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http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...

The East India Company wasn't running amok though. Parliament granted it a charter which gave it a monopoly on trade in a big chunk of the world. The EIC then acted inside that charter which gave it more or less absolute power in the area the charter applied from the perspective of the UK government. If any other state quibbled with that absolute power, the EIC was empowered to raise armies and fight them.

Of course the advantage to the UK government was that if the shit ever hit the fan and the EIC did something the UK government didn't like, the UK government could blame the EIC and potentially disestablish it. Which eventually happened when the Indian Rebellion happened. The UK government decided to blame all the nastiness on the EIC, revoke its charter and rule directly.

In Dune terms the UK government was Baron Harkonnen and the EIC was Beast Rabban - i.e. a rapacious leader who'd subjugate territory and then be replaced by someone else who'd seem like a relief.

http://villains.wikia.com/wiki...

In the aftermath of the Harkonnen attack on the House of Atreides on Arrakis that nearly destroyed the House, Rabban was left in charge of Arrakis by his uncle. Harkonnen gave him orders to squeeze the populace, and to set new lows in cruelty and depraved behavior. Harkonnen's intention was that when the people of Arrakis were crushed enough that he would send Feyd to save the people of Arrakis, and become a hero to the people there.

Well I'm not sure the UK government planned ahead that far. But having empire built by a quasi non governmental corporation was definitely a deliberate strategy that always allowed for the government to abolish the corporation and rule directly.

So the EIC isn't an example of an evil corporation slipping the reins of regulation, it's an example of an evil government using a corporation to do its dirty work in a way that could later be disavowed.

Well I'm simplifying a bit. Inside the UK government there were different factions, some that wanted a highly rapacious but disavowable entity in charge of India and some that want direct government control and enlightened imperialism. The former set up the EIC and the later eventually used the Indian Rebellion as an excuse to shut it down.

I suppose a US counterpart would be Blackwater in Iraq. Blackwater never got as large as the EIC though. At one point the EIC had a larger army than the UK had. Still at no point would it have occurred to the people who run the EIC to take on the UK militarily - the UK was always politically the master and the EIC a mere subcontractor.

Walter Peck from the EPA was a secondary antagonist in Ghostbusters

http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/...

LOL I don't remember a cannon in Star Trek

What about the one where Kirk fashions some sort of rudimentary lathe^W cannon.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...

Section 31. And if they involve them to explain the complete vanishing of the knowledge in the 10 years it takes to reach the time of TOS they'll better pull the other one. Starfleet knows about the ship and the technology and the conspiracy would need to be _really_ stretched to make it work.

Sophia and her cohort sound an awful lot like Tachikomas. I wonder if non-humanoid robots will file discrimination lawsuits (or lead a revolution) to gain the same citizenship rights as the humo's.

Life imitates Futurama.

Or South Park

In "Krazy Kripples", Christopher Reeve comes to town to promote stem cell research. In order to 'cure' his quadriplegia, he is shown sucking the fluids out of fetuses from a medical bio-hazard container. With each fetus he sucks dry, Reeves becomes healthier and more dependent on them for his developing super human strength.

Hmm... Maybe it's art imitating life.

Please Please Please someone make a 'rat thing' I can buy. Thanks.
http://villains.wikia.com/wiki...

Perhaps you remember the Iconian Gateways that were seen in TNG and later in DS9 again.
Developed by an ancient race - the Iconians - who perished some 200,000 years ago. In both TNG and DS9 the technology was deemed to be too dangerous and therefore destroyed by the Starfleet officers respectively. If we can believe Memory Alpha as a reliable source of information on Star Trek, then the Iconians did make some kind of appearance in one of the Discovery episodes: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/... . Although I can neither confirm nor deny it personally.
So if you are willing to suspend your disbelief for the older Treks, is it so difficult to accept that they could have stumbled upon a similar technology in Discovery and might later abandon it for moralistic reasons?

No alcohol? Why was there a bar at 10 Forward then? Money is not silly to get rid of in a post-scarcity society.

They have synthehol, all the taste and smell of alcohol but none of the effects. The actual set up of the Star Trek post-scarcity society is a much larger discussion that is mirrored with societies like The Culture with questions like "Why doesn't everybody get a spaceship?", "If Captain Pickard (or Kirk) gets a nice French farm to live on, why doesn't everybody?"

and I'm guessing we're not going to do a damn thing about it because a good chunk of us can't bear the thought of somebody having a nice things in life and not working relentlessly to get it.

Nobody is ever going to get nice things without working hard to earn them. At best, they'd have their basic needs met and probably not feel much fulfillment in knowing their existence amounts to being a burden on society.

Charles Dickens pretty much nailed the conservative mentality towards this in A Christmas Carol. If those who are unable to work can't make use of the existing social services already in place, then they may as well die to eliminate their burden on society. Notwithstanding the negative stigma associated with suicide, obviously.

Automation reduces the need for human labor, yet all humans need to be productive members of society. It's quite a paradox to solve. To paraphrase Agent Smith from The Matrix, there is another society on this planet that found a way for every member of their society to be productive: The Amish.

The article this was quoted from, without credit, is at http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/... . The last edit of that page was in 2013.

At least with Mondays you still have the after glow of the weekend to keep you happy.

Tuesday is by far the worst day of the week. It's not even half way through and the glow of the weekend is long gone.

Honestly, why do we even have 7 day weeks? Let's get rid of a day in the week preferably Saturday so we can match up better with the Muslim religious days. Now with a 6 day week, we can eliminate the weird cacophony month system where some are 30, others are 31, and February with its weird 28 days.

This can all be done while maintaining the 365 day year by giving each month roughly the same amount of days. The best part of all of this is, we will then have a 4 day work week! No more middle of the week hopelessness because the weekend is so far away.

More can be read from this site: http://calendars.wikia.com/wik...

The question really would be who controls the placement of these guns.

Placement? Oh come on...
Put lighter, low caliber ones, on flying drones and heavier ones on a wheeled or tracked platform.

It's only a temporary measure anyway, until proper humanoid and bird-like hunter-seeker units are developed.
Sure... early models will be ugly and have rubber skin... but that's a small price to pay for security of our children.

A plan for that has already been written.

http://diehard.wikia.com/wiki/...

Native Americans, or the "Sky Spirit" species? :)

Actually I was going to comment on how they pushed the "girl power!" a little over the top in this premiere...

Then I remembered The Lorelei Signal episode of ST:TAS where the men are all lured away by life-force-sucking sirens, captured and weakened ("loss of essence"?) and Uhura has to lead an all-female away team to rescue them.

It's nothing new, it's just a bigger hot potato these days.

Not everybody has been sucking at the tit of Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. In the PC space

In the PC Space? You mean in the Windows space? The MICROSOFT Windows tit?

The first to support 22-bit graphics (Voodoo), 32-bit graphics (RGBA), 4K, 120 fps, SSD, etc, consoles are always playing catching -- signified by the "PC Master Race" slogan.

Son, consoles had graphics back when home computers were using 40 column text and customized character sets for most of their displays. And I distinctly remember the PSone version of DOOM having TRUE transparency aka 24bit+8bit 32 bit color when the PC version didn't. The PSone had 24bit True color in 1995, the Voodoo 3 came out in 1999 and wasn't actually true color but 24 bit dithered down to 16 bit for output (which 3Dfx called 22-bit)

The keyboard + mouse blows the gamepad away for any sort of precision.

The PS2/PS3/PS4 have USB ports for a reason.

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/ps2...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com...

http://www.gadgetguy.com.au/cm...

I also must have imagined using a keyboard and/or mouse with various games for the PS2/PS3/PS4.

i.e. I'll seriously doubt we'll ever see StarCraft (1 or 2) on a console anytime soon

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wik...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

because console peripherals never sell well.

Who says? How many MILLIONS of mics, drums, and extra guitars have been sold for the various Rock band style games. how many millions of network adapters and eyetoys/playstation eyes has Sony sold. How many MILLIONS Of Dual Shock 3's, which wasn't the original PS3 controller, were sold. How many headsets?

Sounds an awful lot like this triple-max slam in the outer ring ... Crematoria, I think it's called. I would suggest that you keep an eye out for a bald guy if you ever visit, but by the time you realize he's there, it's too late.

This light-eating prowess is due to the planet's unique capability to trap at least 94 percent of the visible starlight falling into its atmosphere.

"This light-eating prowess is due to the planet's unique capability to eat light."

Thank you for that useful information... /grumpyoldman

I propose the name Yakon http://dragonball.wikia.com/wi...

Lets just hope the Kekistani that have come here to anonymously maintain their cultural practice of shitposting aren't too traumatized by the ordeal.

And there's me thinking Google was run by a human. Oh well, I guess we can trust it.

Unless it's this guy.

You say tomato I say potato.

I say Tomacco!

Both yourself and Mueller might want to watch (or re-watch) the Star Trek Next Generation episode The Drumhead.

Perhaps the bottom half of the point scale is for asset flips and other comparably bad material.

Who are the spoiled children? The ones who think they can say anything, anywhere they like, that other people should be required to tolerate it, and that there are no repercussions from being an idiot. Don't want there to be consequences of your free speech, keep it to yourself.

Spoiled children are usually demanding that big mommy/daddy step in to solve their conflicts for them. That sounds more like the reddit/pro socjus crowd than the pro free speech people. I'm sure you'd say the same thing to the online SJWs getting flamed for their illogical arguments? Oh, right, when they're criticized, it's 'trolling'...

The rest of your post reads like the sniveling whiny spoiled brat you describe. It's about the right amount of hypocrisy I'd expect from a progressive.

A very common tactic is to pick the worst argument you can make, say it really is something worse, then say it is wrong because it is that thing. It's not quite troll behavior, but it is in that direction. Here we have the generic ad homonym attacks by calling people children or SJWs, etc.

I'd say any attack on a person in the conversation, rather than to attack or defend a topic is fair game for banning. It should be an open and documented process though. Similarly any argument using a bunch of things that can be trivially proven as lies are fair game for banning, but again, it should be an open and documented process.

Money is not speech. Speech that is not true or that does not use reason and logic to address an issue is pretty much garbage. Save me from politicians and other idiots who act on emotion or use appeals to emotions to make their arguments. By the definitions of right wingers I probably am a SJW, and that is fine with me. Maybe I will continue tilting at windmills, but fighting for what is right does not have less value because it is hard.

FWIW, I read part of a series awhile back called the Sword of Truth. While I don't agree with all the Wizard rules in the series, nor have I kept up with the series, the rules are nevertheless worth a read. Wizard Rules

"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."

Operation Dark Storm

Well, we know what happened to Doctor Reginald Bushroot was trying to do something similar....

Agreed. Our internet provider (Shaw Canada) has been shamelessly begging for us to bundle cable with our internet for years now.

You might save some bucks switching to https://start.ca/ or https://teksavvy.com/ for your internet service - they resell the "bug guy's" intenet service. Here are some comparisons for Ontario pricing - similar savings are likely available elsewhere:

http://compare.wikia.com/wiki/...

Drink my juice, it's fucking nutritious!

FTFY.

Quake had many aspects, one of the appeals it had was being mod-friendly. Neverwinter Nights is a game you likely missed (2003 release that runs like mad on any modern hardware) and is highly mod-friendly. Hundreds of community made servers exist, all based on D&D rules (3e). All are welcome to join our server or use this information too help you find other servers - http://argentumregio.wikia.com...

NWN is available from gog.com (you need to go there and see some cool titles really).

There are really good modern old-school games made by indie developers/studios. The Humble Bundle is a good way to start. Here is a somewhat outdated list of bundles. Many of those games can be bought on Steam too.

Would you fly the Bat?

disney already has a premium on-demand streaming service available through cable companies for $5-10 per month extra (exact price dependent on cable company's greed). TWELVE movies at a time, on a rotation that sees about 3 go and 3 come in every week.

there is no fucking way they will give up the farm (their back catalog, especially the 'vault', and current theatrical releases that bring in billions annually) for a measly five bucks a month.

Not very likely. Space is, to coin a phrase, is big.

Not really coining this phrase. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy notes, quite a while ago, that the Universe is, "very big".

And you "tie up" to a pier. You don't fucking dock your ship at a pier.

Unless it's a space dock. Then you certainly do want to dock your ship, come aboard the station and gamble some money at Quark's.

It is just about possible that we could send a probe that would take 80 years to get there. And then of course we would have to wait another 11 years for it to send back the photograph. Human AI may get to the stars but we are never going there.

Send an AI to Tau Ceti? Do you want Sentients coming back to kill us all? Because this is how you get Sentients.

What will China come up with next? A Mobile Oppression Palace?

Perhaps Matt Groening shouldn't give them any more ideas.

I think the AirPods already support streaming compressed audio and decoding on the device (it's part of the Bluetooth spec), so the only thing that's actually missing is the ability to buffer music. You could stick 1GB of flash in them without changing much in terms of cost and form factor and it would only take about 5 minutes to fill that from a phone with Bluetooth 5. The phone could then go to sleep for a long time and the ear pods could keep playing.

He and a couple of whiz kids saved Metropolis with it!

By "selective breeding has nature taking a hand in the outcome" do you mean typical drift during reproduction causes "most babies, puppies and kittens self-abort?"

Nature is cruel and absolutely fair. The punishment for failure is always the same: death. But nature is also careless. Every 'natural' breeding brings in a boatload of baggage, most of it needed but some of it possibly not. An example is that Munkin kittens are adorable, short legged and perfectly healthy. But the mutation is lethal when inherited from both parents.

Instead of playing the genetic lottery with every trait in an animal or vegetable we can now tweak that single bit to see what happens. Now, waiting to thoroughly test that each change doesn't suddenly cronenberg the whole planet is probably not in Monsanto's financial plans for this quarter. But is certainly beats inbreeding corn until it rots in the sun.

Maybe I'm using the wrong definition of SJW; I have been assuming it's a term for people who are so enamored with the idea of fighting for civil rights, that they don't really examine whether they're helping things get better, but there's a kernel that they are fighting for that either was at one time an issue or still is at least somewhat of an issue.

Ah, well... there's your problem.
Your definition clearly lacks the reference to snowflakes or use of the term "cuck", as is the parlance of times and society.

And that's why I think Star Trek is a good home for them: Star Trek was sometimes overbearing in its social commentary and that's part of what made it Star Trek. With that, though, you can help get people thinking about what's really going on and what should be better.

Personally, only overbearing episode I can think of was the one when space ISIS take over the Enterprise and start deleting files and blowing themselves up.
On the other hand...
I'm under the impression that the lack of examination you mention makes SJWs more... Star Wars fans.

What do you use when you need a hammer?

Ideally, it would manage your nail collection - it would search all available work-spaces for nails or nail-like objects - even http://dragonball.wikia.com/wi... - and it would organise your nails according to size, weight, color, composition, shape and which end was pointy and which end wasn't. It would keep track of your nail usage and offer you the nails you use most frequently, even going online to order new nails of that type (or more likely new nails of whatever type is preferred by the hammer's manufacturer), or it might refuse to operate at all unless you had the correct proprietary nails. It would also have social media integration so you could check out what kinds of nails your friends were using as well as be exposed to advertisements for different sorts of nails, screws, bolts, rivets, glue, welding rods and Namekians.

Oh, and it would also hammer nails, although that's kind of secondary at this point.

Get that on kickstarter and I'll put in over 9,000.

What do you use when you need a hammer?

Ideally, it would manage your nail collection - it would search all available work-spaces for nails or nail-like objects - even http://dragonball.wikia.com/wi... - and it would organise your nails according to size, weight, color, composition, shape and which end was pointy and which end wasn't. It would keep track of your nail usage and offer you the nails you use most frequently, even going online to order new nails of that type (or more likely new nails of whatever type is preferred by the hammer's manufacturer), or it might refuse to operate at all unless you had the correct proprietary nails. It would also have social media integration so you could check out what kinds of nails your friends were using as well as be exposed to advertisements for different sorts of nails, screws, bolts, rivets, glue, welding rods and Namekians.

Oh, and it would also hammer nails, although that's kind of secondary at this point.

It's Scaramouche baaaayybeee!

...when you have a good show, people want to see it.

Well, GoT gets slightly "walking deaded": the previous season (6) showed what happens when the show and the books take (slightly) different paths, sensationalism takes over the depth and subtlety found in the books, at times (season 6). Not awful - yet. But let's hope season 7 will not ressemble a Marvel recipe.

An innocent-seeming toy leading to mind control? Sounds like "the game" from ST:TNG that hypnotizes many of Enterprise's youth (and some adults too) into sabotaging the ship's defenses. Fiction before, fiction now. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, eh Russia-24?

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realise that the automotive equivalent of systemd is The Homer

With Missy, they introduced the idea of a male Time Lord regenerating as a woman

Remember the Corsair