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Apparently it is, since you failed to do it in an effective manner, or for that matter, demonstrate any real cognizance of what I said.

Can't justify the unjustifiable.

For example, even this referendum did not detail the mechanism or the price of leaving, so it's kinda vague from the start. Do you consider that acceptable? I don't.

Then take it up with the person who proposed it - Cameron. But the mechanism for leaving is a separate issue from whether or not they should leave, and on which a majority has spoken.

Can't have "majority rules for me, supermajority for thee".

Why? Is there a reason that we can't?

This isn't hard either: because otherwise you're stacking the deck in plain sight to suit your preferences. You can't tell one side that they have to get 50%, and the other side they have to get 60% (or 70%, whatever) with a straight face without playing Calvinball.

People can change what standards they find acceptable.

Oooookay then. So if the Remain faction gets what they want, a second referendum, you'd have no problem with the Leave people insisting they need 60% to stay, when only 50% was required to Leave? If so, you'd still be wrong, but at least you'd be consistent.

So why can't people demand what they want from Parliament?

Because a public referendum is an infinitely superior choice for issues like this, as opposed to trusting an elite few who represent monied interests first and the people a very distant second.

Yeah, I gotta admit, that struck me as odd.

What made me chuckle is that, from the first film, what created this alternate timeline was the Romulan ship that came back in time. So how does that make Sulu gay versus straight in the original timeline. Or did we start in an alternate alternate timeline?

And of course, what'll happen to Demora Sulu?

Or maybe the chase... http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...

Sssooo, it's an Aperture Science Sentry Turret, only without the red eye and projectile pellets.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki...

Also, most capital ships in Star Wars sport ion cannons. Even the Y-Wing fighter had them (cockpit mounted top turret). Not to the level of the cannon on Hoth, so no one-shot kills, but enough to chip away at a target.

83% ? It's been made up by Barney Stinson :
http://how-i-met-your-mother.w...

The Enterprise, at least by the TNG era, is an odd battleship. Crew families on board are not exactly likely to inspire bravery and risk-taking. The majority of the crew have science and diplomacy related jobs too, with only minimal training in the use of firearms and warfare.

If you go nearly a Century without war and no real threats, you'd the same thing...

The Enterprise in Kirk's time was quite different, because, you know, Russians (er, I mean Klingons!)

Notice the families were taken off the USS Odyssey before it went into the Gamma Quadrant at the end of Season 2 of DS9? The Federation was slowly buying a clue that perhaps their plan to put families on battleships was stupid.

Oh no, it's not obvious in TNG, but there were plenty of threats during the "lost years" just not so much from the Romulans and Klingons, or even yet the Ferengi (let alone the Borg.). The Cardassians, for example.

The decision to offload the families in that episode was so they could justify losing a ship, but not look so stupid they sent them all in to what was obviously a military fight.

That was the idea with the saucer section separation. When battle was required and there was time, a small subset of the crew could pilot the engineering section and the majority could stay out of harms way on the saucer. The engineering section even had a "battle bridge".

Yep, again, a Century of no war and no threats does that to you... Stupid idea, not really useful or used all that much, but featured a few times in the show because they spent a lot of money getting ILM to do those shots...

Technically the idea itself was brought up in TOS, and even the seventies movie, but never happened for various reasons. aka budget. But by TNG, there was a desire to show the family side of things for characters while recognizing that they needed some way to get the civilians out of danger.

Couldn't just have the Enterprise go back to port whenever needed, and the absence of a real civilian presence in many episodes of the TOS was something of a problem. Other than one episode, they might as well all have been orphans and confirmed bachelors (even the Mirror Kirk was obviously in a longer-term relationship than the main one). Not that TNG got much better, they even killed off Picard's family, and Data's creator had the most appearances, except for Worf's son and Wesley. The latter who was so annoying, he got put on a Space bus three times. At least Alexander only suffered from a case of SORAS and got a good enough send-off. Poor Kurn though, they wiped his mind with never a question about it.

Still, they tried, as it was their only option. Well, except some weird Holodeck stuff, which would have had other questions.

Plus you know, having them on the same ship sets made it a lot cheaper. Which was actually the reason they ended up not using the Saucer Separation much at all, since it DID cost more money and even distracted from the story. Exceptions being cases where they could do it for more dramatic effect like the movie.

Trek, sometimes its budget limitations open up doors (the Transporters), sometimes they close them (see all the funny nose aliens and universal translators).

Nope, even in the war scenes (mostly in DS9), they don't have armor.

You might read what I wrote again...

"What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else..."

It's just not that kinda show.

No shit... that is why I pointed that very point out. :)

You don't seem to have read the link, that episode even showed the Federation troops fighting on the ground. I get it, you haven't seen all the episodes, so I linked to one you might easily have missed. That might be why you didn't finish quoting my material. Still, you are aware that somebody can point out your error in one aspect, and offering a different take on it? Wasn't missing, it's included in some episodes.

You won't see armor though (I think Babylon 5 had one episode where they did show armored troops in a brief scene on the ground), not because it's a TV show, but because of what kind of show Star Trek is.

But here's the rest of what you cut:

Though when it comes down to it, DS9 is practically the only time they show a war going on. Well, except for that one time [wikia.com] when there was.

Still, most of the time, it's the HMS Beagle on survey, not the Temeraire at Tralfalgar.

Why you removed them when they were the substance of what I was saying(at least in that section, I can forgive the exclusion of the initial part about the focus of TV shows, though I would have preferred a response to it), I don't know, but you really should read those parts. I don't feel like restoring those links, but they're still above. I suppose you wouldn't even need to check them, if you were familiar with the subject. Still, try to show you're paying attention to what I said, since despite your complaints, you show no evidence you understood what I said at all as you did remove part of what I said and I think you missed the meaning because of that. Yes, I can understand trying to be brief, but sometimes with selective editing, you actually reduce your own understanding of a post.

So, to explicitly put it out for you, you do know that the Star Trek series is mostly going to be about Expeditions of the Beagle, rather than Battles of Tralfalgar, right? Since you cut it, I can't even know if you saw it, let alone paid due attention to it.

Though in episodes like this one, you can see how the characters themselves see it. I suspect it's the filter of what you think it would be, as opposed to what it is, that matters. It's really hard to get out of your perceptual box to a new paradigm, and we all think that "Oh, it's a Navy ship, that means it's really all military" when obviously that's not the real intent.

I mean, if you want future space war, there's Legend of the Galactic Heroes, not Star Trek. And if you want depictions of technology, as opposed to a plot device, I think you need MacGuyver. Star Trek is about something else. The setting is just a dressing.

Which is why I personally think the recent movies are a fail, they're too conflict and action oriented. If only we could connect Gene Roddenberry to a turbine.

This is the first time since the beginning of time that I've come back to a thread a second time, more than a day later.

And, so far as I'm concerned, Star Trek Continues is the true heir of TOS. Excellent scripts, better acting than you'll find in the reboots. They just work so damned well, and it's unfortunate it looks like that kind of project is dead in the water now.

STC was the only one I've become invested in, and it's the main reason I'm burned up about the new "guidelines".

On this week's episode of Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast, Jordan Hoffman welcomes John Van Citters of CBS, a lifelong Star Trek fan, to give some much needed context on the recently released Star Trek fan film guidelines issued by CBS and Paramount Pictures.

Unfortunately, this is an in-house affair, with both the host and the guest hewing to the official CBS / Paramount story line. Van Citters seems like a nice enough guy, but then the length restriction comes up, and I wanted to put a brick through my monitor.

48m40

I've heard from a lot of people and seen a lot of chatter online in recent days about the length guideline and people feeling that that is untenable and that they can't tell a Star Trek story in fifteen minutes or thirty minutes.

I think that's a bit insulting to Star Trek and to the creativity of the fans I've met and to some of the fan filmmakers I've met.

The idea that Star Trek is capable of only telling one type or length of story that that is kind of ludicrous. There are dozens of winners of the Strange New Worlds competition who would disagree ...

Certainly, a creative person can compose shorter works. For example, Tolstoy composed a novella by the title (in English) The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This was later adapted by Akira Kurosawa as the movie Ikiru, with a a running time of 143 minutes. Oops, perhaps that was a bad example.

Let's try again.

Nobody ever accused Mozart of not being able to compose a Divertimento. Turns out he actually composed 17 numbered Divertimenti, but the performance times seem to range around the hour mark for the ones with their own Wikipedia pages. Oops, perhaps that's another bad example.

I could go on, but I think that's enough.

What made the original Star Trek captivating for me back when I was ten years old was that the stories involved having an actual attention span. No fanfic production will recapture my childhood with a crappy fifteen minute performance length.

Roger Ebert:

I saw "Ikiru" first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates' statement, "the unexamined life is not worth living."' Over the years I have seen "Ikiru" every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.

Did Kurosawa make it too long? You be the judge. I personally don't think you're going to pack a whole lot of "examined life" into fifteen minutes unless you're fricking Tolstoy.

I'm trying to figure out why that entire interview pussyfoots around the subject matter (I could only handle the first 50 minutes on my first pass). I started to wonder if the real problem with STC is that damn redhead, Elise McKennah, played by Michele Specht. At first I didn't like the character (or character idea), but her spunk eventually grew on me.

The thing

That, and whenever the "bad guys" show up, who responds?

Starfleet...

And it'll almost always be the named ship in the title. Or the crew of DS9.

Oddly, they are ALWAYS there, it's almost as if the show was about them. Just like how it's always a crime for the homicide squad on CSI, or some sort of emergency for the Chicago Fire squad, not for sewer maintenance or parking tickets, and how ER is almost never set in a doctor's office.

You know, except when it's an episode about the Holodeck going haywire. Then the solution is usually shooting Broccoli.

And they show up with ships armed with shields, torpedoes, and phasers for ship-to-ship combat, and so on...

What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else... You would have ship security dressed nicely for casual times, but you'd have armored soldiers for real fighting, but again... "TV show"... :)

Nope, even in the war scenes (mostly in DS9), they don't have armor.

It's just not that kinda show.

Though when it comes down to it, DS9 is practically the only time they show a war going on. Well, except for that one time when there was.

Still, most of the time, it's the HMS Beagle on survey, not the Temeraire at Tralfalgar.

That, and whenever the "bad guys" show up, who responds?

Starfleet...

And it'll almost always be the named ship in the title. Or the crew of DS9.

Oddly, they are ALWAYS there, it's almost as if the show was about them. Just like how it's always a crime for the homicide squad on CSI, or some sort of emergency for the Chicago Fire squad, not for sewer maintenance or parking tickets, and how ER is almost never set in a doctor's office.

You know, except when it's an episode about the Holodeck going haywire. Then the solution is usually shooting Broccoli.

And they show up with ships armed with shields, torpedoes, and phasers for ship-to-ship combat, and so on...

What is missing, of course, is the Army, but that is a reflection of "TV show" more than anything else... You would have ship security dressed nicely for casual times, but you'd have armored soldiers for real fighting, but again... "TV show"... :)

Nope, even in the war scenes (mostly in DS9), they don't have armor.

It's just not that kinda show.

Though when it comes down to it, DS9 is practically the only time they show a war going on. Well, except for that one time when there was.

Still, most of the time, it's the HMS Beagle on survey, not the Temeraire at Tralfalgar.

According to Wookipedia, You've got your clone troopers, (clones of Jango Fett), you've got your Imperial Stormtroopers (described as "the ultimate evolution of clone troopers") , and you've got your First Order Stormtroopers.

Imperial Stormtroopers were originally clone troopers, but their accelerated aging process caused their physical skills and abilities to deteriorate so they were replaced by non-clone volunteers and conscripts.

First Order Stormtroopers composed the army of the junta that arose out of the fallen empire, and were comprised of individuals taken from their parents at birth.

Long story short, it depends on where you are in the storyline as to the level of diversity in the Stormtrooper ranks.

According to Wookipedia, You've got your clone troopers, (clones of Jango Fett), you've got your Imperial Stormtroopers (described as "the ultimate evolution of clone troopers") , and you've got your First Order Stormtroopers.

Imperial Stormtroopers were originally clone troopers, but their accelerated aging process caused their physical skills and abilities to deteriorate so they were replaced by non-clone volunteers and conscripts.

First Order Stormtroopers composed the army of the junta that arose out of the fallen empire, and were comprised of individuals taken from their parents at birth.

Long story short, it depends on where you are in the storyline as to the level of diversity in the Stormtrooper ranks.

Most criminals should be executed.

Ahem!
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Justice_(episode)

I'm pretty sure you're confusing Hilary Clinton with Olivia Pierce

Did they hire Elroy Patashnik?

To bring down a murderous nut-cult, you have to do what the Brits did to the Thuggee. You have to infiltrate them, identify their leaders, and kill them. If the Brits had been worried about offending the peaceful worshippers of Kali, India would STILL be plagued by ritual murders today.

-jcr

Wow, I hope to God (or Goddess) that you know that what you're referring to is fiction: http://indianajones.wikia.com/... .

Kali continues to be (peacefully) worshiped as a very popular form of the Goddess or the Mother of the Universe in Hinduism in India, Nepal and even in Tibet and some forms of Buddhism but I'm not entirely sure about the latter.

Patents are supposed to be about implementations of ideas and not just a vague description of something that would be nice to have.

Yeahh... And if they weren't, then there should be a suit from paramount pictures who invented the PADD

Hell.... StarTrek even had Touch Screen tablets, before the Palm Pilot or the 1st gen Blackberry was a thing.

Depending on the angle and where the zombie was in the animation, it could look a little like they are tossing their asses... closest I could find: http://quake.wikia.com/wiki/Zo...

All I can think of is HUDSON.

But maybe we're on to something here . . . maybe we can consolidate schools and prisons . . . ?

It that does happen, remember The Simpsons predicted it http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Springfield_Elementary_School_and_Prison

Not to mention General Order 24

It's really weird how an 65" HDTV will hang on the wall in a home, and yet you'll find that same home filled with people watching Netflix on a cool smartphone they bought because it has an "HD" screen.

Of course a "home filled with people" and only one HDTV will have people watching on smartphones, unless they all want to watch the same program. The prediction in Back to the Future Part II that split-screen TV would become a common feature by 2015 unfortunately did not come to pass.

This isn't the 1960s, where each home can only afford to buy one TV that weighs 400 pounds and takes up half a room. Most homes own more than one television. Quite a few homes almost maintain the ratio of one per room. HDTVs are cheap enough now that if people want to watch multiple channels, they'll just buy multiple televisions. Some in the same room to create a video "wall".

My HDTV, made in 2008, has both split-screen (presenting multiple inputs, including PC), as well as PIP. We've had the technology for years.

Why be nice to a machine — a mere syntactic device?

Parents ought to teach kids to be polite to the sentient — yes. Unfortunately, lack of good manners there well predates any AI.

It might help when Skynet becomes self-aware.

Stupid article, anyway. Being called in for IT support for family can cause the same kind of rudeness towards machines.

Why be nice to a machine — a mere syntactic device?

Parents ought to teach kids to be polite to the sentient — yes. Unfortunately, lack of good manners there well predates any AI.

It's really weird how an 65" HDTV will hang on the wall in a home, and yet you'll find that same home filled with people watching Netflix on a cool smartphone they bought because it has an "HD" screen.

Of course a "home filled with people" and only one HDTV will have people watching on smartphones, unless they all want to watch the same program. The prediction in Back to the Future Part II that split-screen TV would become a common feature by 2015 unfortunately did not come to pass.

Like in Bugarup in Pratchett's Discworld. Like many things in Discworld, it makes sense.

Dr. Richard Daystrom would disagree...if he was still alive (yet alive?)

The Ultimate Computer

Plus, we can thank Stargate for telling us about how well this idea goes. Hint: not well.

Huh?

First, BDS is not dying - in fact, quite the opposite

My apologies, it was a joke.
For many, many years on Slashdot, people trolled stories about the decline of *BSD: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/...

Don't apologize, any regular visitor here would have understood that joke. I officially revoke your apology and replace it with: "it's a joke dumbass".

Carry on.......

Huh?

First, BDS is not dying - in fact, quite the opposite

My apologies, it was a joke.
For many, many years on Slashdot, people trolled stories about the decline of *BSD: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/...

UNESCO had drawn up a list of world heritage sites that were in danger from climate change, and Australia had the reefs removed because it would hurt tourism.

To top it off, Australia has just gutted the research arm that studies this.

See no evil. Hear no evil.

Industrial Age
Information Age
Advertising Age
Shoe Event Horizon

(Radio version if you're not at work)

http://spacequest.wikia.com/wi...

http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi...

But what about the soufflé?

Choosing a WAD Editor

A tool that the general public either does not know how to use or could not spare the interest/time to learn how to use. A game that the general public could find intuitive and start creating things in the matter of a few minutes while simultaneously playing the game. How is this anything but apples and oranges as parent post states?

Choosing a WAD Editor

Slight problem: IANAL, but unless sw1tched emailed Konami to ask for permission to use and/or monetize gameplay footage of their game (they're one of the few publishers that don't give blanket permission, he could be sued by Konami since they own the copyrights to all of the game assets, sounds, music, etc. and derivative works thereof. While he could probably argue fair use successfully since it was for demonstration/review purposes, unless sw1tched made voiceover commentary during the playthrough he doesn't actually own the copyright to anything featured in the clip. So really, he's not the one who should be suing Fox, Konami is.

Side note: in the DMCA, the only claim made under penalty of perjury is that the entity filing the takedown notice legally represents the party on whose behalf they are filing. Nothing else. The filer of the notice could know for a fact that neither they nor the people they represent own the copyright on a work, file the takedown anyways, and not be committing perjury as long as they actually represent who they say they do.

1. Playing Simpsons Doom at a few LAN parties
2. Playing Aliens TC single player
3. Being told that the movement is like driving a go-kart when I was trying to get used to playing it
4. Playing it over dial-up modem with my mates
5. Playing it with the mod on a local IPX network that allowed us 8-player multiplayer as opposed to 4 I think

1. Playing Simpsons Doom at a few LAN parties
2. Playing Aliens TC single player
3. Being told that the movement is like driving a go-kart when I was trying to get used to playing it
4. Playing it over dial-up modem with my mates
5. Playing it with the mod on a local IPX network that allowed us 8-player multiplayer as opposed to 4 I think

You mean we finally get Power Loaders? I'll buy one...you never know when the aliens might attack.

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Cate...

The best Doom story is the one where The radio said "No, John. You are the demons."
And then, John was a Zombie.

THE INSTRUMENTALITY BEGINS http://evangelion.wikia.com/wi...

Did [Mike] Ross go to Harvard, or is he practicing law without a license? :)

So he's the Finn?

http://williamgibson.wikia.com...

Good idea! It should also have the Ranyhyn ability http://unbeliever.wikia.com/wi... to arrive at the very moment that you summon it.

http://stainlesssteelrat.wikia...

There was also a robot fight in Space Quest III, Nuke'm Duke'm.

They look a little like the Guntank, though, a prototype mobile suit that predated the Gundam. So maybe they're figure out legs eventually.