50 yrs. of Star Trek!

[Tomasz Rola]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2016 at 04:07:45PM -0700, Ali wrote:
> > Star Trek:TNG brought us our first view of Apple iPads.
> > 
> > Jerry
> 
> Except of course in the 24th century the concept of storing more than one
> piece of data on the same pad did not exist. So each report had to be on a
> separate pad. And of course data could be transferred everywhere except
> between pads...
> 
> -Ali

Given how things go, this is actually visionary. The guy has to pay
for data, then even if he owns more pads, he has to pay for right to
display the data on another device. Or even better (and so so much
more optimal) he has to buy another copy - after all, if he wants
another pad, he has to pay for it in full, right?

The ship has an atm unit somewhere on board - most probably vis-a-vis
the microgravity john. The unit sends messages back to Earth, and
contains a storage of every data they would want to have, thus they
can pay for it even if the message travels hundreds years back to the
central. The atm unit has data about crew's credits, and anticipation
of future incomes, so they can buy what they can anticipate to afford
- the info will be synced when they go back home, credit line opened
whenever necessary and interest rates added, as if they got it 200
years ago.

They will never come back home, however. After crossing certain line,
it can be expected they would be never able to repay the credit. It is
much better to just run away, so their atm will never sync, or be able
to send msg to Earth and receive the answer with updated rates and
debts.

Another possibility is, they connected a "pad" to the warp drive and
blowed everything up. But this happened _after_ the end of the movie.

-- 
Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **