rmtodd
1mo ago
Not that prescient, as the net in AFUTD was heavily inspired by the early 1990s Usenet computer network, and the phenomenon you describe existed just as much on Usenet back then as on Internet fora today.
rmtodd
5mo ago
What I still wonder is why the heck that law firm had a security clearance in the first place. I mean, I can see why people in DOD and CIA have security clearances, ditto Boeing and Lockheed-Martin and whatever random contractor gets the contract for making bits of the radar for the F-35 etc., but why does some random law firm need a security clearance?
rmtodd
6mo ago
The Confederate States of America also held congressional elections in 1863-1864 while Grant's and Sherman's armies were busy trashing the place. I think that counts. The CSA didn't hold presidential elections because IIRC the CSA presidency was a 6-year term and the CSA didn't, um, last long enough for Jefferson Davis to have to worry about elections....
rmtodd
6mo ago
You don't even need that; as anyone who's looked at the unauthorized youtube downloader tools out there will know, youtube's protocols allow access to the audio-only and video-only portions of a recording as separate stream. All Grok would have to do is request the audio-only stream.
rmtodd
7mo ago
A pity that we're not making this public event "smaller" and "more selective" on the grounds that when your country is 36 trillion dollars in the hole, it's frankly obscene to be spending anything on a glorified public party. All that's needed for the inauguration is the President, the VP, and the Chief Justice to administer the oath, and maybe a BBC camera crew to show the rest of the world that the inauguration actually happened, plus the usual Secret Service security that'd be there anyway. Anything beyond that is frivolity.
rmtodd
9mo ago
They didn't talk in terms of "users customizing the algorithm" back then, but Usenet certainly supported user/client controlled presentation order/selection of articles since even before the development of the Usenet network protocol NNTP in RFC 977 in 1986. Usenet clients/servers had this as working technology even before there was a world-wide-web (HTTP didn't start till 1989 or so).
rmtodd
10mo ago
Well, they already handed a Peace Prize out to Obama while the country he ran was simultaneously fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, so it seems that actively being involved in one or more wars is not considered a disqualification for the Peace Prize.
rmtodd
10mo ago
He may have accidentally dropped some words and meant "don't drink [alcohol with] acetaminophen, at all, ever."
rmtodd
10mo ago
That and, well, there's more kinds of expense than just the purely monetary -- IVF is inherently a somewhat invasive medical procedure (apparently involving a good amount of being poked with Big Honking Needles while the doctor watches on ultrasound to make sure that the right bit is being poked, as well as dosing with hormone treatments with occasional interesting side effects) and even without the current multi-thousand-dollar medical bills this is a "cost" that people may reasonably decide they don't want to pay.
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
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