Take it up a notch. Pay everyone a Basic Income, sufficient for a basic but not awful existence. That way no employer can use the collective desperation of the masses to pay them shitty wages - they have to offer something that's better than nothing, instead.
They say "a rising tide lifts all boats", but most of us don't have a boat. If you give everyone at least a life-raft, then offering someone a life-raft as an alternative to drowning stops being a thing. You have to offer someone a boat.
The big stupid for me was the hack that disabled the brakes by hacking the radio.
Why, why, why is the entertainment system on the same WRITABLE hardware bus as the brakes? I can see why you might want to talk to the engine management (to enable "sport mode" and such), but not directly, that would be stupid.
Second that on the sims : Elite : Dangerous is apparently one of the finer experiences you can have with your Oculus DK2.
I've only gone as far as headlook with one of those homebrew controllers made of an Arduino and one of those accelerometer / magnetometer chips, and that's pretty immersive for sims, I wouldn't play them without it now.
Thing is, all the technology it describes is possible now, and even in use on some platforms (think iOS, where all apps must be signed by Apple, and apps are specifically prohibited from allowing the execution of arbitrary code). The only gap is in legislation, but that legislation continues to be pushed forward aggressively.
The author of that nifty little program could well find themselves in a nifty little jail cell. They've already tried it, more than once ; and they will keep trying, with the force of these new international treaties like TPP behind them.
They can't affect the screen grab feature in Linux, but patent law can prevent you (legally) writing a DRM compliant image viewer for Linux.
We have DRM protected web video, but not in any OSS browser - you have to grab the Google version of Chrome to watch Netflix on Linux (or the outdated method of using Wine and the Windows version of Silverlight).
Microsoft enable it by having a driver model that requires signed drivers, which was an innovation for the media lobby.
That prevents you from running, for example, a display driver that dumps raw frames to a virtual network adapter that pipes to a video compression program. Or in your example, an audio driver that can record it's digital inputs.
I think the warp drive is superfluous. I think the key technology is fusion power. Once you have unlimited cheap energy, prosperity follows. Reduced population growth follows prosperity (in all our experience of it so far). If you have energy to spend, you can spend it on desalinating water to grow crops in the desert, on plasma torches to safely dispose of all known waste. Giving away fusion reactors might be the most effective tool of peace ever.
All warp drive gets you is opportunities to meet unfriendly aliens, blow up entire planets with bombs made of the fuel, and find caches of unobtanium scattered around the universe (there's no point hunting for normal matter - we have enough of that at home).
I always thought of the Borg as more of a riff on capitalism : constantly assimilating everything that made someone distinct or unique, and making everyone into a faceless drone with no opportunity for personal freedom.
Communism tended to look after it's own : making up jobs for people to do even if they were superfluous. The Borg would just switch off a surplus drone and not think twice about it.
I'm guessing Federation credits are only for import/export trading with other hegemonies. Within the Federation, resources seem to be allocated according to need. They view the fact that the Ferengi still have an internal economy as archaic and somewhat distasteful.
Trading must have been looked at as a slightly odd career choice for a human at least.
Why trade when the only things you can't get are bizarre cultural artifacts and unobtanium with silly names that you'd never heard of before, let alone conceived a use of before Problem Of The Week reared it's ugly head (and only because you went out of your way in your starship to look for it.)
Babies are a pain in the ass for years. They only start becoming an interesting person after at least half a decade. In a society where you can have 100% perfect birth control and hot tub with a holographic supermodel whenever you like, well, it will be like the reverse of Idiocracy - only the very conscientious and dutiful who see the need to propagate the species will breed.
It's commonly stated that hunger is not a production problem, it's a distribution problem.
In the UK we throw away 30-40% of the food we buy. And we are increasingly suffering from the same obesity crisis as the US, so clearly we could probably feed at least another 60 million people with very few ill effects.
In the US, 70% of maize grown is fed to livestock. It takes 100kg of plant matter to make 10kg animal matter, and most westerners eat way more meat than is necessary, so there's another food source.
The feeling of people getting something for nothing : well, as you say, developed nations are reconciled to that anyway, since they feed their poor and starving (although some of their governments seem to be trying to wriggle out of that social bargain). Perhaps it would just be more efficient to recognise this and stop all the bureaucracy involved, and just provide everyone with a Basic Income - which is probably the biggest step we could take toward a Star Trekkian Utopia imaginable.
On Starships the replicators are justifiable because of the space saving.
Not so sure about the average human on Earth though. On Voyager, the economics of the replicator become untenable - despite the warp drive being a real monster in terms of how much energy it must consume, the replicator must have a significant energy consumption even in those terms. I imagine other means of production are still much more efficient where the infrastructure is there.
(Mdme Picard comments that she's been unsuccessfully badgering her husband Robert for a kitchen replicator for years, so they're definitely available, at least to producers of high-premium artisanal beverages, but clearly not 100% ubiquitous and maybe not available to the masses.)
There should be no need to cull the population : one of the effects of prosperity noted everywhere amongst humans is that the birth rate goes below replacement rates. (This could be a side effect of the capitalist economies that usually presage the prosperity though - hard to breed when you're workin' for the man all day).
I think the resource profile associated with interstellar travel is the scarcity economy of Trek.
In TOS : dilithium was a scarcity commodity.
In TNG : probably anti-matter and Starfleet Academy graduates are the limiting factors. Honestly, how many of the comfy happy people on Earth are going to want to go to the dangerous outer space? (Creating anti-matter is incredibly expensive for us now ; even with significant improvements it's efficiency level will never be very good).
The energy requirements for a comfortable life on Earth are minuscule next to those required for interstellar travel. They don't worry about feeding the population ; they do worry about being able to build and crew enough ships to stand up against their enemies.
Once you have replicators and big fusion reactors, you can re-process all the nasty toxic waste on Earth, solve everyone's hunger problems, even have room for fancy premium goods and services like Château Picard and Sisko's Restaurant. Fusion reactors are portrayed as being insufficient to power faster than light travel though - the fuel for starships presumably represents a vast amount of energy generation capacity that is too bulky for the starship to carry.
The only goods worth trading (both locally and over interstellar distances) would be cultural curiosities like Yamok sauce and various forms of unobtanium (of which there are rather more in the Trek universe than in the real world, mostly for their use as MacGuffins and other plot devices).
Sleep is not a full shutdown. There are measurable processes going on there - it's not like turning off your computer, where it's "consciousness" (RAM contents) are rebuilt entirely from long-term storage in the morning. There is no area of your brain that gets "wiped" periodically.
The closest analogy is that a somewhat reduced version of you is performing system maintenance processes.
I always think glial cells are a great target for this sort of thing.
Your neurones have this vast support network of other cells that don't do any thinking. Replace them with high-tech nanobots that perform the functions of glial cells, but also network with each other, and watch the neurones to learn how to be you. Gradually permit clusters of them to actively participate in your natural connectome. You slowly transition to a being composed of mostly thinking nanobots with some squishy bits hanging around from when you were a meatsack.
An operator costs money and is easily occupied. A ticket system can take multiple requests simultaneously and saves money on a real person that can be spent on fixing the problems instead.
Password Safe 3 for me : you can get compatible programs for Windows, and Android, and Linux (I use the eponymous apps for Windows and Android and Pasaffe on Linux).
Open source, and you control your own encryption key.
The case is what makes the difference for me ; without the case, I've had an occasion where the phone factory-reset itself ; not so hard on Android, only requires pushing the power and volume buttons in a particular order.
With one of those flexible plastic shell cases, pushing the buttons requires more effort than a pants crease can manage.
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Take it up a notch. Pay everyone a Basic Income, sufficient for a basic but not awful existence. That way no employer can use the collective desperation of the masses to pay them shitty wages - they have to offer something that's better than nothing, instead.
They say "a rising tide lifts all boats", but most of us don't have a boat. If you give everyone at least a life-raft, then offering someone a life-raft as an alternative to drowning stops being a thing. You have to offer someone a boat.
The big stupid for me was the hack that disabled the brakes by hacking the radio.
Why, why, why is the entertainment system on the same WRITABLE hardware bus as the brakes? I can see why you might want to talk to the engine management (to enable "sport mode" and such), but not directly, that would be stupid.
We know why : because they're cheap bastards.
Second that on the sims : Elite : Dangerous is apparently one of the finer experiences you can have with your Oculus DK2.
I've only gone as far as headlook with one of those homebrew controllers made of an Arduino and one of those accelerometer / magnetometer chips, and that's pretty immersive for sims, I wouldn't play them without it now.
Have you read "The Right to Read"?
Thing is, all the technology it describes is possible now, and even in use on some platforms (think iOS, where all apps must be signed by Apple, and apps are specifically prohibited from allowing the execution of arbitrary code). The only gap is in legislation, but that legislation continues to be pushed forward aggressively.
The author of that nifty little program could well find themselves in a nifty little jail cell. They've already tried it, more than once ; and they will keep trying, with the force of these new international treaties like TPP behind them.
Theoretically possible. Just see what happens if you try and scan a bank note in some modern scanners - the EURion constellation will stop you.
They can't affect the screen grab feature in Linux, but patent law can prevent you (legally) writing a DRM compliant image viewer for Linux.
We have DRM protected web video, but not in any OSS browser - you have to grab the Google version of Chrome to watch Netflix on Linux (or the outdated method of using Wine and the Windows version of Silverlight).
Microsoft enable it by having a driver model that requires signed drivers, which was an innovation for the media lobby.
That prevents you from running, for example, a display driver that dumps raw frames to a virtual network adapter that pipes to a video compression program. Or in your example, an audio driver that can record it's digital inputs.
I think the warp drive is superfluous. I think the key technology is fusion power. Once you have unlimited cheap energy, prosperity follows. Reduced population growth follows prosperity (in all our experience of it so far). If you have energy to spend, you can spend it on desalinating water to grow crops in the desert, on plasma torches to safely dispose of all known waste. Giving away fusion reactors might be the most effective tool of peace ever.
All warp drive gets you is opportunities to meet unfriendly aliens, blow up entire planets with bombs made of the fuel, and find caches of unobtanium scattered around the universe (there's no point hunting for normal matter - we have enough of that at home).
I always thought of the Borg as more of a riff on capitalism : constantly assimilating everything that made someone distinct or unique, and making everyone into a faceless drone with no opportunity for personal freedom.
Communism tended to look after it's own : making up jobs for people to do even if they were superfluous. The Borg would just switch off a surplus drone and not think twice about it.
I'm guessing Federation credits are only for import/export trading with other hegemonies. Within the Federation, resources seem to be allocated according to need. They view the fact that the Ferengi still have an internal economy as archaic and somewhat distasteful.
Riker was an only child.
Possibly the most significant case. He was from Alaska, they must have really innovated like hell in the local entertainment industry.....
Trading must have been looked at as a slightly odd career choice for a human at least.
Why trade when the only things you can't get are bizarre cultural artifacts and unobtanium with silly names that you'd never heard of before, let alone conceived a use of before Problem Of The Week reared it's ugly head (and only because you went out of your way in your starship to look for it.)
Yes, but why WOULD you?
Babies are a pain in the ass for years. They only start becoming an interesting person after at least half a decade. In a society where you can have 100% perfect birth control and hot tub with a holographic supermodel whenever you like, well, it will be like the reverse of Idiocracy - only the very conscientious and dutiful who see the need to propagate the species will breed.
It's commonly stated that hunger is not a production problem, it's a distribution problem.
In the UK we throw away 30-40% of the food we buy. And we are increasingly suffering from the same obesity crisis as the US, so clearly we could probably feed at least another 60 million people with very few ill effects.
In the US, 70% of maize grown is fed to livestock. It takes 100kg of plant matter to make 10kg animal matter, and most westerners eat way more meat than is necessary, so there's another food source.
The feeling of people getting something for nothing : well, as you say, developed nations are reconciled to that anyway, since they feed their poor and starving (although some of their governments seem to be trying to wriggle out of that social bargain). Perhaps it would just be more efficient to recognise this and stop all the bureaucracy involved, and just provide everyone with a Basic Income - which is probably the biggest step we could take toward a Star Trekkian Utopia imaginable.
I think the novels even acknowledge this : they have a human analyst who so far has NEVER been wrong, and thus always gets consulted by the Minds.
Some of them are just interested because in a human population numbered in the trillions, one who is never wrong might be a statistical anomaly.
Whuffie!
On Starships the replicators are justifiable because of the space saving.
Not so sure about the average human on Earth though. On Voyager, the economics of the replicator become untenable - despite the warp drive being a real monster in terms of how much energy it must consume, the replicator must have a significant energy consumption even in those terms. I imagine other means of production are still much more efficient where the infrastructure is there.
(Mdme Picard comments that she's been unsuccessfully badgering her husband Robert for a kitchen replicator for years, so they're definitely available, at least to producers of high-premium artisanal beverages, but clearly not 100% ubiquitous and maybe not available to the masses.)
There should be no need to cull the population : one of the effects of prosperity noted everywhere amongst humans is that the birth rate goes below replacement rates. (This could be a side effect of the capitalist economies that usually presage the prosperity though - hard to breed when you're workin' for the man all day).
I think the resource profile associated with interstellar travel is the scarcity economy of Trek.
In TOS : dilithium was a scarcity commodity.
In TNG : probably anti-matter and Starfleet Academy graduates are the limiting factors. Honestly, how many of the comfy happy people on Earth are going to want to go to the dangerous outer space? (Creating anti-matter is incredibly expensive for us now ; even with significant improvements it's efficiency level will never be very good).
The energy requirements for a comfortable life on Earth are minuscule next to those required for interstellar travel. They don't worry about feeding the population ; they do worry about being able to build and crew enough ships to stand up against their enemies.
Once you have replicators and big fusion reactors, you can re-process all the nasty toxic waste on Earth, solve everyone's hunger problems, even have room for fancy premium goods and services like Château Picard and Sisko's Restaurant. Fusion reactors are portrayed as being insufficient to power faster than light travel though - the fuel for starships presumably represents a vast amount of energy generation capacity that is too bulky for the starship to carry.
The only goods worth trading (both locally and over interstellar distances) would be cultural curiosities like Yamok sauce and various forms of unobtanium (of which there are rather more in the Trek universe than in the real world, mostly for their use as MacGuffins and other plot devices).
Sleep is not a full shutdown. There are measurable processes going on there - it's not like turning off your computer, where it's "consciousness" (RAM contents) are rebuilt entirely from long-term storage in the morning. There is no area of your brain that gets "wiped" periodically.
The closest analogy is that a somewhat reduced version of you is performing system maintenance processes.
I always think glial cells are a great target for this sort of thing.
Your neurones have this vast support network of other cells that don't do any thinking. Replace them with high-tech nanobots that perform the functions of glial cells, but also network with each other, and watch the neurones to learn how to be you. Gradually permit clusters of them to actively participate in your natural connectome. You slowly transition to a being composed of mostly thinking nanobots with some squishy bits hanging around from when you were a meatsack.
An operator costs money and is easily occupied. A ticket system can take multiple requests simultaneously and saves money on a real person that can be spent on fixing the problems instead.
+1 for a local password safe program and Dropbox.
Password Safe 3 for me : you can get compatible programs for Windows, and Android, and Linux (I use the eponymous apps for Windows and Android and Pasaffe on Linux).
Open source, and you control your own encryption key.
The case is what makes the difference for me ; without the case, I've had an occasion where the phone factory-reset itself ; not so hard on Android, only requires pushing the power and volume buttons in a particular order.
With one of those flexible plastic shell cases, pushing the buttons requires more effort than a pants crease can manage.
That's "Direct Rendering Manager", not "Digital Restrictions Management", chummer.