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[hwhatting]

No, I haven't noticed anything like that.

[Travis B.]

Going back to an old discussion that I am not going to track down, apparently Led Zeppelin did plagiarize a good amount of its early music from blues musicians...

[alice]

Going back to an old discussion that I am not going to track down, apparently Led Zeppelin did plagiarize a good amount of its early music from blues musicians...

Bit of a chestnut, this one.

[Raphael]

Belated Happy New Year to everyone who celebrated!

[Jonlang]

Going back to an old discussion that I am not going to track down, apparently Led Zeppelin did plagiarize a good amount of its early music from blues musicians...

Bit of a chestnut, this one.

So we're calling cover versions "theft" now?

[Ares Land]

Happy new year, everyone!

---

Hey, I thought about the replicator thing a bit over the holidays. Also about wine.

Wine tasting is proof that human beings can, with a bit of training, detect differences in molecular makeup at trace levels. If some people can tell wine from one vineyard to the next one, they definitely can notice the replicated pad thai was the exact same as yesterdays'.

I posit, however, that winemaking has underwent a complete revolution in the Star Trek universe.

First off, there's the matter of rarity. In our world we get wines like Romanée-Conti or Cheval Blanc that reach incredibly high prices. That's to be expected: they produce a finite amount of wine, and not everyone gets to taste it (Romanée-Conti, in particular, is no larger than two football fields. No wonder it's so expensive.)
Not a problem in the Star Trek universe as these can be cloned at will.
In general the best wine will be produced by comparatively tiny vineyards; on the other hands winemakers have to make a living somehow. Winemaking is among other things a trade-off between quality and quantity. Replication eliminates the problem.
You just have to make a perfect barrel and clone it indefinitely.

Winemakers note differences down to the individual vine; there are also minute but important differences in insolation, soil quality, and so on. So at an extreme, Star Trek-era winemakers can focus on a single vine, planted in just the right spot with the right quality of pebbles, produce a single bottle, clone it ad libitum.

Relatedly, many champagne producers go out of business. (With champagne, part of the job is to produce something similar year after year, which is a difficult matter with organic methods.)

The same can be said of aging. A 20-year old bottle of wine is (often) expensive, now; but with replicators you can clone it indefinitely.

Winemakers have to get extremely creative because they're all competing with the same 2220 perfect bottle of Romanée Conti, sold at 1 credit at every supermaket.

There's bound to be a market for non replicated wine though. The copy may be identical to the original down to the single carbon atom, but I'm certain some people will be absolutely convinced of tasting a difference.

In any case, I guess that Château-Picard (as featured occasionally in TNG) is truly an exceptional wine, the likes of which we're not likely to taste.
(Or alternatively, it tastes nothing like our present wines and we'd find it horrible. Tastes change a lot in three centuries.)

[zompist]

Winemakers have to get extremely creative because they're all competing with the same 2220 perfect bottle of Romanée Conti, sold at 1 credit at every supermaket.

Yeah, I think this is very likely: with replicators, scarcity is no longer an asset.

But what happens next? I think we can get a clue from looking at US cuisine in the last 40 years, after Americans discovered, to their surprise, that food could be good. We could roughly parody the process thus:

Stage 1: Forget chop suey, have you tried dim sum?
Stage 2: Forget Cantonese, have you tried Vietnamese and Ethiopian?
Stage 3: Forget ethnic food, you need to try fusion food, locally sourced.
Stage 4: Forget traditional cooking, you want to try foams and sous-vide and chemical powders.
Stage 5: Forget the avant garde, what you want is a 1950s meatloaf, but perfected.

At any stage, only the extreme foodies are trying the really new stuff. But it all trickles down: compared to my childhood, there is a bewildering array of options. So I'd expect there to be millions of possible replicator recipes, and most people have very strong personal tastes.

If recipe banks take up significant storage space, that reintroduces scarcity, in that an industrial or military replicator won't have your favorite recipes. Maybe you lug your favorites around in your personal datapack.

Or, people learn to prize the randomness of real cooking with real ingredients. That's the only reason I can see for Picard maintaining a real vineyard. The replicator can produce last year's Château-Picard, but it can't produce next year's.

[Ares Land]

Or, people learn to prize the randomness of real cooking with real ingredients. That's the only reason I can see for Picard maintaining a real vineyard. The replicator can produce last year's Château-Picard, but it can't produce next year's.

Yeah, I think Picard' vineyard would make a lot of sense, for precisely this reason.

To a large extent, it would be like books. There are more than enough books already published to last me several lifetimes but I still check out the new releases.

[keenir]

Winemakers have to get extremely creative because they're all competing with the same 2220 perfect bottle of Romanée Conti, sold at 1 credit at every supermaket.

Yeah, I think this is very likely: with replicators, scarcity is no longer an asset.


Or, people learn to prize the randomness of real cooking with real ingredients. That's the only reason I can see for Picard maintaining a real vineyard.

You know how Picard tells people who are new to his century "anyone can do anything they like" and, when pressed about earning a living, adds "people do what they like" & "they do what they are good at"...things in that vein.

Well, judging from history, now and in the past, some people want to run their family business X generations from its founding, even if they have money troubles. The Federation alledgedly has no money troubles, so now there should be no "I'd have inherited the family vineyards, but gramps had to sell it to avoid losing the house."

Presumably, with the Federation population as high as some have estimated, there will always be at least enough people to man/maintain/run all the things we regard as family businesses...even in an age of automation. (some of those people might even change their surname to give the illusion that the place has stayed in the same family longer than it has...we might see something like the vineyard being owned and run by "Alexa Picard, daughter of Alexander the son of Worf, of the House of Mogh", even if she's not a Picard by adoption or marriage, she takes the name because the Picard vineyards are hers now.

And maybe thats the secret of the Federation? Just like there are always just enough people to always have boots on the ground (except in remote or barely-manned locales, like the settlement on the Horta's planet, or the - was it really just three houses where Mudd was trying to bring those women?)...likewise there is a good chance that there will always be just enough people who like Picard-family wine, or a certain flavor of targ, etc, that there will always be recipients for non-replicated food and drink. Granted, that falls apart with things like famine (TOS) and war (DS9)...but thats all the more reason to keep the peace, right?

(they have warp drive to take it from one orbit to another, however far apart; i was never clear on how things were brought from the ground to orbit, though i'd assume they'd overcome any problems with needing enough fuel to launch both the payload, the vessel, and the fuel itself)

That makes sense, right?


this is a fun discussion.

[Ares Land]

That makes a lot of sense. If money was not a problem, heh, running a vineyard would certainly be a very attractive proposition.

The ST universe has both shuttles and transporters. The use case for each has never been spelled out (that I know of) but in any case fuel economy never seems to be a problem, so this is apparently a long-solved issue.

[keenir]

That makes a lot of sense. If money was not a problem, heh, running a vineyard would certainly be a very attractive proposition.

The ST universe has both shuttles and transporters. The use case for each has never been spelled out (that I know of) but in any case fuel economy never seems to be a problem, so this is apparently a long-solved issue.

has anyone tried to use transporters from one end of an empire to the other? (cross-Federation or cross-Tholian, etc)

the "don't use these for too far" where far is one of those things that polite company doesn't discuss.

[Travis B.]

Going back to an old discussion that I am not going to track down, apparently Led Zeppelin did plagiarize a good amount of its early music from blues musicians...

Bit of a chestnut, this one.

So we're calling cover versions "theft" now?

It's not cover versions - cover versions are perfectly legitimate unto themselves - it's making covers while failing to give the songwriters songwriting credits, or deliberately modifying others' songs just enough that one can get away with not giving them credits.

[Linguoboy]

Going back to an old discussion that I am not going to track down, apparently Led Zeppelin did plagiarize a good amount of its early music from blues musicians...

Bit of a chestnut, this one.

So we're calling cover versions "theft" now?

No, apparently we're commenting on articles we haven't actually read. (The authors make a clear distinction between cases in which the band did initially credit the original authors--which is standard practice when covering another artist's work--and when it failed to or had to be legally coerced into doing so.)

[Civil War Bugle]

Is the Almeopedia down or is it just me?

[keenir]

I'm curious to see who is awarded the Smiley this year.

[Raphael]

Is the Almeopedia down or is it just me?

Seems up to me.

[Civil War Bugle]

Is the Almeopedia down or is it just me?

Seems up to me.

Checked on my phone - Safari on iPhone seems to load it fine, but when using Firefox on my computer, I get a security exception, and then a 'site not found' when I try to bypass that.

[Raphael]

Checked on my phone - Safari on iPhone seems to load it fine, but when using Firefox on my computer, I get a security exception, and then a 'site not found' when I try to bypass that.

Now that's odd - I am using Firefox on my computer. My first thought was that maybe the Firefox on your computer is somehow set so that it won't load unencrypted websites, but if that were true, it wouldn't load the ZBB, either.

[Civil War Bugle]

Checked on my phone - Safari on iPhone seems to load it fine, but when using Firefox on my computer, I get a security exception, and then a 'site not found' when I try to bypass that.

Now that's odd - I am using Firefox on my computer. My first thought was that maybe the Firefox on your computer is somehow set so that it won't load unencrypted websites, but if that were true, it wouldn't load the ZBB, either.

I don't know how I fixed it but I seem to have reset some setting or other and it loads now!!!

[Raphael]

I've written yet another blog post:

https://guessishouldputthisupsomewhere. ... n-systems/