Particularly with the modding scene. You can't exactly do a randomiser with the cartridge.
You can also get rechargeable AA batteries. It might be better, since there isn't a cable, and you can charge one set of batteries, while using the other in the mouse.
While kbin.social's site mentioned that they were migrating to a new provider, and as a result, the site might be experiencing some issues, kbin.social has been serving up a similar HTTP 50x errors, and that migration message for well over a month, if not more.
What happened?
Although part of the difficulty is that if you're coming from a centralised place like Reddit, Fediverse takes a bit to wrap your head around. Lemmy had a whole issue going for a while, where people logically flocked to the largest instance that they could find, possibly out of the misunderstanding that you had to pick and choose an instance.
There have always been people like that, it's just more noticeable now because the numbers are larger.
People still use MySpace and Digg, and there are people on Bluesky, Mastodon, here, etc.
I left Twitter for much the same reasons. All the replies are basically unusable now, because bots just pay to get put at the top of the sorting algorithm, and it's now full of bait and spam, since the website formerly known as Twitter now pays for engagement, since that apparently worked out well for Quora (!).
They're doing a Bradbury, in a way, kind of like Tumblr and Steam. Everyone else is shooting themselves in the foot.
Although the quality has noticeably decreased. The number of bots has shot up a ridiculous amount.
Lemmy is nice, but the content on it is quite niche. If you want something less tech-oriented, you're generally out of luck, for example.
At least with Riker, we also know that it is a combination of the transport operator splitting Riker across two transport streams instead of the usual one, and a bunch of unique circumstances surrounding an ion storm. It's only been done twice, from people doing the exact same procedure in exacting circumstances.
We also know that the transporter isn't a simple clone and kill device, otherwise, their replicators would just utilise the same functionality, and we know that they lack the fine detailed resolution to recreate living matter, or computer chips with it, the result having telltale problems indicative of replication.
Scotty and Voyager would not need to rig up some hyper-complex loop procedure to keep people inside of the transporter otherwise. They could just keep the clone pattern, and put it into normal persistent storage. DS9 shows that that is possible to do that, albeit for a small handful of people per Cardassian space station. The transport accident in TMP would never need to happen, because they could just abort the transport procedure and recreate the clone from the sending transporter.
We also know that the transporter has some error correction capabilities. Scotty seemed reasonably convinced that it might have been possible to recall Lt. Franklin. Geordi disagreed, but more due to the level of pattern degradation, rather than a damaged pattern at all. Though fabricating half a person is almost definitely pushing the limits of those capabilities, it's not impossible. Those imperfections and errors are implied to be what caused Transporter Psychosis in the early days. There do also seem to be variations in the copies that come out the other end. Both parts of Kirk came out different, as did both copies of Boimler. Riker may have been the same, but we don't know enough to say for sure.
So, the matter used to reassemble is not the same matter that was disassembled.
Untrue, for the most part. We're explicitly told that the matter stream is what gets transported, with the constituent matter being converted to energy, moved across, and converted back. Barclay is held at that junction where his matter starts converting to energy, and there's a real concern that it wouldn't be possible to hold him in that state for long.
He then doubles his mass by grabbing onto another person, which oughtn't be possible if the transporter was cloning people, since the other transporter would not have received the pattern to reintegrate with. It'd just squish everything into a double-mass Barclay.
You say that, but the warp core is also pretty nasty stuff. Not only is it full of flesh melting radiation and coolant, but a slight knock will cause it to explode, at least on any ship built in the 24th century.
At least you can not use a transporter. You kind of scuffed if you're on a warp core powered ship and it suddenly goes up in smoke.
Mine is that they wanted it to stand out, compared to all the other phones with flat screens at the time, especially with all the design clones.
You would look at it and go "oh that phone looks funny, must be a Samsung".
It'd be a bit unreliable, though. Not everyone has the same reaction to the same thing, nor do they express it in a similar way.
Someone might think a snake or a spider is cute, whereas another would want to incinerate it on the spot. A third might be concerned because they seem to be injured, etc.
Not to mention that image recognition/emotional analysis has been an ongoing field of research for some time. Making the link is not overly difficult.
…and they do. That SIM card is useless without internet…
Unless you got one from that weird period of time where your car just dialled up a call centre, for reasons unbeknownst to man.
Also great to squeak a little battery in if your phone was flat and you needed to make a call.
You can still turn it off. Not much they can do about your turning it off at the wall.
It wasn't that long ago that "smart mirrors" were en vogue, which was just a display with a reflective coating.
Although I think that they generally fell out of fashion because people don't want a contraption for their mirror that they have to plug in and set up.
I actually prefer TNG's settling down with a Poker game, and Picard joining in with a "I didn't know why I didn't do this before". Mainly because it still feels like they've not left their time, whereas the camping scene could be anytime from the start of the second millennium.
The only way it could be better is if the show opened with a Poker game.
And it doesn't preclude the company just deciding your product is no longer worth supporting/going bankrupt.
It might have been fine and seemingly trustworthy to begin with, and then it stops, a few years down the line.
While ordering a crew cut is easy, since it's on the menu, what about other kinds?
Can you just go "I'd like a men/women's haircut" and leave it at that, or do you need something more specific, like saying you want a Charlestone done by a No. 3 to the sides, and a 4 up top?
I've been using "mechanoid" as a classification (similar to humanoid, etc), but a friend pointed out that it's both too generic, and that said inorganics might just consider it biology, with organics being the weird outlier.
You wouldn't start off an e-mail with "My Dear X", or "Dearest X", since that would be too personal for a professional email, so "To X" being more impersonal seems like it would make the letter more professional-sounding, compared to "Dear X".
What caused the shift from calling things like rheostats and condensers to resistors and capacitors, or the move from cycles to Hertz?
It seemed to just pop up out of nowhere, seeing as the previous terms seemed fine, and are in use for some things today (like rheostat brakes, or condenser microphones).
You often see people in fitness mention going through a cut/bulk cycle, or mention one, with plans to follow up with the other. Why is it that cutting and bulking so often happen in cycles, rather than said person just doing both at once, until they hit their desired weight?
One of the recent laws in Trek that gets looked at a bit, is the genetic engineering ban within the Federation. It appears to have been passed as a direct result of Earth's Eugenics Wars, to prevent a repeat, and seems to have been grandfathered into Federation law, owing to the hand Earth had in its creation.
But we also see that doing so came with major downsides. The pre-24th century version of the law applied a complete ban on any genetic modification of any kind, and a good faith attempt to keep to that resulted in the complete extinction of the Illyrians.
In Enterprise, Phlox specifically attributes the whole issue with the Eugenics Wars to humans going overboard with the idea of genetic engineering, as they are wont to do, trying to improve/perfect the human species, rather than using it for the more sensible goal of eliminating/curing genetic diseases.
Strange New Worlds raises the question of whether it was right for Earth to enshrine their own disasters with genetic engineering in Federation law like that, particularly given that a fair few aliens didn't have a problematic history with genetic engineering, and some, like the Illyrians, and the Denobulans, used it rather liberally, to no ill-effects.
At the same time, people being augmented with vast powers in Trek seems to inevitably go poorly. Gary Mitchell, Khan Noonien-Singh, and Charlie X all became megalomaniacs because of the vast amount of power that they were able to access, although both Gary and Charlie received their powers through external intervention, and it is unclear whether Khan was the exception to the rule, having been born with that power, and knowing how to use it properly. Similarly, the Klingon attempt at replicating the human augment programme was infamous, resulting in the loss of their famous forehead ridges, and threatening the species with extinction.
Was the Federation right to implement Earth's ban on genetic engineering, or is it an issue that seems mostly human/earth-centric, and them impressing the results of their mistakes on the Federation itself?
Can humans eat it? Do they have food at all? What do they have as a staple foodstuff?
Inspired by a bit of discussion over on discord, where there was an argument over whether the USS Discovery had been upgraded by the 32nd century Federation.
On the one hand, the Discovery did undergo a vast overhaul, being fitted with an upgraded power/propulsion system, detachable nacelles and the works, however, we also know at the end of Discovery Season 3, that Burnham resetting the Discovery's computers effectively put much of the ship back to the 23rd century baseline (or as much of one as it could return to). We're also shown that the Discovery still uses microtapes in its computer room.
So was the Discovery upgraded completely to 32nd century standards, or is it still a 23rd century ship underneath the 32nd century paint?
We already know from TOS that Mutlitronic computers are able to develop sapience, with the M-5 computer being specifically designed to "think and reason" like a person, and built around Dr Daystrom's neural engrams.
However, we also know from Voyager that the holomatrix of their Mk 1 EMH also incorporates Multitronic technology, and from DS9 that it's also used in mind-reading devices.
Assuming that the EMH is designed to more or less be a standard hologram with some medical knowledge added in, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that holograms were either sapient themselves, or were capable of developing sapience. It would only be a logical possibility if technology that allowed human-like thought and reasoning into a hologram.
If anything, it is more of a surprise that sapient holograms like the Doctor or Moriarty hadn't happened earlier.