There's an entire episode of ST: Enterprise devoted to depicting the life of freighter crews on early warp ships. If I recall correctly, they're only capable of warp 1 or 2, and this is first-generation warp, so it's much slower than the "Warp 2" you might hear Picard give the order for in TNG, or even the "Warp 5" that the NX-01 Enterprise is capable of. These crews spent a lot of time in deep space doing absolutely nothing except reproducing like bunnies.

The neat thing about the freighter crews as they were depicted in the shows, was that the crews were often families that would live and reproduce on the ship, spending their entire lives in space on a fairly small and poorly-armed vessel. They would occasionally take on new blood from outside their family unit (this helps combat the immediate idea of gene pool degeneration), but the majority of the crew would be biological relatives.

These crews were much less idealistic than Starfleet personnel, and were very much loyal to their families above and beyond any set of ideals. No doubt they'd encounter all kinds of sticky situations in space with pirates, Klingons, and even Starfleet, and have to defend their family, defend their ship, make ends meet, and survive.

A show like that would necessarily have to involve a lot less space combat (and fewer explosions therefore), because even a small warship like a frigate or a destroyer can *easily* overwhelm and destroy a freighter in the Star Trek universe (all time periods), as well as outrun them and probably have better-trained military crew for boarding parties as well. The freighter crew would have to get by on wit, cunning, deception, and probably a whole hell of a lot of sacrifice. Not much you can do with a small pulse cannon against a military vessel, when nobody in your family is trained in the kind of specialization that, say, Data would have, when he'd save the day every other episode with technobabble trick after technobabble trick.

What I said above is NOT in any way a knock against TNG, just saying that you're asking for a very, VERY different side of Trek, but I think it's doable, and there's a lot of established lore in this area that could easily be drawn from to create a series.

However, I don't think it would stick. The majority of the hardcore Trek crowd wants to see a crew on a Federation flagship, or at least a Federation-operated space station. The non-Trekkies would get bored by the lack of explosions. So it's unlikely that such a thing would make an appearance on TV or in the movies.

Indeed. Aside from that, "intellectual" threats to the characters (figuring something out with science and creativity; outsmarting an opponent; devising a diplomatic solution to a problem) create far more tension and build-up to the crescendo. The threat of massive loss of life could be the end result of whatever dreadful thing they're up against, but if their solution is to shoot the hell out of it, it's boring, because you KNOW there's no way the movie could proceed except for them to win. Sure, somebody you're attached to might tragically die, but even that trope is pretty old by now, even within the Star Trek film canon (Spock and Data).

What I've been wanting -- and not receiving -- from modern incarnations of 'Trek are basically the scenes that directors like Justin Lin and JJ Abrams would cut, if they even allowed the scenes to be filmed.

Like the drawn-out philosophical conversations between Wesley and Picard in TNG.

Like the near-total audio silence between lines of dialogue during Spock's death scene in the Wrath of Khan.

Like the many times that a character would *tell* a story through words rather than the viewer being *shown* the story through whizzy graphics.

Like when the activities of the Federation personnel vaguely represent the moral code and rules of engagement that they apparently seek to uphold.

It's not going to get better. The cognitive dissonance behind producing movies these days is stunning. If you don't meet quotas for number of CG-rendered frames and explosions per minute, they won't let you run it in theaters.

Step 1: Pray that the foundational assumptions of state-of-the-art crypto remain true (no P=NP or quantum computer cracking nonsense, please).

Step 2: Rent/buy/lease/colo a VPS or dedicated server in a country that respects users' freedom and doesn't tamper with their network connection.

Step 3: Set up a VPN on said server.

Step 4: Use the latest crypto algs you can get your hands on; apply security patches aggressively; and watch out for notices of weaknesses.

Step 5: Use the VPN on absolutely every device you own: at work, on your phone, on your home router, etc.

Step 6: ???

Step 7: Eat My Bitstream! No more ISP interference.

IMO Step 1 is the shakiest, but it's all we've got for now.

I have the Vue system. This is apparently an ugly redheaded stepchild (like Windows ME, or Windows XP x64 Edition) that came between the "original" Keurig, and Keurig "2.0". It lacks any form of DRM, and there are $10 plastic adapters on eBay that allow you to brew any original K-Cup pack using the Vue. I tried it and it works fine.

The features of the machine are much better than the original Keurig: larger water tank, touchscreen with customizable temperature and water amount, it heats up and brews faster, doesn't make a horrible noise when brewing, and it accepts both K-Cup Vue and original K-Cup packs. Oh, and it has a water filter in the water tank (you still have to replace it of course), so I don't have to wait for water to trickle out of my fridge's filtered water dispenser to fill up the Vue: I just fill up a glass or pitcher from the kitchen sink, unfiltered, and dump it in the Vue's water tank. The filter takes care of the rest.

Sometimes the red-headed stepchild is the sweet spot. Like how Windows 2000 was a suitable substitute for Windows XP for many years for folks who didn't like the whole Internet-based Windows Product Activation. Obtain a single valid Win2K license and you could technically activate an infinite number of systems.

Will be hanging on to my Vue for a long time...

So far, the rise of locked mobile devices is not preventing the sale or use of computing devices which are not restricted in such a way. And at least on Android, even "locked" devices still allow you to install third-party apps, like Firefox, which can be used to block ads.

Locking down all possible systems that can be purchased by consumers and enterprises (including modems/routers, desktops, laptops, etc.) with NO way to purchase, anywhere, a compatible, functional system that can have arbitrary software code executed on it, is a very tall order. If such a system is ever even threatened to be put into place, there will be a social rebellion the likes of which will make the American Revolutionary War look like a playground arm wrestle.

However, to attempt to prevent systems like this from being placed into effect gradually and slowly over time, I believe we should do all we can to reject systems of this nature, and continue to use, promote and purchase open platforms. Even (desktop) Windows, proprietary as it is, is -- relatively speaking -- very "open" compared to the locked-down environment you speak of. By refusing to economically support walled gardens, we can prevent them from gaining a foothold, or worse, becoming such a "de facto" standard that the majority of the web stops supporting open platforms.

I definitely see the danger, but I am optimistic that people will care enough that they will fight it. As usual, with matters like these, technologists such as the ones who often visit /. should be expected to lead the charge. Join the EFF and throw away your iPhones, folks.

There's really no other rational choice than to block most/all ads, in a world where ads can do just about anything they want. The annoyance and performance slowdown are trivial issues compared to the real problems. The same openness that allows Web-based ads to track you using cookies, launch plugins and pop-up windows, and prevent you from viewing content until you watch a video or wait some time, also (fortunately) allows users to fight back as a natural defense mechanism against these predatory tactics. For the advertisers to abuse this openness for their own personal monetary gain, while presuming to control what *I* run on *my* computer, while being appalled at my choice of doing the same, is ridiculous and contradictory.

Far and away the gravest problem with ads today is that the vast majority of them pose *serious* security and/or privacy issues. Most ad networks do very little to prevent bad actors from embedding malicious content that tries to exploit browser zero-days, steal cookies, track your behavior, or trick you into visiting malicious websites. Until website owners and ad networks decide to completely purge all the security and privacy risks, advertising is essentially synonymous with an opportunistic attack on each user who visits an ad-infested site.

On the open web, the only way advertisers are going to get any revenue is through earning the trust and goodwill of their customers. And we ARE customers -- customers who are currently being treated like shit. How would you like it if a car salesman walked up to you and started giving you a tattoo on the arm with the manufacturer's logo, seconds after you get out of your car and step foot on the lot? That kind of intrusive behavior should not be tolerated. And it isn't: users are doing exactly what the advertisers should expect them to do, given how they are being treated.

Ad networks should start by having a manual screening process for each entity that wants to submit ads through their network. The integrity, ownership, and status of each entity should be scrutinized to ensure that they are a legitimate business and are registered with the proper authorities. Additionally, the network should perform constant random sampling of their current ads being run, and employ experienced security auditors or penetration testers to examine the source code and other dynamic behavior of the advertisement payload on various popular browsers, to determine if it is tracking the user or malicious in any way. If it is, all further business with that partner should be stopped immediately, and the advertisement removed from the network. Website owners and users should not be the ones having to push the ad networks to remove these abusers.

The open Web is not going away. Users are in control of what displays in the web browser. Advertisers must either learn to work within a system of reasonable rules that do not attack users' systems or try to compromise their privacy, OR just keep fighting until their revenue stream is slowly strangled to death by their own despicable policies.

That's just passing the buck, not really answering the question. I can imagine three completely different interviews purportedly about, say, "Ruby": one that a college kid could pass by going through a Ruby tutorial the night before; one that would require the same kid to take a Programming Languages class with a 4-week section on Ruby to be able to pass; and one that would unambiguously flunk everyone except Masahiro Matsumoto. There is an entire spectrum of different difficulties of interview in between these three examples, too.

The OP asked a philosophical question, and you provided a concrete answer that, while technically correct, does not actually get us any closer to an understanding of the issue. A more reasoned answer would go something like this: if you're being hired with the intent of writing Ruby code as a significant part, or the entirety of your job description, the interviewer ought to ask questions that are challenging enough that, if you can answer them fluently and capably, the implied skills you must possess in order to do so would be more than sufficient for you to excel at the type of work being performed. Even within the industry of coding shops, there is an enormous difference between writing Ruby for basic office automation tools (say, an automatic timesheet filler using Selenium) and writing Ruby with intense domain knowledge needed in a challenging area, like physics, quantum computing, higher mathematics, actuarial science, etc.

So the two axes of programming language competency are: domain knowledge (can you comprehend the subject matter enough to develop the algorithms/formulae/logic flows for the software you're writing?), and knowledge of the language and its libraries, including third-party libraries (are you able to use the facilities of the language itself or any third-party components in order to implement your solution?). Proper competency must be established on BOTH axes in order to determine if you're suitable for a job.

In the absolutely general, context-free case of determining whether you are "competent" or "good" or "learned" with a language, I don't think it's possible to answer in any meaningful way. One's competency must always be bounded by a realistic look at what exactly the work to be perfomed entails.

Contract prices may be down, but the cost per gigabyte of data (because fuck everything except data; nothing else matters; data is information and information is data, and there's no point in thinking about anything else) has not decreased significantly.

When you pre-purchase tens of gigabytes in advance, you might be lucky to pay $3 to $4 USD per GB of data transferred over a world-class LTE network like Verizon's. If you have any overages, the price shoots up to $10/GB. It's been at that level since the EvDO days.

$3 per GB is an order of magnitude more than what most people expect to pay and are willing to pay for data once you get out of the 10GB category. The convenient fact that most people still don't know how to do anything useful with their phones and hence don't actually use that much data, does not excuse the heinous prices.

A ridiculous amount of 30+ year old local, county, state and federal legislation has kept *actually good* landlines from reaching millions of people in the US, even in densely-packed suburbs with strong median income. Well, let me clarify that: it's legislation that was passed due to industry lobbying, and even without the legislation, the industry would still collude to depress the rollout of things like fiber to the premises. So while yes, government is complicit in the problem, even the anarchists/libertarians having their way wouldn't fix the problem.

But the landline problem could be conveniently sidestepped if the wireless broadband carriers would offer reasonable tethering or home LTE modem plans with affordable prices per gigabyte. On the whole, LTE data is extremely stable, very high-throughput (many times faster than Verizon ADSL, that's for sure), and natively supports IPv6. It's usually still up if you have a localized power outage. It works fine in severe weather. It's cheaper for the carriers to roll out than to bring fiber to every house. Everybody fucking wins! Except they don't want to do it, because they're making money hand over fist as it is, and they have no regulation forcing them to change. Meanwhile, the "have-nots" who can't get FiOS or similar high-speed broadband are left in the 20th century, or trying to buy someone else's grandfathered unlimited data plan on craigslist or eBay.

I'm not even saying that unlimited data needs to happen on LTE. Sure, it would be nice, and I think it's achievable if they simply scale the tower density to the population density and fix the egregious spectrum waste problem (legacy protocols that are hideously inefficient, etc); but even very cheap *limited* data plans would be fine. Nobody wants to pay $9.99+ to buy an HD movie, then pay another $40 in data charges just to download the damn thing. I think a reasonable price for 1 GB of data on a mobile network is 25 cents per GB. $1 to download a feature-length 1080p movie in high quality. That's perhaps a 5 - 10% tax on the cost of the content license. Not too terrible.

It's completely bogus to say that things have improved a lot in the last two years. The ditching of new unlimited data contracts on Verizon and AT&T, coupled with the stagnation in the price of data per gigabyte despite a vastly expanding network capacity, is pure, unadulterated greed on the behalf of the carriers, with absolutely no sign of pro-consumer progress. If you believe $10/GB is reasonable, either you're shilling or you've got your head stuck in the sand.

The biggest challenge with this tech, as with most emerging tech these days, is to mass-produce it, and do so cheaply. People simply cannot afford to pay the prices that are normally slapped on next-generation vehicles like this. That, and they only tend to produce about 1500 of them per year. Not enough to even make a dent in the market.

I'm pessimistic, but I hope they prove me wrong. If the relatively successful mass deployment of gas hybrids is a baby learning to walk, this new fuel system is going to be as difficult to roll out as asking that baby who just took their first steps, to immediately get themselves down to the race track and win a mile race against Usain Bolt.

Good luck.

Actually, the "US military and federal contracting wanker-sphere" were among the few organizations that spent big bucks on the foundational concepts of networking that eventually led to the Internet. Look up the history of DARPA sometimes. The first letter in the acronym, D, stands for Defense.

Their reasons for using "Cyber" in front of everything are for completely different reasons. Beancounters in the massive federal bureaucracy system need distinctive search keywords for disparate efforts. If they just called everything "security", you would end up with hiring security guards with pistols who've never touched a computer, whose job description says they're supposed to do penetration testing on mainframes.

Sure, their terminology seems a little out there (especially because much of the world doesn't feel the need to assign such specific, clumsy terms to everything), and I'm not defending their practice, nor am I claiming that they're up to date with the latest trends and technologies now that the Internet has flourished.

But it is a complete fabrication to say that the military-industrial complex / the US DoD / the US military is "30 years late discovering this whole internet thing". They BUILT it.

Al Gore didn't invent the Internet. DARPA did.

But Verizon is perfectly happy billing customers at $10 per GB. They will only change if they are forced to by law. And I guarantee you that they will sue the FCC, the courts, and even their own mothers again and again until the Supreme Court has to make a decision, in case the FCC does actually strike against them and declare Internet service (including mobile) a public utility.

I consider myself part of the "hacker culture", and I'm sick and tired of this blind adherence to an operating system architecture from the 70s. AT&T UNIX is dead, and its ancestors only mimicked it chiefly for compatibility reasons (otherwise you'd have a rough time compiling any software that was written for UNIX on your new OS, and you'd never gain market traction).

I find very little value in the UNIX philosophy, and in fact I find that it adds a lot of needless overhead and puts MORE work on system administrators for no reason at all except that "we've been doing it that way since the 70s". I'm so tired of hearing this "criticism" of systemd.

More seriously though, if that's the best you can come up with -- that it's not "UNIXy enough" -- then systemd is well on its way to universal adoption. No serious maintainer of any distro except perhaps Slackware is going to take that argument seriously, because it's a strawman that should've died before many of us in the current incarnation of the hacker culture were even born. Now it's properly dying, and all the people who are stuck in the 70s are coming out of the woodwork to pitch a fit as their set-in-stone view of system architecture is rendered obsolete.

The UNIX philosophy had a time and a place, but just like any other design decision, it had major drawbacks. It worked well in the type of environment it was running in at the time, and continues to have some relevance today, but it is high time that we retire it. The new system architecture proposed by systemd may not be the best possible one, but I think it's a step forward from the old ways.

I would very broadly describe systemd's architecture as "service-based" -- you have one or more daemons that offer some kind of service over IPC, then wake up and process requests as they receive them from processes on the system. The kernel mediates the enforcement of access control, while the daemon(s) themselves mediate authentication (if required). It is a design that is pretty close to how we do web services in an enterprise environment.

We're getting away from "edit this file" and moving towards "call this service API" (or run a command that calls it for you, if you want to map the service architecture onto a model closer to UNIX). We are getting away from the rampant race conditions that come from file editing (look at the number of programs that try to touch/manage `/etc/fstab`, `/etc/resolv.conf`, etc. and end up stepping on one anothers' toes, and trying to parse comments like "#FooProgram edited this; leave it alone!" as interoperability hacks). When you have a daemon offering a service, you get parallelism safety by design: the program can just mutex the critical section, and make sure only its user and root have access to its (ultimately) file-based backend. And root has no business touching the backend directly.

"But what if there are bugs?" you ask. Well, if everything is in a bunch of text files, you can just edit those text files as a workaround, thus avoiding the actual problem. But it's much better to get the actual bug fixed in the program itself, so that you AND all other users do not have to trip over the same bug again and again. A text-based configuration architecture just encourages lazy sysadmin practices and hacks that make a system brittle, unportable, and difficult to maintain.

If you read this and you would still rather have the UNIX philosophy, just remember: even though the service-oriented system architecture is gaining the upper hand in terms of mindshare and adoption in most GNU/Linux distros these days, there is absolutely nothing stopping you and a group of friends from starting a new distro, or contributing to an existing one, that insists on remaining on the old UNIX design. It is physically impossible for anyone making any kind of policy decision in the free software community to force you to do or run anything. The only potential threat would be if a liberally-licensed software (e.g. BSD) development team decided to take their future contributions proprietary and shut down the code repos, thus stopping development (with all the existing bugs, etc remaining unfixed) unless you pay a license fee. That's a far greater threat than the existence of any free software could potentially pose.

Kind of ironic that the people who are the most emotionally uncontrollable about this whole systemd thing are the ones that are flocking in droves to BSD. I would actively encourage the OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD dev teams to seriously consider taking their future contributions proprietary, just to show these people how silly they're being. A much better solution long term is to continue using a GPL-based ecosystem (Linux, GNU userspace, etc.) and simply run the init system that you choose, and host forks of any packages that seem to have a "hard dependency" on systemd. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but there seem to be about a million of you who hate systemd, so if only 10 or 15 of you got motivated enough, we'd see "Old Hand Linux" or something get shipped 1.0 by Q4 2015, to the applause of 999,995 people over 50 and about 5 people under 50.

And not a single person would oppose you for releasing Old Hand Linux 1.0. It's completely your prerogative. Just as it is the prerogative of current distro maintainers to adopt (or not adopt) systemd. Start contributing, or get used to it.

While I agree with most of what you said, I think the more important issue to address is that many people don't even have the opportunity to purchase a fast Internet connection, even if they desperately want one, can afford it, and are willing to pay top dollar for it. Even if they live in a fairly densely-populated suburban area. Pointless political posturing and bureaucracy at the state, county and local levels is preventing access to viable connectivity to people who need it due to their choice of livelihood. For example, it's not far-fetched to believe that people who work with software -- programmers, system administrators, etc -- will tend to need more bandwidth than people who work as HVAC repair technicians. If you work with software, you're naturally going to be interested in much more software that's available out there, and want to download it -- IDEs, alternative operating systems, high-end content editing software, games, and so on.

But the current regulatory landscape pretty much dictates a small number of very specific locations where people who actually need high speeds to grow their knowledge and career, are able to live happily. For no reason other than politics or a whimsical decision by a bean counter at an ISP, houses 1/8th of a mile away might have 100 Mbps fiber to the home, while you might be stuck with 7 Mbps ADSL. The reasons for this may not even be related to expected revenue in your area: it may just be that the company didn't want to shell out any more money to have the fiber rolled out. So if you have a paid-off house from before the economy went to crap, and are not interested in buying a new or used house that costs 10x more and paying for a second mortgage, your choices are either to move and vastly curtail your expenses to pay for your new shack, or stay where you are and live with a 20th-century version of the Internet.

The real problem, as I see it, isn't about raising the bar for the average or typical expected speeds. The speeds that people get in the 50th percentile are fine. The problem is about bringing the bottom 20% of the speeds up to what the current average is, so that there aren't as many people left behind -- or AT LEAST making it so that people who are living in areas with these bottom 20% offerings can, at their option, purchase higher speeds, if they so choose.

I mean, there is always going to be *someone* left behind; if you own all the land around your house for 30 miles in all directions, you probably are going to have to pay a lot out of pocket to get any Internet faster than dial-up. But this should not be happening for people who live in areas with a population density that fits very well into the definition of "urban".

It's a tremendous loss of potential, both in terms of the company (they're not getting higher revenues because they aren't offering these willing customers the higher end service), and in terms of the individuals (they have legitimate non-entertainment reasons for wanting 50Mbps+ speeds but are physically unable to get them without bribing a Verizon executive with a couple million bucks or moving their entire livelihood to another place and starting the mortgage-induced poverty all over again). How many kids interested in programming went to download the Qt SDK or Eclipse or Netbeans or Ruby on Rails, only to see the download estimated time say "3 days" and give up? How many gaming enthusiasts interested in starting a career as a games critic on Youtube have been unable to do so because they only get 128 Kbps upstream? Or if you don't have any love for gamers, replace "gaming" with any other product space where being a critic/reviewer would get you enough views on youtube to pull in a decent ad revenue.

So yeah, there are plenty of potential uses for high bandwidth, but the distribution of bandwidth is pretty much like the distribution of wealth right now: you have the elite ruling class with (usually symmetrical or nearly symmetrical) 100 Mbps - 1 Gbps and up; you have the enormous preponderance of users -- the middle class -- with between 10 Mbps and 50 Mbps; and you have the lower class with dial-up to 7 Mbps ADSL. What I'd like to see is the shrinking of the number of people who are stuck being in the "lower class" of the bandwidth spectrum.

The problem is that there is no correlation between your income status, professional need for bandwidth, and the actual bandwidth you're capable of getting. You could be a member of the (income) ruling class, a software developer, and only be able to purchase ADSL, in an urban area. You could be a member of the (income) lower class, living in poverty and unable to afford any Internet at all, and not even own a computer, and have 3 companies competing to offer you 50Mbps+ at prices starting at $9.99 per month. The politics and financials of bandwidth availability are completely nonsensical. I am not advocating aligning the two so that only the rich can get high bandwidth and the poor can only get dial-up; rather, I am advocating that fewer people *overall* would be unable to get anything faster than ADSL, irrespective of their income or profession.

I have a Yubikey NEO. The U2F device they're selling now is the same form factor so I would assume it will work. It's a hardy little device -- it frequently clanks up against my other keys, but it still works in both USB and NFC modes. Not sure if the U2F model supports NFC, though. You'd have to check.

Still, good build quality. And there's no battery; the unit has no moving parts (completely discrete); so they can be expected to last a very long time. Basically the limiting factor is how much damage you will accidentally do to the physical housing of the chip and/or the USB connector by dragging it with you everywhere. So far that amount is "0" for mine as far as I can detect.

The keyboard?! How quaint!

In all seriousness: if you don't have an unlimited data plan, you're probably going to blow your data allowance, unless by some miracle you've found a provider that values 1 GB of LTE at an order of magnitude (or more) less than $10 per GB.

If you had an unlimited data plan, you would ideally be able to use the Hotspot feature that's built into nearly every smartphone these days, and forego the hotspot. On Verizon it's an extra $30/mo for hotspot tethering on a stock firmware for phones that aren't rooted, but totally worth it for the benefit you get. This is my primary (only) Internet connection. You could make yours the same if you had unlimited data. It's not new or far-fetched at all.

In fact, if the carriers *did* reduce the amortized cost of 1 GB of data transfer on LTE by a factor of 10 or more, I'd be willing to bet that we would see many millions of people signing up for *limited* data plans on the order of 100 - 150 GB and tethering through their phones or using a hotspot as their primary internet connection. Right now it's simply too much money to get "limited" data plans -- on Verizon XLTE with the MORE plan, you can get like 100 GB for $700/month. It's still way too much money for too little data. Until and unless the prices become somewhat reasonable, so it "only" costs you $2 to watch that Netflix video instead of $20, we will mostly see unlimited data plans as the only users of LTE as their primary connection.