It doesn't help that a lot of it is simply so out of date now, that it's considered the norm now.
We don't exactly think all that much of Picard being bald, or Janeway being Captain of the Voyager. For us now, they're normal, ordinary things.
Whereas back in the day, it was an unusual choice. There were many jokes about it being natural the Voyager would get into a space accident on its first voyage, because Janeway was in command, for example.
I don't know if it was only a part. The world has moved on from the day, so a lot of what would have been in-your-face bleeding-edge progressivism back then no longer is.
The women could wear miniskirts. No-one was smoking. Uhura (African American) was not a maid or cook, but a well-respected competent peer, along with Chekhov (Soviet Russian), Sulu (Japanese), and McCoy (Caucasian American).
We may not think much of it now, and in the miniskirt case, think poorly of it, but back in the day, they were bleeding-edge social stances.
It might also be groundwork for more complicated things on their GPUs.
The article says nothing about nVidia actually planning to enter the desktop CPU market, only that a bunch of unrelated analysts compared the CPU performance, and said it was about equal to what's on the market.
You can also use https://www.youtube.com/v/<xxx>. It's the old video link structure, but it still works just fine. It's easier to change it too, since a lot of devices can select text by the word.
The translator tech is not very far ahead of what we have today.
I would disagree with the translator. On the surface, yes, but it is incredibly far removed from how any of our translation technologies work.
The universal translator works by scanning your mind/brain signals, finding universal constants within it, and then constructs a translation that way. In theory, a novel alien could be parked next to a universal translator, and it would still be possible to translate for them, in the absence of a linguistic database.
I also think the medical tricorder will some day inspire/shape new tech similar to the communicator with cell phones.
It sort of has, but more in the other way, where the devices are inspired off its functions instead of its form. Going off of wikipedia, there's some speculations that a smartphone might well become our equivalent of a tricorder thanks to the massive amount of sensors that they have in them.
In the original Star Trek, that Alcubierre was inspired by, it wasn't explained at all. You just had warp engines and impulse engines. Warp engines made it so the ship could go at warp speed, but go too fast, and they could come off the ship, or the ship would explode.
It was later series that tried to have an explanation for how they worked.
Although I don't think the writers cared particularly much for whether they were theoretically possible or not, anyway. They work through subspace, and that doesn't exist in reality, so a lot of oddities could just be brushed under that.
But since we’ve already got the fictional construct of subspace, the notion of a mycelial species that can extend through it seems…within the realm of truthiness, all things considered.
Especially since TNG already had creatures that lived within subspace, in Schisms. If humanoid-ish beings can live in subspace, fungal life doesn't seem that much of a stretch.
The part I’ve never fully grasped is how one travels along the network, but then, I’ve never fully grasped how the warp coils are supposed to work, either.
IIRC, it's like the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Hyperdrives. Once you get into spore-space/hyperspace, you get an infinite amount of choices to navigate through, but if you can figure out how to figure out your path, you can exit where you want. Though unlike the Heart of Gold, which tests every single possibility and impossibility simultaneously, the later iterations of the spore drive take a bit more after Dune, where a navigator can commune with the mycelial network and divine the way the ship should go, rather than needing inordinate amounts of computing power to brute force the solution.
How the ship is moved along the network after the navigator figures out the route is left as an exercise for the reader.
Although it might go both ways these days, since it wouldn't be at all surprising if newer writers heard of Alcubierre's warp drive, and incorporated that into Star Trek as a mechanism for how it works.
The mycelial network also exists largely within subspace. So far, we have yet to discover whether subspace exists or not.
The U.S.S. Discovery Spore drive, is it complete nonsense or is there a scientific theory I’m unaware of?
Both, since it relies quite heavily on Star Trek's Signature Subspace Science, and there's no real-life equivalent for it.
The spores are from the mycelial network, an organism/structure that exists in a subspace domain, and like subspace, is spread/connected throughout the universe/multiverse. The spore drive shifts the ship into that subspace domain, and uses the mycelial network to route the ship to the appropriate destination.
The closest things that might apply is the hyperdrives in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or the space-folding drives in Dune, where you have a spanning extradimensional network that you can use to get to your destination, as long as you can find the right set of routes to get to where you want to go.
I don’t know why they actively refuse to do the same with microsoft products.
Maybe the subscriptions are seen as them "keeping up with technology", which isn't the case for the bus pass?
For a while, my university was offering a degree project on cryptocurrencies, for example, because cryptocurrencies were seen as the future for a time, and they would be falling behind if not. Even though it was a few years after cryptocurrencies were going out of vogue (this was before NFTs came about). So they wouldn't mind that, but the bus pass would be instead seen as a waste of money if they just handed it out.
I do wish that more games still had cheats. It does feel a bit like a lot of newer games have foregone them entirely. You can't type plane into GTA V, and have a plane materialise, like you could in Vice City, for example.
You'd need to mod it in.