Sturgeon's Law has always been true, and 90% of music has always been crap. But we don't always agree on which 10% is uncrap.

AI has the capability of moving the 90% up to 95% or 99%, sadly. Current AI is great at rehashing the input into different variants, but truly new things (which are any good) are purely accidental, and AI cannot tell when it produces new, good things.

Except that was already done, and done brilliantly by Deep Space Nine. In reality, the Star Fleet Academy idea had a very old lineage, to the smoking shambles that was Star Trek V, when the idea was posited of having a prequel with the TOS characters, or at least the main ones, portrayed by younger actors, during their Academy days. It was pretty quickly rejected because at the time they didn't think audiences would buy the idea of new actors playing Kirk, Spock and Bones.

Of course, in the end, that was effectively what the first part of the 2009 Star Trek, which, for me at least, proved that the guys who rejected the idea in 1989-90 were spot on. But other people like the Kelvinverse films, so to each their own.

The real problem isn't writing per se. There were no lack of justifiable complaints against Voyager and Enterprise. The real problem is that no one really knows where to take it. The whole 32nd century gambit is because no one really knows how to portray the technology of the intervening period. The Enterprise temporal war rubbish demonstrated just how incredibly problematic it can be for an established sci-fi franchise to push itself across a broad timeline when you start with ships that go multiples of the speed of light, create holodecks and replicators and have computers so intelligent they can create conscious beings, and that's just by the 24th century.

With James Bond they can just keep resetting the character over and over again, and updating the gadgets along the way. Star Trek, for all its faults, has established a sort of permanent 70s-ish technology vibe, and because it's more fantasy then science fiction, the controls for the super planet buster never have to change! That franchise fell on its sword more because of a lack of imagination, lazy writing and an obvious desire not to pay Extended Universe authors some royalties for a cache of rather interesting ideas, and ultimately having to go there anyways.

In all cases, I think the fan base is the worst enemy. No franchise like Star Trek is ever going to measure up to the mythology of the older series. TOS really has entered the realm of cultural myth, and TNG, though everyone forgets how much the first season was disliked (and on rewatch a few years ago, I have to say it feels like a wonder that it ever got a season 2), isn't far behind. Even DS9's critics have finally stopped talking, and for my money, it is the most consistently well-written and well-acted of all the Star Treks. But that kind of legacy is absolutely toxic, because if you try to be too different everyone screams "It isn't Star Trek", and if you try to be similar in tone, then everyone complains "We've seen it all before!"

"Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does."

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

While I would agree the way Nutrek at times has tried to do social commentary has perhaps suffered from a lack of metaphor and allegory, which the older series' writers at times had to work through since things like interracial kisses and non-binary identity would have, at the time, caused stations to go apoplectic (and indeed some did, with the Kirk-Uhura kiss). But I suspect more than just some iffy writing is at play here. Everyone accepts, well almost everyone that is, that mixed-race couples can kiss in public, and most people accept gay couples and class and racial equality. But if you try to push further into social liberalism, past what many conservative elements in society have been forced (kicking and screaming the whole way mind you), well suddenly it's all evil woke trash trying to reprogram our brains.

In other words, many have not progressed very far at all, and because TOS and TNG in particular had to hide the underlying message beneath makeup and latex, the less progressive fans can watch it and, well, almost willfully miss the point of The Outcast (TNG) or Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS), assuming, I suppose, that the metaphor is buried so deeply they don't have to challenge their prejudices.

A fed is a fed. I see no reason to give two shits... or even just one shit... about how the trumpscum choose to organize and subdivide themselves or what particular costumes they wear. Those people goosestep under the banner of trump. And that is all I need to know about any or all of them.

* Illegal immigrants are immigrants.
* Legal immigrants are immigrants.
* In the USA, immigrants (legal or illegal) have kids at a higher rate than citizens. This is what I said in my OP, and it was true then and is still true now.
* A high or low birth rate is neither good nor bad by itself, though the effects of a certain birth rate can have good or bad effects of many parts of life/culture/economy/etc.

The birth rate has been declining for a long time, and has many reasons. However, the declining birth rate has declined less because of immigration (since, again, immigrants have more kids on average). The current administration has deported many immigrants, both legal and illegal immigrants. This will make the (already low) birth rate decline quickly.

Does this make sense? Do you disagree with any piece of this? Because it sounded like you disagreed with my point, despite my comments being accurate for all immigrants regardless of their legal status.

The current administration has deported quite a few legal immigrants who entered properly and were working with work visas or green cards, or were waiting for citizenship. So yeah, "nobody minds legal immigrants" is willfully ignoring what conservatives are saying and deporting in 2025/2026. Do you consume non-partisan media? Because that's important.

Nope, ICE and bigotry. Immigrants have more kids than citizens on average. If it weren't for immigrants, the US birth rate would have been below replacement for years. Bigots know this, so in their fear and hatred they try to racially cleanse us by deporting honest workers and denying birthright citizenship.

Bigots gonna bigot, but we don't need to elect them.

And this tells me that you've never had to find replacement parts for a 25 year old car. I had a '95 motorcycle in the shop for an entire summer trying to get parts for the shaft drive.

Dedicated e-readers are generally designed to work closely with a particular company's servers, and keeping that code running is very expensive. I suppose they could let the code run without maintenance, so that it would either fail someday with zero warning (which people would complain about) or cause massive security issues (which people would complain about). I'd love eternal tablets that work forever with magical fairy dust, but in the real world, 14 years for a device with an expected 5-year lifespan is pretty damn good.

Huh. Many of the paperbacks I bought in the 90s are yellowing and the paper is cracking. The paperbacks from the 70s that I 'inherited" from my siblings (when I moved away from my parents) are all in bad shape. Nothing against paper, but a single-minded "paper good, four legs bad" mindset is just as bad as the opposite single-minded view.

I'm not always a fan of Amazon and their policies, but I gotta respect a 14 year support window for portable devices.

> So far the only reliable way to stop piracy has
> been to make a product that is better and have
> consumers that can actually afford to consume.

Isn't is amazing that the record labels continuously fail to understand this? For my part, even as far back is the original launch of the ITMS, my Limewire usage dropped dramatically because I could just buy the one good song on an album and not waste money on the filler. Convenience. At this point, I don't even know HOW long it's been now since I've fired up Limewire... not since Spotify and Apple Music became things, that's for sure... or if it's even still around. Convenience.

And it is well past time for the TV/Movie studios/networks to knock off the nickel-and-dime crap with a different streaming service per channel. Id Tim Cook wants to secure an actual legacy at Apple after his shameful kowtowing to mega; what he should do is channel Steve Jobs, get the studio heads together, and lay down the law like Jobs did with the record labels so that EVERYTHING is wrapped up in AppleTV's flat rate. There does need to be competition, so Netflix should probably become the Spotify for video. Do that, and movie/tv piracy will collapse too. Like I said... I can't even remember the last time I pirated a song. But I have actually hopped over to TPB and torrented movies that I actually OWN before, because they weren't available on Netflix, the DVDs were buried in a box in the basement somewhere, and it was much faster... AND MORE CONVENIENT... than going down there and digging through boxes to find the actual physical media for the movies I was in the mood to watch at the times.

You fail to realize that different people have different needs and priorities... and that is 100% A-OK. This whole "If this product is not the perfect product for me, Me, ME; than it is crap and should not be sold to anyone." business was tedious from the start and has gone on far too long.

My own laptop needs and priorities are light weight and long battery life. For my use case, those two stand above all other considerations by a fair margin. And if repairability suffers in order to shave off a half-pound or to gain another hour of battery life, so be it. So obviously, I'm on a MacBook Air. It is the right laptop for ME.

It sounds like you have different needs and priorities than I do. So that MacBook Air is probably NOT the right laptop for you. But you know what? That is ALSO 100% A-OK.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

I can see it now. Instead of "Houston, we've had a problem." and Omega being awarded another Silver Snoopy; with the beast of redmond on board the ship, the mission transcript will read:

"This ship will self-destruct in 20 seconds. This is your last chance to push the cancellation button."
"Cancellation button? Hurry!"
"Where is it?! Where is it?!"
"It's gotta be here!"
"Out of order"?! Fuck! Even in the FUTURE, nothing works!"