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Do I have to watch it? This vid, I mean?

Star Wars is about rebels fighting a powerful empire that governs the galaxy. It glorifies taking down the establishment by a group of (well funded) gun-toting terrorists.

I suppose you could draw a parallel to the American war of independence against the British...

But in a modern context this would be like a group of domestic insurgents blowing up an aircraft carrier ("Death Star") while staging an armed rebellion against the US government (now a subsidiarity of "Gov-co," a joint venture of the Disney, Viacom, Lockheed Martin, JP Morgan Chase, and Koch Bros. companies).

Simply put, that's just not going to happen.

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edit: Okay I just watched the above clip. That guy made even less sense than the BS that I just made up.

Cool. So maybe by the end of the universe, I'll finally have made galaxy....

Yippee!

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

Exactly. I see a phrase all the time:

'If there are aliens in our galaxy, why haven't we detected evidence of them?'

Perhaps because they are so different from what we even recognize as life that we don't even know what we are looking for. Perhaps the use of radio waves to communicate is something they haven't done in so long, that using it to send a message in space is unfathomable. Or perhaps they never even used that technology in the first place. It's possible that their own physiology would make such technology pointless.

The point is, we're looking for them in very human ways and expecting something very human to come back. Perhaps a civilization at a stage similar to ours out there is asking the same question and using a technology to search that we ourselves have no understanding of. They could be our galactic neighbors and our differing biologies and technology could be so different, that wouldn't even recognize each other as life.

On the flip side of that coin, I once had a UFO experience that was anything but 'lights in the night sky' and the object did things our planes couldn't hope to do. So who knows, maybe they are already here.

Galaxy Quest did this better.

I just watched the first episode. I am unsure how to feel. I mean, they are trying to be funny, but also trying to be serious.

I dunno, I think I prefer either pure "Star Trek" or pure "Galaxy Quest".

Did none of those chucklehead's not watch Guardians of the Galaxy.... Clues given.

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Dethklok -- The Galaxy has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine on that post.

Dethklok -- The Galaxy has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine on that post.

Dethklok -- The Galaxy has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine on that post.

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Sweet hair feathering. Have been listening to the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack a bit on Spotify so have been getting this song in rotation a bit.

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