But the Enterprise can probably beam Han and Chewy into the void of space if they so desired.

Funny, but to be fair, electricity probably still has its uses in Trek. For instance, does it really make sense to power a toothbrush directly from EPS conduits? (And yes, they seem to still have toothbrushes in the 24th century according to MA; a bit different, but probably still electric.)

Also, according to MA article on EPS:

From the EPS taps, the energy was distributed through conventional electricity; however, this conversion often occurred deep inside the components of a subsystem.

Alternatively, it could be possible the Starfleet voice protocol is similar to UDP, and the system simulates static to fill in the gaps when there is packet loss.

No. “Digital” refers to the logic used to implement a system, which is usually boolean and probably still is in Star Trek.

Things can be digital regardless of implementation; tapes and spinning hard drives, can still store digital binary data.

The whole time, I was thinking, “Why doesn’t Pike just pull a Quark (or more correctly, make Quark pull a Pike), and marry, then almost immediately divorce her?”

“Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so.”

Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?

The difference is it was Federation citizens doing it to rogue Federation citizens, who had actually committed a similar crime of forced relocation by making a Cardassian colony uninhabitable to Cardassians.

That doesn’t make the situation totally right, that’s just to say it’s morally gray.

It’s a little like calling the Alamo a genocide.

Honestly, the transporter is the main reason why I think the Federation could (possible by a landslide) win a war against the Empire from Star Wars; the Empire likely doesn’t have the defenses to stop a Starfleet vessel beaming photon torpedoes, neurocene gas, etcetera directly onto star destroyers. All it takes is a few ships getting past the tie fighters.

It gets less essential the more memory you have, though I have 32GB of RAM on my desktop and still have 32GB swap space, which is probably way overkill, but I can afford it for now become I have a 2TB SSD that still has several hundred gigabytes left and could probably have a bit freed. With the memory shortage caused by “artificial intelligence” companies, I may have to go less crazy on the storage now, though.

If I had any close friends who used Linux, I would install this for April fools.

To be fair, it’s a BB gun, which are tiny metal pellets that, while possibly painful, usually aren’t super lethal and are not a useful instrument in a “good ol’ traditional” American mass shooting. They’re more often used on tin cans than flesh. A few sociopathic kids might use them to torture birds, though.

Maybe they contribute to our dangerous gun culture by getting kids involved early, but getting an older kid a BB gun isn’t as weird or comically American as it sounds in and of itself.

Eh. I mean Christmas Story’s kind of fun, but fair warning, it has a scene that’s rather racist to Chinese people.

That just sounds like insufficient swap space, honestly. For part of the summer of 2024, I used a laptop from 2016 with 8 GB of RAM as my man portable devicr. The swap partition size I used was fine for most things but a but small; however, I’d occasionally run Spleeter and run out of memory, leading to the issues you experienced, which were alleviated by just adding a temporary swap file. Before that, I used a gen 1 Surface Go, also with 8 GB RAM.

I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.

The main thing that personally drives me nuts about DRM is as a Linux user, many streaming services will only give you 480p or even 360p video even though you’re paying for more. With that bullcrap, combined with buggy streaming services, the high seas is sometimes literally a better experience than streaming. Then the hippy moral stuff gets involved:

Although of course, if I can buy it used on Blu-Ray at a local business (Zia and Bookmans are probably the two best places to do it in my area), I’ll do that instead, and just rip the Blu-Rays; it funds places I like while still being (more) legal (than just straight up pirating).

(Granted, I’m a bit of a hypocrite, as I don’t pirate that much. I’m still on Paramount+ for now because my parents still pay for it, but we’re so focused on Star Trek that my idea to just get the Blu-Rays and DVDs is tempting them to get off.)

Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.

I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.

I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.

I mean, that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that’s why Debian’s doing it.

If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.

Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I’ve witnessed first-hand, and I think they’ve made it clear that it’s moreso the ease factor they’re focused on that the security factor.

Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.

This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.