Yes, there's tons of holes in it -- e.g. everyone speaks English via the dubious "Universal Translator," money seems to sort of exist with latinum and somehow Starfleet officers seem to have it..etc etc...but there are also tons of holes in other SciFi.

William Shatner actually ended up making TEK to essentially describe a dystopian future of people addicted to quasi-holodecks :) But it was awful! It, also, had tons of holes in it..despite being more, dystopian.

In the end it's not about the holes in the optimistic or pessimistic portrait the show paints. It's about whether the portrait the show paints gives you something to aspire towards or, by contrast, makes you skeptical or fearful of scientific change. In the latter case, this would make you more comfortable in the way things are, the status quo of our time, as not being so bad. In the former, it would make you less comfortable and want to push things in a positive direction so life could be more like this vision of the future.

and I think watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child inspired me to become an engineer.

Star Trek painted a very optimistic picture of humanity, of a few generations from now mankind not being focused on money, but instead ideas, and progress/wellbeing for all of humanity. About technology (foremost the replicators) really making the world a better place.

Contrast this to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica , which paints a very dreary portrait of advancement of science/artificial intelligence causing the downfall of humanity..

Sometimes, there is scientific data about audiophiles being wrong (like FLAC vs 320k MP3), but no..any idiot can tell the difference between a Cerwin-Vega PA and a Funktion One. Klippel tests can provide scientific data to analyze why this is the case. So, your argument is far too broad to be true. Also, inserting profanity rather than logic or anything to backup your claims shows you're making emotional arguments rather than scientific ones.

FLAC vs MP3 is largely a result of the cutoff at 16khz of MP3 sound, and attentuation of treble frequencies. While someone might have talked about sampling rate (which does matter), the vast majority of the perceived difference in quality is due to the attentuion of treble frequencies. Thus, my comment was completely germane to the subject matter.

I am not wrong about music production. Perhaps in the 90s when you acquired this knowledge it was true, but now this is not the case. Yes, people sing into microphones. That's where it ends. Hip hop music, pop music, electronica all use totally digital sources these days for the basslines, synth lines, and pretty much all the music besides vocals. Vocals themselves are manipulated to hell and back with vocoders, chorus, flanger etc. The second part of your statement is somewhat true but misleading. Yes, you do not hear the 99KHZ tone. However, if you have a 16khz audio signal with a 22khz overtone, many would describe the sound as being "warm" due to the interference of the higher-frequency overtone with the lower frequency signal.

You are a madman. Never did I claim to hear abovd 20KHZ or anything outrageous. There is a great deal of connection between the speaker (and amplifier and processor's) quality and your ability to hear a conversation at normal volume in front of it. Because of the speaker quality matching the input so well, it does not distort into other frequencies. Thus, it is easier for a human ear to pick out normal conversation and removes the need to shout. I have countless times had to shout over subwoofers/etc to talk to people at a club or party, but also, countless times when good quality soundsystems are used (like Danley, Funktion-One) with quality processing and components, I am able to have a conversation a couple meters in front of the soundsystem at normal volume 100% intelliglbly.

You use profanity to refer to audiophiles and you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. 96 or 192kHZ sampling rate doesn't have much to do with frequency response , which is what we are takling about.

Most music these days is not produced via an analog signal to a microphone. Rather, a digital process creates an analog waveform in software like Ableton Live, Cubase, etc. If an overtone or other sonic artifacts are applied, you can definitely hear the effects on the music even though these are at high frequencies..

Speakers are graded for quality using the "Klippel" test, which measures amount of distortion and how clean the signal comes out at various frequencies. With good speakers, you should be able to have a conversation right in front of them at loud volume, and not have to speak loudly or bring up your voice to clearly understand the person. That is because the audio waveform will be clean and not distort other frequencies.

Hardware sampling rate is actually a kind of roundabout way to do it. More easily, one can place an analog high-pass filter set at 20KHZ or so before the speakers in the sound driver hardware etc. These are very cheap for low-power applications like laptops.

While this is true, in that "warmth" is perceived by human ears somewhere in the 16KHZ-25KHZ range, over 30KHZ won't even create a "warm" sensation to human ears. In the range of this network, which from TFA appears to be 20khz, many humans will be able to hear something.

If music is properly recorded and mastered, it will typically not contain any artifacts above the 25-30KHZ range. If you are playing music on a high-end system above this range, typically one will apply a high pass filter on their digital processor or amplifier in order to filter out ultrasonic frequencies, which may damage tweeters trying to reproduce sound beyond their response range.

Disclaimer: I am an audiophile. I use SEAS.no speaker drivers, custom enclosures, and high-end amps like QSC and ZED Audio.

I don't see it listed in the specs but I also don't see it listed as not being there. I agree, I have an N5 and use wireless charging at my desk, and especially in my car ($40 Qi-charging vent-mounted dock is a godsend) -- so while the rest of this phone seems pretty awesome, I'd lament the loss of Qi.

You're right about this..(e.g. River in Firefly) but on top of that, his shows have a very Orange-County/SoCal vibe to them..everything is very polished and Hollywood-esque. It would be much more realistic to have characters who look more rugged, look the part and not like they all live in LA and have daily skin treatments. All of the characters in Whedon's shows emphasize this Southern California plasticy concept of beauty, which is somewhat repulsive to my (and I'm sure others') tastes.

The coerced and bribed, I believe. :)

No, actually, and the hubris of your "Next" comment is telling about how you summarily dismissed this without doing any actual research. Have you ever actually tried to do a traffic correlation attack? Do you even know how Tor works?

Tor, in order to defeat traffic correlation attacks (or at least make them much more difficult), re-negotiates its connection to use a different circuit every ten minutes. The NSA themselves in the leaked "Tor Stinks" document even pointed to this as being extremely difficult, if not impossible, to track users through. The NSA admits that even with manual analysis, only a small fraction of tor users can be exposed. Reference.

That's not what I said at all. What I said is that, in common parlance (as in newspaper articles, discussions, etc) NSA employees are referred to as "Agents" in Standard Written English.

Regardless of this (and please enlighten us to what they are called rather than just dismiss), common parlance is to refer to NSA employees as Agents. Just google "NSA Agent" to see countless journalistic reports about NSA Employees referred to as "Agents" (outside of the context of covert operations video game nonsense)....same is true with other agencies. And yes, they do have "Special Agent" etc ranks. However, they will not permit ex-employees to use such designations on their resumes and force them to use other titles like "Clerk" or "Analyst."

Someone give this man a dollar (or an mBTC) for correctly describing Reverse Heartbleed. Luckily, Tails isn't affected by this.

s/WWI/WWII/g

Let's also not forget one of the first things the CIA did in Post-WWI America.. Project MKULTRA How does giving people LSD in mind-control experiments help anyone's freedom? Seems like something that would be described in Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism