Expensive meat puppets are not required to entertain. The video game business is already bigger than Hollywood and unlike push content is interactive.

Tech will catch up to then pass meatbag limitations. Those not wanting AI are free to skip it. It's mere entertainment, just kitsch and nothing sacred.

Uncle Sugar bought the Zip drives I used at work where I learnt to dislike their meh relaiblity.

For myself I didn't bother with them since I found their high failure rate and media price annoying. I bought a parallel port HP CD burner instead whose drive lasted me many years. (I always burn CD/DVD at slowest speed available for best burn, proven while distrohopping and various live DOS and BartPE discs. Fre trial CDRWIN etc were limited to 1x which was ideal.)

The Zip and early writeable CD eras largely overlapped

Security weakness is not consent to intrusion.

He's an adult criminal, not a child. He chose his fate.

Americans don't want manufacturing jobs for themselves, they want some poor shmuck to take those jobs so they feel affirmed. I can't blame anyone for pulling that off because manufacturing workers are viewed as expendable drones in the US.

Management and labor in the US are historic enemies for good reasons. Lest we forget the objective of employment is eventual retirement while doing as little as possible so you destroy less of your body. The objective of management is maintaining ones escape from labor.

Pinoys and Pinays are working globally because their homeland lacks opportunity. Many of them join the US armed forces where they make excellent troops who are enthusiastic and chill to work with. I never had to discipline one in my USAF career, which I cannot say for home-grown shitbags. They make excellent Merchant Marine and US Navy sailors, jobs few USians want.

Used routers that can run FOSS router software abound because factory firmware updates ended though many are amply fast for their real use case. I just flashed my old 6700v3 with FreshTomato which is simple to do. I'd upgraded but kept the 6700v3 as a ready backup. (I don't believe in being one-deep on comm gear including computers.)

Of course any PC with two or more NICs can route and there are plenty available. "Home lab" enthusiasts make all sorts of interesting appliances from tiny PCs with ethernet and wireless with space to add a second single or multiport network card.

Routers are computers after all.

The reason it worked is because it was organic to the storyline. It did not feel like a forced situation. If it had not felt organic, then it would have repulsed most people. Not because two different races were kissing, it is that norms were being violated just for the violation.

Say what? I might go with "progressive" as a description, but it is a strange claim that is is Left. It all takes place in a Military Authority structure and the rules are strictly enforced without allowing excuses. That is so much not-left, that I am uncertain how you even begin to claim it is Left. Because they are not close minded closeted homosexuals they are Left? What is your reasoning here?

JJ Abrams ended the Star Trek movies. He made beautiful, but ultimately forgettable movies.

A claim I have heard numerous times on Reddit and a few times here on Slashdot is that there are no ethical billionaires. That is not an "average" view. That is a strongly politically Left view. Anyone who views themselves as strongly Left or Right is likely not average. The average is FAR more nuanced than either Right or Left allows. Which is intentional.

You are missing something. The government is too corrupt to handle the upgrades. Billions get sent to certain people and garbage is produced. This has been observed constantly from the 1980s.

I seem to recall two attempts at updating ATC systems in my lifetime. Both ended with absurd amounts of money being flushed into some people's pockets. There is too much money at stake to update them as there is too much corruption and the money will be wasted.

The situation is certainly not as black and white as people appear to make it; however, when I wanted to go to college, I would have had a helping hand throughout the entire process, from filling out forms to requesting money if I were a female. As a male, all I received was, "we have plenty of males, we need to stimulate female accessibility".

You also appear to forget about Affirmative Action.

These programs were absolutely necessary to kickstart some amount of diversity; however, these programs did explicitly discriminate against white males regardless of how much you deny it. Which is why they were, theoretically at least, ended. Artificial discrimination is a terrible thing, even when it is used for "good". It is like murdering part of the population to make everyone who is left feel more equal.

So you forgot about the KDE/GNOME transitions from version 2 to version 3? The interface has been a mess for both since then. And then you propose another proprietary solution when they are trying to escape proprietary solutions? I suspect you may need to rethink your position on this matter.