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Seattle City Councilmember Mike O'Brien speaking at an October event in support of his bill to allow Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize.

In a first-of-its-kind law, the Seattle City Council voted 8-0 to allow drivers for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft to bargain collectively.

"The intent of this legislation is to create an environment where innovation can continue to happen, but not at the expense of the workers," said Councilmember Mike O'Brien, who spearheaded the proposal. "I firmly believe that this legislation is a great step in that direction."

"Uber does not share and does not care," said Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Uber drivers who take out loans to buy cars have become "trapped by debt," she added. "Uber drivers can be 'deactivated,' which is a fancy word for being fired," without cause.

PC gamers of a certain age probably fondly remember the Commander Keen game series, some of the first smoothly scrolling platform games made for MS-DOS. What many classic gamers might not know is that before working on Commander Keen, John Carmack, John Romero, and the rest of the team at id Software (then known as Ideas from the Deep) pitched Nintendo on the idea of porting Super Mario Bros. 3 to the personal computer. The group went so far as to code up a proof-of-concept demo for the game running on the PC.

As David Kushner memorably lays out in his book Masters of Doom, the IFD team managed to come up with one of the first smooth side-scrolling algorithms designed for the PC way back in September of 1990. Unlike platformers on dedicated game consoles (which had hardware more suited to smooth scrolling), PC side-scrollers at the time usually had clunky, screen-clearing transitions when a character got to the edge of the screen. Carmack's algorithm, though, allowed for much smoother background movement by only redrawing the elements of the screen that actually changed frame to frame.

After proving the concept with an SMB3-like one-level demo called Dangerous Dave in "Copyright Infringement," the team set down to make a respectable PC conversion of Super Mario Bros. 3. They sent it to Nintendo in the hopes of gaining a lucrative licensing contract, but Nintendo declined the offer (Romero says they weren't interested in making games for non-Nintendo hardware anymore). At that point, the tech was funneled into the Commander Keen games. Id Software later went on to focus on leaps in 3D gaming with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and its progeny, and the rest is history.

The MYK-78 "Clipper" chip, the 1990's version of the "golden key."

In the face of a Federal Bureau of Investigation proposal requesting backdoors into encrypted communications, a noted encryption expert urged Congress not to adopt the requirements due to technical faults in the plan. The shortcomings in question would allow anyone to easily defeat the measure with little technical effort.

Please note, the testimony referenced above was delivered on May 11, 1993. However, that doesn't change its applicability today. In fact, current pressure being applied by law enforcement and intelligence officials over end-to-end encrypted communications appears eerily reminiscent of a similar battle nearly 25 years ago.

Last week, FBI Director James Comey again pushed forward arguments for law enforcement "backdoors" into encrypted communication applications. Comey claimed that the gunmen who attempted to attack a Texas anti-Muslim cartoon event used encrypted communications several times on the day of the attack to contact an overseas individual tied to terrorism. The revelation is part of a renewed lobbying effort to get technology providers to provide what Comey once described as a "golden key" to access encrypted communications. Though the FBI director reluctantly dropped his lobbying efforts for such a backdoor this summer, the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have raised the issue again. Even President Obama recently asked for technology companies to help give the government access to communications over messaging applications and social media.

"From the director of Fast & Furious" are not words that I want to see in any Star Trek trailer.

Star Trek is a science fiction series. It is at its best when it is exploring the implications of its science. Yes, we want action and adventure, too, but there should be a context: exploration, the conflict between different cultures, the dangers of the (mis)use of technology. The TV series has always been better at this than the films, and perhaps it's understandable that the film would have different priorities in a bid for mass market appeal (though the recent success of the very sci-fi The Martian suggests that there is a healthy appetite for this kind of thing after all). Still, the new trailer looks long on punching, short on thinking.

Trailers can, of course, be completely misleading. I was suckered by the first Terminator Genisys trailer—the good trailer, the one that made the film look like it was going to be an exciting riff on the story we've seen before, not the second spoiler-laden trailer that showed what should have been a major reveal before we even stepped foot in the cinema. So maybe Star Trek Beyond will turn out to be good, but oh boy, the new trailer does not inspire confidence. Star Trek Into Darkness was the worst kind of lazy fan-service, totally squandering the promise of the reboot, but at least it was recognizable as Trek. Based on this glimpse Star Trek Beyond isn't, and it looks like it's going to plumb new depths.