I haven't settled for Hillary. You asked me to explain my current position; I told you. I never said my position was set in stone, nor did I say I'm going to stick to Hillary. In fact I even said repeatedly that I may well vote third-party in the end.
Thus I don't see why you should have even considered a long ranting reply. Am I not entitled to make up my own mind the way I see fit?
I also don't see what forcing a party split would achieve, except to give the Republicans total supremacy in all branches of government for at least a generation. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory!
He's made some pretty drastic flip-flops over his career.
While still in Utah, he characterized himself as being pro-choice; then later said he didn't want to be called pro-choice; then while in Massachusetts, he suddenly came out strongly against abortion except for rape and incest. Needless to say I'm pro-choice, so that irks me more than a little.
He used to be for embryonic stem cell research; now he's against.
He also once wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans, claiming to be more pro-gay rights than even Ted Kennedy. Now he's against both civil unions and gay marriage, going so far as to support a Constitutional amendment for banning them. Since I happen to be for civil unions and for defining "marriage" as a religious, not a civil thing (i.e. anyone who's married would be in a civil union; a civil union would not necessarily be a marriage), that too irks me.
In other words, I get the distinct impression he's trying to make up to the religious right for being a Mormon by pandering to their positions. Since I 1) don't like it when politicians blatantly pander to anybody and 2) have a strong dislike of the religious right and 3) most especially don't like it when someone panders to the religious right, that makes Romney pretty iffy for me at best.
Hillary does some things that piss me off, that's true, but then again anyone with her age and experience will have done things to piss me off, so it's a bit of a wash.
I also like no-nonsense intelligent women, which is one of the things I think she has going for her. Love her or hate her, she is tough. Obama and Edwards come across as total lightweights in comparison. Toughness matters to me as well.
Obama's a great guy to have a beer with. I'm not sure about being leader of the free world. Veep, sure. In '12 or '16, perhaps. Now, no.
Edwards is just a lightweight, maybe nice to elect to the school board or vestry, but not President. If I have to watch him in another debate, I'll scream.
Richardson lacks the gravitas and charisma to make it. Sad but true. Again, good Veep material.
As for specific positions, I happen to be among those who think her health care reforms way back when were a good idea. (Certainly loads better than extending Medicare to everyone like the Dems seem to want these days. I want universal care, but not single-payer.) I also like the way she is more internationalist, but is also no dove. While I am not happy about getting stuck in Iraq, we are there now and have to make the best of it, so I'd rather have someone who has established good ties to the military (if not have experience themselves, but the only one with experience to speak of is McCain). Economically I want someone who's a free trader and small-business friendly, while also friendly to workers and makes the right noises about environmental policy. I also want someone who is a fiscal hawk -- no more of this cut-tax-and-spend-like-a-drunken-sailor bullshit -- while wanting to keep tax levels more or less on an even keel (no soak the rich stuff, but also no stupid cuts). Hillary fits all those criteria better than all the others named.
She is also a potentially divisive figure (though so far in the Senate she's actually gotten on well with Republicans), and I'm sick to death of the rampant partisanship of the current administration. She has tried to have it both ways on the war, which may be understandable, but still annoying. She has been near power all her adult life, and her spouse obviously has loads of insight and experience to lend her, but she lacks personal experience. I am also allergic to dynastic B.S. So it's not like I'm rah-rah Hillary. More like, oh well, I guess I am stuck with her, because no one else has the combination of qualities I am looking for. If McCain hadn't started fishing for votes among Falwell's brood, I've have considered him as a favorite (the first time I have considered a Republican that seriously), but that's a huge black mark for me -- I strongly dislike any association with the religious right, which is also my major beef with Romney.
As noted above, though, I am also tempted to vote for a third party this time around. None of the likely candidates are so good for me that I want to for for them, but also none are so bad I'd want to vote against them. Thus I may take the opportunity to support a party I'd like to see get more cash next time around. Or, if I'm in a funny mood that day, I'll vote for the Grass Roots Party.:-)
Like I said, I'm a very tepid, unhappy supporter. On the actual policies she has pursued and announced, she's the closest to my own position of the six. Obama is basically a blank card, so I have no idea what he actually would do, and I don't vote for platitudes. Experience is also important to me.
However, if it was a Clinton-McCain or Clinton-Giuliani race, I might well just not vote in that election or toss a coin or vote third-party. I'm lukewarm to all of them, Hillary only very marginally less so, and there is no guarantee I'd vote for her in the primaries or the general election.
I'll disagree with your observer bias on one point -- Romney is probably my least favorite candidate of the six, but I think his site's the best overall.
I like Obama's site, especially the O logo -- nice touch. The navigation is surprisingly disappointing compared to the rest of the eye-candy-based site, almost an afterthought. I'll rank it second. (As for what I think of him, he's a good speaker, but I think he's too young and untried.)
Hillary's is good overall, but that picture of her is awful. Pursed schoolmarm lips? WTF? (Consider me a very tepid and unhappy supporter of Hillary.)
I don't think Edwards' site is that bad, in fact there are some things I like about it, but it still ranks fourth for me. (After Edwards' horseshit performance against Cheney, I don't think I could ever take him seriously as a candidate, let alone President. Good looks and no substance.)
Giuliani should shoot his web designer. 'Nuff said. (I have nothing for or against Giuliani -- I don't know I'd vote for him, but I wouldn't feel at all bad if he won.)
I think McCain is going for the goth/emo vote or something. Way too busy, too. Worst of the six. (My bias: Same as with Giuliani.)
Strange thing about campaign sites, though. Often it seems that campaign people think a site can be too good. I remember Gen. Clark's first site in 2004 -- it was awesome. Gorgeously done, in fact. But not too long afterwards, they dumped it for a really boring, flat one, and stuck with it for the rest of the campaign.
I agree. When I was in Koeln, every time I asked someone if they spoke English the answer was "A little" (and that "little" ranged from truly a little to being fluent). German-speaking Switzerland was the same. Almost no one in Lyon tried to speak English, and northern Italy/Italian speaking Switzerland was somewhere between those extremes.
Except that I never said that all parts of Germany are poor in English speakers. I wrote that the really big top-tier German cities (Cologne is one of them) tend to have relatively high numbers of English speakers, and your experience fits with that. It's when you leave the big cities and tourist areas that you start to run into trouble. I live in a more moderately sized city, and there really aren't that many English speakers around, certainly not many that can hold a conversation for more than a few minutes -- and that in a city that used to have a big British garrison, no less.
When I go to visit my in-laws out in a smallish town (population 30,000), the number of English speakers is very, very low -- vastly outnumbered by Russian and Turkish speakers, and even they are a small minority. Even hotel staff there don't speak English (as my parents found out when they've stayed there).
As Petrushka says below, the proportion of Germans who speak English is much, much lower than in Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on -- and only marginally better than in France. Actually, in my experience, more French speak English than Germans do, but the French are just unwilling to use English unless you at least try to speak French first (then they tend to be pretty cool about it).
If you're in a major city in Germany, or especially near where a NATO base is or was, then the proportion of English speakers is relatively high. Oustide those areas, though, the numbers drop considerably. I live in a city of about half a million, and in spite of its having been in the old British sector (indeed in the 1800s it was technically part of the British Empire), having an airport and major train station, and the local university having a substantial English and American Studies department, it's surprising how few people speak English beyond the very basics. Even English teachers I've spoken to have been surprisingly bad at it.
I speak fluent German myself, so it's not like it's a problem for me, but I notice it whenever my (English-only) parents are here to visit. Aside from at the hotel where they like to stay (the staff all speak pretty good English), most of the time I end up translating for them.
Ahem. That may be the case in Switzerland, but in my experience (having lived 13 years in Germany) the Germans are also by and large pretty monoglot themselves -- not as bad perhaps as the French, English and especially Americans, but it's not like you find that many people in Germany who speak more than a bit of a second language (usually English). Certainly a far lower proportion than in Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on.
It is partly because there just isn't that much interest in Germany in learning other languages -- movies, TV shows, etc. are all dubbed (usually poorly to middling), English-language original editions of books don't sell remotely as well as German translations (quite often rather inferior), and so on. Before multilingual DVDs came out, it was very hard to find English-language video cassettes, unless you lived in a major city like Hamburg or Berlin. It used to be that most major cities had perhaps one or two cinemas that did show movies in English, but even that's being scaled back -- the city where I live now shows more movies in Turkish and Russian than in English (because of all the immigrants).
In Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on, by contrast, movies generally are shown in the original language (albeit often with subtitles) and the culture is more encouraging towards learning another language. In four-official-language Switzerland it's a day-to-day necessity; in official-language-pretty-much-only-spoken-here Netherlands it's a commercial necessity, just to do business with the rest of the world.
I remember visiting Amsterdam once some years ago. My (German) wife and I were accosted by a panhandler, who addressed us in Dutch. I didn't catch what he said (I only speak a bit of Dutch) and asked my wife sotto voce if she caught what he said. He apparently thought I spoke French to her, so he switched to a stream of pretty fluent-sounding French. I turned back to him, and said "What?", and he switched to (quite good) English, and said "Can I have a bit of money? I want to buy some food." I asked him how many languages he spoke. Dutch, French, German and English, he said. Why doesn't he get a job as a translator, I asked. He shrugged and said everyone in Amsterdam speaks four languages. I figured he had a point, gave him a few guilders (I don't normally give panhandlers money, but what the hell, I gave him an A for effort), and went on.
Personally I think we should send a commando squad to nail it into place.
Especially if it's going to Siberia. Clearly it was a double agent from the Cold War. Because it is leaving the geographic North Pole, the North Pole will clearly get warmer, adding a whole new meaning to "Cold War". Thus we will have new war with Soviet Russia, which will be called the Warm War, so we'll dig up Reagan, who will tell the Russians to stop dancing around our pole (while the Poles will go on strike against martial law and double entendre).
Some call me Nostradamus. Others call me "raving lunatic". You be the judge.
Oh please. My ego is not as large as you think. It only occupies 85% of the known Universe (scientists keep calling it "dark matter" and "dark energy" to annoy me).
It was always a point of Trek that the humans were not as good at individual things as other races -- the Klingons were far better warriors, or Vulcans far better rationalists -- but because humans were semi-good at everything, they were more versatile and therefore overall better off. (This same idea shows up in numerous other sci-fi shows and books.) There is also a strong hint throughout that the Vulcans were glacially slow at developing anything, but they did make progress (IIRC there were times when Vulcan's spacefaring is described as being at least a century older than Earth's).
I can imagine how the Klingons got into space -- stealing. Suppose a spacefaring species lands on Qo'nos -- some Ferengi, perhaps -- and the Klingons there steal their ship (and quite likely kill the crew). As resourceful as the Klingons are, it's not too preposterous a thought. And they do apparently have scientists of a sort, just they don't get anywhere near the status or priority of the warrior class. And again, there are implications in the series and some books that the Klingons developed only slowly.
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
I disagree. I think they are an allegory for the jihadis or revolutionaries (or, dare I say it, neo-cons) who want to impose their idea of perfection on everyone else in the name of their own superiority. Voyager fleshes out that idea in some episodes, or at least tries to.
My only complaint about the Borg was that they were too perfect. Whenever the Federation defeated them, it always seemed even more contrived than the other episodes. The Best of Both Worlds was the high water mark for the Borg, and after that they became...well, just another plot device.
The Borg Queen always was a complete contradiction anyway -- suddenly the Borg went from being a distributed network, as it were, to being a centralized state, with all the weakness that implies. Take out the Queen, and the Borg crumble. Quite different from the Borg in the early parts of TNG...
Anyway, veering back onto topic, I too think Enterprise deserves another season. Too many things are turning for the better, and they have too good a cast (and now too good a writer) to stop now. I'm hoping UPN changes their minds. Yes, the first two or three seasons were at best uneven, but the plotlines are getting better and better -- just as good as DS9 or TNG were at the same points in their productions, and loads better than Voyager.
I'd be happy to add you to the Apple Death Knell Count, though, if that's what you're predicting:-p
Considering that I've been a Mac user since '84 and am typing this on a dual G5 (which happens to be my seventh Mac), I hardly think I'm going to be easily painted as an Apple-gloom-and-doom kinda guy.:-P
Wait, so you mean Apple just released a raft of kick ass new products, and got more beleaguered?
Hence I said: "SJ just delivered an under-$500 Mac and an under-$200 iPod, so you'd think people would be going ape-shit." In reference to Wall Street.
If you really want to be offended by what I wrote, fine, but at least be offended at what I actually wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine Ballmer throwing a chair, and getting tackled by the secret service presidential security detail.
So long as it's live on TV, that alone is worth my vote for McCain.
Cheers,
Ethelred
But the comedy almost writes itself.
Imagine Ballmer jumping around and screaming at cabinet meetings.
Cheers,
Ethelred
The truly funny bit was that this article came up with an ad for Sony's Blu-ray Disc Player.
Cheers,
Ethelred
The phrase "don't put all your eggs into one basket" comes to mind...
Cheers,
Ethelred
I haven't settled for Hillary. You asked me to explain my current position; I told you. I never said my position was set in stone, nor did I say I'm going to stick to Hillary. In fact I even said repeatedly that I may well vote third-party in the end.
Thus I don't see why you should have even considered a long ranting reply. Am I not entitled to make up my own mind the way I see fit?
I also don't see what forcing a party split would achieve, except to give the Republicans total supremacy in all branches of government for at least a generation. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory!
Cheers,
Ethelred
He's made some pretty drastic flip-flops over his career.
While still in Utah, he characterized himself as being pro-choice; then later said he didn't want to be called pro-choice; then while in Massachusetts, he suddenly came out strongly against abortion except for rape and incest. Needless to say I'm pro-choice, so that irks me more than a little.
He used to be for embryonic stem cell research; now he's against.
He also once wrote to the Log Cabin Republicans, claiming to be more pro-gay rights than even Ted Kennedy. Now he's against both civil unions and gay marriage, going so far as to support a Constitutional amendment for banning them. Since I happen to be for civil unions and for defining "marriage" as a religious, not a civil thing (i.e. anyone who's married would be in a civil union; a civil union would not necessarily be a marriage), that too irks me.
In other words, I get the distinct impression he's trying to make up to the religious right for being a Mormon by pandering to their positions. Since I 1) don't like it when politicians blatantly pander to anybody and 2) have a strong dislike of the religious right and 3) most especially don't like it when someone panders to the religious right, that makes Romney pretty iffy for me at best.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Hillary does some things that piss me off, that's true, but then again anyone with her age and experience will have done things to piss me off, so it's a bit of a wash.
I also like no-nonsense intelligent women, which is one of the things I think she has going for her. Love her or hate her, she is tough. Obama and Edwards come across as total lightweights in comparison. Toughness matters to me as well.
Obama's a great guy to have a beer with. I'm not sure about being leader of the free world. Veep, sure. In '12 or '16, perhaps. Now, no.
Edwards is just a lightweight, maybe nice to elect to the school board or vestry, but not President. If I have to watch him in another debate, I'll scream.
Richardson lacks the gravitas and charisma to make it. Sad but true. Again, good Veep material.
As for specific positions, I happen to be among those who think her health care reforms way back when were a good idea. (Certainly loads better than extending Medicare to everyone like the Dems seem to want these days. I want universal care, but not single-payer.) I also like the way she is more internationalist, but is also no dove. While I am not happy about getting stuck in Iraq, we are there now and have to make the best of it, so I'd rather have someone who has established good ties to the military (if not have experience themselves, but the only one with experience to speak of is McCain). Economically I want someone who's a free trader and small-business friendly, while also friendly to workers and makes the right noises about environmental policy. I also want someone who is a fiscal hawk -- no more of this cut-tax-and-spend-like-a-drunken-sailor bullshit -- while wanting to keep tax levels more or less on an even keel (no soak the rich stuff, but also no stupid cuts). Hillary fits all those criteria better than all the others named.
She is also a potentially divisive figure (though so far in the Senate she's actually gotten on well with Republicans), and I'm sick to death of the rampant partisanship of the current administration. She has tried to have it both ways on the war, which may be understandable, but still annoying. She has been near power all her adult life, and her spouse obviously has loads of insight and experience to lend her, but she lacks personal experience. I am also allergic to dynastic B.S. So it's not like I'm rah-rah Hillary. More like, oh well, I guess I am stuck with her, because no one else has the combination of qualities I am looking for. If McCain hadn't started fishing for votes among Falwell's brood, I've have considered him as a favorite (the first time I have considered a Republican that seriously), but that's a huge black mark for me -- I strongly dislike any association with the religious right, which is also my major beef with Romney.
As noted above, though, I am also tempted to vote for a third party this time around. None of the likely candidates are so good for me that I want to for for them, but also none are so bad I'd want to vote against them. Thus I may take the opportunity to support a party I'd like to see get more cash next time around. Or, if I'm in a funny mood that day, I'll vote for the Grass Roots Party. :-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
But I didn't even mention the Madeleine Albright one yet.
I'm sorry. I'll stop now.
Helen Thomas!
I'm sorry. Really.
OK, now maybe I need mental floss.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Like I said, I'm a very tepid, unhappy supporter. On the actual policies she has pursued and announced, she's the closest to my own position of the six. Obama is basically a blank card, so I have no idea what he actually would do, and I don't vote for platitudes. Experience is also important to me.
However, if it was a Clinton-McCain or Clinton-Giuliani race, I might well just not vote in that election or toss a coin or vote third-party. I'm lukewarm to all of them, Hillary only very marginally less so, and there is no guarantee I'd vote for her in the primaries or the general election.
Cheers,
Ethelred
What? You mean you didn't pre-order her Playboy spread?
Cheers,
Ethelred
I'll disagree with your observer bias on one point -- Romney is probably my least favorite candidate of the six, but I think his site's the best overall.
I like Obama's site, especially the O logo -- nice touch. The navigation is surprisingly disappointing compared to the rest of the eye-candy-based site, almost an afterthought. I'll rank it second. (As for what I think of him, he's a good speaker, but I think he's too young and untried.)
Hillary's is good overall, but that picture of her is awful. Pursed schoolmarm lips? WTF? (Consider me a very tepid and unhappy supporter of Hillary.)
I don't think Edwards' site is that bad, in fact there are some things I like about it, but it still ranks fourth for me. (After Edwards' horseshit performance against Cheney, I don't think I could ever take him seriously as a candidate, let alone President. Good looks and no substance.)
Giuliani should shoot his web designer. 'Nuff said. (I have nothing for or against Giuliani -- I don't know I'd vote for him, but I wouldn't feel at all bad if he won.)
I think McCain is going for the goth/emo vote or something. Way too busy, too. Worst of the six. (My bias: Same as with Giuliani.)
Strange thing about campaign sites, though. Often it seems that campaign people think a site can be too good. I remember Gen. Clark's first site in 2004 -- it was awesome. Gorgeously done, in fact. But not too long afterwards, they dumped it for a really boring, flat one, and stuck with it for the rest of the campaign.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I agree. When I was in Koeln, every time I asked someone if they spoke English the answer was "A little" (and that "little" ranged from truly a little to being fluent). German-speaking Switzerland was the same. Almost no one in Lyon tried to speak English, and northern Italy/Italian speaking Switzerland was somewhere between those extremes.
Except that I never said that all parts of Germany are poor in English speakers. I wrote that the really big top-tier German cities (Cologne is one of them) tend to have relatively high numbers of English speakers, and your experience fits with that. It's when you leave the big cities and tourist areas that you start to run into trouble. I live in a more moderately sized city, and there really aren't that many English speakers around, certainly not many that can hold a conversation for more than a few minutes -- and that in a city that used to have a big British garrison, no less.
When I go to visit my in-laws out in a smallish town (population 30,000), the number of English speakers is very, very low -- vastly outnumbered by Russian and Turkish speakers, and even they are a small minority. Even hotel staff there don't speak English (as my parents found out when they've stayed there).
As Petrushka says below, the proportion of Germans who speak English is much, much lower than in Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on -- and only marginally better than in France. Actually, in my experience, more French speak English than Germans do, but the French are just unwilling to use English unless you at least try to speak French first (then they tend to be pretty cool about it).
Cheers,
Ethelred
If you're in a major city in Germany, or especially near where a NATO base is or was, then the proportion of English speakers is relatively high. Oustide those areas, though, the numbers drop considerably. I live in a city of about half a million, and in spite of its having been in the old British sector (indeed in the 1800s it was technically part of the British Empire), having an airport and major train station, and the local university having a substantial English and American Studies department, it's surprising how few people speak English beyond the very basics. Even English teachers I've spoken to have been surprisingly bad at it.
I speak fluent German myself, so it's not like it's a problem for me, but I notice it whenever my (English-only) parents are here to visit. Aside from at the hotel where they like to stay (the staff all speak pretty good English), most of the time I end up translating for them.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Ahem. That may be the case in Switzerland, but in my experience (having lived 13 years in Germany) the Germans are also by and large pretty monoglot themselves -- not as bad perhaps as the French, English and especially Americans, but it's not like you find that many people in Germany who speak more than a bit of a second language (usually English). Certainly a far lower proportion than in Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on.
It is partly because there just isn't that much interest in Germany in learning other languages -- movies, TV shows, etc. are all dubbed (usually poorly to middling), English-language original editions of books don't sell remotely as well as German translations (quite often rather inferior), and so on. Before multilingual DVDs came out, it was very hard to find English-language video cassettes, unless you lived in a major city like Hamburg or Berlin. It used to be that most major cities had perhaps one or two cinemas that did show movies in English, but even that's being scaled back -- the city where I live now shows more movies in Turkish and Russian than in English (because of all the immigrants).
In Switzerland, the Netherlands and so on, by contrast, movies generally are shown in the original language (albeit often with subtitles) and the culture is more encouraging towards learning another language. In four-official-language Switzerland it's a day-to-day necessity; in official-language-pretty-much-only-spoken-here Netherlands it's a commercial necessity, just to do business with the rest of the world.
I remember visiting Amsterdam once some years ago. My (German) wife and I were accosted by a panhandler, who addressed us in Dutch. I didn't catch what he said (I only speak a bit of Dutch) and asked my wife sotto voce if she caught what he said. He apparently thought I spoke French to her, so he switched to a stream of pretty fluent-sounding French. I turned back to him, and said "What?", and he switched to (quite good) English, and said "Can I have a bit of money? I want to buy some food." I asked him how many languages he spoke. Dutch, French, German and English, he said. Why doesn't he get a job as a translator, I asked. He shrugged and said everyone in Amsterdam speaks four languages. I figured he had a point, gave him a few guilders (I don't normally give panhandlers money, but what the hell, I gave him an A for effort), and went on.
Cheers,
Ethelred
I predict the money will be spent on one mother of a blowout.
Then all of Bill's misdeeds will be forgiven many times over. :-)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Personally I think we should send a commando squad to nail it into place.
Especially if it's going to Siberia. Clearly it was a double agent from the Cold War. Because it is leaving the geographic North Pole, the North Pole will clearly get warmer, adding a whole new meaning to "Cold War". Thus we will have new war with Soviet Russia, which will be called the Warm War, so we'll dig up Reagan, who will tell the Russians to stop dancing around our pole (while the Poles will go on strike against martial law and double entendre).
Some call me Nostradamus. Others call me "raving lunatic". You be the judge.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Relatively speaking.
Cheers,
Ethelred
This thread is getting silly. I am ordering this thread not to be silly again.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Great Scott! I'm Steve Jobs!
Cheers,
Steve Jobs
(formerly known as Ethelred Unraed)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Cheers,
Ethelred
I can imagine how the Klingons got into space -- stealing. Suppose a spacefaring species lands on Qo'nos -- some Ferengi, perhaps -- and the Klingons there steal their ship (and quite likely kill the crew). As resourceful as the Klingons are, it's not too preposterous a thought. And they do apparently have scientists of a sort, just they don't get anywhere near the status or priority of the warrior class. And again, there are implications in the series and some books that the Klingons developed only slowly.
The borg mindlessly stumble their way through the universe like a bunch of zombies. I think their highest ideal is to be scary.
I disagree. I think they are an allegory for the jihadis or revolutionaries (or, dare I say it, neo-cons) who want to impose their idea of perfection on everyone else in the name of their own superiority. Voyager fleshes out that idea in some episodes, or at least tries to.
My only complaint about the Borg was that they were too perfect. Whenever the Federation defeated them, it always seemed even more contrived than the other episodes. The Best of Both Worlds was the high water mark for the Borg, and after that they became...well, just another plot device.
The Borg Queen always was a complete contradiction anyway -- suddenly the Borg went from being a distributed network, as it were, to being a centralized state, with all the weakness that implies. Take out the Queen, and the Borg crumble. Quite different from the Borg in the early parts of TNG...
Anyway, veering back onto topic, I too think Enterprise deserves another season. Too many things are turning for the better, and they have too good a cast (and now too good a writer) to stop now. I'm hoping UPN changes their minds. Yes, the first two or three seasons were at best uneven, but the plotlines are getting better and better -- just as good as DS9 or TNG were at the same points in their productions, and loads better than Voyager.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Considering that I've been a Mac user since '84 and am typing this on a dual G5 (which happens to be my seventh Mac), I hardly think I'm going to be easily painted as an Apple-gloom-and-doom kinda guy. :-P
Cheers,
Ethelred
Yes, but you were wearing the lime-green goofy hat, which according to standard etiquette and protocol negates the ironic japes.
Clearly you have much to learn in matters of high society, my good lad.
Cheers,
Ethelred
Hence I said: "SJ just delivered an under-$500 Mac and an under-$200 iPod, so you'd think people would be going ape-shit." In reference to Wall Street.
If you really want to be offended by what I wrote, fine, but at least be offended at what I actually wrote.
Cheers,
Ethelred