Prodigy is an excellent story ... with a caveat. Just like Star Trek: Discovery, the first few episodes are difficult to watch and have turned a lot of people away from the series before it gets great.

It answers the question "what if you put a Star Wars character into a Star Trek universe?" So it opens with a hotshot kid who bends all the rules so he can escape the mining colony where he's held prisoner. And he thinks he can do everything himself, and that he's cool and awesome. He's insufferable and all the other characters basically can't stand him.

By episode 5, he's gotten his tail handed to him a few times too many, so that's the point where he bucks up and accepts that he's part of a team ... and from there, the series beautifully goes into the principles of Star Trek, strength through diversity, boldly going, &c.

S1 is on Netflix right now, with S2 coming to it later this year. For anyone who's curious about it, I recommend watching it up through episode 6 "Kobayashi", which is a love letter from the writers to the fans. That should be enough to know whether it's to your liking.

I'm a veteran of the browser wars. I remember when Microsoft tried to snuff out its competition by including a fully-featured Internet Explorer with Windows, and justified this by saying that users wanted all the features of a best-in-class app.

I always wondered (sarcastically) why this didn't extend to their word processor, too. Why not include a fully-featured Microsoft Word with Windows?

Maybe now's the time to do that.

In 1998, Apple had recently purchased NeXT announced that Mac OS X would be built atop BSD Unix. There was talk about the potential benefits of Microsoft doing something similar with Windows, making the GUI a component on top of Linux.

I still think that would have been a good move. Microsoft would have benefited from getting a stable and proven multitasking OS (something which was only realized around the time of Windows 7, I'd say) with a broad set of drivers, and Linux would have gotten improvements it needed to provide better support to desktop GUIs.

Agree! And yes, the number of infinite string constructions is large! It's the enumeration of infinity that kills. :D

Yep! Also the same Apple which refused to give the iOS source code to the Chinese government.

I don't mind Apple abiding by Chinese laws to make its hardware and software available in China. I am glad it hasn't bowed to pressure to make its hardware and software modifiable by China.

And not just Star Wars, but also Star Trek! Haven't any of them watched Picard season 3? Remember "Fleet Formation"?!

The fact that China is a surveillance state, whereas Apple has frequently and publicly resisted pressure to add back doors to its devices and software.

What are the other possible interpretations?

Came here to say this. "Enhance cybersecurity" means that China can't bug iPhones to monitor its government employees, so it'll require them to use phones that it has already bugged.

If anything, this is a sign that Apple is doing things right.

How about this little language called Go. It's only used by a small company and crafted by amateurs and occasionally used for high performance computing, but it's worth checking out. The lang spec is still tiny with a stdlib that does all the things.

Man this is gold and I needed this today, thank you AC. I guess it's an age thing where people think that the "old" way of doing things (such as responsible code writing) is somehow automatically trumped by a new language that forces you to work with kid gloves. I'm a Go man myself and love the freedoms it offers -- I don't want or need the handholding because 30 years of mistakes have taught me well!

What you are talking about. Soyuz has over 1,900 flights and was commissioned for all kinds of launches until up to the war in Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If it helps, look at some of the engineering wonders *in operation* in the 60's on ICBMs. Mt fav is [Polaris 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris) that saw *deployment* by 1962! Optically-driven guidance!

That all said, what is a tragedy is the quantity of wealth consumed by the MIC in this process -- all for MAD policies. Just as Eisenhower foresaw -- and here wewre are today where this MIC waste has grown to grotesque proportions.

I liked Cortana, but I never actually found anything it could do. Sure it could tell jokes and make Halo references, but if I asked it to launch an application, change the volume, shut down the computer, &c., it would give me a generic "I can't do that" message. What was the point?

Oh, and after 30 years by themselves in a spaceship, once the "astronaut" gets there, they're probably INSANE.

From re-watching Friends and Seinfeld 2400 times.