There are people who are attracted to Science Fiction as a literature about ideas. 'Darmok' is a relatively pure version of that. It does have a physical threat and there's some facing off between the aliens and the Enterprise so it's not completely devoid of Space Opera, but maybe not enough to please, or maybe not done well enough to please those that were expecting Space Opera.

Also, the idea in 'Darmok' is very subtle and cerebral for TV, and I think that's why a lot of people like it. It must have been a tough one to write. I do think they glossed over some complications. Children would have to learn a more conventional form of language first, in order to be taught about the metaphors for example.

I do vaguely remember reading something like this is in some sci fi book I read once. I think it might have been a Larry Niven book. The protagonist is stuck among some aliens who communicate by singing excerpts from some big epic. He meets another human who was raised among them from the time she was a child and knows some basic usages and teaches him enough to get by. It was just one episode in the protagonist's various adventures in the book.

Suzette Haden Elgin's 'Native Tongue' and Jack Vance's "Languages of Pau" also deal with ideas about language in science fiction but not in the same way as 'Darmok'.

The guy from the Ars article went over to the IMDB for checking outside his own little village. Tvtropes.org is another good place to look for disussions and other opinions on anything to do with entertainment. There they use to have a trope called "The Good Troi Episode", though when I went to confirm, I found that it's been renamed to 'A Day In the Limelight' after some discussion amongst the tropers. (Personally, I knew instantly what the trope was about from the old name, much more than 'Day In The Limelight', which doesn't even seem to be about the same thing. After all, having a day in the limelight doesn't mean you have a good episode for a change.) The episode in question is "Face of the Enemy", episode 14 of season 6. The implication is that this was the only episode featuring Deanna Troi that was actually good.

I found this article in the Christian Science Monitor to be very plausible. That was on March 18, when they were still looking all over the place for the plane, and it's a scenario that still holds up. Basically, something went wrong, the pilots started to head for the nearest airport, but then passed out. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0318/Malaysia-Airlines-Flight-370-Why-some-pilots-point-to-mechanical-error-video

Ronald Reagan waged economic warfare on the Soviet Union. I think that dog might hunt again, what with all the money Russia is spending on its military right now, and maybe trying to digest the Ukraine which I think could be expensive.

Hey I once rewrote something from scratch and made it better. But that was after I had been fixing bugs in the old version for about a year. Also, I had written from scratch some similar things.

Yeah, but how about when they tell YOU two weeks? My boss told me I had 2 weeks to write a coverage analysis tool for Ada (This was back in the 1980s). I just nodded and said OK and walked out of the office, then it hit me. I walked back in and said "How many weeks!" His reply was, "I finally got your attention."

My creds, I saw the original broadcast of that first Beatles' performance on Ed Sullivan; I was 17 at the time (and really envious of all the attention they got from those girls.)

Now to try to make an objective comment, or at least to try to figure out the phenonemon from an objective rather than a 'get off my lawn'/'children no longer respect their parents' perspective.

The technologies of recording and broadcasting must have profoundly affected our relationship to music. I say 'must have' because I've never lived in an environment that wasn't saturated with opportunities to hear music. In fact, music is thrust upon me, and I have to tune it out. I do think the money people cheapen music, just like they will cheapen food, or clothing, or whatever. I'm nostalgic for the old fashioned disc jockey experience, and college radio stations where the student DJs would find stuff they personally liked with various idiosyncracies.

I read somewhere about an Irish fiddler who may have been the first to record Irish fiddle music. His record was a big success, so after that, all the other Irish fiddlers started copying his style, abandoning their own unique styles, which are pretty much lost now. (Sorry, I don't remember details like the name of the fiddler, or when the record was made, though I think it was the early 1920s, but there's a lesson in there somewhere.)

Fresh new music has I think usually come from places that were a bit isolated, but which could then be introduced to the rest of us through the new 20th century technologies. Jazz exploded on the scene with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, not because they 'invented' jazz or were the best of their day, but because they were the first to be recorded.

Early rock and roll or thythm and blues was not encouraged by the industry, but the young picked up on it. And I think nowadays, the industry is always catering to the young, because they are the ones who will spend money on this stuff. Each new generation of musicians grows old with their own fan base, except that yes, nowadays, there don't seem to be any new generations of musicians that capture a loyal base the way Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or Led Zep did. (BTW, I'm 'too old' to appreciate Led Zep myself.)

I'm not sure why that is (That no Elvises or Led Zeps show up anymore), except maybe there is no place for a new sound to grow and mature away from heavy marketing influence. I have a CD of 'ska' music from Jamaica. It's old, primitive stuff, but the musicians there had a chance to hone their sound until it became polished, solid reggae. I think that's because Jamaica at the time was isolated enough, without being too isolated, that they could do that. But where is a place like that now? Instead the music industry marketeers are ready to grab and squeeze everything as soon as it shows as a blip on the radar.

When I search out new music to my liking it's usually older music in genres I didn't pay much attention to before, older Country, old Jazz and blues, partly that's because the lower quality stuff has been filtered out for me already. If I try to listen to new stuff, I have to wade through a lot of mediocre and downright awful along with everyone else.

As others have mentioned, this is an old idea, that we might live in a simulation. Anybody ever see "Close To The Truth" episodes on TV? I remember an early one talked about this quite a bit (It'ss a show that has folks like Ray Kurzweil, Alan Guth, and Leonard Susskind as guests, as well as theologians.) I don't remember who, but somebody on that show said that if any one from some universe ever has the ability to do a simulation and follows through, then the odds are that we are in a simulation, because 'most' universes would be simulations.

However, the big question to me is, is the universe discrete or not? Physicists, correct me if I'm wrong, but quantum stuff seems to suggest that it is discrete, while Einstein Space Time seems to be continuous. Continuousness would mean you really could have a perfect circle in the universe for example, with a diameter to circumference ration of pi, and that could not be simulated by a Turing machine style computer.

I once saw a TV documentary, I think it was "The Body In Question", Jonathan Miller was definitely the guy demonstrating. He put some sort of breathing equipment on his face, so that he kept breathing the same air over and over, except there was something to absorb the carbon dioxide. So he never felt bad. He tried doing arithmetic and stuff, and gradually lost the ability, finally, just before he passed out, helpers came and took it off and started giving him extra oxygen.

That looked like the cleanest, most painless, method of execution I could imagine, and I don't know why it's never been tried.

You can name something 'university' and have another university next to it. Why not the same with universes. Both words come from a Latin expression that meant something like 'turned into one' or maybe 'rolled into one'. A 'university' was a sort of guild as in a guild of students, or students and teachers. Universe was probably meant to imply 'the whole deal' all of existence when it was first applied, just as 'the world' suggested there was only one world. Now 'the world' is 'our world' as opposed to say Mars. 'The Universe' is 'our universe'. I think most people know what is meant by the word 'multiverse', or 'other universe' don't they? (Or do they? Hmmm.) Maybe the word 'cosmos' should be reserved for the whole deal, all of existence.

When I saw 'daily pot use' I thought first of cooking pots, that maybe this was some anthropological post about when humans first started cooking, then I thought maybe it was about sitting instead of squatting when answering a certain call of nature (also anthropological, presumably the 'pot' method can lead to varicose veins in the legs, so why not other things.)

But I guess your average slashdotter would assume 'pot' was for good old Mary Jane.

'Maybe what SHOULD be done is allow two certificates...from the "trusted" certificate authority...and then a second that can be self-generated by that other end to actually encrypt'

Sounds like a good idea to me. Somebody mod the anonymous coward up. (Unless somebody sees a flaw in AC's arg and can point it out.)

A couple of books I read recently come to mind. "My Life as a Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, and "The Valachi Papers". The reason is these books tell about the seamy side of life from the inside out. Iceberg Slim was quite literate. Joe Valachi was barely literate but he was intelligent and interviewed by an excellent writer, Peter Maas. A lot of "The Sopranos" comes from "The Valachi Papers".

So much for the unsavory; In the 'savory' department I'd recommend "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave",
"Act One" by Moss Hart is another autobiographical classic, by a successful American playwright of the 1st half of the 20th century.

"...because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."

Y'know, when I read that, for some reason the first thing I thought of was James Brown, the singer/composer/dancer. I watched a documentary about him once, and remember that as a child, he would go off by himself and be in his own head. I think that's where a lot of his creativity came from. Maybe I just identified with that and maybe a lot of people don't care. But yes, I think privacy matters.

Looked at from a different point of view, I remember reading, as a layman, about a hypothesis of Darwinism that many big changes in evolution came from isolated, what one might call protected, environments where something analogous to human activies of design and 'working out the bugs' could happen.

Isn't one of the 4 freedoms supposed to be 'Freedom from Fear'? I think there's always a little bit of fear, or at least anxiety, when you don't have privacy.

"Does it serve the users well?" is a question that needs to be asked from time to time when developing code as a way of keeping perspective. But the point of the rules and guidelines is to find ways to achieve that goal. Whether the rules and guidelines actually serve their own users well is another question.