Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say “Ni” at will to old ladies.

Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?!

You don’t need any help from me, sir.

That’s right! …

A standard reference model in 3d modeling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot

In emergency cases most holograms can be shut off to match increased energy demands by weapons and shields.

Disengage the safety protocols and suddenly you’ve got weapons and shield emitters than ought to work just as well as their material counterparts, but can’t be damaged (or any damage can be instantly reset). We know that holograms can be projected into space so the only limitation would be the range of the holoemitters.

At least “crushed by asteroid” is not contagious.

• Network (1976)
• Jurassic Park
• Pulp Fiction

Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast (especially series 3 covering the French Revolution) and his The History of Rome series.

Hyperbole to emphasize the importance of following orders in battle, even if you think it’s a mistake.

Ours is not to reason why; Ours is but to do and die

White noise. I bought a white noise machine years ago when I lived near a large emergency room that had ambulances going by all day every day. It really helped with the sirens, and when I moved away I kept using the machine. My brain now interprets the white noise as profound silence, and I sleep so deeply that I don’t know how I ever got by without it.

From a national security standpoint of the government, it absolutely does matter who has the data.

TestDisk and PhotoRec. TestDisk can recover broken drive partitions, PhotoRec can recover deleted files even if the partition table is borked.

PSA: gog.com sells versions of Armada and Hidden Evil that work on modern systems.

The Voyage Home is the first movie I remember seeing. I was around 3 years old and my parents took me to see it at a drive in theater. It remains my favorite Trek movie.

“Here come the test results: ‘You are a horrible person’. That’s what it says, ‘a horrible person’. We weren’t even testing for that!”

I just use Everything desktop search and let the files fall where they may.

Just lemmy in a browser for me. Never used facebag or twatter or others besides reddit.

I want Roland Emmerich to make a movie out of the short story A Pail of Air.

tl;dr/spoiler: ~20 years ago, a black hole passed through the solar system and captured the Earth, dragging it inexorably away from the Sun. This causes great earthquakes, tsunami, and other immediate civilization-ending catastrophes, but the real disaster comes when the atmosphere freezes and falls like snow to the ground. The original story follows a young boy born after the cataclysm whose chores include collecting buckets of frozen air.

The government only knows that they voted, not how they voted.

Your replicator is probably too small to replicate larger components, which would be a major inconvenience at best or a showstopper at worst. And industrial replicators are even harder to come by than starships.

Then there’s getting access to the replicator patterns for sensitive or dangerous components. Dilithium chambers, weapons, Mercassium composite for shield generators, etc. are classified by Starfleet.

Then there are substances that can’t be replicated, such as verterium cortenide for the warp coils. I don’t think it’s explicitly stated that VC can’t be replicated, but we know that Voyager had to find some to refit their warp coils, they couldn’t just replicate it. Also dilithium.

And finally, there’s antimatter. Building a starship won’t do you much good if you don’t have gas for the tank. Antimatter does not occur in large quantities in nature, and probably can’t be replicated (or at least not safely.) So you’d need some sort of industrial base to produce it, further complicating your plans.

If social media companies exist to collect massive troves of personal info from users–and they do–then there is a valid national security concern over social media controlled by an adversary. This is distinct from the individual privacy concerns towards domestically-controlled social media.