Vorlonagent

Data never bothered me because he was always phrased as "Pinoccio trying to become a Real Boy", (which you can argue is a rehash of Spock and His Relationship to His Emotions). Holograms always struck me as narrow-use things and having them spontaneously transcend their limits never sat well with me. Voyager's EMH is the one exception. He kinda had to evolve in order to do his job.

That's actually news to me. Hmm...

I don't get it. Your turn to break out the exposition charts.

Only because that hologram had its lines written for it by people who had a god's eye view of the relationships in question. If you had that perspective, you'd give great advice too. The only time The Franchise's flirtation with "holograms are alive" was anything besides massively annoying to me was Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram character, and he was the only good thing about Voyager...

Generally agreed. Competition tends to force one to step up their game and Babylon 5 reached its prime about the same time as DS9 hit Season 3 or 4. I'd argue DS9s first few seasons didn't push the envelope much past Sisco punching Q. The Dominion War was good stuff with a few caveats. I could have done without Jake Sisco: Ace War Reporter and the degree to which characters went to a hologram for relationship advice...

Years ago, I saw 10" tablets for sale running intel hardware and Win7. I would cringe to think of Win 7 on even an 8" tablet screen, let alone a phone. OK, you got me on that one. I guess I need to stick to comics history. But I know I won't.

Yes.

I'd argue they cast the wrong women to pull off a successful Ghostbusters film or perhaps simply produced the wrong trailers. There's a fine line between saying that and hearing "women can't do this". It's easy to mishear even before we get into the people who will throw the slur out there just to stir up trouble. This is also before the way the trailers presented themselves. It was like being poked in the chest by someone getting in my face telling me I had to go see a film I did not want to see in order to prove I was not a misogynist. I don't like being poked so I said "I'm not your demographic" and let it pass by.

Classic Trek was very much a creature of its times. It doesn't stand well to 2016 standards. But compared to other shows of its day (any Lost in Space episode filmed in color for example), it was both groundbreaking and stone-cold serious.

I find protests hard to envision. And as TOH has pointed out the actor demographics aren't an absolute indicator of success or failure. I think it's just a money thing. White, cis males are a proven market with money to spend which will give a proven return. This is not to say that the current state of affairs is OK. Obviously not. The world of movies is a largely stagnant thing and could use some fresh ideas and shake-ups, including but not limited to departing a largely white, cisgender cast.

I'm not surprised to hear there might be hints in season 3. My understanding of Season 7 was "Last season. Screw it, nothing matters anymore"

There are DOS emulators... Primarily for games.

The full discussion of your examples goes too far into politics. Race in the US has gone completely bonkers since the election of Obama. It's a tangled subject that does not reduce well to simple right/wrong judgements in my view. Similar Ghostbusters. The internet is often crass and lowest-denominator. I have no doubt that the film took a lot of misogynist slurs hurled from behind the shield of anonymity. But I'd contend that one need not *be* a misogynist to be repelled by the film or even the trailers for it. I had no idea John Boyega was taking more flak than normal for someone in the public eye for starring in Star Wars. I know Ep 7 was not received well in some quarters. It's reboot nature didn't sit well with everybody. Speaking honestly, I was briefly started when I saw the stormtrooper who wouldn't kill was black (they all sounded like white guys in eps 4 - 6) but Boyega made it easy to roll with. He pulled off a great performance. Why's there an especially big target on his back? Is it just a side effect of dislike of Ep 7?

I only just googled it. I didn't know it'd be *that* hard to find, though I suppose it makes sense in retrospect. The only reason I even know about it is that it crossed my FB feed 4 or 5 years ago. It's possible you ran across it independently. I don't know what you know or don't know about comics. I know I sound like I know more than I actually do. TNG kind of did the inverse, right? Got less serious than Classic Trek? It was hard for me to take the first 3 seasons of TNG seriously, anyway. It got better by seasons 4-6 and but went stark raving silly in season 7, save for "All Good Things", the show-ending final episode.

Nvidia presents a unified driver to the public but when you look at the drivers on the internal networks, the XP drivers are found in the "Win2000" folder. I imagine if you drill down to the really low levels there are differences between Vista and Win7 that the driver programmers have to deal with. But they've got to be pretty minor. Speculating: a double handful of caveats and gotchas that one has to remember. I*I wouldn't think you'd want to run a Win7-like interface on a phone, maybe--maybe on a tablet... I am referring to Android the OS not android apps. Android the OS is, IIRC, open-source though I don't know the details. And yeah IIRC, you need to to pay money to get google to approve your custom version of Android.

I said "tend to", didn't I? I know I also phrased it as "one factor out of several" since you answered it, moving on to negate something I didn't even say. I have heard from multiple sources that minorities and women are hungry for protagonists that "look like them" and I am working off that. If this isn't true, please correct me. If it is, well then maybe consider the idea that race/gender/etc of the cast really does figure into why all people choose the movies they go see. In a non-absolute way. And therefore figures into what movies are made and demographics of the cast. Please don't call this influence "bigotry" unless it's equally bigotry for all. For the record, I don't think "looks like me" is bigotry. You are welcome to disagree or assert exceptions that make sense to you. I'm sure genuine bigotry still exists and it does affect how some people choose their entertainment. That's a whole other thing in my book and a much smaller influence to moviegoing in 2016 than, say, 1956. By an order of magnitude, at least.

"Bigoted" is at least sometimes an overstatement. People tend to go to movies where the cast "looks like me". It's a factor among several. I don't see it as any more bigoted for whites or straights to go to a film that "looks like them" than it would be for a black or gay to go to a film that "looks like them". It's the same motivation in both cases so where it is in play I see no reason to call one case "bigotry" and the other not. So for the studio, it becomes a math game. I make a film with a female or ethnic minority lead. How many will come to see it? Will the minorites attracted to a "looks like me" protagonist offset the whites which won't be hooked?

XP was a dressing-up of Windows 2000, MS' NT-based server OS. Windows Me was the death-song for DOS-based Windows. I work for Nvidia and we don't differentiate drivers written for XP or 2000. Win7 was the apology for Vista or what Vista always should have been were MS not quite so arrogant and full of themselves. Nvidia's Win7 driver is also its vista driver. Agreed, though Win8.1 can be converted to operate like Win7, which makes it a palatable option. Basic Win8, which shackled the user to Metro, was the true dog. It helped a lot of you're a fan of Apple products. Or smartphones and tablets in general, come to think of it. MS' anti-trust defense depended on claiming Apple as a valid alternative, which led to MS riding to Apple's financial rescue in Apple's darkest hour after the Second Coming of Steve Jobs. There are Apple snobs who heap elitist hate on MS. While I am a Windows-centric user, I'm not a Windows partisan. I generally don't care about OS one-upmanship. There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike the way MS does business. But I do tend to dislike elitists, so the picture of Bill Gates' face on the gigantic projection screen behind Steve Jobs always brigs a little schadenfreude smile to me. Or when Apple quietly converted from Power PC-based components to PC-compatible ones for their desktops. "Open Source" does not automatically mean "free to use" even though the two often go together. IIRC, Android itself is also open-source and free to use but you probably want the Google certification too and that costs money.

That's my point. Phoenix' "Phoenix Force" backed mutant powers apply unique rules to her powers that nobody else gets. Not another telepath/telekinetic, certainly not Storm. There would be commonalities between a Phoenix-Force-backed telepath/telekinetic mutant and one that doesn't have that extra kick, sure. The question then becomes but what exceptions and differences does the addition of the Phoenix-Force make? The other telepath/telekinetic might have rules just for them as well. Given that several characters have at various times claimed the "Phoenix" name and/or tapped into the Phoenix Force, you can probably treat them as using a common rule set among that group. You could treat them like gamma ray transformations (Hulk, etc.) or DC's "Speed Force" Speedsters or those with Kryptonian physiology. To my mind, Canon doesn't work second-hand. You know what happens when you assume, right? For me to accept Shortpacked as referencing DC continuity, they need to actually reference continuity. Especially working with something obviously over the top on its own like the "I'm Batman" joke/meme. Then you quote that, not Shortpacked, except to add an amusing note to the conversation. It's kind of a "pictures or it didn't happen" thing. Not with webcomics. They usually just get abandoned by the creator(s). Exiern was sold by its creator to a third party, who then was free to bring in writers/artists as needed, which is exactly why it works so well as an analogue to print comic books. It's really rare but can't be the only webcomic that this has happened to. DC's first continuity shift occurred when the Comics Code Authority allowed them to start up their heroes again, around 1960. They built a new continuity Where Green Lantern had a science-based origin borrowed from the Lensmen books instead of his original sort-of magic origin. The guy with the ring was renamed Hal Jordan instead of Alan Scott. This was where the Flash transitioned to Barry Allen from Jay Garrick. It was also here where Earth's premiere superhero team was renamed the Justice League instead of the Justice Society. As time went on, there was eventually a crossover between the Justice League and the Justice Society. The new Justice League world became known as Earth-1 and the Justice Society was Earth-2. Other earth's followed including one where the Justice League were all villains (Earth-X, IIRC) As far as costumes and attitudes go, DC movies seem to shrink from DC's bright-colored heritage. Perhaps, since DC is known for much silliness from the 40s to the 70s they darkened their movie outlook to cue the viewer that they are trying to be serious. You could argue with cause that they're trying too hard... No I am not referring to the movie WW costume however. The Wonder Woman costume I so despise evaded a quick google search. I found one that looked to be a rebuild of it, but that's as close as I got.

Yes Win8 hurt MS' desktop sales. As did Windows Me and Vista before it. MS can handle that if that's all it was. But the size of the Desktop and laptop market is also shrinking. Just as some people decided they only needed a laptop to do what they want to do, so now some people have decided that their phones and tablets are all they need. Windows is one of two MS' cash cows, (the other is Office). The smaller the market the less cash-cow-y Windows is. MS really needed to jump to the New Thing (Phones and Tablets) in order to insure it would continue to be supported in the manner to which it had become accustomed. With Win 8, they rolled out an OS which was the same on phones and tablets, laptops and desktops, which would have been great if the OS was one of MS' "good" OSes. But it wasn't. Win8 and Win8.1 have market shares on the level of Vista. None of this is a death blow to Microsoft but it is the start of a long, painful shrinking towards irrelevance. Apple is on that same trajectory now that Steve Jobs is no more. In 10 years' time we may be talking about an antitrust suit against Google.

Agreed, especially with the Kryptonian powerset. It's a matter of degree to some extent. Superman is the archetypal Kyrptonian. Everybody else is a "krypttonian...something". Even Kryptonian animals got the full makeover, often complete with uplift to sentience. Certainly Krypto, Superboy/Superman's dog had thought bubbles in the Earth-1 days. It's kind of dangerous and scary to think of what an unmodified earth dog or cat would be like suddenly blessed with Kryptonian grades of strength and speed. Mutants, can go a bit farther afield. Both Phoenix and Storm fly but they don't do it the same way. Nor do Wolverine and Deadpool have quite the same healing abilities. Shortpacked is not DC canon, nor meant to be. It can be ignored for the one-off joke it obviously is. If you read the TVTropes listing under "comic books" you'll Batman was not breathing in space but training to survive in a vacuum. I'm sure me researching the characters I'm about to write is considered a "nice to have"... The thing about a webcomics is the writer usually not just a continuing writer, they're the creator(s). That's usually a good thing through the relationship between creator and creation does occasionally go south (*cough*Star Wars*cough*). A creator hits the ground running with a familiarity with the characters and setting that would take several years of writing a comics character to build up. At least. So yeah definite advantage there. Have you read any webcomics that have changed writers? The one example I can think of is Exiern. It has changed writers twice now and it has issues similar what we see with print comic books changing writers. Including its ongoing continuity getting pretty strained. (as an aside, I find myself a bit annoyed the comic at the moment. I haven't dropped it yet but it is on probation) Remember, DC just rebuilt their universe. It wouldn't be a retcon if Wonder Woman was greek coming out of the world's bootup cycle. Instead they obsessed over her costume (Did you ever see the awful pantsuit they wanted to give her? So very bland...)

http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1478

Botching Win8 was not a fatal error, no. But it made Microsoft a bit player in the mobile (phone and tablet) market which is devouring MS's bread-and-butter desktop and laptop market from beneath. MS lost out on being a third major player in a future they really need to be a part of to remain profitable. It's a move that will hurt MS for years if not decades to come. "Save the Earth" is a lot catchier than just saving dumb ol' humanity which got us in this mess to begin with....

Not at all. She could be carried.

Magic isn't in any danger. The risk is only an interface change. I'm sure Microsoft excecs said something like this to themselves when they launched Windows 8...