Movies have become more derivative every decade since the motion picture camera was invented. This is the "low hanging fruit" observation.

People only have a certain number of desires, and only desire a certain amount of change. As it gets more difficult to come up with something new that people like, something old will get repeated more. As there gets to be a longer history of "something old that people liked", something new will be created less often.

It's not just movies. You can see it everywhere. Consider, e.g., software. A new edition has to change something noticeable, but it gets harder to come up with something new that people will like as much.

The time when we could (sometimes) rely on legislators to mandate basic security was back when they understood how basic security worked. In these areas only (some) tech specialists do.

That is, indeed, the most ethical. It's the way I chose. But I never deluded myself into believing that it would alter the behavior of the companies. Only two things (that I've thought of) stand a chance of doing that.
1) If you stop selling something that you are the monopolizer of sales in, you lose all associated copyrights. (And possibly all associated patents.) I.e. legal action to make things that you buy act is if they are yours.
2) Massive community on-line attacks whenever a company disables something that it's sold.

I don't think either of those have much chance of happening, and the second would be quite dangerous.

I would think Chief O'Brien would have known how to handle this situation.

There's probably no "the" filter. It's probably a raft of multiple pieces. Some species won't be able to survive away from their home planet. Some will be aquatic (or other heavy medium). Some won't be able to tolerate the communications lag time. Some will kill each other off in suicidal war. Etc. Etc. Etc.

And another part of the filter is, since FTL appears to be impossible, (if only because of collision with grains of dust) once you've spent thousands of years in space, that's what you're adapted to, and then you don't want to (or can't) visit a planet.

I never agreed to allow my printer to connect to the internet. Even though I always used HP ink (I don't print that much), my printer still shut down, because I wouldn't allow it connection to the internet.

HP has become garbage.

There were contributions from multiple countries. You can point to particular problems that the Russians solved, but also some the the folks in the US solved. And the Germans. (And, IIRC, the French.) If you go back far enough, most of the progress happened in China.

For that matter, I suspect that in the 1700's much of the progress happened in Britain. (Consider "in the rocket's red glare", and there was a lot of work on rockets between ships...often for carrying a line to allow a rescue.)

China is NOT communist. They pretend to be, but they are actually a tyrannical oligarchy. (OTOH, no large government can ever be communist, as the theory doesn't scale beyond around Dunbar's number of people...and that requires a charismatic leader.)

That's a gross overstatement WRT "Russian theory of space travel".

As for the "German engineers", well, that's true. There were US engineers working on rockets, but they were ignored and never funded, so they never developed massive hardware.

If you're not afraid of China, you're a fool. China is potentially the greatest power on the planet. OTOH, the key word there is "potentially". This report is a sign that they are achieving at least part of their potential.

China has the largest population, and has at least SOME tradition of respecting scholarship. The Mandarins were originally scholars more than aristocrats. And it's also got a large number of internal resources that have been excessively mined out.

That said, China also has a history of overly regulatory and corrupt government. That's why the key is "potential".

That's what patents were claimed to be supposed to be. What they have been if baffle-gab lawyer speak. I've looked at a few that should have been intelligible to me, and they weren't. I understood how to do what they claimed to be about, but I couldn't understand the patent.

Not that they *were* aware of, but that they *should* have been aware of. (OTOH, I'm no expert in the field. Possibly it's actually the best design feasible.)

Boeing chose to accept that engine and cowl design. It's not ONLY Southwest maintenance.

If you say "responsibility is mixed", I'll agree, but if you imply that it's not Boeing's fault I'll disagree. If I have a cracked tail light, and it costs a thousand dollars to fix, yeah, it's my fault for not fixing it, but it's also the fault of the guy who designed it to be impossible to maintain.

No, the part he's missing is the idea that one can't model this while ignoring time dilation. Not even approximately accurately.