Which it kind of deserved. They set it in a dark future and STILL made it bland. And they didn't commit to it, either, as evidenced by all the changes they threw in as the show was crashing.
That's rarely good. Building on what you have in a new direction? OK. Trashing what you have and attempting what amounts to a soft reboot? Pretty much guaranteed to lose whoever is still hanging on as a fan.
>Perhaps a star trek in the future where the hit a dark ages because of the ever perfect starfleet morality? All empires die. So a story line showing the federation slowly dieing and the conflicts around survival vs. their beliefs. Technology degrades because the support infrastructure to build and maintain all the cool technology you mention no longer exists?
I would think that it would work better than what they're doing now. Instead of "We're putting in a non-white female because you're a cis-privileged shitlord who needs to be properly brainwashed" you'd get "Look at the shit we used to think was OK, and watch these awesome role models overcome it".
If your goal is some kind of display of social progressiveness to effect change... you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
> or jump a few generations ahead and show a future federation.
Problem: The tech is already ridiculous. As of the recent movies, (set in TOS era!) they can beam anywhere without a star ship. They can resurrect the dead. We know in Kirk's time they develop planet-destroying weaponry and full AI. In Picard's era they have replicators and holodecks.
There's already not much point in getting out of bed in the Star Trek universe - it'd make a lot more sense to climb into a life support unit in orbit around a non-descript star and live an eternity in the simulated reality of your choice.
>We know how the Klingon war went, we know all the back stories.
We know how WWII ended... but there are a lot of movies out there about it.
> I already know there will be some story about the half vulcan/human being conflicted.
Yep. With the original Spock's popularity, Star Trek pretty much ensured that a Pinocchio character would be a significant part of most sci-fi for the foreseeable future.
There's likely lots of people who disagree with me on this (such as those morons who are modding my original post 'troll' despite it being an accurate report of the original press releases...) but Sisko and Janeway sucked.
Not because Sisko was black, but because Avery Brooks' delivery was odd and I personally didn't like it. Not because Janeway was a woman, but because the show's writing was atrociously bad and they wrote her making some of the dumbest possible decisions
Trek may have put women in important positions, but they've rarely taken them and written what I've found to be a compelling character. 7 was hot ass-kicking cyborg and emotionally a child... wow, so a nerd fantasy chick. B'Elanna had squandered potential. I kind of liked Nerys, but the whole cultural/religious angle felt too forced.
Maybe Uhura, but due to the times Nichols didn't really get much to work with... it's decades of time and a few cool movie lines that have retroactively made her great.
You are correct, of course. The problem is that is even worse than what they're shovelling now... because while that was relevant social commentary back then, it ain't now.
Sticking with that - showing the great Federation as still recovering from post-WWIII social regression despite thinking of itself as an egalitarian utopia - would have been a great sci-fi premise, but a difficult sales pitch.
In fact, showing the Federation as a bunch of aggressive but cautious jerks who are reeling from getting kicked in the groin by the Romulan War right while still recovering from the Eugenics Wars, and heading straight into the Klingon War would have been a really brave move with a lot of potential for stories with emotional weight - something Trek's been pretty weak at.
Showing women (and scapegoated minorities) fighting to regain rights they know their ancestors had, in a Cold War-esque paranoid society with the general population trying to return to peace while the leaders and military know war looms and want to crack down on social progress to maintain control in the name of survival... there's so much material there. Plenty of which that would be a great analogue for the problems of today.
>In the pilot Majel Barret played the second in command of the ship.
Yeah, but he was tapping that on the side, so it's not like the casting is untainted.
The guy was morally flexible when it came to sheathing his penis or filling his wallet. He was not a moral compass guiding us towards utopia as he is usually portrayed,
First, there's a big difference between a black woman with authority accepted by white men in the 60s, and having a non-white woman in command in 2017. Orders of magnitude of difference. They're late to the game if the goal is to show what's possible in an egalitarian society. We're not perfect, but it is certainly no longer unusual to the point that people gasp upon seeing a female CEO, and if she wants to move into a new neighbourhood she's not going to have trouble buying a house or making friends.
All that ground got thoroughly trampled in the 80s and 90s, along with homosexuality... which is why being known as gay or lesbian is now a marketing gimmick rather than a career ender. We're even (mostly) over the childish novelty of getting girls to kiss each other for men's pleasure.
Second, Rodenberry was a cynical guy. One of the stories regarding Chekov is that his late addition was to cash in on the Monkees' popularity (thus the stupid bowl cut). I tend to credit that over most other stories, because Roddenberry was a cynical bastard who would push any story that sold his product. He was not particularly interested in the philosophy espoused in Star Trek when it came to his own life, and especially his own wallet.
>The only key question is : are these characters otherwise well written, and are the actors portraying them good ?
It's an order of operations issue. When they have a good character and then say, "Hey, you know what? What if we lean towards someone who is [trait x] for this role?" that's one thing.
When they say, "Hey, we need a show about a minority woman" that's a totally different, and offensive thing. Just imagine, "Hey, we need a show about a wealthy white male" and tell me how you feel about THAT as a starting point...
Where the show was designed by the actor's race and sex instead of a plot and a casting call. Because blatant sexism and racism is good so long as it isn't favouring white males!
Then there's the whole problem with it being restricted to a very limited new streaming service.
> As a matter of fact there were no businesses that rely on geo locks at all.
Sure there were... they relied on the inconvenience of international delivery to allow for regionally-tiered pricing of physical media.
You may blame the distributors, but in a lot of cases they're not the owners of the IP, and may only have a distribution deal covering a particular region, or they've landed the distribution contract on the basis of the ability to achieve maximum profit on a per-region basis.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with a combination of the IP holders being greedy, but also with large wealth and cost of living disparities between different portions of the globe.
>There's no reason why an intelligent computer would be any better at writing software than an intelligent human.
Except you likely would design it to be obsessively interested in programming to spec, and not get distracted by watercooler talk, problems at home, medical issues, exhaustion, the hot chick at the end of the cubical farm, etc.
> More importantly, a intelligent computer might decide it doesn't want to write software.
I have no urge to eat mice, but my cat does. (Also small birds and the occasional housefly) My instincts are different. Why would you create an AI that even had the capacity to decide it wanted to do something other than what you designed it to do?
Until I can have a conversation with an artificial entity that can reason abstractly to extrapolate experience to apply against novel concepts to which it is introduced, we're not there. (Technically, the conversation part is not required, but it's useful as a human interface)
We're seeing complex decision trees based on statistics, not AI.
>Even with mobile device manufacturers charging for more storage space and cellular carriers charging for transmission from your home or leased server?
My phone has several times more storage space than I require, and as yet my video collection has not become a significant portion of the used space. I dump movies and tv shows on there too, from time to time... though those I rotate in and out as I require them since my movie/television collection is closing in on 4TB.
I'd never stream from home (except for security cams, which are kind of pointless if you move them from what they're supposed to watch!). If I'm away for any length of time, I bring my NAS box with my laptop.
In that I don't collect files with MP3 extensions any longer.
Those days are past, now I collect my audio with video attached. Space isn't an issue and I might want to watch something while I listen (and every device I have has a screen...) and I can ignore it if I don't.
I haven't bothered to check, but I assume the audio component of those videos could still be using the MP3 standard.
My kids' school is like this - every kid gets a Google logon administered by the school. It's nice because they can access it from home to continue working on things, but not so nice because I don't like everything my children do being tracked by the Americans.
I have no control over what's done with that information, or how it will be used in the years to come. I'm not even in the same country, so I have no legal recourse if I find the data gets shared and abused.
It's not like it would have been that difficult for the school board to set up their own similar system, then the kids would just have to use a different URL than Google's.
He wants to retire on Mars, so he's building rockets to get there.
Mars has no fossil fuels, so everything's going to be electric and the source will be solar or nuclear. So he's got Tesla working on solar power and storage.
Mars has a nasty surface, so underground is the place to be. Either you build and heap surface material over you... or you bore tunnels. Enter the Boring Company.
Mars has no communications infrastructure... at all. Enter SpaceX worldwide Internet. You think those same satellites couldn't orbit Mars? Probably with less worry of orbital impact or atmospheric drag, too.
Mars has no transportation infrastructure... and the surface (as previously mentioned) is not human-friendly. Mars ALSO has very little atmosphere, and Elon has a boring machine. Enter the Hyperloop. With less gravity and less atmosphere to deal with, the Hyperloop concept seems like it's a perfect fit for a well-bored tunnel.
Each of the things he's working on is part of a future Mars colony, and they all have the potential to make him money here (which helps him get there).
No matter what we do, this rock will be baked dry in about 700 million year and then consumed by the Sun after floating, lifeless, for another 3 billion years.
There is no living 'harmoniously with our environment' on long enough scales. We ride the entropy gradient until the universe's spring finishes winding down.
However, yes, it would be nice if we managed to use our available resources in a manner that didn't exhaust them before Nature destroys them anyway, and in a way that didn't make our existence less comfortable.
>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?
Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.
Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.
Any scanned baggage with a laptop in it will be opened 'randomly', the drive cloned, and everything put back - and you may or may not get a tag on your luggage letting you know they did it.
Then they'll apply standard cracking against the drive image, which in 99% of cases means mounting it in an OS that doesn't respect its security settings. In the other 1% of cases, they'll decide whether or not to be a little more thorough, and in 99% of THOSE cases, standard utilities will crack them open.
The other 1%... they'll scoop you up on the return flight if they really want to.
It has been, actually, though maybe the Microsoft folks didn't know.
I read years ago about insoles for the elderly experiencing balance problems - they would randomly stimulate the bottom of the foot and having them do so markedly improved balance.
>I'm a cyclist, so I don't trigger the sensors. If there are no cars waiting at an intersection with me then the lights simply stay red for me, even without traffic, until a car arrives or I get off and press the pedestrian cross button.
I feel your pain. At least on a bicycle you can more or less easily pop up on the curb and hit the pedestrian button. It's not so easy on a heavier vehicle - in my experience, a scooter-style ebike, a moped, and even a light model motorcycle can all be too small to trip the sensors, and yet they're all too clunky to be circling around to the pedestrian crosswalk button. And I hate leaving my vehicle behind, even for a moment, just in case a car actually does come along while I've left it parked on the roadway.
But for now - as in, for at least the next couple of decades and probably longer - we need to allow for human drivers.
For as long as I can recall, my region has had semi-intelligent lights, with pre-set schedules tweaked by data gathered from sensor loops in the pavement.
Unfortunately, while that tells you if at least one person is waiting at the light, it doesn't tell you how many cars are coming, how far away they are, or how fast they're moving (though you could simply assume the speed limit for that last one).
By adding in some cameras to identify vehicles that aren't yet at the intersection, lights could anticipate and change for optimal flow. I can't count how many times I've sat waiting at a light while the other direction has no cars... only to see the light start changing they come around a corner. A smart light would have seen there was no traffic in the other direction and immediately flipped to green as I approached resulting in a lot less car idling. And you wouldn't have to rip up the intersection to put in the sensor loops, either.
Slashdot Mirror
>I totally forgot about that show.
Which it kind of deserved. They set it in a dark future and STILL made it bland. And they didn't commit to it, either, as evidenced by all the changes they threw in as the show was crashing.
That's rarely good. Building on what you have in a new direction? OK. Trashing what you have and attempting what amounts to a soft reboot? Pretty much guaranteed to lose whoever is still hanging on as a fan.
>Perhaps a star trek in the future where the hit a dark ages because of the ever perfect starfleet morality? All empires die. So a story line showing the federation slowly dieing and the conflicts around survival vs. their beliefs. Technology degrades because the support infrastructure to build and maintain all the cool technology you mention no longer exists?
So... Andromeda? :)
I would think that it would work better than what they're doing now. Instead of "We're putting in a non-white female because you're a cis-privileged shitlord who needs to be properly brainwashed" you'd get "Look at the shit we used to think was OK, and watch these awesome role models overcome it".
If your goal is some kind of display of social progressiveness to effect change... you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
>Why is this a thing? picked up from a two-minute trailer?
No, from the original press releases where that's literally all they had.
Free love is fine when everyone consents, but Roddenberry was cheating on his spouse with someone over whom he had significant authority.
I mean, yeah, it ultimately seems to have worked out for Majel, but it was a skeezy start.
> or jump a few generations ahead and show a future federation.
Problem: The tech is already ridiculous. As of the recent movies, (set in TOS era!) they can beam anywhere without a star ship. They can resurrect the dead. We know in Kirk's time they develop planet-destroying weaponry and full AI. In Picard's era they have replicators and holodecks.
There's already not much point in getting out of bed in the Star Trek universe - it'd make a lot more sense to climb into a life support unit in orbit around a non-descript star and live an eternity in the simulated reality of your choice.
>We know how the Klingon war went, we know all the back stories.
We know how WWII ended... but there are a lot of movies out there about it.
> I already know there will be some story about the half vulcan/human being conflicted.
Yep. With the original Spock's popularity, Star Trek pretty much ensured that a Pinocchio character would be a significant part of most sci-fi for the foreseeable future.
There's likely lots of people who disagree with me on this (such as those morons who are modding my original post 'troll' despite it being an accurate report of the original press releases...)
but Sisko and Janeway sucked.
Not because Sisko was black, but because Avery Brooks' delivery was odd and I personally didn't like it. Not because Janeway was a woman, but because the show's writing was atrociously bad and they wrote her making some of the dumbest possible decisions
Trek may have put women in important positions, but they've rarely taken them and written what I've found to be a compelling character. 7 was hot ass-kicking cyborg and emotionally a child... wow, so a nerd fantasy chick. B'Elanna had squandered potential. I kind of liked Nerys, but the whole cultural/religious angle felt too forced.
Maybe Uhura, but due to the times Nichols didn't really get much to work with... it's decades of time and a few cool movie lines that have retroactively made her great.
You are correct, of course. The problem is that is even worse than what they're shovelling now... because while that was relevant social commentary back then, it ain't now.
Sticking with that - showing the great Federation as still recovering from post-WWIII social regression despite thinking of itself as an egalitarian utopia - would have been a great sci-fi premise, but a difficult sales pitch.
In fact, showing the Federation as a bunch of aggressive but cautious jerks who are reeling from getting kicked in the groin by the Romulan War right while still recovering from the Eugenics Wars, and heading straight into the Klingon War would have been a really brave move with a lot of potential for stories with emotional weight - something Trek's been pretty weak at.
Showing women (and scapegoated minorities) fighting to regain rights they know their ancestors had, in a Cold War-esque paranoid society with the general population trying to return to peace while the leaders and military know war looms and want to crack down on social progress to maintain control in the name of survival... there's so much material there. Plenty of which that would be a great analogue for the problems of today.
>In the pilot Majel Barret played the second in command of the ship.
Yeah, but he was tapping that on the side, so it's not like the casting is untainted.
The guy was morally flexible when it came to sheathing his penis or filling his wallet. He was not a moral compass guiding us towards utopia as he is usually portrayed,
Two things:
First, there's a big difference between a black woman with authority accepted by white men in the 60s, and having a non-white woman in command in 2017. Orders of magnitude of difference. They're late to the game if the goal is to show what's possible in an egalitarian society. We're not perfect, but it is certainly no longer unusual to the point that people gasp upon seeing a female CEO, and if she wants to move into a new neighbourhood she's not going to have trouble buying a house or making friends.
All that ground got thoroughly trampled in the 80s and 90s, along with homosexuality... which is why being known as gay or lesbian is now a marketing gimmick rather than a career ender. We're even (mostly) over the childish novelty of getting girls to kiss each other for men's pleasure.
Second, Rodenberry was a cynical guy. One of the stories regarding Chekov is that his late addition was to cash in on the Monkees' popularity (thus the stupid bowl cut). I tend to credit that over most other stories, because Roddenberry was a cynical bastard who would push any story that sold his product. He was not particularly interested in the philosophy espoused in Star Trek when it came to his own life, and especially his own wallet.
>The only key question is : are these characters otherwise well written, and are the actors portraying them good ?
It's an order of operations issue. When they have a good character and then say, "Hey, you know what? What if we lean towards someone who is [trait x] for this role?" that's one thing.
When they say, "Hey, we need a show about a minority woman" that's a totally different, and offensive thing. Just imagine, "Hey, we need a show about a wealthy white male" and tell me how you feel about THAT as a starting point...
Where the show was designed by the actor's race and sex instead of a plot and a casting call. Because blatant sexism and racism is good so long as it isn't favouring white males!
Then there's the whole problem with it being restricted to a very limited new streaming service.
Pass.
>You should try to learn what "AI" actually means. Lookup "Strong AI" and "Weak AI", also referred to as "Hard AI" and "Soft AI".
No, people involved should stop misusing terms to make their work sound more impressive.
They've got the artificial part down, but so far they've made zero progress on intelligence... prefixing 'weak' or 'soft' doesn't change that.
> As a matter of fact there were no businesses that rely on geo locks at all.
Sure there were... they relied on the inconvenience of international delivery to allow for regionally-tiered pricing of physical media.
You may blame the distributors, but in a lot of cases they're not the owners of the IP, and may only have a distribution deal covering a particular region, or they've landed the distribution contract on the basis of the ability to achieve maximum profit on a per-region basis.
Ultimately, responsibility lies with a combination of the IP holders being greedy, but also with large wealth and cost of living disparities between different portions of the globe.
>There's no reason why an intelligent computer would be any better at writing software than an intelligent human.
Except you likely would design it to be obsessively interested in programming to spec, and not get distracted by watercooler talk, problems at home, medical issues, exhaustion, the hot chick at the end of the cubical farm, etc.
> More importantly, a intelligent computer might decide it doesn't want to write software.
I have no urge to eat mice, but my cat does. (Also small birds and the occasional housefly) My instincts are different. Why would you create an AI that even had the capacity to decide it wanted to do something other than what you designed it to do?
Nothing we're seeing these days is actually AI.
Until I can have a conversation with an artificial entity that can reason abstractly to extrapolate experience to apply against novel concepts to which it is introduced, we're not there. (Technically, the conversation part is not required, but it's useful as a human interface)
We're seeing complex decision trees based on statistics, not AI.
>Even with mobile device manufacturers charging for more storage space and cellular carriers charging for transmission from your home or leased server?
My phone has several times more storage space than I require, and as yet my video collection has not become a significant portion of the used space. I dump movies and tv shows on there too, from time to time... though those I rotate in and out as I require them since my movie/television collection is closing in on 4TB.
I'd never stream from home (except for security cams, which are kind of pointless if you move them from what they're supposed to watch!). If I'm away for any length of time, I bring my NAS box with my laptop.
In that I don't collect files with MP3 extensions any longer.
Those days are past, now I collect my audio with video attached. Space isn't an issue and I might want to watch something while I listen (and every device I have has a screen...) and I can ignore it if I don't.
I haven't bothered to check, but I assume the audio component of those videos could still be using the MP3 standard.
My kids' school is like this - every kid gets a Google logon administered by the school. It's nice because they can access it from home to continue working on things, but not so nice because I don't like everything my children do being tracked by the Americans.
I have no control over what's done with that information, or how it will be used in the years to come. I'm not even in the same country, so I have no legal recourse if I find the data gets shared and abused.
It's not like it would have been that difficult for the school board to set up their own similar system, then the kids would just have to use a different URL than Google's.
He wants to retire on Mars, so he's building rockets to get there.
Mars has no fossil fuels, so everything's going to be electric and the source will be solar or nuclear. So he's got Tesla working on solar power and storage.
Mars has a nasty surface, so underground is the place to be. Either you build and heap surface material over you... or you bore tunnels. Enter the Boring Company.
Mars has no communications infrastructure... at all. Enter SpaceX worldwide Internet. You think those same satellites couldn't orbit Mars? Probably with less worry of orbital impact or atmospheric drag, too.
Mars has no transportation infrastructure... and the surface (as previously mentioned) is not human-friendly. Mars ALSO has very little atmosphere, and Elon has a boring machine. Enter the Hyperloop. With less gravity and less atmosphere to deal with, the Hyperloop concept seems like it's a perfect fit for a well-bored tunnel.
Each of the things he's working on is part of a future Mars colony, and they all have the potential to make him money here (which helps him get there).
No matter what we do, this rock will be baked dry in about 700 million year and then consumed by the Sun after floating, lifeless, for another 3 billion years.
There is no living 'harmoniously with our environment' on long enough scales. We ride the entropy gradient until the universe's spring finishes winding down.
However, yes, it would be nice if we managed to use our available resources in a manner that didn't exhaust them before Nature destroys them anyway, and in a way that didn't make our existence less comfortable.
>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?
Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.
Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.
Any scanned baggage with a laptop in it will be opened 'randomly', the drive cloned, and everything put back - and you may or may not get a tag on your luggage letting you know they did it.
Then they'll apply standard cracking against the drive image, which in 99% of cases means mounting it in an OS that doesn't respect its security settings. In the other 1% of cases, they'll decide whether or not to be a little more thorough, and in 99% of THOSE cases, standard utilities will crack them open.
The other 1%... they'll scoop you up on the return flight if they really want to.
It has been, actually, though maybe the Microsoft folks didn't know.
I read years ago about insoles for the elderly experiencing balance problems - they would randomly stimulate the bottom of the foot and having them do so markedly improved balance.
>I'm a cyclist, so I don't trigger the sensors. If there are no cars waiting at an intersection with me then the lights simply stay red for me, even without traffic, until a car arrives or I get off and press the pedestrian cross button.
I feel your pain. At least on a bicycle you can more or less easily pop up on the curb and hit the pedestrian button. It's not so easy on a heavier vehicle - in my experience, a scooter-style ebike, a moped, and even a light model motorcycle can all be too small to trip the sensors, and yet they're all too clunky to be circling around to the pedestrian crosswalk button. And I hate leaving my vehicle behind, even for a moment, just in case a car actually does come along while I've left it parked on the roadway.
But for now - as in, for at least the next couple of decades and probably longer - we need to allow for human drivers.
For as long as I can recall, my region has had semi-intelligent lights, with pre-set schedules tweaked by data gathered from sensor loops in the pavement.
Unfortunately, while that tells you if at least one person is waiting at the light, it doesn't tell you how many cars are coming, how far away they are, or how fast they're moving (though you could simply assume the speed limit for that last one).
By adding in some cameras to identify vehicles that aren't yet at the intersection, lights could anticipate and change for optimal flow. I can't count how many times I've sat waiting at a light while the other direction has no cars... only to see the light start changing they come around a corner. A smart light would have seen there was no traffic in the other direction and immediately flipped to green as I approached resulting in a lot less car idling. And you wouldn't have to rip up the intersection to put in the sensor loops, either.