I do 1-4 as I listed above. In my business account I get about 2 unwanted emails a day. My spam filter BTW is not a good one, I just have my browser file as junk any email that has the words cialis, viagra, niger*(ia)(ian), and pharm*.
My personal email account gets about one spam a month (maybe), but I don't use any filtering at all on that one (so only 1,2, and 4 --I guess). I use my personal one for everything, including online purchases. I've been doing so for four years now.
Almost all the unwanted email I get is nigerian scams (or more specifically mutations of nigerian scams that don't use any words beginning with niger...). It doesn't make sense to legislate against those because what those people are doing is already very illegal. RBL wouldn't help either as the scammers are only in it for the short term, plus they are devious and will just go around RBLs and cause the RBL providers to do more harm then good --like by say banning large blocks of rotating IP addresses as someone mentioned. Imagined how pissed you'd get when you can't email Mom cause someone else that uses your ISP decided to go phishing.
No, I don't think they had anything like that. I don't think the idea ever really occured to them. I really wasn't on that end of the company, my job was just to write press releases and answer email.
Most of what little I know comes from my talks with the tech guy. It was a very small company and there were only a few of us, no one that was actually trained to do the job that they were doing and no one taking home more then 15k --it was a pretty shit job.
RBL's are a terrible idea. I wouldn't say they are outdated though, mostly because they were always a terrible idea.
There is nothing easier for a spammer to defeat then a RBL; they just set up a server in their closet and run their own SMTP server. Most DSL and cable connections use temporary IP addresses and you can't RBL Verizon. No spammer is going to co-lo a server to send spam from.
Spam complaints are often ridiculous due to user ignorance. I used to work for a company that send a plain text newsletter to a 100% opt-in mailing list once a month. To receive a mailing a user either had to sign up on the website or via a piece of paper on the front desk. They still would get spam complaints both to themselves and to their ISP.
Half the time they were from people that specifically signed up to get mailings. It wasn't as if we were mailing previous customers or anything, you had to say "please send me your newsletter". Evidently these people either forgot or changed their mind and couldn't be bothered to click the opt-out link at the bottom of the email. Somehow, 9 out of 10 of these people were AOL users, Funny.
The other half they were even more crazy. One time the guy was not even in the mailing list database; we weren't sending him mailings. We even checked with him to see if he had a second address that could be forwarding mail to the one in question but he claimed he had no such mailbox. There was simply no way for us to remove him from the list because he wasn't on it in the first place. Another time, we deduced that someone else had signed up the person in question (the person's last name was recorded in the database as "Assface"). Evidently someone didn't like them very much and had signed them up for every mailing list they could find. Kinda a good method of getting back at someone I suppose. (everyone that has ever flamed anyone on/. and posted an email address cringes)
Laws, RBLs, regulations... all these things are both ineffective and erode our freedom. If you don't want spam there are three things to do: 1) Don't post your email address on the web, use a PHP mailer instead. 2) Don't give out your personal address, use a a "spam" address. My Dad once gave his real address to one of those "win a Segway" things at the mall (he must have been drunk or something), he now gets about 200 spams a day, up from zero. 3) Use an email filter. The good ones don't even use blacklists and work great.
And well... 4) Don't piss someone off that knows your email address.
"Seriously though, I offered up a definition of Art that you have just said, "no it's not, use the word illustration instead." I'm afraid I'm sticking with Art."
One of the problems with both our statements is that illustration is also considered art. Art is a horribly imprecise term. I'm not trying to poo poo illustration, its just that the definition of art has considerably expanded from when illustration was the only form of art. You were suggesting that only works that convey specific meaning (emotional response) were art. You also stated that skill was in some way relevant. Neither is the case. Pretty much anything is considered art if it is "man made" (see my post below) and presented in an "art context". For instance: Marcel Duchamp is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His break though piece was a urinal he took off the wall, mounted in an art gallery, and titled "fountain". Its considered one of the most important pieces of the 20th century. It certainly doesn't convey emotion, nor did it require any real skill on his part; it simply sits there for you to question.
"I believe that Art must convey meaning..."
If you rephrased this as "...art I like must convey meaning..." I could not argue with you. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, art is not.
"...and I'd very much disagree with your statement that most artists don't have a clue what their art means. Your statement has an in-built assumption (your own) of what Art is - i.e. anyone who paints is an artist and therefore if someone paints and doesn't convey meaning..."
I should have said "many" not most. I was speaking about a distinct type of artist, but if you include all types of artists then "most" must be reduced to "many". This is not my assumption, its a principal taught foundation year of art school. There are two distinct creative methods employed when creating art work, "product orientation" and "process orientation":
Product orientation is the method which involves designing, planning, and executing a piece. The yardstick by which the piece is measured is how effectively it fulfills the artists goals in making it: "Does it make you sad?", "Would most people feel moved by this figure?", "Is the technical execution sufficient to convey its message?". This method is considered "illustrational" and is currently used when making most hollywood films, illustrations for magazines, some paintings, websites, etc.
The other method, product orientation, is considered to be a method more suited to "contemporary gallery art" (there is no good term, many people call it "fine art" but the term is bad shorthand in this instance) because it is believed to produce art work that is original. Process orientation essentially involves an artist confronting a blank canvas (or whatever) and struggling to fill it. The artist relinquishes the control mechanisms that are valued in product oriented work and allows themselves to move freely from idea to idea. The piece almost never has too much to do with the original conception and usually comes as a bit of a surprise. The artist then repeats the process again and again with each new piece feeding from the last. I would liken the process to a cross between personal exploration and pseudo science.
The artist will often talk about what works produced in this method in terms of the sources that inspired the work. Critics, historians and galleries will attempt to interpret the "meaning" of the work. What you see in the two page blurb is the work of the critics and galleries. As mentioned above, much of that interpretation is often concerned with obfuscation.
"...exists merely to convey factual information to the viewer and on this basis, I do not call it Art, it is, to use your own term, illustration. However, you mistake the intention of the painter if you think that it was merely to convey this inf
No offense, but I really get annoyed with people who expunge this sort of reductionist view of the democratic process.
It would be one thing to make the statement you made if there was a referendum on the issue; but in reality the decision is being made be the legislature. A legislature who is being heavily lobbied by the telecommunications (mostly Verizon) companies to block public WiFi. "People" don't really have a say except perhaps to not reelect their representative, something I seriously doubt their representative is sweating over considering not a large enough segment of the population even knows what WiFi is.
Lets say you are on the state legislature of Pennsylvania. On one hand there is a non-profit group trying to WiFi Phily. On the other is Verizon with enough money and power to do whatever they want with your career for good or ill, and they don't like the idea. You are serving on the state legislature, not a position that affords you much power, job security, or prestige.
Having public WiFi in Phily might be good for you, the project might get enough attention that everyone involved comes out looking so good that Verizon isn't a problem. But thats a big "might". Are you going to take that risk?
Phily is not a wealthy city. Most of it is sprawling ghetto. Many of the residents do not own computers and have never even heard of WiFi. The ones that have heard of it can mostly afford to pay for it. You aren't going to get too many votes for supporting the Non-profit from the city itself.
The only way this is going to turn into a substantial amount of votes for you is if the project becomes a media circus. For that to happen it has to be sold as a bill that will make Philadelphia a "city of the future" or it has to be sold as you going toe to toe with big bad Verizon. The city of the future thing is good but the Verizon thing is better, but carries significant risk to you.
It comes down to whether "you" in the Pennsylvania legislature think its a good idea to take on Verizon. You might, but even if you do its going to take some balls.
Last I heard the PA legislature does have a set, kinda. From what I read the Phily WiFi project is going to be allowed to move forward, though similar efforts elsewhere in the state are going to be banned. Its not exactly a great precedent for public WiFi, and similar debates are being held all over the country. Ultimately most of the decisions are going to be made by the politicians involved and the will of the people will not be their primary concern.
Yeah Voyager really did screw everything up, in many, many ways. I think they were the first ones to use phasers at warp (a practice carried over to Enterprise); among many other huge problems.
One of the biggest problems with Voyager was the founding principal of the series, namely the amount of time it was supposed to take them to get home. It might have been consistent with the TNG tech manual (I'm not sure) but it certainly wasn't consistent with speed precedents set in TNG or the movies. For instance: in ST:V the Enterprise goes from Earth to the Neutral Zone to the center of the gallaxy in what could have been (at most) a month or two. In TNG and DS9 there is plenty of "too fast" travel between destinations in the alpha and beta quadrants as well.
The TNG tech manual isn't exactly authoritative when it comes to speed, BTW. The reason is that they measure warp factors in cochranes. A cochrane (as a measure of speed, its also a measure of field strength) is theoretically equal to approximately c but the actual speed varies depending on "gas density, electric and magnetic fields... and fluctuations in the subspace domain" (pg 55). One could suppose certain parts of the galaxy allow for faster travel then others, which does help Voyager's case, if for some reason the gamma quadrant slows you down or the alpha/beta quadrants speed you up (though really that's stupid).
Well, I suppose that romance is in the eye of the beholder.
" Any nerd can tell you the slingshot method is idiotic -- the energy gained is still in the same old ballpark as normal physics, and thus could not get you going faster than the speed of light. But a controlled, never before done implosion of cold antimatter, well, what more can be said?"
I never bring actual physics into Star Trek, as its an exercise in frustration. I just like to think that gravity extends into subspace and has different properties there.
I agree that the "faster then possible in normal space" thing is also exciting though.
There is at least one TOS episode where they do warp 13 (or something above 10). I wish I knew the ep. off the top of my head.
I read in one of those white, not-at-all-canon technical manuals (the ones you sometimes find at conventions) that exceptions to the warp 10 rule are explained away by having a different type of warp field.
The warp factor isn't actually a measure of speed, its a measure of the number of layers or folds in the warp field (this statement is based on the TNG "canon" manual).
The type of warp field that is used in TOS-TNG era can only have 9 layers before consumption and speed approaches infinity, but other types of fields can be folded more (not canon, but explains several instances of higher than warp 10 travel).
Ah good point, they do indeed call it a "black star"! I do think they are referring to the same phenomena though; or was the air date too early even for that? It seems like they are definitely referring to a black hole, not some technobabble thing-y.
Oh I was just talking about TOS's "sling shot" method. There were plenty of methods of time travel available to them in both TOS and TNG (not to mention the others).
I always thought that the borg vortex was a bit lazy myself. There was always something a bit more romantic about the sling shot (and the crazy ST:IV montage that came with it). I would have happier if the E had had to chase that sphere around the sun and found itself in the 22nd century, rather then just chasing it through a vortex in near earth orbit (well, one assumes a temporal vortex orbits).
They mention being cault up in a black hole in "Tomorrow is Yesterday". Its the first time they use the sling-shot time travel method.
Warping away from the black hole caused the Enterprise to pass beyond Warp 10, which evidently caused it to go back in time (though passing Warp 10 sometimes doesn't). They wind up on earth in the 1960's and have some dealings with the USAF.
I don't think it was the fist time they did the time warp, there was also an early episode where it occured because the had to "hard start" the warp drive.
You are confusing art with illustration, its a very common mistake.
Art is not inherently supposed to convey anything to you, it is not a form of communication (though sometimes can be). Art is an exploratory process. The meanings you hear assigned to artworks are part of the marketing process, not part of the artwork. Most artists have no clue what their work means and don't give a crap because their work isn't supposed to mean anything. The idea is that when you view the artwork it allows you to perceive the world from a different point of view. The viewer has the responsibility to assign meaning to what they are seeing and that meaning will vary from person to person.
One of the differences between pre-modern and modern, post-modern, or contemporary art is that pre-modern art is essentially what today would be considered illustration. It was often designed to convey specific ideas, often to an otherwise illiterate audience.
Example: much western pre-modern art was religious. The reason for this is that painting was used by the church to convey stories to its congregation. It was efficient in this task because the congregation generally couldn't read, and mass was generally held in latin, which they couldn't speak.
Another example: much per-modern painting was concerned with portraiture. A painted portrait is designed to carry a specific set of information: this is what so and so looks like, this is the type of clothing they could afford to wear, and even: look at he famous artist who they could afford to pay to paint them.
Many people are much more comfortable will illustration then contemporary art. The reason for this (I believe), is because they are not comfortable assigning meaning to something unfamiliar presented in a gallery or museum. The industry involved in the buying and selling of art is to blame for this. They have a financial interest in making art inaccessible to the general populace because art is sold as a luxury good to a very exclusive set of individuals. By controlling the meaning of the artworks they can better control the monetary value of the artworks. They want it to thought that if you don't like what you are seeing its because you are too dumb/ignorant to understand it. They can then categorize you as unimportant (which if you can't afford to by the $500k photograph you are looking at you are unimportant to them anyway). This way the work retains value among those who can afford to buy it.
Damn that was a long post. Sorry, its rare that I get to post on something that I know a lot about.
I think you are very close to dead on here: art is essentially something that someone calls art. But there is one thing that is being left out. In order to be art there has to be human intervention at some point. Art must be (to at least some extent) man made. Even in the case of those damn painting cats (too lazy to find a link), someone at least had to dip the cat in paint and throw it on a canvas.
Ultimately the difficulty is not qualifying something as "art" because the term "art" carries with it no inherent value judgment:
"Look I pooped on the floor, its art!"; "Look I spent the last two years slaving away, painting a masterpiece" --both statements are equally true. The difficulty is organizing art into hierarchies of content and value (both monetary and cultural). The process is very subjective, but in practice it comes down to the fact that the worth of art is determined by persons well placed in the art industry. Essentially, if art makes it into the Met or Matthew Marks Gallery or Mary Boone Gallery, it is expensive and therefor valuable.
Its a joke,/. (where you go to rail against spam) is literally spamming us. The joke isn't just that they are dupes, its that the dupes are ads for "products" at think geek, which as they point out is owned by the same people as/.. They are spamming their subscribers.
I think everyone should lighten up a bit, its only one day a year. And a lot of stuff thats been relayed is pretty funny.
Its actually a damn shame that these pills aren't real. I want some. Somebody get on that!
Here is a scenario (I'm assuming a distant future where the technology has developed significantly and has many common uses and abuses.):
Since the brain has to adapt to the electrodes in order to use them, what if the "chips" will only work really well if they are implanted in children. Children can learn languages without an accent, what if the same is true of these devices.
It seems within the realm of possibility that this could be the case. It also raises serious questions about freedom of choice. If you have to get the implant by 13, who makes the decision, you or your parents (or of course... the state)?
I imagine if brain-electronics technology got advanced enough you could do a lot more then text based telepathy. If you had an extensive enough network of electrodes capable of both "sending and receiving" a signal, you could probably take the electrical activity of one brain and duplicate it in another brain. I imagine it will be a bit more complex then that, but I think it will be pretty interesting (or horrifying) if we find a way to network brains.
Taking it a step further, what if you could also "view" recorded thoughts? What if you had a person sit down and learn how to program in C for instance. While they did that you recorded the electrical activity in their brain. You then played it back in someone else's brain: and then they know C too. Maybe you could even speed the playback up so you could learn faster.
And, to take it even a step further then that, what if you had a group of people networked together so that they were thinking each others thoughts while simultaneously interacting with a central server that delegated tasks to each persons brain, similar to a computer cluster. The server could be used to regulate communication between brains and also used to call up stored information needed be members of the group. Once a problem was solved by one member, the process of solving it could be speedily played back to the other members to bring them up to speed.
A development like this could be either a very good thing or a very bad thing. People like to point out how Star Trek influences future technological developments. I wonder if it will give us the Borg, and whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
The real question is: Why didn't Microsoft buy Immersion and then sue Sony? $230 is nothing to them, but the ability to severely hamper a competitor is priceless.
Then again, MS has been relatively benign of late (except with regards to OS competition).
I think you are off the mark a bit. iTunes is a "break-even" business according to Jobs. Apple only makes something like 4 cents per song; so for every million songs sold Apple only makes 40k. ITunes exists so as to provide content for the iPod that is both legal and user friendly.
Almost 50% of Apples revenue comes from iPods now. Apple's ultimate goal is to sell iPods and Mac hardware via the iPod "halo effect".
I remember Mousin' Around, it could have been something else though, I had an Apple II GS. The version I remember had a simple drawing program in it, and there was a part where you had to point and click a man thru a cave (it was kinda a very short plateform game). Is that the same thing?
I know what you are talking about as far as clients and one button mice. I used to make extra money in college by tutoring people in the use of the Adobe suit, mostly Photoshop. I spent so much time just going over simple "this is how to use your computer" stuff that I wasn't even sure they are absorbing the software I was actually being paid to teach. The Mac people generally had less difficulty even though they were using OS9 (OS X had just come out and I didn't use it, I was a late adopter). Maybe it was the mouse.
I think a designer could design a phone interface as good as or better then the current designs using nothing more than the button and click wheel on the newest model ipod.
br
To be clear, I'm not suggesting an "iPod phone" or that the buttons would do anything like they do on the ipod, or would even be labled similarly. I'm just saying that the click wheel is a flexable and powerful input device cabable of supporting all the functions of a cell phone. If the designer was clever enough it could be beter then conventional setups; which if you think about it are kinda awkward.
Slashdot Mirror
I do 1-4 as I listed above. In my business account I get about 2 unwanted emails a day. My spam filter BTW is not a good one, I just have my browser file as junk any email that has the words cialis, viagra, niger*(ia)(ian), and pharm*.
My personal email account gets about one spam a month (maybe), but I don't use any filtering at all on that one (so only 1,2, and 4 --I guess). I use my personal one for everything, including online purchases. I've been doing so for four years now.
Almost all the unwanted email I get is nigerian scams (or more specifically mutations of nigerian scams that don't use any words beginning with niger...). It doesn't make sense to legislate against those because what those people are doing is already very illegal. RBL wouldn't help either as the scammers are only in it for the short term, plus they are devious and will just go around RBLs and cause the RBL providers to do more harm then good --like by say banning large blocks of rotating IP addresses as someone mentioned. Imagined how pissed you'd get when you can't email Mom cause someone else that uses your ISP decided to go phishing.
No, I don't think they had anything like that. I don't think the idea ever really occured to them. I really wasn't on that end of the company, my job was just to write press releases and answer email.
Most of what little I know comes from my talks with the tech guy. It was a very small company and there were only a few of us, no one that was actually trained to do the job that they were doing and no one taking home more then 15k --it was a pretty shit job.
RBL's are a terrible idea. I wouldn't say they are outdated though, mostly because they were always a terrible idea.
/. and posted an email address cringes)
There is nothing easier for a spammer to defeat then a RBL; they just set up a server in their closet and run their own SMTP server. Most DSL and cable connections use temporary IP addresses and you can't RBL Verizon. No spammer is going to co-lo a server to send spam from.
Spam complaints are often ridiculous due to user ignorance. I used to work for a company that send a plain text newsletter to a 100% opt-in mailing list once a month. To receive a mailing a user either had to sign up on the website or via a piece of paper on the front desk. They still would get spam complaints both to themselves and to their ISP.
Half the time they were from people that specifically signed up to get mailings. It wasn't as if we were mailing previous customers or anything, you had to say "please send me your newsletter". Evidently these people either forgot or changed their mind and couldn't be bothered to click the opt-out link at the bottom of the email. Somehow, 9 out of 10 of these people were AOL users, Funny.
The other half they were even more crazy. One time the guy was not even in the mailing list database; we weren't sending him mailings. We even checked with him to see if he had a second address that could be forwarding mail to the one in question but he claimed he had no such mailbox. There was simply no way for us to remove him from the list because he wasn't on it in the first place. Another time, we deduced that someone else had signed up the person in question (the person's last name was recorded in the database as "Assface"). Evidently someone didn't like them very much and had signed them up for every mailing list they could find. Kinda a good method of getting back at someone I suppose. (everyone that has ever flamed anyone on
Laws, RBLs, regulations... all these things are both ineffective and erode our freedom. If you don't want spam there are three things to do: 1) Don't post your email address on the web, use a PHP mailer instead. 2) Don't give out your personal address, use a a "spam" address. My Dad once gave his real address to one of those "win a Segway" things at the mall (he must have been drunk or something), he now gets about 200 spams a day, up from zero. 3) Use an email filter. The good ones don't even use blacklists and work great.
And well... 4) Don't piss someone off that knows your email address.
Forgive me for this incredibly long post...
"Seriously though, I offered up a definition of Art that you have just said, "no it's not, use the word illustration instead." I'm afraid I'm sticking with Art."
One of the problems with both our statements is that illustration is also considered art. Art is a horribly imprecise term. I'm not trying to poo poo illustration, its just that the definition of art has considerably expanded from when illustration was the only form of art. You were suggesting that only works that convey specific meaning (emotional response) were art. You also stated that skill was in some way relevant. Neither is the case. Pretty much anything is considered art if it is "man made" (see my post below) and presented in an "art context". For instance: Marcel Duchamp is considered to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His break though piece was a urinal he took off the wall, mounted in an art gallery, and titled "fountain". Its considered one of the most important pieces of the 20th century. It certainly doesn't convey emotion, nor did it require any real skill on his part; it simply sits there for you to question.
"I believe that Art must convey meaning..."
If you rephrased this as "...art I like must convey meaning..." I could not argue with you. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, art is not.
"...and I'd very much disagree with your statement that most artists don't have a clue what their art means. Your statement has an in-built assumption (your own) of what Art is - i.e. anyone who paints is an artist and therefore if someone paints and doesn't convey meaning..."
I should have said "many" not most. I was speaking about a distinct type of artist, but if you include all types of artists then "most" must be reduced to "many". This is not my assumption, its a principal taught foundation year of art school. There are two distinct creative methods employed when creating art work, "product orientation" and "process orientation":
Product orientation is the method which involves designing, planning, and executing a piece. The yardstick by which the piece is measured is how effectively it fulfills the artists goals in making it: "Does it make you sad?", "Would most people feel moved by this figure?", "Is the technical execution sufficient to convey its message?". This method is considered "illustrational" and is currently used when making most hollywood films, illustrations for magazines, some paintings, websites, etc.
The other method, product orientation, is considered to be a method more suited to "contemporary gallery art" (there is no good term, many people call it "fine art" but the term is bad shorthand in this instance) because it is believed to produce art work that is original. Process orientation essentially involves an artist confronting a blank canvas (or whatever) and struggling to fill it. The artist relinquishes the control mechanisms that are valued in product oriented work and allows themselves to move freely from idea to idea. The piece almost never has too much to do with the original conception and usually comes as a bit of a surprise. The artist then repeats the process again and again with each new piece feeding from the last. I would liken the process to a cross between personal exploration and pseudo science.
The artist will often talk about what works produced in this method in terms of the sources that inspired the work. Critics, historians and galleries will attempt to interpret the "meaning" of the work. What you see in the two page blurb is the work of the critics and galleries. As mentioned above, much of that interpretation is often concerned with obfuscation.
"...exists merely to convey factual information to the viewer and on this basis, I do not call it Art, it is, to use your own term, illustration. However, you mistake the intention of the painter if you think that it was merely to convey this inf
Personally I love trailers and ads before movies. I never have to worry about being late for the show!
No offense, but I really get annoyed with people who expunge this sort of reductionist view of the democratic process.
It would be one thing to make the statement you made if there was a referendum on the issue; but in reality the decision is being made be the legislature. A legislature who is being heavily lobbied by the telecommunications (mostly Verizon) companies to block public WiFi. "People" don't really have a say except perhaps to not reelect their representative, something I seriously doubt their representative is sweating over considering not a large enough segment of the population even knows what WiFi is.
Lets say you are on the state legislature of Pennsylvania. On one hand there is a non-profit group trying to WiFi Phily. On the other is Verizon with enough money and power to do whatever they want with your career for good or ill, and they don't like the idea. You are serving on the state legislature, not a position that affords you much power, job security, or prestige.
Having public WiFi in Phily might be good for you, the project might get enough attention that everyone involved comes out looking so good that Verizon isn't a problem. But thats a big "might". Are you going to take that risk?
Phily is not a wealthy city. Most of it is sprawling ghetto. Many of the residents do not own computers and have never even heard of WiFi. The ones that have heard of it can mostly afford to pay for it. You aren't going to get too many votes for supporting the Non-profit from the city itself.
The only way this is going to turn into a substantial amount of votes for you is if the project becomes a media circus. For that to happen it has to be sold as a bill that will make Philadelphia a "city of the future" or it has to be sold as you going toe to toe with big bad Verizon. The city of the future thing is good but the Verizon thing is better, but carries significant risk to you.
It comes down to whether "you" in the Pennsylvania legislature think its a good idea to take on Verizon. You might, but even if you do its going to take some balls.
Last I heard the PA legislature does have a set, kinda. From what I read the Phily WiFi project is going to be allowed to move forward, though similar efforts elsewhere in the state are going to be banned. Its not exactly a great precedent for public WiFi, and similar debates are being held all over the country. Ultimately most of the decisions are going to be made by the politicians involved and the will of the people will not be their primary concern.
Yeah Voyager really did screw everything up, in many, many ways. I think they were the first ones to use phasers at warp (a practice carried over to Enterprise); among many other huge problems.
One of the biggest problems with Voyager was the founding principal of the series, namely the amount of time it was supposed to take them to get home. It might have been consistent with the TNG tech manual (I'm not sure) but it certainly wasn't consistent with speed precedents set in TNG or the movies. For instance: in ST:V the Enterprise goes from Earth to the Neutral Zone to the center of the gallaxy in what could have been (at most) a month or two. In TNG and DS9 there is plenty of "too fast" travel between destinations in the alpha and beta quadrants as well.
The TNG tech manual isn't exactly authoritative when it comes to speed, BTW. The reason is that they measure warp factors in cochranes. A cochrane (as a measure of speed, its also a measure of field strength) is theoretically equal to approximately c but the actual speed varies depending on "gas density, electric and magnetic fields... and fluctuations in the subspace domain" (pg 55). One could suppose certain parts of the galaxy allow for faster travel then others, which does help Voyager's case, if for some reason the gamma quadrant slows you down or the alpha/beta quadrants speed you up (though really that's stupid).
Well, I suppose that romance is in the eye of the beholder.
" Any nerd can tell you the slingshot method is idiotic -- the energy gained is still in the same old ballpark as normal physics, and thus could not get you going faster than the speed of light. But a controlled, never before done implosion of cold antimatter, well, what more can be said?"
I never bring actual physics into Star Trek, as its an exercise in frustration. I just like to think that gravity extends into subspace and has different properties there.
I agree that the "faster then possible in normal space" thing is also exciting though.
There is at least one TOS episode where they do warp 13 (or something above 10). I wish I knew the ep. off the top of my head.
I read in one of those white, not-at-all-canon technical manuals (the ones you sometimes find at conventions) that exceptions to the warp 10 rule are explained away by having a different type of warp field.
The warp factor isn't actually a measure of speed, its a measure of the number of layers or folds in the warp field (this statement is based on the TNG "canon" manual).
The type of warp field that is used in TOS-TNG era can only have 9 layers before consumption and speed approaches infinity, but other types of fields can be folded more (not canon, but explains several instances of higher than warp 10 travel).
Ah good point, they do indeed call it a "black star"! I do think they are referring to the same phenomena though; or was the air date too early even for that? It seems like they are definitely referring to a black hole, not some technobabble thing-y.
Oh I was just talking about TOS's "sling shot" method. There were plenty of methods of time travel available to them in both TOS and TNG (not to mention the others).
I always thought that the borg vortex was a bit lazy myself. There was always something a bit more romantic about the sling shot (and the crazy ST:IV montage that came with it). I would have happier if the E had had to chase that sphere around the sun and found itself in the 22nd century, rather then just chasing it through a vortex in near earth orbit (well, one assumes a temporal vortex orbits).
They mention being cault up in a black hole in "Tomorrow is Yesterday". Its the first time they use the sling-shot time travel method.
Warping away from the black hole caused the Enterprise to pass beyond Warp 10, which evidently caused it to go back in time (though passing Warp 10 sometimes doesn't). They wind up on earth in the 1960's and have some dealings with the USAF.
I don't think it was the fist time they did the time warp, there was also an early episode where it occured because the had to "hard start" the warp drive.
You are confusing art with illustration, its a very common mistake.
Art is not inherently supposed to convey anything to you, it is not a form of communication (though sometimes can be). Art is an exploratory process. The meanings you hear assigned to artworks are part of the marketing process, not part of the artwork. Most artists have no clue what their work means and don't give a crap because their work isn't supposed to mean anything. The idea is that when you view the artwork it allows you to perceive the world from a different point of view. The viewer has the responsibility to assign meaning to what they are seeing and that meaning will vary from person to person.
One of the differences between pre-modern and modern, post-modern, or contemporary art is that pre-modern art is essentially what today would be considered illustration. It was often designed to convey specific ideas, often to an otherwise illiterate audience.
Example: much western pre-modern art was religious. The reason for this is that painting was used by the church to convey stories to its congregation. It was efficient in this task because the congregation generally couldn't read, and mass was generally held in latin, which they couldn't speak.
Another example: much per-modern painting was concerned with portraiture. A painted portrait is designed to carry a specific set of information: this is what so and so looks like, this is the type of clothing they could afford to wear, and even: look at he famous artist who they could afford to pay to paint them.
Many people are much more comfortable will illustration then contemporary art. The reason for this (I believe), is because they are not comfortable assigning meaning to something unfamiliar presented in a gallery or museum. The industry involved in the buying and selling of art is to blame for this. They have a financial interest in making art inaccessible to the general populace because art is sold as a luxury good to a very exclusive set of individuals. By controlling the meaning of the artworks they can better control the monetary value of the artworks. They want it to thought that if you don't like what you are seeing its because you are too dumb/ignorant to understand it. They can then categorize you as unimportant (which if you can't afford to by the $500k photograph you are looking at you are unimportant to them anyway). This way the work retains value among those who can afford to buy it.
Damn that was a long post. Sorry, its rare that I get to post on something that I know a lot about.
Wow, its like I'm back in art school again! :-)
I think you are very close to dead on here: art is essentially something that someone calls art. But there is one thing that is being left out. In order to be art there has to be human intervention at some point. Art must be (to at least some extent) man made. Even in the case of those damn painting cats (too lazy to find a link), someone at least had to dip the cat in paint and throw it on a canvas.
Ultimately the difficulty is not qualifying something as "art" because the term "art" carries with it no inherent value judgment:
"Look I pooped on the floor, its art!"; "Look I spent the last two years slaving away, painting a masterpiece" --both statements are equally true. The difficulty is organizing art into hierarchies of content and value (both monetary and cultural). The process is very subjective, but in practice it comes down to the fact that the worth of art is determined by persons well placed in the art industry. Essentially, if art makes it into the Met or Matthew Marks Gallery or Mary Boone Gallery, it is expensive and therefor valuable.
Naaa, its been building to this post all day! This one is the funny one, all the other ones were annoying just so this one could be funny.
Its a joke, /. (where you go to rail against spam) is literally spamming us. The joke isn't just that they are dupes, its that the dupes are ads for "products" at think geek, which as they point out is owned by the same people as /.. They are spamming their subscribers.
I think everyone should lighten up a bit, its only one day a year. And a lot of stuff thats been relayed is pretty funny.
Its actually a damn shame that these pills aren't real. I want some. Somebody get on that!
Here is a scenario (I'm assuming a distant future where the technology has developed significantly and has many common uses and abuses.):
Since the brain has to adapt to the electrodes in order to use them, what if the "chips" will only work really well if they are implanted in children. Children can learn languages without an accent, what if the same is true of these devices.
It seems within the realm of possibility that this could be the case. It also raises serious questions about freedom of choice. If you have to get the implant by 13, who makes the decision, you or your parents (or of course... the state)?
I imagine if brain-electronics technology got advanced enough you could do a lot more then text based telepathy. If you had an extensive enough network of electrodes capable of both "sending and receiving" a signal, you could probably take the electrical activity of one brain and duplicate it in another brain. I imagine it will be a bit more complex then that, but I think it will be pretty interesting (or horrifying) if we find a way to network brains.
Taking it a step further, what if you could also "view" recorded thoughts? What if you had a person sit down and learn how to program in C for instance. While they did that you recorded the electrical activity in their brain. You then played it back in someone else's brain: and then they know C too. Maybe you could even speed the playback up so you could learn faster.
And, to take it even a step further then that, what if you had a group of people networked together so that they were thinking each others thoughts while simultaneously interacting with a central server that delegated tasks to each persons brain, similar to a computer cluster. The server could be used to regulate communication between brains and also used to call up stored information needed be members of the group. Once a problem was solved by one member, the process of solving it could be speedily played back to the other members to bring them up to speed.
A development like this could be either a very good thing or a very bad thing. People like to point out how Star Trek influences future technological developments. I wonder if it will give us the Borg, and whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
"Ya, but for the same price, you can get a far more powerful PC."
Where?
The real question is: Why didn't Microsoft buy Immersion and then sue Sony? $230 is nothing to them, but the ability to severely hamper a competitor is priceless.
Then again, MS has been relatively benign of late (except with regards to OS competition).
Be careful!
I think you are off the mark a bit. iTunes is a "break-even" business according to Jobs. Apple only makes something like 4 cents per song; so for every million songs sold Apple only makes 40k. ITunes exists so as to provide content for the iPod that is both legal and user friendly.
Almost 50% of Apples revenue comes from iPods now. Apple's ultimate goal is to sell iPods and Mac hardware via the iPod "halo effect".
No, but hey... why not? You know of any pending class action suites?
I remember Mousin' Around, it could have been something else though, I had an Apple II GS. The version I remember had a simple drawing program in it, and there was a part where you had to point and click a man thru a cave (it was kinda a very short plateform game). Is that the same thing?
I know what you are talking about as far as clients and one button mice. I used to make extra money in college by tutoring people in the use of the Adobe suit, mostly Photoshop. I spent so much time just going over simple "this is how to use your computer" stuff that I wasn't even sure they are absorbing the software I was actually being paid to teach. The Mac people generally had less difficulty even though they were using OS9 (OS X had just come out and I didn't use it, I was a late adopter). Maybe it was the mouse.
I think a designer could design a phone interface as good as or better then the current designs using nothing more than the button and click wheel on the newest model ipod.
br To be clear, I'm not suggesting an "iPod phone" or that the buttons would do anything like they do on the ipod, or would even be labled similarly. I'm just saying that the click wheel is a flexable and powerful input device cabable of supporting all the functions of a cell phone. If the designer was clever enough it could be beter then conventional setups; which if you think about it are kinda awkward.