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_r...@bigfoot.com **