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Taking a quick look, it seems that South Africa went for the Pfizer-BioNTech and J&J vaccines. If vaccine supply was the issue, they should have bought Indian and Chinese vaccines. Those vaccines were actually the best bang for the buck for the global South at the time: their marginally lower efficacy was more than compensated for by their far better availability. It seems like the problem for SA, ironically, is that it stuck too close to the West and did not think independently enough.

This episode was probably peak Dukat. Unfortunately, I don't think they stuck the landing for his character arc. His descent into insane mustache twirling villainy in the last season was not very interesting. By the finale, the Dukat part was by far the weakest of the simultaneous plot threads.

To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.

Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we've seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.

Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery -- even if he's clearly labelled as playing devil's advocate, it feels beyond the pale.

People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There's a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don't suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.

Knowing Google, though, chances are they'll fuck up the execution.

Given TikTok's precarious situation, it's no surprise they're going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It's not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

I'm just surprised Elon Musk didn't find a way to inject himself into this story somehow, like he did with the Thai cave rescue.

This isn't true, though; politics is in the driver's seat, and capital is at the mercy of government. We can see this even in the US where the Biden administration is pushing decoupling/deglobalization for geopolitical and domestic reasons, to the discomfort of US-based multinationals. On the other side of the aisle, the business-friendly cosmopolitan arm of the Republican party has lost ground to the Trumpian populist wing. You see a similar story elsewhere in the world. In the case of Russia, a lot of people thought that Putin was a tool of the oligarchs, so you can change his behavior by putting pressure on the oligarchs. Surprise, it turned out that the oligarchs have to do what Putin tells them, not the other way round.

Shouldn't it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

Now they get to organize dives to view the wreckage of the Titan. Twice the business!