It's A, she's turning the voice back on us -- outside of the stream!!. The end is nigh!!

b+down+start9

God no. Why make even more noise pollution?

Instead:

1) Drivers should walk around a vehicle before getting in and verify the condition of the vehicle and that it will be safe to move it

2) Drivers should back up slowly and carefully using their mirrors and should not drive vehicles which they're not competent to handle.

Me and many others. I was the primary designer of the crypto processing hardware which intersects with these specs. My public comments on the specs are here .

And how do you know the NSA's influence didn't simply steamroll over all your professional objections and put the flawed standard in the chips anyway? The NSA has social as well as technological backdoors.

The HFTs are buying in response to your order. Before you've even bought the good. They pay to get your orders before your orders are even filled.

It's a straight up insider trading contract between the exchanges and the HFTs. The fact that it is carried out over the course of microseconds does not alter the basic dynamics of the scheme, which amounts to the exchanges engaging in insider trading at the expense of their customers.

I'm guessing it's because they honestly believe what they are doing is necessary to keep America safe.

This is like the banks and sub-prime lenders "honestly believing" that house prices would go up forever and money would always be cheap.

Read my lips: Everyone involved knew exactly what was going on.

Everyone inside the NSA with so much as a high school Diploma, when encountering even a low level program, knew that it was fundamentally wrong, probably illegal, and corrosive to the civic society. You don't even need to know what civic society is to know that tapping and permanently recording all calls in the US is both dangerous and wrong.

The on the record denials are effectively the NSA aping of the likes of John Corzine's claims of "We have no idea where the money is", despite being the man who took it right out of customers accounts. I dwell on the financial crisis because the breakdown in the rule of law, propriety, common sense, and all morality there is a mirror image and ultimately a fore-runner of the excesses and lies we now see in the NSA.

All that Keeping America Safe is BS. This is all about budgets, contracts, staffing levels, prestige and power seeking on the part of an entire city block of executives, officers, and IT workers throughout the NSA. The purpose of the NSA is to procure BMWs and range rovers for its management, and for favored private contractors and sub-contractors. That is why the price of a incorporated city is being spent on all these ludicrously overblown surveillance programs.

Forget the lies. Follow the money. Men will do anything, say anything, to anyone to keep such a gravy train flowing.

All it will take is one incident, one incident of a ride-sharing assaulting or mugging one of their passengers or vice versa, and the whole operation will collapse overnight.

And rightly so. At least there is some quality control/accountability among licenced Taxi-Drivers.

But to learn what "Darmok" means, you'd have to have an entire comic book or something -- "Darmok on the ocean" means something like "loneliness." "Darmok and Jilhad at Tanagra" means something like "people coming together to face a common obstacle or foe or problem." "Darmok and Jilhad on the ocean" means something like "friendship," perhaps "friendship resulting from overcoming a shared problem."

I'm not an early educator, so I don't know how children are actually taught what words like "loneliness" or "friendship" mean, but my understanding is that they learn them through stories and picture books. Looking at a simple childs picture book, it's a not a stretch to suggest this is how a sptry like Darmok would be learned.

Except this is terrible. The point is precisely what you identified in English -- we have idioms all over the place, and that's actually how most languages work. So, if the universal translator fails to work for this alien language, it should fail for ALL languages, including English. That's the stupidity in the premise.

I think this is being too pedantic. The universal translator is meant to translate, presumably language with things like atomic nouns, adjectives, etc. Basically the Chomsky model of language.

And in the episode, it does actually do this. The problem was that the sentences themselves did not make sense without a deeper context -- without actually having read the Darmok and Jalad picture book. The translator was basically translating "Coloured green ideas sleep furiously" or "Buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo , buffalo buffalo buffalo." or "Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra".

By the way, speaking of Chomsky, his Universal Grammar was challenged recently by the description of the language of a particularly obscure Amazonian tribe which seemingly breaks the rules of Universal Grammar. Once again, I note that, especially compare to some of the standard technoballe in Start Trek (FTL Drives, teleportation, psychics), the idea of an alien species who communicate through idioms, methaphor, analogies, etc is not actually that much of a stretch.

And setting aside your snark for a minute, the OP's comment was in itself one of arrogance, and not curiosity.

All it would have taken is a single Google search, even if s/he wasn't aware of who Abrash was. Instead, it was a blatant "who the fuck" question, which I responded with a mostly polite (and personal) anecdote.

So, your snark re: signal processing etc. is silly for a few reasons, not the least of which is that Slashdot is a heavily comp sci focused site, with a dedicated section to gaming even.

And btw, my undergraduate thesis was on Spread Spectrum Multiple Access. We actually built *shudder* SSMA hardware at a national lab. Now not only am I knowledgeable in signal processing, I am apparently also more knowledgeable than you in graphics. How does that make you feel?

If Karpeles was smart enough, he would have been careful to avoid the accounts of Russian Oligarchs etc, and instead simply have stolen money from unconnected, largely unmonied Libertarians who have little to no legal recourse. Since there is no society, these types would have little means of coming back at him.

Actually, yes. My undergrad was in ECE. You were saying?

Try to imagine "bootstrapping" the alien language in this episode. How do kids learn who Darmok is in order to understand what he represents in the many different metaphors and analogies in which his name could appear?

The same way they learn about triangles. Somebody shows them a picture.

And if they never bothered to tell the kids the actual stories of Darmok, then within a couple generations, no one would remember who Darmok was.

You mean like Charles Boycott, or Teddy bears, or The Three Princes of Serendip. I think it's more than possible to pick up the meanings of works without knowing any of their original context. Perhaps your knowledge would be the poorer, but you would still be able to hold a conversation. The conversation we are holding right now, in english, uses dozens of words which come from another language altogether, and to whose original context and meaning most English speakers are oblivious of.

Faced with this, it is not such a stretch to put a language based on idioms into an episode of a science fiction show.

Amidst all the outright ridiculous scientific technobabble fans are prepared, nay eager, to accept, I find myself surprised to see how many of the same will turn down innovative and well though out linguintic science fiction from the same show.

This reminds me of how a lot of people claim that water on alien worlds is "essential" for life. Sometimes I think there is a dearth of imagination among the scientific classes.

Which is just the opposite of what Martin Luther King said which is that if you break laws protesting an unjust law, you should gladly go to jail.

He set up a laptop in a cabinet and downloaded files. The charges -- at best -- should have concerned interference with property. There have been MIT pranks which warranted more serious charges.

Instead Schwartz was faced with a 35 year sentence and the full weight of a Federal prosecution. It's as if Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, and instead of a $10 fine, found herself charged under anti-terrorism legislation with a 15 year prison sentence for disobeying TSA regulations and a $10 million fine. In other words, a cruel and unusual punishment. Even Dr. King would have found it difficult to rally support in the face of that kind of state reaction to protest.

This is precisely why Pearson dropped Occulus after the buyout. We had a cool piece of tech, and a company ready to deliver it the the place best suited to it -- video games.

Now we have a multi-billion dollar social media site willing to spend more on the marketing and propaganda budget for the deal itself than they are on the actual technology. Hence this article.

Facebook is the Walmart of the Internet. Occulus should have taken their cue from Snapper and walked away.

Not just any somebody. This particular somebody had been instrumental in organizing public opposition to the SOPA act. Schwartz was targeted by the Justice Department in a clear cut case of political suppression.

As we all know, the Department under Holder and Breuer has better things to do with their time(banks, guns, etc), but instead chose to politicize their offices instead of upholding justice.

Because those running modern industries are intimidated by the simplicity and reliability of the services that came before.