"A Life Well Lived" for $2000, Alex.

Thanks for entertaining while also educating us. Pursuit of knowledge, in all forms, is a grand goal for all of us. Again, RIP.

How about we close the research arm of Deutsche Bank and spread those salaries around to help those who can't work from home -- like (main lobby) bank tellers, drive through tellers, janitors, IT staff, and many others? It makes as much sense as taxing work from home employees and giving it to others who can't work from home, forced out due to redundancy, or any other issue. That is just Socialism under the guise of a tax with shiftily crafted words to try and make it not look like Socialism.

Yes, they did, and please tell me how many times TOS made mention of that fact on the show? Did Uhura ever say "because I'm black"? Was it ever even mentioned? I don't remember it. Just like Sulu being Asian or Chekov being Russian or any number of other things. ST: TOS did these things SUBTLY and EFFECTIVELY.

I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that Discovery will not only rub it in the face of 2020 America, but will try to force your mouth open and then shove it down your throat. THAT is the difference. Subtle but there versus overt and obnoxious. Don't scream "I'm X" at me; I'm an adult, intelligent, and have empathy -- I'll figure it out through your actions, my observations, and, in the case of TV, through good storytelling.

Still living in the 1990s I see. Hey France, this has been tried multiple times and always fails.

Grow the fuck up, You show tits and ass on normal television programming. Sure, it isn't hard-core porn, but it is still the naked human form. With simulated and/or implied sex in a lot of cases.

Going to require age verification to watch TV as well?

This is nothing more than a large load of bullshit. There is nothing racist in D&D -- not even the Drow. I, nor any of my many friends who play, have ever thought that any race in the game was racist, no monsters, no nothing. If you're seeing racism in D&D then you went looking for it and didn't quit until you found it... the same way you went looking for a snowflake in the middle of an empty wheat field in the southern United States during summer and saw your own dandruff and went "See! Snowflake."

Give me a break and give this SJW virtue signalling revisionist claptrap a fucking rest already.

...to no longer be connected to the internet at large? They want to run their own internal "internet" that is crippled with no strong encryption or end-to-end protections.

I'm going to say "Good luck with that, India!" Black hole of Calcutta indeed.

If so, William Gibson will be a happy camper then. I, for one, welcome the Turing Police overlords!

What about the severe child porn problem that is apparently plaguing WhatsApp (https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/whatsapp-pornography/)? All this move to make communications end-to-end encrypted across all three platforms will do is extend the amount of people that can be reached, and can reach, those resources nearly anonymously -- making it more difficult to investigate the situation.

but FUCK NO. Any bank that allows or sells access to any portion of my banking accounts should get sued into oblivion. The only people that need my account balance are the bank and myself.

Anyone else is a violation of privacy and, I believe, several Federal banking regulations as well. If I need to prove my banking information (say, mortgage or other large loan), then sure -- but only because _I_ approved the bank to share that information. Under no other circumstance should any of my bank balances be shared with anyone.

Holy fuck, I think we need a reset in this country and "the people" need to take back control -- not the corporations.

considering Windows 7 doesn't EOL until 2020. I think Microsoft needs another pimp slap from the anti-trust folks in the US Government. This is a blatant attempt to make currently popular versions of its operating system appear less secure in an effort to consolidate everyone under Windows 10.

After months of usage, I've come to the same conclusion as when it was first announced -- Windows 10 sucks. I don't need a tablet/phone interface on my desktop. Their attempt at giving us a "regular" desktop really doesn't cut it either. I do not need the internals obfuscated so that "normal" users find it difficult to affect them as that makes it difficult for IT staff to reach them as well unless I learn a whole bunch of new shortcuts. Shortcuts that are there just because Microsoft decided to change how access worked; not because workflow is better or follows the Vulcan principles of logic -- just because they needed a UI change.

I've just been on the phone with Comcast for over 2 hours. This is from Chicago down to Florida and spread all over. I have locations that I take care of across Georgia and Florida and every single Comcast location is affected. VoIP and landlines alike. They can't even forward the lines I need forwarded because their system has locked the Voice team out of that function.

This is the second time in, what?, 6 months or so that they've been hit with a vast, multi-state outage. We depend on fax lines (yes, still the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA and related issues - plus the easiest to train/utilize), and my company will be missing everything from our affected locations for 4+ hours. Tens of thousands of dollars in immediate jeopardy with much more in possible losses to come.

Want to bet we won't even get a credit on our next bill? Ma Bell might have been a bastard monopolistic company, but copper lines in the ground had better up-time than a lot of what I've witnessed moving to VoIP and such technologies. Now get off my lawn, you're standing on the fiber lines.

..I am old. I remember ICQ and all the rest, too. Fuck, now I need some 18 year old scotch to help me forget. :-p

Fuck Sony and Spider-man. Disney needs to acquire Fox and get back all of the X-men so that they can do some movies correctly AND use the word mutants to properly describe those who carry the natural X/mutant gene. I mean, what the hell? Let's make all super-powered people Inhumans on Marvel-run TV shows because we can't say "mutant" due to Fox??

Inhumans are not mutants in the X-way, but by way of advanced technology and experimentation by the Kree.

Give us Professor X, 1407 Graymalkin Lane, Phoenix, Wolverine, Kitty Pride, Angel/Archangel, and all the rest and call them what they are -- X-men and mutants.

other telecommunication lines in the ground. Especially those that were paid for by the American Public (just about every line laid by Ma Bell/AT&T and most other phone companies). -- you know, one of those tacked on extras on every phone bill since the creation of Ma Bell. Not to mention right of way grants from the government(s) because the phone system was considered necessary for the growth of the United States.

It will have to be set up such that the entity responsible is its own company (like the US Postal Service) with safeguards in place so the US government can do NOTHING with the copper/fiber except maintain, upgrade, and expand it. No tapping it at will (or continuously), no running it all through NSA headquarters, no monitoring (except for quality control), and so on.

Then you open it up to anyone who wants to be a phone company, internet provider, and so on. For each account hooked into the national communication grid, it cost the providing company $24.95 (or whatever) and then the Comcast, AT&T, and Google's can play on the same field but compete based on price+service.

I dislike nationalization as much as the next person, but to get the overall internet prices and speeds we want then I fear this is the best solution.

I don't install Facebook messenger, don't install the Facebook app, and damn sure don't want to log in to other applications or sites using my Facebook information.

Seriously, WTF? There is already enough associative information floating around the internet and databases without me connecting even more dots for all the three-letter agencies and "big business" and so on. Piss on Facebook "making it easier" for anyone but themselves and their business partners.