There was an entire TNG episode (Season 6, Episode 12) whose plot centered around this:
Moriarty was reactivated by mistake, and took the ship hostage, demanding to be able to leave the holodeck.
Geordi and Data spent half the episode experimenting with beaming (inanimate) holographic objects off the holodeck, to no avail. With that said:
Their transporter turned out to be a holographic fake (and so was Geordi), so who knows if the results were valid.
Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.
Even without an official rank, on Voyager he was still considered a Department Head and (more importantly) the CMO, which gave significant authority (even exceeding the Captain on certain medical matters), regardless of whether or not he was ever given any pips. The same thing would likely apply on subsequent postings.
If he ever had to be assigned a rank for clerical/administrative purposes, it would probably be the default required rank for a Starfleet CMO candidate for the class of ship he was serving on.
Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.
And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.
Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.
You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.
…
Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers
I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.
Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.
Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.
I can’t speak from experience as I don’t own any Amazon devices, but I have read reports that it seems to work fine with the FireTV variant of Android.
The dev has only tested it against Chromecast with Google TV, with that said I’m using it on a Shield TV and a Shield Pro and it runs fine on both.
Google is already doing this with their default Android TV launcher. I tolerated their home screen ‘recommendations’ for a while as they occasionally highlighted something interesting to watch, but one day I switched on the TV and was greeted with a huge advert banner for a fucking watch on the home screen.
At that point I spent a few hours setting up FLauncher on all my ATV devices.
Same. Coming up to 4 years owning my Model 3 with no major issues and no work needed other than normal serviceable items common to all cars (tyres, wiper blades, cabin filters, etc).
On the flip side, one of my old coworkers who got his Model 3 at the same time as me had a litany of problems from day one. We used to joke that his car had been built by an intern on a Friday night before a major holiday.
I don’t do enough miles these days to justify getting rid of a perfectly good, functional, almost brand new car and buying a new one - I plan to just run it into the ground instead.
I don’t think I’d buy another Tesla in the future, though. Not necessarily because I care what people think of the car I drive, but because Tesla has made some astonishingly stupid decisions with their new/refreshed cars. No physical drive selector? No TURN SIGNAL STALK? Yes, because I love having critical vehicle controls on a movable surface. Come on now.
I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.
Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.
Unlike oil, rare earth minerals can be recycled to a degree. What is today your car battery may end up in 10+ years as someone’s house battery, or a power bank or other low-load energy store. The raw materials can eventually be recovered to an extent as well.
A resource disaster is inevitable either way as nobody wants to give up the convenience that we have become accustomed to. Encouraging affluent economies to adopt EVs is pure damage limitation at this point, our biosphere is already fucked from over a century of waste emissions, the least we can do is try and find solutions that don’t involve burning fossilized plant matter for every car journey.
The EMH is never shown with pips on Voyager. The “ECH” was shown with pips appearing on its first appearance, however:
spoiler
The entire ECH subroutine was created as the result of The Doctor’s daydreaming, so the visualisation of a rank appearing out of thin air makes sense in that context.
The only other time the ECH mode was used in a genuine emergency (Season 7, Episodes 16/17), he did not have pips.