Stierlitz

@krapp said:

> Why it's almost as if Star Trek is fiction and the "canon" of a franchise spanning over fifty years of television, film and books has always been fluid and arbitrary.

Despite it being fiction, you cannot arbitrarily mess with the basic mythology and still keep what makes the thing magical.

In the latest Star Trek, the starship Discovery runs on spores harvested from shrooms grown onboard. Despite being set in the Captain Pike era, no one ever noticed this up to then :]

ThePreacherMan 6 hours ago [dead] [–]

Defund. Defund. Defund.

mtgx 9 hours ago [dead] [–]

Just when marijuana is about to be legalized at the federal level. This can't be a coincidence. They will no longer be able to arrest people for marijuana, but now they can arrest them for dozens or hundreds of other drugs. Seems like a net "win" for the DEA.

Yet anóther win for the prétend war on drúgs!

> the biggest problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The biggest problem was that the site did not work ..

If my memory serves me, a bunch of editable PDFs and drop-down selection boxes that gave no clue as to the correct content. Some serial number, depending on your insurance provider, AS234 BD568 and so on. A total mess.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140122141413/http://www.shirky...

I sometimes suspect the whole raison d'être of dot.NET, docker, kubernetes etc, is to render programming into such an esoteric art, that the hoi polloi can be excluded. --

DI == Dependency Injection

lambda, maybe, monad, overloading, scope .. concepts that don't exist in mathematics. Imagine if the keywords in a standard English sentence changed meaning depending on the overload operators. A virtual new language in each context. Programming took a wrong turn since Pascal

The Simpsons jumped-the-shark in that episode where they made Nelson Muntz go nice.

“I can’t tell you how many new product initiative meetings I’ve been in where no one remembers the meeting about the exact same thing from two quarters ago. It’s like Groundhog’s Day, but you’re having the same meetings over and over.”

Haaar!

“But around the same time, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an idea even stranger and more fantastical: selling computer operating systems”

This article must be coming from some parallel universe. As I recall how Micro-Soft got a contract from IBM to supply an OS for their low-spec personal computer. They didn't have one, so Micro-Soft bought-in 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, using the IBM money to pay for it up front. Rather than buy it outright, Microsoft persuaded IBM to license a copy of DOS for each IBM PC sold. Later on with ‘Columbia Data Products’, Compaq and other, figuring-out how to clone the PC without paying IBM, Microsoft was more than happy to license DOS to them.

“Columbia_Data_Products”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products

“Joint Development Agreement between International Business Machines Corporation and Microsoft Corporation”

“With respect to Phase I Output, to the extent such joint ownership is prevented by operation of law each party hereby grants to the other a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide and irrevocable license to use, execute, perform, reproduce, prepare or have prepared Derivative Works based upon display, and sell, lease or otherwize transfer of posession or ownership of copies of, the Phase I Output and/or any Derivative Works thereof.”

http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000...

Nothing that's not already out in the media. Colin Wallace (and others) wrote about this, so they framed him for manslaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace#Imprisonment

Is there a link to some text that I could read. Listening to the spoken word, I tend to nod off after five minutes. Don't think I can manage 42 minutes :]

> In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”:

“In his efforts to thwart the council, Syme eventually discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives; each was employed just as mysteriously and assigned to defeat the Council. They soon find out they were fighting each other and not real anarchists; such was the mastermind plan of their president”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1695/1695-h/1695-h.htm

Sounds like what the war-on-terror eventually ended-up like in Northern Ireland. Eventually virtually every other terrorist of note ended up working for the security forces.

“What was the problem? The moon had risen, and was reflecting radar signals back to earth.”

First I've heard of radar reflections off the moon causing a false positive. I do recall reading about where the sun glinting off the ocean was misinterpreted by orbiting sensors as light emanating from missile trails?

@coldpie: ‘If you're putting the words "secure" and "computer" in the same sentence, you've already lost. There is no such thing as computer security.’

We should borrow an idea from nature and not create a monoculture. That way when a ‘computer virus’ comes along, it won't run rampant through the ecosystem.

“the intruders stole and published online tens of thousands of sensitive documents — including schematics of client bank vaults and surveillance systems.”

Explain like I'm five what such information is even doing on a “computer” connected directly to the Internet.

If you run your infrastructure on a “computer” directly connected to the Internet such that it puts hospitals and power grids in danger, then maybe you're in the wrong profession.

Seriously HR admins, if you care anything about your reputation, you should cease re-posting this kind of neocon disinformation.

Tribal Voice ...an editorial© by Paula Giese

http://www.dickshovel.com/tv.html

re: @sudosysgen: "The proposed mechanism of microwave or sonic waves is completely implausible, to the point of absurdity .."

Very reasonable and well thought piece. It is highly irresponsible for of NPR talking up the next cold-war. But I figure without a foreign bogeyman to scare the American people, the spooks wouldn't be able to justify the budget.

“Microsoft Edge”, don't they mean a re-skinned Google Chromium.

> Is DNA Hardware or Software?

Yes, it's both.

@green_rooster: “Not far off from that, it seems:”

Ни черта не умеют!

@cameldrv: “Then the foreign powers should declare war and they'll be subject to the Geneva convention”

Question: Which military power has threatened to bomb the International Criminal Court in the Hague, if its military are brought before the court. a) The Russian Federation or b) The United States of America.

* and the answer is ‘b’

https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...

@dx87: “It could also just be done as a thinly veiled threat to discourage people from working there”

Yea, those damn Ruskies are so stupid they left their name and home address in the compiled files.

Do you really have to give space to this Neocon cyber BS on a respectable tech forum. Cyber BS by people who seem to be desperate to re-start the cold-war. Fortunatly, the Russians won't come out to play. Neither will the Chinese, Iran or North Korea.

> It's been a long, strange trip but it's always driven by two motives: Making good products and money.

Actually, they are going after Android handset makers. Who are paying Microsoft for each handset sold didn't you know Microsoft owned Android?.

https://www.theregister.com/2014/10/07/how_much_is_that_micr...

> It's been a long, strange trip but it's always driven by two motives: Making good products ..

Really, really .. more like shifting it out the door if it compiles sucessfully!

“Trickbot, a global menace that has infected millions of [microsoft windows] computers and is used to spread ransomware.”

There, corrected for accuracy.