Corporations and commerce are basically run by elementary school-yard rules. Essentially the CEO runs up, takes something belonging to you, and runs away yelling "Nally-nally-neener-cakes! I get what you make!". There are no take-backsies unless you are willing to call a teacher/lawyers and get engaged in a huge fuss.

In fact, our modern system of commerce has become so efficient and automated that you do not even need to enter into a prior agreement or even a school in order for your property to "neener-caked". This will be the next step in the evolution of rent-seeking.

That's not freedom, that's power.

That's not a tautology, that's a platitude.

And if you don't want to be a victim of paparazzi and vindictive newspaper editors, black out all of your windows and never go outside again.

if you don't want to be a victim of the NSA or ad tracking companies, never go online again.

And if you don't want your pension scalped, don't invest it in the stock market where HFTs and Goldman rule the roost.

One the one side of all of these arguments, we have victims, and on the other, we have predators of all kinds who happily proclaim "It's legal. I'm allowed to exploit you. Freedom of Speech!! Small government!!.....Ignore the man behind the curtain I paid to have laws changed in my favor."

I have a different philosophy. I believe that the Law can be used to shape societies; to encourage behaviors we would like to promote, and discourage behaviors we would like to see curtailed. As long as we can have a debate about what Laws are legal and reasonable -- and not devolve into a Dogmatic ideological shouting match about commas in constitutions -- and as long we can apply Reason and wisdom, over emotion and ignorance when doing so, the Laws we develop stand a good chance of shaping society to make it a better place.

In short, I don't think a young girls smile in a photograph constitutes sacred, inalienable grounds for the bearer to upload said photograph to the Internet whenever he feels like 'sperging out would make him feel better.

The people who are waiting for you to develop secure password login libraries.

If you send too few people out then production won't be high enough in the beginning. You need to send a fair few billion out to at least the first few star systems so that the population can grow, then once the colony is establish, you need to ship people back to maintain production levels on the home world. This is basic stuff people.

I, and others, can relate story after story about people like this,....

I can also related dozen of stories of people who drove dangerously, passed me out, and flew passed the lights ahead before they went red.

So called "bad" or dangerous drivers are more often than not rewarded for accellerating quickly and swerving dramatically. Those of us foolish enough to stay within the speed limit, and not take risks, are left waiting at the red light.

There are only so many times you can see this happening before one say, you decide to speed up as well.

And geeks and other "smart people" working in finance, law, and the NSA are doing just that, one egregious breach of trust at a time.

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

b+down+start9

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.

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.

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.