LovableSidekick

The tall kid looks exactly like Billy Sparks, the neighbor kid on Young Sheldon.

That's a very old-school gaming style. Every game I played on my Atari 2600 was like that. You never win, you just play until you lose. I used to wonder about the possible mass side effects of this - were we subtly conditioning people to accept being losers?

Well of course I did, whaddya think I am, some kinda idjit?

So do I, but I wouldn't expect her to win right now. Americans are too lazy to want change but they'll want to be rescued from collapse. Things have to get a lot worse before enough fence-sitters will listen to her.

Isn't MacOS based on a Unix kernel? Or did they evolve away from the core principle of treating everything as a file?

America isn't going to have a revolution. Modern Americans couldn't revolution our way out of a Walmart. Best we might be able to do is a collapse, and we'll blame it on everybody in the world but ourselves.

Please don't let her form a new party. As much as people say they hate the 2-party system, fragmenting the Democratic Party would be a yuge mistake at this point. We need to let the Trumpublican Party eat itself when he keels over from dementia or his final Big Mac Attack. The MAGA opportunists who rode in on his coattails will tear each other to pieces as they claw for position like rats.

I can really see AOC as president. She's already at the minimum age, but I would like to see her take another 5-10 years to learn how to broaden her appeal.

Yes, but that kind of subjective comparison doesn't work when you do a little math. The density of air at 1 atmosphere is about 1.2 kg/m3. According to Jonathan Frakes he weighed about 90kg when they shot TNG, so assembling Riker would require about 17 cubic meters of air - about how much is in a 16x16-ft room with a 10-ft ceiling - which is about the size of the transporter room. And that would use ALL the air in the room, i.e. making the room a vacuum, which doesn't happen.

And that's just for one guy, not a whole landing party. Of course the air could be supplied through vents - but it would have to rush in like a hurricane, which doesn't happen, and this doesn't cover how people beam into places that aren't equipped like that.

On the flip side, we know people's atoms don't turn into air when they beam away, because there's no violent outward whoosh from where they were standing. The effect would be as if they asploded.

Seems to me the transporter would have to operate on principles that just aren't known to us right now. Maybe the fabric of spacetime itself can somehow spawn and absorb matter, enabling a person's atoms to appear seemingly out of nothing when when they materialize - as well as local air disappearing to get out of their away. Vice versa when the person dematerializes. In fact instead of just information being beamed up, maybe the person's actual atoms are transported through a special spacetime medium, not just radio waves. The idea of sending your original atoms might clear up the philosophical/moral dilemma about whether the transporter kills you.

But then where did Tom Riker come from? I dunno, maybe the transporter glitch forked Will through the spacetimes of two separate multiverses, and both of them got reassembled in our universe? Or maybe it wasn't technically a transporter glitch but a weird wrinkle in spacetime, where it folded onto itself and he got sent through both folds.

I love speculating about this stuff!

Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn't sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.

The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn't fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.

Oh come on... next you'll tell me that 24 hours in a day and 24 beers in a case is just a coincidence!

Mine is that I had a drink with Scotty, at least in my imagination.