love with Israel.
If the U.S. wanted a democracy in Iraq, it is done. If they wanted a pro-America government in Iraq, they should have installed a pro-America dictator.
I'm getting sick of the claim that Obama's plan gives rebates to people who don't pay federal income taxes. While it is technically true that they don't pay income taxes, the people who keep bringing it up are deliberately specifying income taxes to mislead people into thinking that those folks don't pay any federal taxes at all, which is bullshit. They still pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes, which amount to 15% of income. The fact that the IRS doesn't classify those as income taxes is just a convenient technicality the McCain people are latching onto to make it sound like giveaway instead of a tax cut.
Looks like the misdirection worked on you.
I'm not an astrophysicist either, but as far as I can tell nothing about this hypothesis contradicts the idea that once matter crosses the event horizon it doesn't come out again, except as radiation. They aren't saying that the black hole begins "ejecting" gas, just that at that mass it gives off enough radiation to prevent any more gas from falling in.
I'm not sure I buy that as setting an upper limit on the size of a black hole. It just means the rate of growth would slow, and potentially reach equilibrium with regards to the surrounding gas. If something denser, like a star were to fall in, I doubt that the radiation pressure would push it away.
But who knows. I don't.
The ACLU is making their point very effectively, but I think they drew up this map of theirs rather indiscriminately. I agree with their stance, but. . . their reasoning is sloppy.
I question the total coverage of Michigan, as they appear to be treating the shores of all the great lakes, including Lake Michigan, as a "costal border," even though Lake Michigan lies entirely within the United State. And they are including much more of Minnesota and Wisconsin than they should as well, again by treating the lake shores as a border. Pop over to google maps and see where the actual border going through Lake Superior is. . . it's nowhere near the US shore.
You're incorrect. The criminals would replace the phone number of an approved contractor with their own number, and then pose as that company when the customer with goods to ship called them up to arrange a contract. They'd then turn around and, still posing as the legitimate trucking company, subcontract the job to someone else who would actually pickup the goods and deliver them.
Thus, the customer pays the criminals to move the goods, and the criminals get the subcontractor to do it, then they just don't pay the subcontractor. If the subcontractor wants to complain, he just ends up talking to the company that the criminals were impersonating, who has not been involved at all up to that point.
The "real contractors" never show up to ship anything -- they are just the "fall guy" who the customer and subcontractor both thought they were dealing with.
The ultimate weapon for the state in this case is that state can legally declare all gambling debts unenforcable.
The state declaring it won't make it so. Gambling debts will still be enforced by large men in very nice suits, who carry heavy objects and know a great deal about the anatomy of the human knee.
Wow. You are clearly thinking way to much about this. But just for fun, I figure I'll join you for a while, just to play devil's advocate. I don't think most of your points are worth singling out, given what I would call principals of good fiction -- artistic license is allowed, after all.
*Atmospheric coloration (if it's not blue, I shouldn't have my helmet open)
What if the atmosphere is an oxygen helium mix? What if the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen but on a dry planet with no water vapor? What if the system's star radiates no light in that end of the spectrum? This is really just about artistic license, but I'm sure that theoretically there are a lot of parameters one can change to get a different color sky without it being unbreathable -- our own sky is all kinds of shades of red and purple at sunrise and sunset, when the light strikes at a different angle.
*Sound in space
Nearly every piece of sci-fi ever made gets this wrong. Deliberately wrong. For aesthetic reasons. It doesn't seem worth nitpicking, since it's not a "mistake," so much as a narrative device.
*The Asari having no explanation to counter the Red Queen hypothesis
The Red Queen hypothesis attempts to explain why sexual reproduction is adaptive. That does not in any way preclude the development of asexual life forms. Just because a trait can be adaptive does not mean every species must develop that trait.
*How did the alien races manage to overcome their innate desire to conquer the universe (required for advancement to the space stage) and instead work in harmony with one another?
Okay, I'm not sure where to start with this one. First, required by whom? What scientific evidence have you that all species must have an innate desire to conquer the universe in order to advance to the space stage? Is that a fact because you read it in some other piece of science fiction? To my knowledge we have only one data point, as we know of only one species that has achieved space travel, and only to LEO and their own moon at that. Second, even if we assume that all spacefaring species have an innate desire to conquer the universe, why is it necessary that an explanation of how it was overcome be provided? Should the game also provide an explanation for how primitive man overcame his own innate desire to war with other tribes?
*I also remember a number of errors in solar system creation, where you'd have a gas giant orbiting waaay to close to a sun.
Our current theories about planet formation are very, very young. We don't really know what is and isn't possible yet. And besides, haven't just about all of the extrasolar planets found to date been gas supergiants orbiting very close to their stars?
Hey, while we're on the subject, the relative sizes of the planets, stars, and distances between them are also waaaay off. It isn't supposed to be a mathematically correct depiction of a star system. It is supposed to be a navigational system, allowing you to decide where to go. It is not to scale.
*GELFs were far too rare, were these banned?
Is there a "scientific" theory that says every conceivable future must involve the proliferation of genetic engineering? A fictional universe in which one theoretically possible technology doesn't happen to be prevalent or important hardly seems like getting the science wrong. That's like asking, "where were the food replicators?"
*There didn't seem to be any checks in place to keep VIs from becoming AIs (and they could, remember the mission to Luna?
The briefing for the Luna mission made it extremely clear that it was not an AI. It was a VI designed for live fire combat training that had malfunctioned and could not be shut off. Even if it was an AI (which given the self-defense reaction is plausible despite Hackett's claims), a government failing to set up adequate safeguards is likewise not an error of science. It just means your fictional government hasn't set up adequate
I'm happy to see someone else point that out, it has always been an element of the game universe that bugged me as being poorly thought out or incomplete. The story makes a big deal about the Asari being mono-gendered and all appearing female, and yet never explains why you can travel all over the galaxy and never see a single Turian or Salarian that isn't male. Or Volus, or Elcor for that matter. Female Krogans are at least mentioned, though none ever appear.
Asking a non-technical cop, "Here's the IP address that he is using, please subpoena Comcast to find out his name and address," is like asking the sun not to shine. It's just not going to happen and your item isn't a big enough ticket for them.
Your insistance that it is "just not going to happen" is somehow unconvincing to me in light of my actual experience with it happening.
Are you calling me a liar, or did you just not read the part where I mentioned that I've actually been through this?
I will grant you, I did have to explain TCP/IP 101 to the officer over the phone. That's why it was a 15 minute conversation, rather than a five minute one. But if you are seriously arguing that a non-technical cop won't understand that you can trace an IP address, but will easily grok how you've located your laptop via SSID lookups, wardriving and signal triangulation, you are delusional. You're going to have to explain just as much about how networks work as I have to, and at the end of the day I've given him a lead that he can follow up on through known channels (the courts and a large company), while you've just given him your word that you know where your laptop is. I don't think he'll be able to get a search warrant with that.
I'll also grant you that the IP may belong to a coffee shop, an unsuspecting neighbor of the perp, or whatnot, and I made that perfectly clear to the officer I spoke to. In my case, I was logging dozens of connections from the stolen laptop, throughout all hours of the day, and every one of them was from the same IP, so that was fairly unlikely. It is at least as good as narrowing it down to a few houses.
But hey, for all I know your method might work too. I at least acknowledge that I haven't tried it, and that I'm only speculating as to how well it would work. Tell you what, when your laptop gets stolen and you get it back in the manner you've described, then let's discuss it again. Until then, please stop being so dismissive of the demonstrated fact that getting the IP address can be enough, and GO STICK YOUR HEAD IN A PIG.
3a and 3b aren't all that difficult. My Macbook Pro was stolen back in April and once I had the IP address, all it took was a 15 minute conversation with the investigating officer, who then got a subpoena to get the address from Comcast. How is driving around to triangulate the signal and narrow it down to a few locations easier than that?
I'm pretty sure if I had gone to the cops with "Here's the house I traced my laptop's radio transmissions to!" instead of "Here's the IP address that he is using, please subpoena Comcast to find out his name and address," they'd have just thought I was some crackpot.
BIG. Huge. Gigantic. Orders of magnitude larger than you can imagine.
Is its diameter larger than how far it is down the street to the chemist?
Maybe because those religious broadcasts only occur on Sunday mornings? It sounds to me like a couple of churches that broadcast their weekly services so members who are confined to the nursing home can tune in.
Obviously this explanation fails if you have tuned into these stations throughout the week -- you weren't specific in that regard. But it sound to me like Sunday morning just might be the only time they are transmitting.