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CLEMENS: Oh? I'm not so impressed with this future... huge starships... weapons that can no doubt destroy entire cities... military conquest as a way of life.

She looks sidelong at him.

TROI: Is that what you see here?

CLEMENS: Oh, I know what you say... this is a vessel of exploration... your mission is to, discover new worlds...

The Turbolift arrives. A strange alien EXITS. Clemens reacts, stares after him. They ENTER the Turbolift.

TROI: Deck thirty-six.

CLEMENS: That's what the Spanish said... and the Dutch, and the Portuguese. It's what all conquerors say... (beat) I'm sure it's what you told that blue skinned fellow I just saw... before you brought him here to serve you.

TROI: He's one of thousands of species we've encountered. We live in a peaceful Federation with many of them... the people you see are here by choice.

Clemens ponders this for a moment.

CLEMENS: So there are a privileged few... who serve on these ships, living in luxury, wanting for nothing. But what about everyone else? What about the poor? You ignore them...

TROI: Poverty was eliminated a long time ago. And a lot of things disappeared with it: hopelessness... despair... cruelty... war...

He regards her solemnly. He's beginning to realize that his dark view is misplaced.

CLEMENS: I come from a time when men achieve wealth and power by standing on the backs of the poor... when prejudice and intolerance are commonplace... when power is an end unto itself... (beat) And you're telling me... that isn't how it is anymore?

TROI: That's right.

CLEMENS: (with a sigh) Maybe it is worth giving up cigars for, after all...

Troi smiles... the Turbolift door opens and they EXIT.

There's an episode of Voyager, Author, Author that does explore issues of the oppressed living in the Federation, but the oppressed are holograms and are obviously a stand-in for an arbitrary oppressed minority. They had to use holograms because it would have been unbelievable if they had used people whose rights were clearly established. This is also a very brief plot line that (as far as I recall) appeared only in that one episode. By contrast, Troi's view of the Federation/humanity in the future is the same one as in each of the series. Really, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Not even Scotty could change the laws of physics,

Well, LaForge changed the gravitation constant of the universe.

Scotty could probably change a few laws with some duct tape, phasers, and a tricorder.

Data referring to "TeeVee"

"That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year Two Thousand Forty."

You might as well argue that you have to go the extra length to say "Mozilla but not MSIE" because IE started the whole "compatible" thing. Just say "Opera". No one spoofs that.

I am not the GP, but what are your trying to imply? You took him seriously enough to read and respond to his post.

Like our fat Zakdorn friend tells us, "how you perform in a "mismatch" is precisely what interests Starfleet. After all -- when one is in the superior position, one is expected to win."

MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.

Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:

• section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
• automatic image rescaling
• LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
• message transclusion - create messages that can be used
• namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
• plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)

I'm the webmaster of the "Star Trek Minutiae" site... it seems my .htaccess script needs a little work. ;-)

Here's the regular HTML page: click here

However, the chart that's currently online is over a year and a half old, and rather out-of-date. Certainly nothing compared to the original site...

Dan Carlson

Here's an interesting graphic comparing ship size.

-Mansa

And Paramount has nothing to do with it. Some snippets from their website.

"Star Trek: Renaissance is a collaboratively written fan fiction project depicting events in the Alpha Quadrant after the Dominion War with an original ship and crew. The series is a mixture of political intrigue, exploration and character driven drama with a definite story arc running in the background.

A new Star Trek series written with the same industry standards as a real TV drama, but from the fans, to the fans, by the fans - most of them people who were disappointed to the lack of ingenuity in Star Trek: Voyager. Like its canon cousins, the series is written in standard script format and divided into seasons, each lasting for 26 episodes."

"The Dominion War has been over for a quarter of a century, but the painful scars of the conflict still run deep. The Alpha Quadrant rebuilds but in the process, a lot of compromises are made. Idealism and principles of the old are sometimes bent, sometimes broken.

Alliances forged in the fires of war buckle as the galaxy looks for the troubled new century, a time of isolationism and prejudice. New and old enemies rise, both without, and within. It takes a resolved crew to face the challenges of this era. A new Captain. A new ship. The USS Enterprise."

We've got a Captain that's flawed, alien shipriders that we're not sure we can trust and a Federation that could be withering from internal corruption. I've read the first few, and they have been GOOD. Easily better than the last 2 TV series AND movies to come out of Hollywood. If you've been thirsting for new Trek but with the same qualities that endeared you to the old Trek then you should stop reading this and click the link.

Those are old tech. They've been used in Transporters for years as in this article. You will notice that, in this case, the Heisenburg Compensation is done with Elmers Glue to make the electrons stay still during transport.

--
Mike
I eat glue!