A few articles from Siderea
Feb. 26th, 2013 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyhttp://www.technologyreview.com/news/429616/computer-viruses-are-rampant-on-medical-devices-in-hospitals/
In a typical example, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 664 pieces of medical equipment are running on older Windows operating systems that manufactures will not modify or allow the hospital to change—even to add antivirus software—because of disagreements over whether modifications could run afoul of U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulatory reviews, Fu says.
Ye gods. Maybe the second is less gloom and doom.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/dkim-vulnerability-widespread/all/
Harder to find just the right paragraph to quote there, but let me say it is pretty funny. This guy got a recruitment email from google, noticed it wasn't that secure, assumed it was a test, played along, and found out that they, like so many other companies, had no idea they had this huge vulnerability.
Some of these other companies include many that work with your money. Sheesh.
On the subject of hacking, I'm now up to the DS9 episodes with the earthwide blackout. I have a few questions, like "in the last few centuries, did everybody decide that there's no point to being off the grid" and "doesn't anybody think that having an analog backup for your power supply, one that isn't run with the same computer codes, is a good idea?" and "did these people just forget about viruses recently? why are they circumlocuting what happened instead of calling it a worm or a virus or like one of those?" and "isn't going to the head of the federation for an earth problem sorta like asking the mayor to change your light bulbs? I don't expect to call in The Feds every time there's a garbage strike, doesn't earth have its own independent government to decide things like when to issue random blood tests? I thought each member planet had its own personal government, like in the UN."
I also find myself wondering how, exactly, Roddenberry could honestly have thought that humans would universally ditch religion. That is one amazingly persistent trait among people. And why is it that in Star Trek people still put on plays and write print books as well as holo novels, but only history geeks like Tom Paris know what movies or TV are? Shakespeare ought to be as distant to them as Chaucer is to us, so shouldn't that make 90s tv and movies, at least the good ones people admit to watching, analogous to Shakespeare to Picard? (Then again, I've never understood the man's fascination with English drama. I know there are French playwrights.)
There goes the idea that atheists are more rational than the rest of you. I'd love to believe myself, but I don't see how I *can*!
In a typical example, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 664 pieces of medical equipment are running on older Windows operating systems that manufactures will not modify or allow the hospital to change—even to add antivirus software—because of disagreements over whether modifications could run afoul of U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulatory reviews, Fu says.
Ye gods. Maybe the second is less gloom and doom.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/dkim-vulnerability-widespread/all/
Harder to find just the right paragraph to quote there, but let me say it is pretty funny. This guy got a recruitment email from google, noticed it wasn't that secure, assumed it was a test, played along, and found out that they, like so many other companies, had no idea they had this huge vulnerability.
Some of these other companies include many that work with your money. Sheesh.
On the subject of hacking, I'm now up to the DS9 episodes with the earthwide blackout. I have a few questions, like "in the last few centuries, did everybody decide that there's no point to being off the grid" and "doesn't anybody think that having an analog backup for your power supply, one that isn't run with the same computer codes, is a good idea?" and "did these people just forget about viruses recently? why are they circumlocuting what happened instead of calling it a worm or a virus or like one of those?" and "isn't going to the head of the federation for an earth problem sorta like asking the mayor to change your light bulbs? I don't expect to call in The Feds every time there's a garbage strike, doesn't earth have its own independent government to decide things like when to issue random blood tests? I thought each member planet had its own personal government, like in the UN."
I also find myself wondering how, exactly, Roddenberry could honestly have thought that humans would universally ditch religion. That is one amazingly persistent trait among people. And why is it that in Star Trek people still put on plays and write print books as well as holo novels, but only history geeks like Tom Paris know what movies or TV are? Shakespeare ought to be as distant to them as Chaucer is to us, so shouldn't that make 90s tv and movies, at least the good ones people admit to watching, analogous to Shakespeare to Picard? (Then again, I've never understood the man's fascination with English drama. I know there are French playwrights.)
There goes the idea that atheists are more rational than the rest of you. I'd love to believe myself, but I don't see how I *can*!
no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 07:45 pm (UTC)But I like your idea that Star Trek might amount to little more than propaganda for the (evil) federation. That would explain why everybody is so darn moralistic.
As far as rationality, I put my paragraphs in a funky order I'm not sure how to remedy. I just can't see how he thought that humans would give up religion en masse without serious coercion. (But that fits nicely with a trekstopia. Oooh. On a similar note, why does nobody think it strange that planets coalesce around a single species wide culture? I would think that magical technology and universal translators and the ability to colonize new planets would make it harder to unify under one culture, not easier. Especially that last one! Don't like the majority culture? Don't like that minority culture that is always making waves? Well, time for one of you to hire a moving van, and don't let the door hit you on the way out! There are more planets in the sky, waiting to be filled up! But other than the Romulans, does this happen?)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-05 11:37 pm (UTC)I was fortunate to see TOS before I knew enough of science to question any of it - and the level of SFX was so much higher than Lost In Space and The Outer Limits that it looked really, really impressive.
LOL, now I'm thinking of the airship in Blade Runner that's always playing a commercial for "A new life in the colonies!" as it flies over the city. Depending on how good the colonies were, that might not be a bad idea. Certainly we saw plenty of isolated, mostly-uninhabited planets with perfectly breatheable atmosphere and surviveable weather - Serenity takes place all in one solar system, "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons" - even if they did have to be terraformed.
It could be that solar systems with at least one Earthlike planet abound throughout the galaxy. The Enterprise is forever going where no one has gone before, and finding that not only HAS someone gone there before, but left a whole civilization of their descendants - primitive and messed-up as those civilizations generally seem to be.
I don't think the Federation is evil, but they're necessarily bureaucratic, and they've got an unbelievable amount of diversity to deal with, so I think - as usual - the richer, stronger, better-represented party will always have an advantage, croneyism, nepotism and the Peter Principle will be rampant, and the people at the top will have no clue what effect their rulings actually have on those affected. Calling on the Feds for help in a planet-wide crisis seems reasonable -it's like calling for U.N. aid - but probably costly in a lot of ways.
Clearly, StarFleet is all about the gung-ho Sir-yes-Sir old-school military traditions, which actually seems like a good idea, because if they didn't consciously maintain those traditions, they'd gradually sink to the level of pirates, sloppy and argumentative.
If the Enterprise's movie library has Casablanca and The Day The Earth Stood Still, d'you suppose it might have Galaxy Quest?
no subject
Date: 2013-03-06 12:27 am (UTC)