NaibofTabr

Does the term "self-defeating" mean anything to you?

Historically the biggest problem with revolutions is what happens after. It's very common for people with some form of power to use the opportunity of a revolution to step in and take over after the previous government is destabilized, which usually results in even worse corruption and abuse of authority. Revolutionaries often don't plan very well for how to actually run a country post-revolution.

The US revolution is an exceptional case study. I think it's very important to recognize that the people who led that revolution spent a lot of time planning how to actually run a government that was not a monarchy. There were a lot of meetings, literally people (OK all white men, which created a host of follow-on problems, but that's another story) sitting around talking about government operation for hours, days, months, before they agreed on the Articles of Confederation, and then in a few years they realized they fucked it up and they needed to start over. Then they had years more debate about government bureaucracy before finalizing the Constitution. How many people do you know, personally, today, who have that kind of patience and obsessiveness about the minutiae of government structure, to sit and talk about it for days at a time? Do you even have the attention span to read this entire wall of text? How about the Federalist Papers?

Also, those people had a rare context:

1. Once they kicked the monarchists out, they were the most powerful people around, with the most guns, land, money, and public support. They didn't have to worry about other competing interests, only each other.
2. They had protection from a more powerful nation (France) that really didn't care what they did with their new country so long as they weren't paying taxes to the British crown anymore.

They functionally existed in a shielded bubble that provided years to get their shit together, with room to restart after failure. Few other revolutions have had that kind of opportunity.

The point being, if you want to actually create a better society you have to plan for it extensively, and you need the time and space and resources to actually implement it, and you had better be thinking about that before the revolution. If you don't have the passion for building a better world, if your primary interest is just in tearing down the existing one, then your priorities are fucked and the world would be better off if you didn't start. You're just angry and angsty, you want violence and destruction, you don't actually care about the consequences or the well-being of other people.

The present reliability issues come from the ubiquity of WiFi networks, especially residential. If you live in an apartment building you're surrounded by them, and they're all trying to use the same limited radio bands. It wasn't such an issue when the first WiFi standards were designed.

802.11bn is trying to implement some better interference-dodging and de-conflicting, but it requires changes at the hardware level. Without reading the full spec, my guess is that the WiFi device has to do more active listening to other networks in the area and adjust its own transmissions to work around them - maybe even talk to other devices at the protocol level and do some traffic policing (e.g. you go then I go then you go then I go...) to reduce interference.

They are, it just takes time to update, since it gets sent over whenever the computer gets updated.That’s why Tom Paris was annoyed that the Voyager’s replicator didn’t have his preferred tomato soup ready. It was scheduled to be loaded onto the computers on Tuesday.

Patterns might be portable on storage devices, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're cross-platform, especially cross-species/technology, or maybe it would require a technical specialist to convert the pattern between systems.

I can absolutely see this being a thing in Star Trek life. You find specific versions/recipes that you like and save them to a personal data storage device, and then when you transfer to a new command you put in a request with the local IT department to have your recipes loaded into the replicator system, which takes some time because they have to review them for safety (no malicious insiders uploading weapons labeled as "grandma's chicken soup") and maybe convert the pattern to work on the local replicators. There's a support ticket queue for that, submit your files and take a number, we'll get to you when we can.

You can write the pattern yourself, but it is easy to get them wrong (Janeway managed to have it consistently produce charcoal).

Absolutely, or probably try to arrange a new meal pattern using information on previously scanned & stored items. But yeah, it would require some specific knowledge and skill to get right. In the present, you can download lots of 3D-printable objects from the Internet, or if you know how to model you can design your own - the second is a lot more complicated. Most people would probably just use existing replicator patterns.

So, I've been thinking about this and finally realized I need to RTFM:

lets say, the materials are all scanned down, and they just tile them to fill in what ever part you’re trying to fabricate. lets say they’re 1 cm3 cubes of materials. sure, the computer could tile those cubes digitally, and then cut them back into the shape you needed. But, how do you handle the gaps between the blocks? you could fill them with procedurally generated molecules/atoms, right?

So, kind of. Page 91 says "The chief limitation of all transporter-based replicators is the resolution at which the molecular matrix patterns are stored" and "extensive data compression and averaging techniques are used" which results in "single-bit inaccuracies".

I think the implication is that objects are reproduced in essentially arbitrary blobs/fields which are of uniform molecular patterns (e.g. the flesh of an apple being distinct from the skin, the stem, or the seeds) but not in blocks/voxels.

you wouldn’t need to scan materials. You can just model the atoms and procedurally generate the bonds, and then tell the replicator how to print the damn thing.

The problem is that specifying the exact molecular structure of something complex like, say, a soufflé, would be extremely difficult and time-consuming to do manually, and probably it still wouldn't taste or feel right when you ate it - imagine trying to reproduce a Monet by specifying manually in lines of code where each drop of each color of paint was placed on the canvas, without being able to see the finished product until you hit "print" - it would take you years, maybe decades to get it right. Getting the texture and flavor of a grilled chicken breast right would be insanely difficult to do by specifying each atom in the whole structure from scratch. Scanning a real one would be a much easier path to acceptable reproduction, hence: "a quantum geometry transformational matrix field is used to modify the matter stream to conform to a digitally stored molecular pattern matrix." (Treknobabble but the point being that a thing is scanned and the pattern stored digitally for later reproduction)

we know what an iron atom is and can model it.

So yes, especially for industrial applications such as your example of a uniform steel bar, but for things with complex chemistry and physical structure it's too difficult to specify from a "first-principles" perspective and get something that you actually want to eat.

Maybe a higher-grade, specialized food replicator could generate food items procedurally as you suggest, or maybe it would just have a group of stored patterns for the same item that it would randomly select from (probably easier) so that the output isn't always the same, but probably the standard Starfleet model doesn't do this as it would be more of a luxury feature.

With all of these multipurpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word?

I mean... were there other people present at the protest?

Probably at least one single person cares. Maybe a few married people too.

Hard to have a protest by yourself.

A literal decimation.

Didn't a lot of Nazis end up in Argentina after WWII?

Normally I would agree with this perspective, but in this case the "malicious app" is just a demo. It requires no permissions to do the malicious behavior, which means that the relevant code could be included in any app and wouldn't trigger a user approval, a permissions request or a security alert. This could be hiding in anything that you install.

Republicans have begun to frame the protests as “hate America rallies,”

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but exercising your right to protest is one of most patriotic things you can possibly do.

Share that message with anyone you know who needs to hear it.

Sure, I mean... that's a possible outcome... I guess...