Comment Awww look... (Score 1) 77
One protection racket is upset that another protection racket is encroaching on their territory. Queue up the violins...
One protection racket is upset that another protection racket is encroaching on their territory. Queue up the violins...
If Samsung wants to muscle Apple and Google on app/software sales, don't they have the might to create an independent app store for their phones? I don't believe there is anything that would prevent it as Amazon sells Android apps independent of Google's app store. That would be much less risky and complex than trying to introduce yet another smartphone OS into what is already available.
Well, I did indicate I would continue to watch to give the show more of a chance.
Blade Runner, by changing the name of the movie to something which didn't reference the book, at least gave a big clue that it would only be loosely based on the source material.
Philip K. Dick was very enthusiastic about the adaption of Blade Runner from his story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" As far as we know, perhaps he would like this adaption as well.
I really wanted to like the adaption of "The Man in the High Castle", but was dissapointed it went in directions greatly different than the book. One example is "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy". It is is no longer a book, but a 16mm movie filled with images of the Allies winning WWII including scenes from VE and VJ day. How did this movie physically cross from our reality to their reality? As a book, the alternate reality was about ideas and imagination, not a physical reality to be escaped to. This could lead the series into well worn SciFi time-travel and alternate universe trope that wasn't what the PKD story is about.
I thought the visuals and atmosphere of the show were good, but the characters seemed to bland vanilla versions of the rich and colorful characters in the PKD source material.
If Amazon picks it up, I'll give it more of a chance, but I didn't enjoy the show as much as I wanted to. I remembet it taking me a little while to get into the book so perhaps I have to do the same with this adaption.
So, that should give us another seven or eight years to figure out how to service the Hubble with one of the new orbital vehicles.
...and stressful enough already. Now they'll tell you to strip and get into a silly motion capture suit. Next up is sticking a probe up our anus to measure the contraction of the sphincter muscles. After all, it's for our own good. How else will our overlords prevent another Snowden fiasco?
...somewhere 2 million lightyears away in the Andromeda galaxy a nerd zooming into a similar high resolution image of the Milky Way galaxy, seeing a faint yellow smudge no larger than a pixel and wondering if it's a star or noise in the image.
Stars... If you pan around the outskirts of the image you will see that the density drops off defining the shape of the galaxy.
These images demonstrate that the Hubble is a national (if not international) treasure. With two U.S. rockets soon capable of delivering astronauts to LEO, there must be some way to perform some type of minimal maintenance mission to the Hubble so it can continue its mission beyond the current EOL deadline. With no suitable visible light replacement telescope on the horizon, dumping the telescope into the ocean will be a crime. This would be a marvelous opportunity for someone like Elon Musk or the executives at Boeing to step up and lobby the government to be allowed to put together such a mission.
On the pillars comparison image, if you cross your eyes to superimpose the old image over the new image you'll see a pretty cool 3D effect. Not sure if it's something in my imagination or if the stellar motion over 20 years gives us two slightly different view of the pillars to create a kind of stereo image.
Instead of making the big lead from star to star. You can make smaller leaps from comet to comet.
This may best idea here as it may solve the replenishment of consumables such a long journey would entail. Hop from comet to comet until at the edge of the Oort cloud timing things so that the edge of another Oort cloud is passing by for the big interstellar hop to be made. H3 could be harvested on each comet for fusion energy to mine carbon, minerals and metals in preparation for the next hop. Any single hop wold probably be no more than a few decades - almost within our technology today.
Given a few centuries of technical progress, I can forsee such a journey be possible by either biological entities (our descendants), robots or some hybrid of the two. Robots are interesting because theit artificial DNA could be programmed to spread like a virus from comet to comet, monitored for success or failure, and new improved models sent out if earlier models prove unsuccessful due to unforseen difficulties. Such advanced robots would probably be nearly indistinguishable from biology except for being well suited to reproduction and locomotion in the deep space environment of the Oort clouds.
Perhaps from the outside the Democrat party appears right-wing, but in the U.S. they generally self identify as being left-wing.
BTW, I believe it would be best to abolish using terms derived from 18th century revolutionary France to describe modern political parties. Both of the parties seem to have fascist tendencies when it comes to favoring eilitist and corporate interests over a citizen's individual rights.
Or their kids or spouses get ensured after downloadinga few songs from a torrent (assuming we know judges would never participate in such activities themselves).
I don'the know if left or right-wing ideology has anything to do with such matters. In the U.S. it is generally the left-wing Democrat party that pushes the agenda of the Hollywood media giants with regards to copyright law and the government aiding corporations to step all over individual rights to pursue copyright violations.
I mentioned the era of the dinosaurs to put the time span of a few hundred thousand years in context of actually being fairly brief. I honestly don't know of any data to draw upon to extrapolate whether such a time span is reasonable for a technical civilization. Thus I'm open to hearing other's ideas on the matter.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.