I'm one of those overconfident idiots who never knows what he's talking about (being an expert in nothing), but I suspect it has to do with the higher mental effort required to intelligently form and express an idea about what is inadequately understood than to simply regurgitate what one thinks they already know. I remember when I was a kid my shrink gave me an IQ test and asked me why there were seasons. I had no fucking idea, but started thinking about possible reasons. I knew the Earth's orbit was elliptical and guessed our distance from the Sun was responsible (incorrectly, of course). I suppose demonstrating that I was able to use what little I knew to form a reasonable hypothesis was good enough for the test, but the point is the very act of pushing myself forward based on inadequate information gave me confidence.

What worries me are the people who speak confidently as pure, thoughtless bullshit pours from their mouth (politicians, for example). At least give it a really hard think before you make a fool of yourself.

Don't know much about physics, but Newton's laws of motion were good and still work on a small scale for most practical purposes. Then we had the theories of general and special relativity, which work on larger scales and describe spacetime. Further we have quantum field theory, which describes interactions at an extremely small scale and apparently has yet to be unified with the G/S theories of relativity. The lack of unification leads me to believe that we're either too stupid to discover the missing link or that one or both theories are inaccurate. Now that our observable universe is pretty damn huge, a larger sample size to test our various theories against, it doesn't surprise me that things don't add up. There could be dark matter/energy, other dimensions/universes bumping into ours, a godlike noncorporeal alien race using quantum teleportation as its neural network and galaxies as its body, etc., but if I had to put good money on it I'd venture that our theories are wrong. Until current "working" theories can at least be unified, I'd hold off proposing things like the majority of all matter/energy in the universe not being directly observable. Errors on a small scale are negligible, but when applied at the insane scale of the universe they can't be ignored. Even if dark matter/energy do exist, our theories are probably still wrong.

I've heard of such drinks but never tried them. Perhaps on a hot day they'd be both refreshing and invigorating. Down with room-temperature coffee, then. Here's to piping hot or icy cold coffee and cold beer.

Nothing worse than a person who always finds a way to blame someone else for their own mistakes, except perhaps cold coffee or warm beer.

Background Music to Star Trek-style chill vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Another way of looking at the question is to put us in place of the octopus. Imagine if the octopus had evolved several hundred thousand years further, becoming the dominant life form on a different planet, and chose to explore and colonize Earth. They may look on our people and cities like a bee hive or ant mount; intelligent as a collective but oblivious and insignificant as individuals. Smoking us out and sucking our honey (or worse) may seem completely ethical and moral to them. Our nukes could be their ink cloud, our cries of panic would be incomprehensible, and our futile efforts to escape their snares would be comfortably familiar and expected. What's considered "right" and "wrong" only has meaning if practiced and communicated by those with power, and for those whose minds work differently it often seems arbitrary.

Sadly Niccolò Machiavelli had a good, and probably correct, answer to that proposition.

Why wouldn't they just change whatever internal version number is being improperly queried to 10, have the correct API call return 9, and market it as 9? Maybe once they realized there was a problem, they decided they liked the idea of 10 and it would be the simplest fix? Or perhaps these bad apps are using the correct API call (as opposed to pulling a registry key or something) but are parsing it incorrectly... The correct approach would be to issue an advisory for all these shitty programmers to update their applications or they may not work on Windows 9. Fix your shit, or GTFO, basically. In any case, glad I don't have to deal with that sort of crap anymore. Linux has its own steaming pile for me to wade through these days. :)

We're getting some good answers here. Since it has a screen like a phone, the "mode" button could change which program controlled how the input graphs were rendered, like OpenGL display lists in a game. The x-ray/backscatter method could have a red button and audibly beep when it's on to warn people. Maybe a mass spectrometer to sniff the air in front of it (and compare the results to a database of known sample patterns) would make it truly boss. If someone farted, the tricorder would have the answer.

Ultrasound, x-rays or similar tech wouldn't work?

Well we're using laser weaponry now for missile defense, and I think they've even burned up artillery with it but I could be imagining things. So in another 100 years, laser weaponry's probably going to be rather insane compared to what we have now. Energy weapons could conceivably be created to fire high frequency electromagnetic radiation like gamma rays, perhaps being able to simulate something like a focused solar flare. That would fry any electronics in the target. The waste heat issue would be a function of the weapon's efficiency, and presumably lesser than chemically-propelled bullets. Missiles would be best were heat dissipation a problem. On that subject, how do you dissipate heat in space? I can't figure that one out.

Is there currently technology that senses the distance and density of matter and requires nothing be behind the object? If this device had the capability to graphically display this information I think that would impress more than anything else. You could scan for a broken bone, find lost objects in the grass (assuming they were more dense than the grass/dirt), or find studs or electrical wiring behind drywall in buildings.

He's dead, Jim.

Where there are people, particularly in large groups separated by distance (and by proxy culture), there will be war. The harshness of the environment or emotional and physical costs to the soldiers, history has proven, is irrelevant.

Combat ships will be largely unmanned, with several (for redundancy) manned "overseers" nearby to give the drones a sentient strategic advantage. Remote oversight wouldn't be able to respond quickly enough due to communications lag, although the overseers would be in two-way communication with more distant officers coordinating the combat groups general strategy.

Assuming the technology to efficiently and compactly generate incredible amounts of power has progressed equally with all other fields relevant to space colonization, energy weapons would be favored over more conventional chemically-propelled/detonated ordinance like bullets, missiles and bombs. Conventional ordinance requires mechanical fidelity and precision to fire, is limited in quantity to due to the mass required to be effective, travels slowly over great distances, may be easily impeded by other ordinance or energy weapons, suffers from intertia and can result in friendly fire if it is disabled, misses its target, or is fragmented by defensive countermeasure. Energy weapons reach their target nearly instantaneously, may track their target for sustained, precision delivery, and use only enough energy to obtain the desired effect. Their vector can be controlled non-mechanically, allowing sensors to maintain a lock on a rapidly and unpredictably moving target. They may not be impeded by other energy weapons and travel too quickly to be countered by dynamically-deployed mass-based countermeasures.

The precision and accuracy of combat drones' movement and energy weaponry combined with the tiered progression from automated drone to human overseer would, with the exception of any extreme tactical choices by central command, product a general lack of chaos that is atypical of conventional battles. The primary focus would be to edge out the opponent by obtaining slight defensive advantages through technological superiority, use of unique environmental factors (planets, moons, stars, gravitational or radiological fields, asteroids), the purposeful introduction of unpredictable or chaotic elements (literally gambling that the increase in chaos will be favorable), or psychological tactics such as deliberate attacks on civilians, propaganda and public (broadcast) executions and torture.

The bottom line is that less people would die. Once the enemy drones have been decimated there's really no reason to go on slaughtering the general public. Once that happens the first few times, history will keep the losers of the future in line outside of the inevitable (but manageable through surveillance and information control) insurgencies.

You nailed it there. The act of letting go the belief that people, things and the world have an "official purpose" is a difficult one. I've heard first hand numerous times from religious people when confronted with the idea, and the response is always disturbing. It goes something like this: "Then it doesn't matter what I do. I can break the rules of man and God. There is no reason to be moral or ethical." I can only guess that response is born of the fear and hopelessness felt in that brief moment when they imagine there is no purpose. The concept of purpose is purely human. We as sentient beings ascribe purpose to things (this bed is for sleeping because we built it that way); it's not an innate, natural property.

That is an excellent solution to the proximity problem. They'd also have to use inertial dampeners to simulate the effect of movement when not actually moving (the opposite of what they normally do) and variable gravity plating. I wonder if the holodeck can localize pressure and humidity, or if it's just the entire room. If the safeties were turned off and there was a serious hull breach in one of two shuttlepods how would the holoprojection or deck mechanics depressurize only one of the participants? Perhaps the safeties only pertain to force field injuries and more difficult properties are performed globally. Localizing scent, for example, would be difficult without hiding little scent dispensers. There was a Voyager episode (the one where the holodecks were expanded to encompass multiple decks) where a holodeck-generated explosion actually blew out other parts of the ship. The holodeck concept is awesome and fun to talk about.