Film crew here.

If you work for a major studio like Paramount, in California, everyone's supposed to be in a union so they can't get away with paying people a pittance, you're generally guaranteed a living wage, even a very good one, if you can keep working all year (and if you can keep it consistent enough you'll get health and pension). The people you hear cheating at this aren't usually big studios, but little fly-by-night operations making TV movies in the valley, and production companies in right-to-work states like Georgia and Louisiana. Those are the sketchy operations.

Also, most of the time nowadays actors get residual payments, every time a show they acted in airs, they get paid a little something. It's not much but if you act on TV for a long time it really adds up. In the late 60s though it was customary for TV actors to be contracted into a "buy-out," where they sold they residual rights, or they agreed to only take residuals from the first few runs of the show. Back then the idea that a show would make money in re-runs was unheard of and nobody considered demanding residuals. I think I read somewhere that specifically in the Star Trek case, the actors got residuals for the first one or two NBC network re-runs, but they didn't get any money from the syndicated re-runs, which is where Star Trek really made its money.

Rental payments from Star Trek episodes literally kept Paramount in business in the 70s, they would have gone bankrupt without that show.

I totally don't dispute that.

To wit, New Pope is a Jesuit and worked as a chemical engineer.

They weren't against free thought or free exchange in general. They were against free thought and free exchange when it dealt with theological matters. The early colleges and universities were started by them.

There's obviously going to be some conflict over "theological matters" when the Universities you found are uniformly staffed with clerics in all departments. Note many of these "scientific" or philosophical conflicts tended to arrogate with theology. All of the science faculty at the University of Paris were trained scholastics and din't for second see any conflict with science and, say, Thomist natural theology, which is in fundamental opposition to the scientific method and the interpretation of empirical knowledge.

It could also be difficult to have any political argument in these places, since the Church was not just a Church but also a state, in alliance with many of the countries of Europe against others, either due to the schism or the Reformation, and voicing a political opinion not in accord with Vatican policy on, say, the excommunication of Urban VI by Clement VII could get you kicked out of your job, or worse.

his unfortunate habit of insulting a medieval absolute monarch.

As I said, freethought and free exchange of ideas. Note also that his "insult," substantively, was attempting to publish his works.

Surely, the church has always had a remarkable scientific establishment. They didn't lock up and suppress Galileo because of his science, they were just hostile to free thought and the free exchange of ideas more generally. :)

The Catholic Church generally supports universal free healthcare, as long as it doesn't pay for the Pill or abortions.

When you have a comoany that knows how to do a certain thing , aka one of those evil corporations, getting hired by the federal government, some people want to do a lot of paperwork and stuff to keep track of what's going on, and other people go crazy with it.

If we're doing something important, like killing Hitler, or trying to beat the Commies to the moon, federal procurement can be remarkably efficient. Clear goals, and the stated willingness to accept some waste as long as the job's done, can do that.

Unfortunately since about the mid-1970s (Watergate you say?!), approximately zero "waste," of any kind is tolerated on any federal project, as this is "profiteering" or "wasting the people's money," so a lot of contractor time is spent on compliance. This makes the process incredibly loss-averse, and probably too risk-averse to actually accomplish anything.

The reality is that Elon Musk is able to do a good job, because he can destroy two or three recovery barges in a row and he doesn't have to explain it to anybody but his accountant. If the SLS had only one slip-up like that there would be a bloodbath of firings, senate hearings, press conferences with the President, and maybe the entire program might be scrubbed. Back in the late 50s NASA screwed up these kinds of operations all the time, but the American people tolerated it because of the Cold War. Nowadays the budget is so tight and public accountability is so fierce that frigging welding assembly subcontractors are apparently front-page news. We probably built and destroyed five facilities on the scale of this thing during Apollo and nobody batted an eye at the expense.

Just speaking as someone who's PI is in the Sony dump, I have not yet been killed.

However, I'll be under fraud alert for the next three years, Nigerian princes call my cell about twice a day, and someone has already tried, and fortunately failed, to open a student loan in my name. (No, I don't get it either.)

I mean it's not awful, it's not like I slept with a video game reviewer or anything. But it's been a huge hassle.

I'm not sure Tyson is an atheist.

I may decide that I have (iTunes,Amazon,BeatPort) music but you have no business deciding, or worse forcing, those ditinguishing attributes for me.

Where have you been the last five years? The war was fought and consumers of your ilk have lost utterly. I mean you may want your phone or your computer to work this way but you're a vanishing minority. Only dorks prioritize app choice over content.

Can I store an arbitrary file on an iOS device yet? What if I want to download an MP3 using Safari or Chrome and play it with the native iOS music player? Can arbitrary apps share data without specific developer support yet?

How would you share data between two apps if both developers didn't support that?

Generally speaking, if you're a developer, you can vend whatever files you want as long as you and the recipient agree on type identifiers, either copying or by sharing a destructible reference. You can't save an arbitrary file to an arbitrary location because the apps are sandboxed, as far as they can tell they're the only thing running on the phone. It's a little more careful than Android but it's meant to be part of a defense in depth.

Everything you mention is fine but I'm not sure there's some killer user story or use case that justifies it in light of the security issues. I don't think any 3rd party app developer should be able to see any of your file system ever, not on your phone. It's just too dangerous, the thing is always on the network, it knows where you live and you can't unplug it.

Visible global filesystem on a phone always seemed like a gee-whiz feature that wasn't really justified. Frankly I think the visible global filesystem on personal computers isn't really justified, considering how many people just dump everything into ~/Documents and most productivity apps have their own bespoke document browser/organizer.

Honestly I just spent about 30 minutes trying to find a website where I could even try to download an MP3, usually everything I'd want to listen to is in the podcasting app (or the site the content is on just has an app). I used to have GoodReader, which you'd launch from a URL in Safari and it'd just download anything and play it, but it sorta became unnecessary after a certain point. I'm not sure what the point of being able to play it in the "native music player" is. What app you play content with shouldn't be important, all the matters is that the desired content is available by a convenient and appropriate modality. iOS doesn't have a "native music player," it has iTunes for music in iTunes, Podcasts for Podcasts, and then Beats and Amazon Music and Spotify and everything else for their music.

One app to play all your music is 1990s thinking; modern apps are meant to brand content and service experiences, instead of them all launching the "native music player" they all call the same native sound API. The mechanics of how the media moves across the internet or across the filesystem is invisible to the user.

-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K

"Oh, I don't know" -- Joel Robinson.

The IBM PC was an open platform, not an Open platform. :)

Similarly Microsoft's platform was "open," but only relatively, when compared to IBM. Meanwhile Linux is open and Open and really only excels at niches.

The conventional wisdom is that the Wintel platform prevailed because the hardware was cheaper; Windows and Mac OS had about the same level of openness from the perspective of third-party developers.

Google runs Android as an Open OS but most of the units sold are actually running closed-source code, because the OEMs can license their way out of being Open. Which is why Cyanogen exists.

I respectfully submit that Android is substantially more functional with its core set of applications than iOS.

A good case can be made that an OHA Android phone is a better value proposition for a vanilla end user than an iOS iPhone. If you're alright with your phone being a dumb terminal for Google services and $SOCIAL_NETWORK_X, you're better off.

If you're a third party developer like Microsoft though, it's a much worse value proposition to target the platform, because Google aggressively crowds them out of providing features, and their store/monetization model doesn't produce as much income. If you're somebody like Microsoft, Apple is kindof easier to work with, since Apple isn't trying to clone Onenote and constantly dragging the users to their clone through defaults and platform integration. Also if Microsoft wants to charge $5 for an app or an IAP, on iOS there's a good chance they'll actually get the sale. Ads just don't generate the revenue sales do.

The user value proposition starts to break down if the end user isn't vanilla, and actually kinda wants access to the kinds of high-quality 3rd party apps that tend to show up on iOS first or exclusively. Or they're privacy conscious, or would just prefer not use Google services for everything.

Android can share data freely among applications and is much less picky about data formats, so there's no need to resort to some of the weird fuckery or workarounds iOS users have to deal with to bend, fold or mutilate their needs into something that iOS can actually do.

I think you may be working with old information.

Buddhism generally doesn't assert the existence of the supernatural, not does Taoism. Many devotees of these are hold syncretic beliefs that incorporate supernatural elements, though.

Certain tenets of Scientology are supernatural, most saliently, the claim of the existence of "thetans."