smittyoneeach - Slashdot User

Submission + - "The Politics of Star Trek" Is Unlikely Trigger Much Discussion On Slashdot

Submitted by smitty_one_each on Saturday September 05, 2015 @05:08PM

smitty_one_each writes: Timothy Sandefur, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation has written a breezy overview of the politics of the little-known show Star Trek. His thesis:

the key to Star Trek’s longevity and cultural penetration was its seriousness of purpose, originally inspired by creator Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction vision. Modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era’s finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek’s moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era.
The article traces through episodes at each phase of the franchise, exploring literary allusions and lamenting that
"Star Trek's latest iterations--the 'reboot' films directed by J.J. Abrams--shrug at the franchise's former philosophical depth"

I mean, if we're going to call it a franchise, why should it not be to thought what fast food is to nutrition?

Submission + - Pssst: You Want A Secret Ballot

Submitted by smitty_one_each on Sunday January 05, 2014 @03:13PM

smitty_one_each writes: Per the Daily Caller

A Clemson University professor is developing a new electronic voting system that will allow voters to cast their ballots from home computers, tablets and smartphones.
As Clemson’s chair of human-centered computing, Juan Gilbert has lead teams of students over the last 10 years to create an online voting system accessible at home or on the go that will be more accurate, have increased verification and make voting more accessible to people with disabilities by offering mobile and voice-command options.

It is laudable to improve accessibility for all voters. If you're getting mugged for taxes, you really should be casting a ballot.
At the same time, retaining anonymity is key. That's why, in the polling location where I've served in the last couple of elections, verifying voter eligibility is separate from the part where the ballot is cast. Information Technology professionals would tend to want to engineer all of the ambiguity out of the system. However, the easier it is to correlate a specific person to an election outcome, the more likely abuses become.
You really don't want Checkov's Gun showing up at election time.

Submission + - NASA Voyager Data Rescued

Submitted by smitty_one_each on Friday May 16, 2008 @11:38AM

smitty_one_each writes:
Beyond the edge of the solar system, something has gradually dragged two of America's oldest space probes — Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 — a quarter-million miles off course. Astrophysicists have struggled 15 years in vain to identify the infinitesimal force at play. The Pioneer anomaly, as it is called, throws a monkey wrench into celestial mechanics.
Slava Turyshev may have found the answer in NASA's trash. Reconstructing decades of discarded spacecraft data, the Russian-born astrophysicist and the private space enthusiasts helping him say they believe they are on the verge of solving a mystery of time and gravity that has perplexed a generation of physicists and might have confounded Newton and Einstein.

Besides the cool astrophysics angle, there is also the data recovery angle:

Then, at JPL in 2002, he discovered 400 computer tapes of Pioneer data gathering dust under a stairwell. In 2005, he intercepted 70 filing cabinets of Pioneer engineering data on their way to the junk heap at the NASA Ames Research Center, at Moffett Field, Calif. The computer files held all of the Pioneer mission data, but they were unreadable.
With no formal NASA funding, almost 6,000 members of The Planetary Society, a space-exploration advocacy group based in Pasadena, Calif., donated $220,000 to translate the antiquated data into a digital format that a modern computer can read.

The Information Age seems counter-intuitive in that, for all of the terabytes of information gathered, there is such a struggle to maintain the information in a usable form.
Will your precious /. posts one day vanish like the works of Ozymandeus?

Slashdot Top Deals