You're going to have to cite some kind of evidence that your statement is true before I'll believe that. If the USSR only had a handful of nukes as you state, it would be beyond crazy to load them on ships and sail them into a US Navy blockade, even if they thought we wouldn't shoot at them. I'd have believed it more if you'd said that the nukes on those ships were fakes than your statement, but I still find them both very difficult to believe. It's the research that costs so much time and money. Once you have a workable design it isn't all that costly to build a bunch of bombs.

Virg

And yet, here we are reading about it happening, so I'm guessing that it's not as much bunk as you claim.

Virg

The flip side is that it takes a year for a keyboard to get bad enough to warrant replacing, and it requires almost no cleaning at all in that time (slapdash cleaning once a week is more than most people bother with), where cleaning a touch screen is an almost daily affair. Add to that the fact that a grubby keyboard doesn't interfere with reading what's on the screen and the crud level just doesn't rise into awareness the same way.

Virg

Mostly because replacing a grubby keyboard is a ten dollar affair, and even the grubbiest fingers don't render a keyboard too grubby to use properly in a day or three.

Virg

You missed your target there. The NDA was presented by the CIAPC as part of a settlement offer to avoid them reporting the issue to the authorities in the first place. That doesn't make the NDA any better, but the authorities weren't insisting on any secrecy once the prosecution started.

Virg

This makes no sense at all, because (as the case itself demonstrated) blaming her would still cause charges to degenerate to him as her legal guardian, so it would be a pointless extra step, unless you're adding the extra and unlikely part that he planned to make it a PR nightmare in the event he got caught.

Virg

The fact that you'd even ask this indicates that you've already jumped the rails. The answer is simply yes, that executing an innocent person should be considered far more abhorrent than not executing ten guilty people. Your argument is also entirely screwed up in that eliminating the death penalty does not in any way equate to setting people on death row free. They'd still be in prison so the worry that they'd kill more is certainly significantly reduced. Still, if being innocent of a crime isn't sufficient to prevent your being executed for it, then there's no "justice" in your justice system. And of course, for just about every crime that could result in the death penalty, executing an innocent person means that the guilty person, the one who committed the crime and the one whose future actions worry you so much, goes free. If you consider that reasonable, then maybe you shouldn't be commenting on anyone else's insanity.

Virg

The second-to-last choice should be "Slog" because they were always reporting to "Captain Slog, Stardate (mumble)." Anyway, The problem I have finding a "best" is that the different captains were in different positions of command. Captain Kirk was the captain of an exploratory vessel and so he could afford to be (and was more effective as) a maverick. Captain Picard was captain of the Starfleet flagship with families and such aboard, and so was called on much more to be an ambassador/controller/rear admiral (Picard more than once took command of a multi-ship engagement whereas I don't believe Kirk ever did in TOS). Commander Sisko was the commandant of a space station and a religious icon to the people of the nearby planet, so it stands to reason he'd be much more deeply mired in the politics of Starfleet and the Federation than a ship's captain. Captain Janeway was captain of another relatively small exploratory vessel and ended up with a melded crew far from her base of authority, so again it stands to reason that she'd be able to compromise more morally and functionally than a regular Starfleet captain. Lastly, Captain Archer was the captain of what was essentially an experimental ship with only a loosely defined directive so it seems that he'd be closer to the position that Kirk was in than any of the others.

In terms of who I liked watching the best, I'd have to say that Picard is my favorite because Patrick Stewart is a world-class actor. In terms of who I found most "real" in terms of the character fitting the in-world position, Sisko is far and away the best. I always felt that Kirk would have been pulled out quickly because so many of his successes were based entirely on luck (in reality, on being written out of the jam), Picard would have been promoted away from ship's captain, Janeway would have had her luck run out at some point, and Archer seemed to lack the explorer's spirit so I just couldn't ever see someone like him wanting to command NX-01.

Virg

That's "The OP never said he was (she was) a spelling Nazi."

Virg

While I tend to agree with you that DS9 had much better characters in general than Voyager, I disagree with your assessments of several of them. To take the strongest example, Tom Paris was supposed to be a slacker, not a "hardened" ex-con. He was a low-ambition smart kid that got in trouble with the law for low-level stuff and got tossed in a penal colony for it. He wasn't a gangster or high level criminal, just a screw-up, and his characterization fit perfectly with that background. He was one of the better-developed characters in all of Star Trek because Mr. McNeill did such a good job balancing his cut-up personality with his newfound sense of purpose.

Also, you entirely left out the best character in the whole of Voyager and another contender for one of the best characters in all of Trek: The Doctor. Every show had some version of the not-human trying to understand humanity better and giving the viewer an "alien" feeling character (Spock, Data, Odo) and the Doctor was Voyager's "weirdo", and I thought both the premise and his development over the series were handled very well. He started out pretty flat because the character had no "personality" but by the end he was as central to the crew as any other character and Mr. Picardo was great ai stealing scenes without trying to steal scenes.

Virg

Considering that you don't know the size of the paycheck, you can't really judge them on the size of the gift. Who knows, maybe the shipbuilders really wanted iPods. I know I'd rather have one than an iPad myself, and it's a thank you gift, not a gratuity.

Virg

The analogy you've chosen doesn't make any sense. To extend it to match, you'd have to consider every pallet bridge, board-over-creek and fallen tree and see if they're serving their purpose reasonably well for the effort put into them. In that sense, your analogy fits, and using that analogy, most such "bridges" work very well in terms of utility for cost. To take it back to software, my company has produced a huge array of proprietary programs and products, and the majority of them don't sell for enough to make it worth maintaining them, but the few that do are enough to support the failures and the company to boot. That's just the business, and so by your model proprietary software development doesn't work very well either.

Every product you named sprung from OSS stuff. Linux came from UNIX, but UNIX developed from big iron OS software that got expanded to mini- and microcomputers for free. Photoshop commercialized software that the fashion industry built for their own use, and Office came from a number of products that themselves grew from basic tools available, you guessed it, free for mainframe users.

As an approach proprietary software has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, proprietary projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE proprietary projects. In other words, the average chance of a proprietary program to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind.

Also, who cares why the end user wants FOSS? If the F drives people to want it and the OSS drives developers to contribute, you've got a working model.

This argument makes no sense because it's entirely reversible. If Linux makes your computing experience better then you'd go with that instead, and so your argument boils down to Windows or OSX always being easier to use and therefore more efficient, when that's only the case because you've worked with it for years.

Why would differing distros matter to an end product developer? It no harder to write a product that runs on most if not all distros than it is to develop a program that runs on more than one version of Windows, and it's not difficult to write a completely version-neutral version for either OS if you're careful. To give an example, try writing any program that's not trivial for every version of Windows starting with Win95 and ending with Server 2008. Then do the same for OSX (we'll even leave out OS9 because it would prompt too many developers to commit suicide). Then compare that to writing a program that runs on 90 percent of current and legacy distros of Linux. Guess which one will be vastly easier? Various distros incorporate wildly different things for whatever purpose they're pushing, but most of the central components of Linux are pluggable if you're willing to commit the disk space and you have the horsepower. Sure, you could argue that (for example) XUbuntu won't run games out of the box without a bunch of stuff loaded in, but that distro is meant for low power machines so it doesn't contain it by default. Unlike low power versions of other OSes (like Windows Mobile) though, you could install KDE if you wanted to play World of Warcraft. That's the value of a component based OS, and that's why different distros of Linux don't present nearly the same level of trouble as major upgrades of proprietary OSes.

This is stating the obvious. The driving force that makes an OSS product more likely to fork is that an independent developer has access to the source and so can legally and realistically fork the product if he sees fit. Closed source software doesn't do that because whoever has control of the source can squash independent development efforts, but that introduces the sort of problems that drove people to come up with FOSS in the first place.

I very much disagree with that. The ability to take a product in a new direction without destroying the old tree is a great thing. It's the core value of OSS.

Virg

That's a nonsensical reply since (a) skydiving without a chute is already "banned" insofar as it's a crime to attempt suicide and the general public will already attempt to stop you from jumping out of an aircraft without a parachute, and (b) the number of people injured or killed in regular skydiving accidents already far outstrips the total number of chute-free skydivers so it's not even a good example of limiting risk. My point is that a soda serving size law is already an irrational attempt to legislate risk, and it's not even going to be very effective since there really aren't that many people who truly don't know that a liter of soda contains a lot of calories, and the ban will simply motivate people who overindulge to load up on calories elsewhere. What I find insane in all of this is thinking that legislating the serving size of a sugary drink is going to have any beneficial effect on general obesity.

Virg

But you're not arguing for health warnings, you're arguing for banning servings that large. I'd like to see the logic that justifies that and not banning a vast array of other dangerous activities that adults voluntarily take part in every day. You could easily press the argument that because you think it's insane that it actually is to a large number of things. Are you calling for a ban on skydiving or extreme skiing? Do you think that it's rational to mandate governors on automobile and motorcycle engines? Most Americans don't subscribe to that level of governmental control because we've found that it doesn't work very well.

Virg

Then don't go to a smoke-filled pub. This argument fails requirement because there's no mandatory reason to visit a pub, so restricting smoking there doesn't make sense. If there's enough demand for smoke-free pubs, then smoke-free pubs will pop up, but this isn't like banning smoking in a government office where someone might be compelled to go there, or in a workplace where someone has no reasonable choice in the matter.

Virg