This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.
This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.
I think that’s just how the US signs off on every meeting with world leaders.
Russia was always Turkey’s number one geopolitical antagonist; even in the best of times, a dangerous frenemy. Now, Turkey is probably the number one beneficiary of Putin’s botched war. Its main antagonist is defanged, maybe permanently, and it’s become a geopolitically indispensible regional power that the US and Europe desperately need to keep onside. It can dick around with stuff like hosting Putin visits, just to flaunt its own importance. Everything is coming up Erdogan.
Shutting down polluting businesses, relocating others away from where people live, and traffic congestion control are all valid approaches to air pollution control, used not only in China but around the world. Not sure why you need to put scare quotes around the word “solved”.
The people in charge of TNG by that point were creatively bankrupt. It would have been a fiasco.
Also, the idea just doesn’t fit Star Trek. It isn’t a comic book franchise, where fan-pleasing callbacks and crossovers are baked into the formula. In Star Trek media, callbacks and crossovers have tended to be some of the worst stories.
Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.
If it was so irrelevant, the colleges would not have fought tooth and nail to maintain it. Anyway, the prior experience of individual states that have banned affirmative action indicates that the effects are not negligible – it’s responsible for double digit shifts in racial compositions of student bodies.
Things will depend on how the universities respond; one can imagine Harvard doubling down on ever-subtler ways to tag Asians as personality-free robots undeserving of consideration.
This episode was probably peak Dukat. Unfortunately, I don’t think they stuck the landing for his character arc. His descent into insane mustache twirling villainy in the last season was not very interesting. By the finale, the Dukat part was by far the weakest of the simultaneous plot threads.
To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.
Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we’ve seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.
Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery – even if he’s clearly labelled as playing devil’s advocate, it feels beyond the pale.
Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.
Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.
To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.
By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.
Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.
The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.
It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.
It’s GPL compliant, so there’s no problem. It’s a good thing for companies to explore a variety of business models that are FLOSS-compatible.
How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.
That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.
And one of these days, someone will rediscover the magic of having a uniform editing environment for manipulating text in multiple different contexts.
Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.
Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.