data1701d

I just realized. They say they're broadcasting to the entire quadrant - but which quadrant?

Chances are they'll do something normal and boring like the Alpha Quadrant and create a bunch of canon confusion, but it would be kind of awesome if took place in the Gamma Quadrant and looked at life in the Dominion (or post-Dominion planets) after the war.

I had no idea what Posadism was until you mentioned it. Looking at it, I think elements of it are coincidentally in there, but I don't think that's totally what it's trying to convey.

For one, Boseman, Montana definitely didn't look that socialist, and yet Cochrane developed a warp drive; it was the new connections and widened view of the galaxy that facilitated the development of socialism. Sure, the Vulcans helped, but it was humans who had to change.

Also, I feel like "aliens helping in revolution" is sort of antithetical to the concept of the Prime Directive.

Overall, I think Star Trek is less about through ufologic socialism and more about peoples figuring out socialism for themselves; space and aliens are mostly just a plot device to explore.

I think it depends. Overall, I think most of Star Trek isn't solarpunk, but the version of earth depicted in it very much is.

Why do we even bother with data at all? Let’s just not exist - humans greatly increase attack surface.

I think it wasn't actually Stallman - it's a common misattribution.

Depends on your hardware and distro. Linux-libre not be so bad assuming it’s one of those old Thinkpads. Also, though, if you’re on Debian; they deblob their kernel already and put the blobs in separate packages so they can be optionally used. Don’t install any blobs and you’re good.

Why does it feel like if Ron had a computer at all, he would would a Libreboot Thinkpad running one of those weird FSF-approved distros with no firmware?

It's mostly a breeze. The only misery I can recall is I remember I had a wonky knockoff Arduino board that kept jumping serial ports, but that was a hardware issue.

Apple should experience bij.

I agree. The only feature where I'd say it's weaker feature-wise is it doesn't have any form of virtual GPU acceleration - either you deal with software rendering or have to pass through a graphics card (I've done it, but it's not easy.).

Otherwise, I'd say it tends to run better than VirtualBox, though it's been years since I last used Vbox anyhow. A plus is Virt Manager comes in most distro repos, whereas VirtualBox doesn't. Also, it allows you to directly edit the XML, so you can do some cool stuff that would be really annoying (not impossible) to do in VirtualBox.

To be fair, the mirror universe in general, even in the DS9 era, is kind of Star Wars-y.

In general, though, it sometimes gets annoying when the franchises swap aesthetics, even back to V when they did bargain bin Mos Eisley (the bar in III was hilariously campy, though). Recently, I watched the first episode of a certain Star Wars series on a friend's recommendation (I wouldn't have otherwise), and at one point, I was like, "What the heck! This is supposed to be a rough pirate ship, but there's so little weathering on the set that this could be a Federation starship!"

I agree with your positions about short seasons and brand new big bads.

However, I don't think TNG, and classic Trek at large, have a future totally devoid of "the pains and pitfalls of present-day life". For instance, Captain Maxwell blows up a bunch of Cardassian outposts, and there was that whole incident with the Pegasus and the cloaking device. These are clear instances showing in TNG's world, we haven't completely grown out of the darker parts of our nature.

I think the ideal of Star Trek is there is a future where we have overcome many of our problems, and when new (or old, sometimes) arise, we can work together to overcome them and improve ourselves.

In some ways, I think that Lower Decks embodies this extremely well. Because it's supposed to be a comedy, it liberates the show from a lot of modern sci-fi conventions; this allows a largely utopian environment for our Federation characters where they're free to help each other evolve far beyond the borderline insane sitcom archetypes they started the show as.