By the reasoning of most of the posters here, unless your home is as secure as fort knox, anyone who breaks in and steals stuff isn't really to blame... I mean, come on, you could have protected your house better. Put in pressure plates and motion sensors. Try a laser grid on the floor. Armed guards, time sealed doors, attack dogs etc. Anything less and, geeze, you're practically inviting them in to take your stuff!
Makes you wonder if there's some truth to this article...
To say hackers are evil is like saying germs, viruses, and carnivores in general are evil. By merely acting out Adam Smith's society being benifited best by each acting in his own best interests (adapted by John Nash to include societal interests for best outcome), we are keeping in step with mere nature.. A dog will forage for food, defend it's food, and kill it's food, so that it can stay alive. A rabbit will defend against other rabbits if need be (though they'll generally run away from anything else).
Yeah, but this is to provide their own nourishment so they can survive. What do most of the "hackers" referred to in the article get out of breaking into systems other than their own perverse pleasure? Yeah, some are security consultants, white hat, etc., but I don't think these are what Ranum was primarily talking about.
What would you prefer? An Internet full of weak hosts, with a wealth of unexploited security holes and weakly configured security systems, where your security is left up to the good will of others (everybody just play nice now)? Or one where leary vendors and service providers stand in constant vigilance over security issues, because they have to. The wolves are circling the herd.
Given a choice? I'd say the first one. That's kind of like asking me if I would prefer a world where there were no locks or policeman because no one ever tried to break into anything, or a world where it's harder to break into things, but people still try.
Is it realistic to hope that people wouldn't take advantage of this? Of course not. But I'd sure prefer it if they didn't. Who cares that you would have 3,000 security holes if people had the basic decency not to use them?
No, it's the builders fault if the construction of the door was faulty to begin with. If a burglar can walk up to your front door, pound on the hinge side slightly and cause the entire door to fall in THEN THE BUILDER IS INFACT RESPONSIBLE.
Perhaps, in part, but if someone picks your lock or smashes your window, is it the fault of the people who manufactured those products, or is it the fault of the person breaking in? What next, it's the homeowner's fault for not getting steel security doors and bulletproof windows?
#2 wasn't a movie, although several movies did come out of it. Here's a more complete list of series and movies in roughly chronological order (grouped by actor playing Batman):
And this doesn't even include Catwoman, "Justice League", "Super Friends", Batman: Dead End, etc. (Note that Batman Beyond: The Movie and The Batman/Superman Movie are actually episodes of their respective series.) However, most people do consider Batman Begins to be the fifth "modern" live-action Batman movie, although I personally consider it a separate series altogether from the previous films.
Whether or not Easter originated with Constantine may be debatable, but your implication that Easter was did not have an origin outside of Christianity is dubious at best.
Quote:"Passover" and "Easter" are the same word in the Greek Bible.
I've done full-text searches for the word "Easter" in 20 different translations of the Bible, but only three of them produced the word. One of these matched due to the phrase "...a wind of hurricane force, called the north-easter..." (Acts 27:14, NIV UK) The two that did match with that meaning were the King James and the 21st Century King James, both for Acts 12:4. Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words notes on this translation specifically. Under the heading of Easter, we read:
PASCHA, mistranslated "Easter" in Acts 12:4 A.V. [Authorized/King James Version], denotes the Passover (R.V.). The phrase "after the Passover" signifies after the whole festival was at an end. The term Easter is not of Christian origin. It is another form of Astarte, one of the titles of the Chaldean goddess, the queen of heaven. The festival of Pasch held by Christians in post-apostolic times was a continuation of the Jewish feast, but was not instituted by Christ, nor was it connected with Lent. From the pasch the Pagan festival of Easter was quite distinct and was introduced into apostate Western religion, as part of the attempt to adapt Pagan festivals to Christianity.
Now consider this: Jesus and his apostles were celebrating Passover the night before he died. Both his death and the Passover landed on the Jewish date of Nisan 14 (since days begin and end at sundown in the Jewish calendar). Jesus' resurrection, which Easter claims to celebrate, came on the "third day" (Nisan 16). Why would the same word be used for a celebration that happened two days apart from that event? Obviously the Bible writers were not referring to Easter in this passage. One edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica stated the following:
There is no indication of the obeservance of the Easter festival in the New Testament, or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers. The sanctity of special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians.
Quote:There's no credible cultural or etymological link between "Ishtar" (whom Constantine did not worship at any point in his life) and "Easter".
What about the paralellism between Easter customs and Babylonian worship? The Two Babylons stated:
What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, whose name, [...] as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar. [...] Such is the history of Easter. The popular observances that still attend the period of its celebration amply confirm the testimony of history as to its Babylonian character. The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now.
originally a Saxon word (Eostre), denoting a goddess of the Saxons, in honour of
whom sacrifices were offered about the time of the Passover. Hence the name came
to be given to the festival of the Resurrection of Christ, which occured at the
time of the Passover. In the early English versions this word was frequently
used as the translation of the Greek pascha (the Passover). When the Authorized
Version (1611) was formed, the word "passover" was used in all passages in which
this word pascha occurred, except in Act 12:4. In the Revised Version the proper
word, "passover," is
Each one is really pretty appropriate for their respective characters if you think about it, although "Vader" probably is the farthest stretch out of the four.
When are they finally going to release two-disc editions of the Episode II and III soundtracks? Or what about a box set of the prequel trilogy, or even a box of the entire series? We know they were holding out on us at least a little bit with the other two-discs, if only through the omission of the Ewok song...
But you're definitely right that Williams' score is the best part of the movies. Some have compared the complete score of the two trilogies to Wagner's Ring cycle.
It's interesting that VH1 was rerunning "When Star Wars Ruled the World" the other night, and they included footage from John Williams stating (as he was wrapping up the Sith score) that he fully believed that another trilogy would be made. Wait and see...
What will it come bundled with? I hope it comes bundled with atleast IE so that as soon as people install it they can get on the web and download FireFox;)
I love Firefox, but I wouuldn't want to run it on old hardware with very little memory. Maybe Opera or Amaya instead.
I'm curious as to who would come out #1 if we only included films from the past decade. I strongly suspect Pixar would still come out on top, seeing as they have yet to release a single film that wasn't a blockbuster.
The first web site I ever worked on was for a realty company. We weren't the greatest graphic designers in the world, and we never claimed to be, but we gave them (IMHO) a pretty good site that worked well and did all they asked. It was standards-compliant, displayed well cross-platform, accounted for those with disabilities, and did the job effectively. We leave the company on less than spectacular terms.
Six months later, they've replaced most of our hard work with web pages created in Microsoft Word. Thankfully, they hadn't yet found the <lamejoke> tag I had unintentionally left in one of the pages that they had given us the text for... Unfortunately, they have left our company's name on at least one page of the site. I didn't want to be associated with lame Word-generated pages.
Six more months later, all of our code is gone. They have replaced the CGI scripts with a technology so obscure that none of us had heard of it, and NONE of our browsers supported it. All this for a realty company.
Now, several years later, someone has set their pages up with some obfuscated JavaScript and some ridiculous use of iframes. The front page alone has 54 HTML errors and 3 CSS errors. A quick check with Bobby shows around 100 accessibility problems on the front page alone. The new page was written in FrontPage, which explains why they use a rather large (kb-wise) repeating background image that is completely invisible to the user.
I had to quit caffeine a while back due to a stomach condition, and the sad truth is that the only way to beat a caffeine addiction is to tough it out through painful withdrawal symptoms. Just to make things worse, if you go off caffeine for long enough, you become far more susceptible to caffeine then you were before... Again, speaking from painful experience...
A further investigation found the remains of a brutal scene, where James Whitmore appears to have been killed why trying to exterminate the creatures, but he had succeeded only in killing Dave Foley, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss, and Woody Allen.
A few years back I remember Scott Adams writing (in "The Dilbert Future") that cable lines would be a great way to provide internet service, but he didn't think the cable companies would ever get their acts together about it.
But now that people are used to the idea of transmitting something other than television over broadband cables, we're seeing the technology take on a whole new life. Who would have dreamed, when broadband first came around, that geophysicists would use it in the study of earthquakes?
Hopefully this will bring us a little closer to more accurate earthquake prediction. It seems like every few months we hear another report of thousands dead in a major quake. The more we understand about the earth, the better off we are.
Ah, but isn't mankind's (technological) ability to get past these limitations a form of evolution in itself? If intelligence such as is present in Hawking were to be passed on, it could continue to overcome any physical limitations, such as the ones that Dr. Hawking now overcomes.
In any case, I'm not sure if ALS is passed on as a genetic disease. I believe it is, but I could be mistaken. However, some complications have resulted with Dr. Hawking due to a car accident later in life, although ALS seems to be the source of most of his physical limitations.
In any case, I gladly look forward to his new book. "Brief History of Time" is one of the greatest physics books ever written, esp. the 10th Anniversary and Illustrated editions. I'm currently part-way through my second reading, and I am amazed at how clearly Hawking can explain extraordinarily complex topics. I can't wait to see what he has next.
Whoa... Quantum Physics at Work
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
I think Stephen Hawking said something about this, but with black holes. Black holes emit X-Rays, due to a quirk of quantum physics in which particles and antiparticles constantly form and collapse, but the gravity of the black hole messes things up... But how does conservation of matter fit in?
My theory: These amazing machines, which you can pick up at your local Sears, analyze identical pairs of objects, take a single one of them, and allow the particles to reform as particle/antiparticle pairs... these pairs continually reform and reannhilate each other until black holes split them apart...
I just wish you hadn't asked this right after that article on artificial intelligence. Two concepts I'd really prefer not to have floating around in my head together.
"Hal? Hal? Lift up the toilet lid Hal."
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave. I can't allow you to endanger the safety of this mission. You'll have to take it outside."
I guess it's not too bad as long as it doesn't start asking me how my day was...
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it seems like JMS is far more suited to comic books than television. I don't mean that as any sort of a put down. I LOVE JMS's comic books, from Rising Stars to Spider-Man to the old Star Trek comic he wrote. But much of the dialogue that works so well on the page seems to come off as corny, off-putting, or downright foolish when spoken by actors. (Sadly, I believe the same may be true of another favorite author of mine, Peter David.) Without actors like Peter Jurasik and the great Andreas Katsulas (who can spit out with reasonable dignity whatever garbage he's given), how much of the dialogue on B5 couldn't have been pulled off successfully. Much of it wasn't (i.e., "Abso-fraggin-lutely", "Butt butt butt...", "General Hague is coming, and HELL is coming with him", etc.). Again, don't get me wrong, I loved to watch Babylon 5 and see the story unfold. JMS is a master plotter. But his dialogue is frequently more suited to the printed page. Still don't believe me? Why do so many B5 fans detest Season 5, the movies, Crusade, and now LOTR? We don't see any of the epic plots really unfolding, excepting the excellent last half-dozen B5s. I'll probably watch Jeremiah when it comes to syndication. But my hopes aren't particularly high.
Not necessarily. While "Manhunt" wasn't exactly the creme de la creme of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it shows how a cameo can be done effectively. Mick Fleetwood (of "Fleetwood Mac") appeared under heavy makeup with few lines, and even those were somewhat garbled. We can't assume anything about how the Ep. 2 cameo will be done. Maybe the 'actors' will be background aliens. Maybe they'll be so heavily costumed so as to be unrecognizable. I'm sure they won't look anything like they do when they 'play' their 'songs'. And with different hair and wardrobe, and probably no more than one or two lines, what self respecting/.er would even be able to tell it was them?
Even Lucas knows the rule of the cameo fairly well. How many people really caught the Enterprise-D's cameo in Ep. 1 before it was pointed out to them? How many have caught it now? In any case, with Lucas' stilted directing, I don't think a few stilted, unrecognizable extras are going to make any difference.
On the other hand, if you'd like to think more positively: If the man can make muppets seem real, surely he can make puppets seem real.;)
According to a recent interview with Rick Berman, the title of the show may not include the phrase "Star Trek". I'm sure this will bring much rejoicing to those who feel he will only defame the name.
Personally, I'm not willing to trash Berman or Braga to quickly. Berman brought us Voyager, but he also brought us Deep Space Nine (with the much-appreciated direction of Ira Steven Behr) and the best years of The Next Generation. He brought us Generations and Insurrection, but he also brought us First Contact. Braga's similarly a mixed bag, but he also helped create many of Voyager's best episodes. He did the same on Next Generation, and he also co-wrote First Contact.
It's also interesting to note that Berman sees the need for "new blood" in the franchise. He's brought in John Logan to write Star Trek X, and now he claims that there will be mainly new writers for Star Trek's fifth series. (Sixth if you count the beloved animated series.)
As for the series itself, I don't believe we'll be getting "Birth of the Federation", and it seems doubtful that we'll get "Excelsior". But we've been promised something new and different, and it seems only fair to withhold judgment until we have some idea what that means.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes you wonder if there's some truth to this article...
Yeah, but this is to provide their own nourishment so they can survive. What do most of the "hackers" referred to in the article get out of breaking into systems other than their own perverse pleasure? Yeah, some are security consultants, white hat, etc., but I don't think these are what Ranum was primarily talking about.
Given a choice? I'd say the first one. That's kind of like asking me if I would prefer a world where there were no locks or policeman because no one ever tried to break into anything, or a world where it's harder to break into things, but people still try.
Is it realistic to hope that people wouldn't take advantage of this? Of course not. But I'd sure prefer it if they didn't. Who cares that you would have 3,000 security holes if people had the basic decency not to use them?
Perhaps, in part, but if someone picks your lock or smashes your window, is it the fault of the people who manufactured those products, or is it the fault of the person breaking in? What next, it's the homeowner's fault for not getting steel security doors and bulletproof windows?
#2 wasn't a movie, although several movies did come out of it. Here's a more complete list of series and movies in roughly chronological order (grouped by actor playing Batman):
Lewis Wilson: The Batman (1943 movie serial).
Robert Lowery: Batman and Robin (1949 movie serial).
Adam West: "Batman" (1966 series) and Batman: The Movie (1966) .
Jing Abalos: Batman Fights Dracula (1967).
Olan Soule: "The Batman/Superman Hour" (1968 series) and "The Adventures of Batman" (1969 series).
Michael Keaton: Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).
Kevin Conroy: "Batman" (1992 series), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), "Batman: Gotham Knights" (1997 series), The New Batman Superman Adventures" (1997 series), Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero (1998), The Batman/Superman Movie (1998), Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003).
Val Kilmer: Batman Forever (1995).
George Clooney: Batman & Robin (1997).
Kevin Conroy and Will Friedle were in Batman Beyond: The Movie (1999), "Batman Beyond" (1999 series), Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000).
Rino Romano: "The Batman" (2004 series).
Christian Bale: Batman Begins (2005).
And this doesn't even include Catwoman , "Justice League", "Super Friends", Batman: Dead End , etc. (Note that Batman Beyond: The Movie and The Batman/Superman Movie are actually episodes of their respective series.) However, most people do consider Batman Begins to be the fifth "modern" live-action Batman movie, although I personally consider it a separate series altogether from the previous films.
Whether or not Easter originated with Constantine may be debatable, but your implication that Easter was did not have an origin outside of Christianity is dubious at best.
Quote: "Passover" and "Easter" are the same word in the Greek Bible.
I've done full-text searches for the word "Easter" in 20 different translations of the Bible, but only three of them produced the word. One of these matched due to the phrase "...a wind of hurricane force, called the north-easter..." (Acts 27:14, NIV UK) The two that did match with that meaning were the King James and the 21st Century King James, both for Acts 12:4. Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words notes on this translation specifically. Under the heading of Easter, we read:
Now consider this: Jesus and his apostles were celebrating Passover the night before he died. Both his death and the Passover landed on the Jewish date of Nisan 14 (since days begin and end at sundown in the Jewish calendar). Jesus' resurrection, which Easter claims to celebrate, came on the "third day" (Nisan 16). Why would the same word be used for a celebration that happened two days apart from that event? Obviously the Bible writers were not referring to Easter in this passage. One edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica stated the following:
Quote: There's no credible cultural or etymological link between "Ishtar" (whom Constantine did not worship at any point in his life) and "Easter".
What about the paralellism between Easter customs and Babylonian worship? The Two Babylons stated:
Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary states:
Vader = Invader
Sidious = Insidious
Maul = Maul
Tyranus = Tyranny
Each one is really pretty appropriate for their respective characters if you think about it, although "Vader" probably is the farthest stretch out of the four.
Obi-Wan: "Only the Sith see things in absolutes".
Yep, only the Sith. No one else. You're either a Sith who sees things in absolutes, or you're not, and there's no middle ground.
So when did Obi-Wan become a Sith?
Which leads to the inevitable question:
When are they finally going to release two-disc editions of the Episode II and III soundtracks? Or what about a box set of the prequel trilogy, or even a box of the entire series? We know they were holding out on us at least a little bit with the other two-discs, if only through the omission of the Ewok song...
But you're definitely right that Williams' score is the best part of the movies. Some have compared the complete score of the two trilogies to Wagner's Ring cycle.
It's interesting that VH1 was rerunning "When Star Wars Ruled the World" the other night, and they included footage from John Williams stating (as he was wrapping up the Sith score) that he fully believed that another trilogy would be made. Wait and see...
What will it come bundled with? I hope it comes bundled with atleast IE so that as soon as people install it they can get on the web and download FireFox ;)
I love Firefox, but I wouuldn't want to run it on old hardware with very little memory. Maybe Opera or Amaya instead.
The story should read "The BBC are..."
BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation
"The British Broadcasting Corporation are"?
I'm pretty sure the original wording were correct. ;-)
I'm curious as to who would come out #1 if we only included films from the past decade. I strongly suspect Pixar would still come out on top, seeing as they have yet to release a single film that wasn't a blockbuster.
The first web site I ever worked on was for a realty company. We weren't the greatest graphic designers in the world, and we never claimed to be, but we gave them (IMHO) a pretty good site that worked well and did all they asked. It was standards-compliant, displayed well cross-platform, accounted for those with disabilities, and did the job effectively. We leave the company on less than spectacular terms.
Six months later, they've replaced most of our hard work with web pages created in Microsoft Word. Thankfully, they hadn't yet found the <lamejoke> tag I had unintentionally left in one of the pages that they had given us the text for... Unfortunately, they have left our company's name on at least one page of the site. I didn't want to be associated with lame Word-generated pages.
Six more months later, all of our code is gone. They have replaced the CGI scripts with a technology so obscure that none of us had heard of it, and NONE of our browsers supported it. All this for a realty company.
Now, several years later, someone has set their pages up with some obfuscated JavaScript and some ridiculous use of iframes. The front page alone has 54 HTML errors and 3 CSS errors. A quick check with Bobby shows around 100 accessibility problems on the front page alone. The new page was written in FrontPage, which explains why they use a rather large (kb-wise) repeating background image that is completely invisible to the user.
Sigh...
I had to quit caffeine a while back due to a stomach condition, and the sad truth is that the only way to beat a caffeine addiction is to tough it out through painful withdrawal symptoms. Just to make things worse, if you go off caffeine for long enough, you become far more susceptible to caffeine then you were before... Again, speaking from painful experience...
I wonder if they can conclusively prove whether or not Grape Nuts taste like crap?
A further investigation found the remains of a brutal scene, where James Whitmore appears to have been killed why trying to exterminate the creatures, but he had succeeded only in killing Dave Foley, Julia-Louis Dreyfuss, and Woody Allen.
At least some good has come from this tragedy...
A few years back I remember Scott Adams writing (in "The Dilbert Future") that cable lines would be a great way to provide internet service, but he didn't think the cable companies would ever get their acts together about it.
But now that people are used to the idea of transmitting something other than television over broadband cables, we're seeing the technology take on a whole new life. Who would have dreamed, when broadband first came around, that geophysicists would use it in the study of earthquakes?
Hopefully this will bring us a little closer to more accurate earthquake prediction. It seems like every few months we hear another report of thousands dead in a major quake. The more we understand about the earth, the better off we are.
Ah, but isn't mankind's (technological) ability to get past these limitations a form of evolution in itself? If intelligence such as is present in Hawking were to be passed on, it could continue to overcome any physical limitations, such as the ones that Dr. Hawking now overcomes.
In any case, I'm not sure if ALS is passed on as a genetic disease. I believe it is, but I could be mistaken. However, some complications have resulted with Dr. Hawking due to a car accident later in life, although ALS seems to be the source of most of his physical limitations.
In any case, I gladly look forward to his new book. "Brief History of Time" is one of the greatest physics books ever written, esp. the 10th Anniversary and Illustrated editions. I'm currently part-way through my second reading, and I am amazed at how clearly Hawking can explain extraordinarily complex topics. I can't wait to see what he has next.
I think Stephen Hawking said something about this, but with black holes. Black holes emit X-Rays, due to a quirk of quantum physics in which particles and antiparticles constantly form and collapse, but the gravity of the black hole messes things up... But how does conservation of matter fit in?
My theory: These amazing machines, which you can pick up at your local Sears, analyze identical pairs of objects, take a single one of them, and allow the particles to reform as particle/antiparticle pairs... these pairs continually reform and reannhilate each other until black holes split them apart...
Black holes emit our missing socks!
Now where's my Nobel Prize?
Someone had to say it.
I just wish you hadn't asked this right after that article on artificial intelligence. Two concepts I'd really prefer not to have floating around in my head together.
I guess it's not too bad as long as it doesn't start asking me how my day was...
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but it seems like JMS is far more suited to comic books than television. I don't mean that as any sort of a put down. I LOVE JMS's comic books, from Rising Stars to Spider-Man to the old Star Trek comic he wrote. But much of the dialogue that works so well on the page seems to come off as corny, off-putting, or downright foolish when spoken by actors. (Sadly, I believe the same may be true of another favorite author of mine, Peter David.) Without actors like Peter Jurasik and the great Andreas Katsulas (who can spit out with reasonable dignity whatever garbage he's given), how much of the dialogue on B5 couldn't have been pulled off successfully. Much of it wasn't (i.e., "Abso-fraggin-lutely", "Butt butt butt...", "General Hague is coming, and HELL is coming with him", etc.). Again, don't get me wrong, I loved to watch Babylon 5 and see the story unfold. JMS is a master plotter. But his dialogue is frequently more suited to the printed page. Still don't believe me? Why do so many B5 fans detest Season 5, the movies, Crusade, and now LOTR? We don't see any of the epic plots really unfolding, excepting the excellent last half-dozen B5s. I'll probably watch Jeremiah when it comes to syndication. But my hopes aren't particularly high.
Not necessarily. While "Manhunt" wasn't exactly the creme de la creme of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it shows how a cameo can be done effectively. Mick Fleetwood (of "Fleetwood Mac") appeared under heavy makeup with few lines, and even those were somewhat garbled. We can't assume anything about how the Ep. 2 cameo will be done. Maybe the 'actors' will be background aliens. Maybe they'll be so heavily costumed so as to be unrecognizable. I'm sure they won't look anything like they do when they 'play' their 'songs'. And with different hair and wardrobe, and probably no more than one or two lines, what self respecting /.er would even be able to tell it was them?
Even Lucas knows the rule of the cameo fairly well. How many people really caught the Enterprise-D's cameo in Ep. 1 before it was pointed out to them? How many have caught it now? In any case, with Lucas' stilted directing, I don't think a few stilted, unrecognizable extras are going to make any difference.
On the other hand, if you'd like to think more positively: If the man can make muppets seem real, surely he can make puppets seem real. ;)
According to a recent interview with Rick Berman, the title of the show may not include the phrase "Star Trek". I'm sure this will bring much rejoicing to those who feel he will only defame the name.
Personally, I'm not willing to trash Berman or Braga to quickly. Berman brought us Voyager, but he also brought us Deep Space Nine (with the much-appreciated direction of Ira Steven Behr) and the best years of The Next Generation. He brought us Generations and Insurrection, but he also brought us First Contact. Braga's similarly a mixed bag, but he also helped create many of Voyager's best episodes. He did the same on Next Generation, and he also co-wrote First Contact.
It's also interesting to note that Berman sees the need for "new blood" in the franchise. He's brought in John Logan to write Star Trek X, and now he claims that there will be mainly new writers for Star Trek's fifth series. (Sixth if you count the beloved animated series.)
As for the series itself, I don't believe we'll be getting "Birth of the Federation", and it seems doubtful that we'll get "Excelsior". But we've been promised something new and different, and it seems only fair to withhold judgment until we have some idea what that means.