I imagine a few robots with electrified surfaces and maybe a microwave area denial device would be considered great for crowd control in certain countries. If the power requirements could be met, put a tetanizing beam weapon on them. Just have them roll down the streets after curfew and torture anyone found outside... while also recording their faces for human follow-up. Have them 'shout' orders in a loud, slightly distorted voice to frighten people and encourage compliance.
And from there it isn't a huge leap to adding lethal weaponry to defend the robot if dissidents are inclined to destroy them (which they will be). And then will come the robots just killing from the start.
Imagine what a ruthless dictator could do with such devices; no worries about loyalty, no fears the machines won't fire on 'their own people' if ordered to do so. Nobody would even think of trying to argue with them - they're machines, a mindless force. Make people carry ID cards, and if you don't present them for scanning when challenged, you get tased if you move, maybe shot if you get out of taser range, to keep you around while the human thugs come to check up.
Of course (at least for a while) stairs will be their greatest enemy. Or maybe a hat hung over the optics.
>but "science" has been open to all for the entirety of its existence,
In theory, yes... but it wasn't all that long ago that women were denied education and mocked if they attempted scientific research or to present findings.
While in theory anyone can use the scientific method... coming up with it independently (because you're uneducated), doing some sound research, then getting the world to listen to your findings? Herculean task.
Science is and always has been for everyone, but the kind of science we generally think of (figuring out new things at the edges of humanity's collective knowledge) is for people with education, means, and opportunity... and that is NOT everyone.
Random moderating with random meta-moderating seems to limit the issue here, but it certainly doesn't stop it.
There's certainly very little serious guidance from the admins to keep the site as a legitimate tech news site. Once you have advertising, the lure of that income is bound to make you value page views over the quality of the content being viewed.
The problem is what happens when you disable a drone - gravity tends to have a say in that.
I agree that leaving a back door in place and hoping the bad guys don't copy the key is worse, but there IS a reason that net or HERF guns aren't immediately selected as the best option.
There are companies working on anti-drone drones to do a 'capture and safely ground', and I believe at least one person was working on using trained birds (which do fine for the vast majority of consumer-grade drones).
Which brings up another issue... with the kind of payload most consumer drones are capable of lifting, they're just not a threat worth getting worked up about. There's plenty more damage you could do on the ground, a lot easily, if you were of a mind to do so.
>if you're going to get banned for saying anything that offends anyone, which is what "safe spaces" always devolve into, you learn not to say anything.
Which is why instead of a 'safe space', you need to find professional moderators your user community will come to trust to be fair about enforcing rules despite the fact that any community rule set will have grey areas.
Those kinds of people cost money, and given that Reddit-like sites don't seem to generate mountains of the stuff, it's unlikely you'll see them except for serious issues that are likely to cause legal problems for the company.
This is Slashdot. News for Nerds / Stuff that Matters. This ain't that, and it shouldn't have been approved by the mods.
If we're going to talk about Trump there's a hell of a lot more interesting stuff to talk about, like the signs that his wife is being abused (at least emotionally), the whole 'interfering with an FBI investigation' thing, or the fact that he committed an act of war without congressional approval (which seems to me to be bigger than the FBI thing, but apparently the news media doesn't think so),
And that's if you're done with the whole 'crowd size', which honestly was so ludicrous he should have been tossed out on his ear for being mentally unfit long before the CIA speech. Or the wall, or coal, or healthcare. Or that Trump just fucked over Canada with his oil plan and NAFTA.
But no; let's talk about a stupid budget that's all based on the economic equivalent of 'feelz over realz' and not solid numbers anyway.
> If during the standard day you find yourself fighting mental fatigue, exhaustion and constantly battling complex problems, you're probably just a bad developer and shouldn't be in the field.
Those are my favourite times! It means I'm working on a challenging project and I'll have a sense of accomplishment when it's completed.
The easy stuff gets difficult when there's too much of it... because it's boring!
FFS. The SJWs are idiots, but you're not helping to shut them down when you spew counter-lies.
>" "Gender is a spectrum," "Homosexuality is not abnormal or an aberration," "Men and women are equal." These are all patent untruths.
Gender IS a spectrum. And very highly influenced by culture. Also, you're conflating gender and sex, which really doesn't help either. I would certainly allow that non-binary sex is abnormal and the result of reproductive error.
Homosexuality as an 'abnormality' or 'aberration' is debatable. In evolutionary terms, it's there... which is all nature 'cares' about. It's normal in humans to have ~3% homosexuals, it's normal to have some in mammals, and it even occurs in a broad range of non-mammalian animals. Since there appear to be some environmental influences affecting the rate at which homosexuals are produced - check studies on birth order vs. probability of homosexuality in humans, for instance - it's quite possible there's a communal benefit to having non-reproducing family members that increases overall reproductive fitness.
And men and women aren't equal? Wow. Of course we are - equally human, equally deserving of an equal share of opportunities provided by our communities. We are not identical. Only fools claim that we're universally 'plug-and-play' equivalents in all ways. But then, there's a bell curve for men and women for any trait you choose (outside of the gonads and related reproductive factors), and if you look into it you'll find there's plenty of places where those curves overlap and there will be some women exceeding some men where you would expect the opposite to be true. And there are things women tend to be better at than men, yet again you're going to find the curves overlap and some men will excel where you'd expect women to be 'winning'.
In short, you're spouting misogynistic tripe and it's not helping.
> it said most people ONLY had 2-3 close personal friends?
Yep. There's a whole spectrum between those people who treat everyone like their 'bestie' and the hermit who trusts nobody.
My standards for a 'close personal friend' are very high - I have lots of acquaintances but very few friends. Honestly, I have a lot of trouble understanding how people can say they have more than a handful of friends unless they're still in high school or have retired, because proper friendships take a lot of time and don't fit very well into a normal adult schedule. First there's work, then there's 'chores', then immediate family, then extended family, THEN friends. When? Every weekend or three?
Once you're seeing them once or twice a year, they're acquaintances, not friends.
I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough I can tell you this is not the first time since WWII that we've had wannabe 'thought police' gain political influence. It comes and goes to varying degrees on what seem to be decade-long cycles.
The important thing that we never seem to learn as a society is that the more you tolerate these fools early on, the harder it is to stop them later on when they've gained positions of power - and the greater the return swing on the pendulum. Neither extreme of the swing is good for reasonable people just trying to live their lives.
Whiny social justice warrior demands science be primarily a political tool for her pet causes, complains more when told science is supposed to be apolitical about facts and reproducible experiments - and can't resist implying that those things are bad because she was told so by scary 'old white men'.
Maybe Heather Metcalf should shut the hell up and spend some time thinking about why the 'old white men' are right and she's a complete idiot. Scientific American does itself a disservice by letting her post this crap under their banner, blog page or not.
Any issue you may see with the sex ratio of scientists or treatment scientists tend to receive based on sex or gender, whether they're famous or toiling in obscurity, or sex or gender issues in the community at large... has nothing to do with whether or not science should a political arena. It should not. Science seeks facts and understanding, what we do with that is the arena of politics.
You know... there could have been a whole monster-type movie made with Khan on board the Enterprise as it spends a week falling towards Earth. (Let's say it had the appropriate velocity to intersect)
Imagine Khan sneaking about the ship, killing off the crew and attempting to subvert systems. Lights flickering out, crew hunkering down in defensive positions, and Kirk knowing he has to kill Khan before the rescue ship / space tug arrives and provides a way to get to Earth.
A little bit of script work and they could have pulled two or three good science fiction movies out of one mediocre action flick.
1) Don't worry about the core, it'll last. It's currently at ~5000K and will be at ~4950K in a billion years... which is about 300M years after the surface will be baked sterile by the Sun.
2) Even so... it would take a LONG time for the solar wind to strip our atmosphere away. And in fact, it turns out we were wrong about the effect of the Earth's magnetic field; it is actually helping the solar wind heat and strip the atmosphere. At current depletion rates, it's estimated to be good for another 4 billion years or so. That's more than 3 billion years after the planet is baked and around the time it'll be engulfed by the Sun.
We really don't need to worry about the core, its magnetic field, or the density of the planetary atmosphere.
Star Trek has never really been about the future of humanity, though. It's been about the future of humanity, if the future is entirely descended from the present-day USA, and a thinly-veiled reflection of the society that is creating the show.
By that measure, 72% of the cast should be white, 12% black, 5% Asian, and 9% 'mixed or other' (figures rounded). And women should make up 5-15% of the command-level (lower as you go up the authority scale).
There's a reason TOS had space-hippies and miniskirts, no women in command, and a couple of half-white, half-black guys trying to kill each other for all eternity. And Klingons were more or less Russian analogues and Romulans stand-ins for the Chinese. (Though sometimes it felt like the writers mixed the two group's traits fairly freely)
It is kind of funny that the wholesome American Christian farm-boy hero from Iowa was played by a Canadian Jew from Quebec, though.
That's nothing new to Trek, even from the very early days of the original series.
Then again, TOS was pretty much an anthology series with a consistent cast and set dressing. With the heavily episodic nature, I don't think they worried too much about individual story problems that would just be ignored the next week anyway.
From a system designed to ensure information flows no matter what... to a system designed to ensure selected information flows at a rate determined by your wallet.
Another change to America that will squeeze the 99% for the enrichment of the 1%, sold with the lie that they're doing it for the exact opposite reason.
You know, I'm not big on class warfare but at some point you have to realize that your society is going to shit if its primary focus is to benefit a small subset of the population to the detriment of the majority.
1) OMG. Typewritten, not printed, not an email. The 80s are so long ago technologically. I lived through them, and I routinely forget we didn't all have smart phones.
2) I like it so far (I'm only up to page 13), but man, did they ignore some of the best instructions and fall back on the 'easy out' a few times in TNG. Right in the pilot, with Q, they threw out the whole 'Science fiction based on extrapolation of current scientific knowledge'.
3) It's funny (and sad) that in 1987, "telepathy is supported by reputable scientists" was seriously included in a document.
>There was a Stargate SG1 episode where they were reluctantly trying to make a movie. There were several kind of parodies like the Wizard of Oz, Farscape
Some of my favourite Stargate memories are the self-aware stuff they threw in. Especially 'Wormhole X-Treme'.
It hasn't aged well, though. I mean, the basic concepts are solid but going back and re-watching a lot of it comes across as 'filler', low-effort stuff. And certainly low budget... most of the alien ship interiors were so Spartan they were barely there.
OK. This is where you've called me a liar, and I call you a liar in return.
We can stop now.
"Major plot and character details about Star Trek: Discovery have not been revealed. It is known, however, that it will take place about 10 years before the events of the original series, and that the lead character will be a young woman, likely non-white, serving as a lieutenant commander aboard the Federation starship Discovery"
Literally all the studio felt like revealing. "Non-white woman lead."
>So the stereotype of Star Trek fans being white male basement dwelling virgins is false?
It's been something like 15 years since I last went to a convention... but the attendees were from pretty much every walk of life regardless of whether you sliced by economic class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or job.
There was a statistical deviation from the normal distribution when it came to social skills (and yes, some inept guys creeping harmlessly but still creepily on the girls) and physical fitness (lots of obese and painfully thin people, muscles were far and few between), but there was still a bell curve with all points represented. Mostly younger, because it's less likely a whole family will want to go to a con, or a spouse will be pleased with losing their partner for a few days. (I stopped going because of kids... who grew up to not be scifi fans).
I'd definitely have to say that they tended to be nicer and more accepting than the average random person you might meet.
My understanding is that these days it's skewing closer to the norm as being 'nerdy' about things has lost a fair bit of the old stigma that used to apply.
>The one constant is you can heap any amount of abuse you want on low social value males.
Before you finish nailing yourself to that cross, consider that the drama nerds often have it pretty bad compared to other varieties of nerd until they're adults, and even then life can suck unless they're really talented or make it big. It's still the pretty people and the athletes that by default score well in popularity until you get out of high school. Luckily the majority of people grow the fuck up in their 20s and most of that shit fades away.
But it's the drama nerds who are writing the scripts and the drama nerds who are acting them out, and most of them know what it's like to be on the shit end of the stick. Unfortunately... they're just not as smart as us alpha nerds and can have trouble with logic and moral philosophy so they don't see the flaws in the SJW manifesto.;p
>Here's some diversity that might actually make for an interesting character on STar Trek: human characters that aren't all atheists/agnostics. Give me a Catholic science officer. Or maybe the weapons officer is a muslim and he goes Space Jihad on fuckers.
Theists generally don't see it this way, but... religion is irrational. By definition it is belief without proof, and sometimes even despite proof to the contrary.
It is rare that you see a devoutly religious person who is also a highly educated, frontier-advancing scientist. It's not impossible, and there have been some remarkably brilliant ones, but it's rare.
Then there's the fact that any faith you portray in a show is going to result in people of the faith you're portraying (or worse, appearing to parody) are going to be offended and turned off.
And it's futuristic light sci-fi... you're talking about people who have figured out the laws of nature and met god-like creatures and then killed them for being a pain in the ass. In fact... Spock shot El/Yahweh - our friendly neighbourhood Abrahamic god - with a Klingon ship's weapons!
In the Star Trek universe, it turns out humans came up with the concept of God because of a telepathic psychotic floating head imprisoned in the galactic core trying to fool us into helping him escape.
I'm pretty sure Christians would have an issue with any depiction of their faith in the future that took those events into consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine a few robots with electrified surfaces and maybe a microwave area denial device would be considered great for crowd control in certain countries. If the power requirements could be met, put a tetanizing beam weapon on them. Just have them roll down the streets after curfew and torture anyone found outside... while also recording their faces for human follow-up. Have them 'shout' orders in a loud, slightly distorted voice to frighten people and encourage compliance.
And from there it isn't a huge leap to adding lethal weaponry to defend the robot if dissidents are inclined to destroy them (which they will be). And then will come the robots just killing from the start.
Imagine what a ruthless dictator could do with such devices; no worries about loyalty, no fears the machines won't fire on 'their own people' if ordered to do so. Nobody would even think of trying to argue with them - they're machines, a mindless force. Make people carry ID cards, and if you don't present them for scanning when challenged, you get tased if you move, maybe shot if you get out of taser range, to keep you around while the human thugs come to check up.
Of course (at least for a while) stairs will be their greatest enemy. Or maybe a hat hung over the optics.
>but "science" has been open to all for the entirety of its existence,
In theory, yes... but it wasn't all that long ago that women were denied education and mocked if they attempted scientific research or to present findings.
While in theory anyone can use the scientific method... coming up with it independently (because you're uneducated), doing some sound research, then getting the world to listen to your findings? Herculean task.
Science is and always has been for everyone, but the kind of science we generally think of (figuring out new things at the edges of humanity's collective knowledge) is for people with education, means, and opportunity... and that is NOT everyone.
In fact I'd kind of encourage terrorists to try, since they're far more likely to kill themselves than anyone else. Horribly, too.
Random moderating with random meta-moderating seems to limit the issue here, but it certainly doesn't stop it.
There's certainly very little serious guidance from the admins to keep the site as a legitimate tech news site. Once you have advertising, the lure of that income is bound to make you value page views over the quality of the content being viewed.
The problem is what happens when you disable a drone - gravity tends to have a say in that.
I agree that leaving a back door in place and hoping the bad guys don't copy the key is worse, but there IS a reason that net or HERF guns aren't immediately selected as the best option.
There are companies working on anti-drone drones to do a 'capture and safely ground', and I believe at least one person was working on using trained birds (which do fine for the vast majority of consumer-grade drones).
Which brings up another issue... with the kind of payload most consumer drones are capable of lifting, they're just not a threat worth getting worked up about. There's plenty more damage you could do on the ground, a lot easily, if you were of a mind to do so.
>if you're going to get banned for saying anything that offends anyone, which is what "safe spaces" always devolve into, you learn not to say anything.
Which is why instead of a 'safe space', you need to find professional moderators your user community will come to trust to be fair about enforcing rules despite the fact that any community rule set will have grey areas.
Those kinds of people cost money, and given that Reddit-like sites don't seem to generate mountains of the stuff, it's unlikely you'll see them except for serious issues that are likely to cause legal problems for the company.
Someone with mod points was so upset by the above post, they crawled through my history and applied down votes to other posts on unrelated topics.
I suppose that means I hit a nerve... or that we're letting Redditors in here now that the site's declined enough in quality to attract them.
This is Slashdot. News for Nerds / Stuff that Matters. This ain't that, and it shouldn't have been approved by the mods.
If we're going to talk about Trump there's a hell of a lot more interesting stuff to talk about, like the signs that his wife is being abused (at least emotionally), the whole 'interfering with an FBI investigation' thing, or the fact that he committed an act of war without congressional approval (which seems to me to be bigger than the FBI thing, but apparently the news media doesn't think so),
And that's if you're done with the whole 'crowd size', which honestly was so ludicrous he should have been tossed out on his ear for being mentally unfit long before the CIA speech. Or the wall, or coal, or healthcare. Or that Trump just fucked over Canada with his oil plan and NAFTA.
But no; let's talk about a stupid budget that's all based on the economic equivalent of 'feelz over realz' and not solid numbers anyway.
> If during the standard day you find yourself fighting mental fatigue, exhaustion and constantly battling complex problems, you're probably just a bad developer and shouldn't be in the field.
Those are my favourite times! It means I'm working on a challenging project and I'll have a sense of accomplishment when it's completed.
The easy stuff gets difficult when there's too much of it... because it's boring!
FFS. The SJWs are idiots, but you're not helping to shut them down when you spew counter-lies.
>" "Gender is a spectrum," "Homosexuality is not abnormal or an aberration," "Men and women are equal." These are all patent untruths.
Gender IS a spectrum. And very highly influenced by culture. Also, you're conflating gender and sex, which really doesn't help either. I would certainly allow that non-binary sex is abnormal and the result of reproductive error.
Homosexuality as an 'abnormality' or 'aberration' is debatable. In evolutionary terms, it's there... which is all nature 'cares' about. It's normal in humans to have ~3% homosexuals, it's normal to have some in mammals, and it even occurs in a broad range of non-mammalian animals. Since there appear to be some environmental influences affecting the rate at which homosexuals are produced - check studies on birth order vs. probability of homosexuality in humans, for instance - it's quite possible there's a communal benefit to having non-reproducing family members that increases overall reproductive fitness.
And men and women aren't equal? Wow. Of course we are - equally human, equally deserving of an equal share of opportunities provided by our communities. We are not identical. Only fools claim that we're universally 'plug-and-play' equivalents in all ways. But then, there's a bell curve for men and women for any trait you choose (outside of the gonads and related reproductive factors), and if you look into it you'll find there's plenty of places where those curves overlap and there will be some women exceeding some men where you would expect the opposite to be true. And there are things women tend to be better at than men, yet again you're going to find the curves overlap and some men will excel where you'd expect women to be 'winning'.
In short, you're spouting misogynistic tripe and it's not helping.
> it said most people ONLY had 2-3 close personal friends?
Yep. There's a whole spectrum between those people who treat everyone like their 'bestie' and the hermit who trusts nobody.
My standards for a 'close personal friend' are very high - I have lots of acquaintances but very few friends. Honestly, I have a lot of trouble understanding how people can say they have more than a handful of friends unless they're still in high school or have retired, because proper friendships take a lot of time and don't fit very well into a normal adult schedule. First there's work, then there's 'chores', then immediate family, then extended family, THEN friends. When? Every weekend or three?
Once you're seeing them once or twice a year, they're acquaintances, not friends.
>Welcome to the new Gestapo.
I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough I can tell you this is not the first time since WWII that we've had wannabe 'thought police' gain political influence. It comes and goes to varying degrees on what seem to be decade-long cycles.
The important thing that we never seem to learn as a society is that the more you tolerate these fools early on, the harder it is to stop them later on when they've gained positions of power - and the greater the return swing on the pendulum. Neither extreme of the swing is good for reasonable people just trying to live their lives.
Whiny social justice warrior demands science be primarily a political tool for her pet causes, complains more when told science is supposed to be apolitical about facts and reproducible experiments - and can't resist implying that those things are bad because she was told so by scary 'old white men'.
Maybe Heather Metcalf should shut the hell up and spend some time thinking about why the 'old white men' are right and she's a complete idiot. Scientific American does itself a disservice by letting her post this crap under their banner, blog page or not.
Any issue you may see with the sex ratio of scientists or treatment scientists tend to receive based on sex or gender, whether they're famous or toiling in obscurity, or sex or gender issues in the community at large... has nothing to do with whether or not science should a political arena. It should not. Science seeks facts and understanding, what we do with that is the arena of politics.
You know... there could have been a whole monster-type movie made with Khan on board the Enterprise as it spends a week falling towards Earth. (Let's say it had the appropriate velocity to intersect)
Imagine Khan sneaking about the ship, killing off the crew and attempting to subvert systems. Lights flickering out, crew hunkering down in defensive positions, and Kirk knowing he has to kill Khan before the rescue ship / space tug arrives and provides a way to get to Earth.
A little bit of script work and they could have pulled two or three good science fiction movies out of one mediocre action flick.
1) Don't worry about the core, it'll last. It's currently at ~5000K and will be at ~4950K in a billion years... which is about 300M years after the surface will be baked sterile by the Sun.
2) Even so... it would take a LONG time for the solar wind to strip our atmosphere away. And in fact, it turns out we were wrong about the effect of the Earth's magnetic field; it is actually helping the solar wind heat and strip the atmosphere. At current depletion rates, it's estimated to be good for another 4 billion years or so. That's more than 3 billion years after the planet is baked and around the time it'll be engulfed by the Sun.
We really don't need to worry about the core, its magnetic field, or the density of the planetary atmosphere.
Star Trek has never really been about the future of humanity, though. It's been about the future of humanity, if the future is entirely descended from the present-day USA, and a thinly-veiled reflection of the society that is creating the show.
By that measure, 72% of the cast should be white, 12% black, 5% Asian, and 9% 'mixed or other' (figures rounded). And women should make up 5-15% of the command-level (lower as you go up the authority scale).
There's a reason TOS had space-hippies and miniskirts, no women in command, and a couple of half-white, half-black guys trying to kill each other for all eternity. And Klingons were more or less Russian analogues and Romulans stand-ins for the Chinese. (Though sometimes it felt like the writers mixed the two group's traits fairly freely)
It is kind of funny that the wholesome American Christian farm-boy hero from Iowa was played by a Canadian Jew from Quebec, though.
>plot holes big enough to drive a planet through.
That's nothing new to Trek, even from the very early days of the original series.
Then again, TOS was pretty much an anthology series with a consistent cast and set dressing. With the heavily episodic nature, I don't think they worried too much about individual story problems that would just be ignored the next week anyway.
From a system designed to ensure information flows no matter what... to a system designed to ensure selected information flows at a rate determined by your wallet.
Another change to America that will squeeze the 99% for the enrichment of the 1%, sold with the lie that they're doing it for the exact opposite reason.
You know, I'm not big on class warfare but at some point you have to realize that your society is going to shit if its primary focus is to benefit a small subset of the population to the detriment of the majority.
Thoughts:
1) OMG. Typewritten, not printed, not an email. The 80s are so long ago technologically. I lived through them, and I routinely forget we didn't all have smart phones.
2) I like it so far (I'm only up to page 13), but man, did they ignore some of the best instructions and fall back on the 'easy out' a few times in TNG. Right in the pilot, with Q, they threw out the whole 'Science fiction based on extrapolation of current scientific knowledge'.
3) It's funny (and sad) that in 1987, "telepathy is supported by reputable scientists" was seriously included in a document.
>There was a Stargate SG1 episode where they were reluctantly trying to make a movie. There were several kind of parodies like the Wizard of Oz, Farscape
Some of my favourite Stargate memories are the self-aware stuff they threw in. Especially 'Wormhole X-Treme'.
It hasn't aged well, though. I mean, the basic concepts are solid but going back and re-watching a lot of it comes across as 'filler', low-effort stuff. And certainly low budget... most of the alien ship interiors were so Spartan they were barely there.
But it was always fun, wasn't it?
OK. This is where you've called me a liar, and I call you a liar in return.
We can stop now.
"Major plot and character details about Star Trek: Discovery have not been revealed. It is known, however, that it will take place about 10 years before the events of the original series, and that the lead character will be a young woman, likely non-white, serving as a lieutenant commander aboard the Federation starship Discovery"
Literally all the studio felt like revealing. "Non-white woman lead."
>So the stereotype of Star Trek fans being white male basement dwelling virgins is false?
It's been something like 15 years since I last went to a convention... but the attendees were from pretty much every walk of life regardless of whether you sliced by economic class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or job.
There was a statistical deviation from the normal distribution when it came to social skills (and yes, some inept guys creeping harmlessly but still creepily on the girls) and physical fitness (lots of obese and painfully thin people, muscles were far and few between), but there was still a bell curve with all points represented. Mostly younger, because it's less likely a whole family will want to go to a con, or a spouse will be pleased with losing their partner for a few days. (I stopped going because of kids... who grew up to not be scifi fans).
I'd definitely have to say that they tended to be nicer and more accepting than the average random person you might meet.
My understanding is that these days it's skewing closer to the norm as being 'nerdy' about things has lost a fair bit of the old stigma that used to apply.
>Do you have any evidence that this actually happened?
The original press release, where they explicitly said that and nothing else?
>The one constant is you can heap any amount of abuse you want on low social value males.
Before you finish nailing yourself to that cross, consider that the drama nerds often have it pretty bad compared to other varieties of nerd until they're adults, and even then life can suck unless they're really talented or make it big. It's still the pretty people and the athletes that by default score well in popularity until you get out of high school. Luckily the majority of people grow the fuck up in their 20s and most of that shit fades away.
But it's the drama nerds who are writing the scripts and the drama nerds who are acting them out, and most of them know what it's like to be on the shit end of the stick. Unfortunately... they're just not as smart as us alpha nerds and can have trouble with logic and moral philosophy so they don't see the flaws in the SJW manifesto. ;p
>Here's some diversity that might actually make for an interesting character on STar Trek: human characters that aren't all atheists/agnostics. Give me a Catholic science officer. Or maybe the weapons officer is a muslim and he goes Space Jihad on fuckers.
Theists generally don't see it this way, but... religion is irrational. By definition it is belief without proof, and sometimes even despite proof to the contrary.
It is rare that you see a devoutly religious person who is also a highly educated, frontier-advancing scientist. It's not impossible, and there have been some remarkably brilliant ones, but it's rare.
Then there's the fact that any faith you portray in a show is going to result in people of the faith you're portraying (or worse, appearing to parody) are going to be offended and turned off.
And it's futuristic light sci-fi... you're talking about people who have figured out the laws of nature and met god-like creatures and then killed them for being a pain in the ass. In fact... Spock shot El/Yahweh - our friendly neighbourhood Abrahamic god - with a Klingon ship's weapons!
In the Star Trek universe, it turns out humans came up with the concept of God because of a telepathic psychotic floating head imprisoned in the galactic core trying to fool us into helping him escape.
I'm pretty sure Christians would have an issue with any depiction of their faith in the future that took those events into consideration.