I'm as paranoid as they come, but really - this is over the top unless you honestly believe that the "X-Files" is based on true stories.
Given the paranoid, cynical, untrusting nature of most Linux folk when it comes to the government I'm sure thousands of eyeballs will be poring over that code looking for anything suspicious. And I'm sure the NSA knows this as well and realizes that this is NOT the time to do something really stupid, in open source, that any persistent hacker with an editor can find.
It's not like a backdoor is especially difficult to locate when you can see all the code. Your only hope is obfuscation; the NSA changes aren't large enough for such a tactic to work. You don't have to check the whole kernel, mind you, just what's modified after the patches. Not a hard thing to do. Divvy up the work among 50 people and even without a search algorithm to reduce the text involve the search becomes trivial.
The only difference between a b.a. and a b.s. is essentially the foreign language requirements. Those who can't do math take a foreign language, those who can't master a foreign language take math (e.g., statistics). The liberal arts requirements still hold for both degrees for most subjects.
I already have a degree so I don't need to try anything. However, I still haven't heard a rational argument on why student choice in the matter should be limited.
Glad I bought my nifty new phone before the GPS rollout. My natural paranoia tells me that precise location/movement tracking is *far* too tempting to government just to be used for E911 calls, regardless of claims to the contrary.
The point of making child pornography illegal is not to keep people from seeing it, but to protect the children who might be forced to have sex in order to make the porn in the first place. Until now child porn automatically meant that children were used in its production.
So how on earth can virtual child porn - where only the artistic tools of a computer are used to make it - be deemed harmful? No one was hurt in the production; no human being was involved in said production aside from the graphic artist(s), who undoubtedly aren't children.
Is this argument being presented by the same folks who think that playing Deus Ex will somehow magically persuade people to pick up high-caliber firearms and use them on all and sundry? Or that playing Doom leads to Satanism because of all the pseudo-satanic imagery in the game?
There's a huge gaping hole in the logic of the argument against virtual porn.
But most important in my mind: if such a law passes does that mean that my (hilarious) animations of Alice in Wonderland doing the wild thing with the White Rabbit will be just as illegal as actual child porn? Or that my animation of Dino doing Wilma "doggy style" will be just as illegal as actual bestiality? And if so, where does my animation of a smurf chowing down on a woman's nipple fit in, given that smurfs are neither children nor people nor animals?
Given how much time I wasted in courses that were of no use to me, I believe that students (who are all adults and thus legally considered to be capable of making adult decisions) should have the choice of whether or not they want to take classes outside of their major.
A university could designate two tracks for the same degree: call them 'liberal arts' and 'technical arts'. Liberal arts would include the core classes on the degree plus all the other absurd requirements that most universities foist upon their clientele, while technical arts degrees would be focused solely upon the subject the degree is in. Students would have the choice (as they should) of what degree they want, while employers would have the choice of which type of graduate they want to hire.
There's no reason there can't be two side-by-side systems for obtaining a degree. Perhaps you don't like the technical degree; well, fine, *YOU* don't have to get one. No one has the right to force you to go the technical route, nor do you have any right to force someone to go the liberal arts route.
These aren't high schools and college students aren't children. Choice should be inherent to the system.
The consumer is never at fault if the model doesn't work; the model itself is. That's fundamental to capitalism. Good models result in a business that flourishes, bad models result in businesses that go bankrupt.
If the ad-revenue model doesn't work because consumers are blocking the ads, the onus doesn't lie on the consumer but rather the model. Eventually the model will be abandoned if it isn't profitable, or the businesses that can't adapt will go under. It's as simple as that.
There isn't a moral argument to be made here. None whatsoever. Unless and until a site posts in big bold letters on the front page 'you must view our ads if you want to use our service' no blame can be laid upon those that block the ads.
The main purpose of a gun is to inflict harm upon another human being.
Or to prevent another human being from harming you. In 1995 the FBI, not exactly the poster child for 2nd Amendment rights, released a report that conservatively estimated that approximately 800,000 crimes a year were prevented because the intended target used a firearm to protect himself. The firearm was discharged in less than 1% of these cases, and the criminal was actually harmed in only 1/10 of these instances (despite what people may think, Americans really don't like to go around shooting people. Most of the discharges were in the air, to frighten away the criminal).
Laws designed to ban the ownership of firearms will be quite effective with law-abiding citizens. They will be utterly ineffective with criminals because, surprise! Criminals don't obey the law. That's why we call them criminals, after all.
Banning firearms will only increase the effectiveness of criminal activities because the criminals will still be armed, but the citizenry will not.
On a purely anecdotal and thus utterly unscientific note, I've had people try to break into my residence on three separate occasions. On all of these occasions I've been home and I confronted the criminal. No one was hurt during the confrontations; the criminal decided that it was best to flee the scene.
(Well, to be entirely honest the last guy was so scared he ran pell-mell off into the darkness and right into a woodpile. Judging by his screams of pain I think he broke something, but that's just the hazards of B&E. I didn't follow him or try to arrest him; I figured a broken arm or leg was punishment enough).
There's nothing senseless about his logic at all. These sites decide, on their own, to offer up their content for free. No one held a gun to their head, no one bludgeoned them into providing a free service. They had the right and the choice to require payment for their services and opted not to.
That's the business model that these sites decided to follow. Don't ask for money, use advertising revenue instead. To argue that people who use the site are somehow 'freeloaders' if they block the ads, that there's an ethical argument to be made that somehow a person is morally bereft if they block ads, is just plain ludicrous. No, worse: it's laughable. Only a dot-bomber, or someone who invested in a dot-bomb, could argue in this fashion and not sound like a total idiot to themselves.
Economics 101. Most community colleges offer courses on the cheap. Take it and find out how *real* capitalism functions. If the business model doesn't work it has nothing to do with the *consumers* and everything to do with the *model*. Unless you're one of those whiners who lost a bucket-load of cash on a fool's dot-bomb investment.
I don't mind banner ads at all and don't block the ad itself (although I do block any attempts the ad might make to track or gather information about me).
The most inoffensive banner ad system I've seen has to be in an app, not a web site: Opera. I've been using the browser for a year now and the ads in the upper right almost never get annoying. They don't flash, pop up windows, pull stupid animation tricks or whatnot, and roll over only once every 5 minutes or so.
Because the ads in Opera are so inoffensive, I can actually *remember* the most recent half-dozen or so that I've seen displayed over the last month. And I've actually clicked on a couple of them, which I can't remember doing on a website for years.
Maybe these businesses should take a look at how Opera does it and see where a successful strategy might actually be employed where people aren't scrambling to block their advertising schemes.
Don't forget that the whole 'beaming down' thing essentially involves 'faxing' a copy of a person to the destination, destroying the original in the process. Every time someone beams anywhere, they're killed and a copy of themselves is constructed at the endpoint.
HP's Oregon office is strictly in the hands of an openly Mormon management. What the hell does this matter? According to a number of non-Mormon friends who work at the company, or who used to work at the company, the Mormon management goes out of their way to fast-track other Mormons who may be much less skilled than their non-Mormon counterparts.
An example: a guy I know, incredibly skilled at his job, has worked at this office for 14 years. He's been passed over for promotion the last three times, and every time to a Mormon with far less experience. The last time a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed kid with less than five years of experience got the job even though the kid has no experience in programming at all!
This is all anecdotal but I've heard two-dozen stories along the same lines as the one above, especially in the last five years. How can a company make informed decisions if it promotes, in part, on religious affiliation???
The government has publicly stated that it's goal is to have 1 sky marshal for every ten flights. According to informed sources, the realistic ratio of sky marshals to flights will be closer to 1 in 20.
If I were a suicidal terrorist then a 1 in 10 chance of getting a sky marshal, or better yet a 1 in 20 chance, is good odds. Especially if my group is trying to capture 5 planes at the same time.
So what if we combine the two measures? Have face recognition software which flags *possible* terrorists and then takes a sky marshal from the pool available at that airport and puts the marshal on *that* flight? The odds of getting a marshal onto a flight with terrorists would be substantially higher (assuming you had pictures of the terrorists in question) than through random assignment.
Low market share and the fact that the OS has far fewer exploitable bugs.
Given the number of linux servers out there right now, do you honestly think that worm creators would give Linux a pass if it were anywhere near as easy to punch into as IIS? Or are you saying that the people who run an IIS box are generally idiots, while those who run Linux boxes aren't?
Oh, please. Indulging in broad overgeneralizations, setting up strawmen to distraction - thinking of running for office, are you?
I doubt the average slashdotter cares a great deal about banner ads. I certainly don't; I run Opera with the ads and it doesn't bother me at all. These ads aren't the problem; it's the POPUPS (please, try to parse the article and the reactions before taking a leak in the pool next time) that piss people off. The damned things drive me insane; it's one of the reasons I'll never go to a tripod or geocities (now yahoo) site.
I vote with my feet. Popup sites go on my ban list, banner sites don't. This by default gives the banner sites (a fraction) more traffic than they otherwise would have. If enough people do it, it becomes something more than a fraction.
But very few here claim that they have a *right* to ad-free services provided by the money of others. If you think otherwise please provide the proof, other than your own unsubstantiated blathering.
Let me guess: ubergeek trekkie who has nothing better to do than spend time online as a trek apologist and can't *stand* the idea that someone, somewhere, might think that
THE NEW TREK SUCKS!!!
Well, it does, in my NSHO. If you don't like that then I suggest you troll elsewhere, or beat off more.
Any time MS shoots itself in the foot I'm a happy camper. The more often they throw around their weight, the more likely it is for their customers to bail.
You can't imagine how pleased I'd be if I never had to fix another shitty installation of Windows ever again. It almost makes me want to go back into Perl/C++ programming just to get away from Really Bad Software (RBS)(TM).
Precisely. I object specifically based upon the fact that the complete and utter wimp is a woman, and a stereotypical one at that. I grew up with this stereotype (I was around during the days of TOS, if that gives you a clue) and hate to see it played out for the ten-thousdandth time in any way, shape, or form.
But a better solution would be to make the crew the stalwart SOBs they should be.
Look: the leeches were a stupid idea. Really stupid. No amount of justification of modern-day practices can save that scene.
Vulcan behavior has been established over four series and many movies. Redefining it now is a serious mistake. Someone on the staff has a bit too much ego, I think.
So if there are still screaming 'rescue me!' women in the future, where are the screaming 'rescue me!' men? They exist in abundance in the here and now, despite false bravado. Or would that be too much of an insult to frail male egos?
Don't be such a fucking idiot. They're all examples of conversations with an expectation of privacy that's fictitious (easily circumventable no matter what you might believe) yet upheld by law. Email is no different in fact, only in legal bias.
Yes, it sucked even worse than Voyager's first episode. Christ, but it was *bad*. Just some of the highlights:
- Bakula still can't act, and as a captain he's laughable in his attempts to be tough. Why in gods name didn't they pick some hungry nobody willing to bust his ass for this role?
- The communications chick was a complete loser, the stereotypical pre-Xena "I'm a screaming bitch who needs to be rescued by a big strong man" kind of girl. I thought we'd put those days behind us in SF....
- What the hell was up with Texas boy? Can you get any more wooden than that? He's even worse than Bakula.
- The doctor could actually act, but for chrissakes - interstellar LEECHES? That's what we've come to??? Roddenberry has to be turning over in his grave.
- more hackneyed Vulcan shit. On the brighter side, not only was the Vulcan one hell of a Hot Star Trek Babe(TM), but the best actor of the lot. That isn't saying much, but one can see how she might improve over time.
- the entire Vulcan lot was openly emotional, even when they denied it. For a moment I wigged and thought they were Romulans.
- the Enterprise was just plain ugly on the outside, and doubly ugly on the inside. I mean, it looked like a tramp steamer run by a bunch of lackwits. No wonder the Vulcans kept saying "um, maybe you should wait on this interstellar exploration thing". The graphics design team should be put up against a wall and shot.
- hey, guess what? At warp 4 it's only FOUR DAYS from Earth to the Klingon homeworld! Wow! Completely contradicts anything ever said on the subject in previous series, but hell - who cares? This is Star Trek, birth place of TV paradoxes!
- argh! Time travel in the pilot! Surely a sign of imminent doom if there ever was one.
- "polarized plating" - and it 'goes down', like shields. Metal that disappears! And comes back once it repolarizes! Nifty.
- the chemical composition of the gas giant just isn't possible. Chemistry 101 folks; or hell, spend a quarter, call a college astronomer, ask him what *real* gas giants are made of.
- no actual plot. Maybe one will come clear in the future, but other than 'get the Klingon dude home' the rest was confused wandering.
- the Enterprise certainly can't shoot for shit. Guess we're going to have more eps of "the Enterprise is badly outgunned by everyone they run into" or "power fails mysteriously once again" or "the computer's been possessed again".
- Berman. 'nuff said. This guy turns everything he touches to shit.
Man, I can go on and on. But I'd rather watch Farscape. At least it's internally consistent and the girls can kick as as well as, or better, than any man.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm as paranoid as they come, but really - this is over the top unless you honestly believe that the "X-Files" is based on true stories.
Given the paranoid, cynical, untrusting nature of most Linux folk when it comes to the government I'm sure thousands of eyeballs will be poring over that code looking for anything suspicious. And I'm sure the NSA knows this as well and realizes that this is NOT the time to do something really stupid, in open source, that any persistent hacker with an editor can find.
It's not like a backdoor is especially difficult to locate when you can see all the code. Your only hope is obfuscation; the NSA changes aren't large enough for such a tactic to work. You don't have to check the whole kernel, mind you, just what's modified after the patches. Not a hard thing to do. Divvy up the work among 50 people and even without a search algorithm to reduce the text involve the search becomes trivial.
Max
The only difference between a b.a. and a b.s. is essentially the foreign language requirements. Those who can't do math take a foreign language, those who can't master a foreign language take math (e.g., statistics). The liberal arts requirements still hold for both degrees for most subjects.
I already have a degree so I don't need to try anything. However, I still haven't heard a rational argument on why student choice in the matter should be limited.
Max
You just aren't getting it, are you? If the model doesn't work it'll be changed.
THAT'S JUST FINE. THAT'S HOW CAPITALISM WORKS.
Morality has nothing to do with it, except somewhere in that delusional brain of yours.
Max
Glad I bought my nifty new phone before the GPS rollout. My natural paranoia tells me that precise location/movement tracking is *far* too tempting to government just to be used for E911 calls, regardless of claims to the contrary.
Max
The point of making child pornography illegal is not to keep people from seeing it, but to protect the children who might be forced to have sex in order to make the porn in the first place. Until now child porn automatically meant that children were used in its production.
So how on earth can virtual child porn - where only the artistic tools of a computer are used to make it - be deemed harmful? No one was hurt in the production; no human being was involved in said production aside from the graphic artist(s), who undoubtedly aren't children.
Is this argument being presented by the same folks who think that playing Deus Ex will somehow magically persuade people to pick up high-caliber firearms and use them on all and sundry? Or that playing Doom leads to Satanism because of all the pseudo-satanic imagery in the game?
There's a huge gaping hole in the logic of the argument against virtual porn.
But most important in my mind: if such a law passes does that mean that my (hilarious) animations of Alice in Wonderland doing the wild thing with the White Rabbit will be just as illegal as actual child porn? Or that my animation of Dino doing Wilma "doggy style" will be just as illegal as actual bestiality? And if so, where does my animation of a smurf chowing down on a woman's nipple fit in, given that smurfs are neither children nor people nor animals?
Max
Given how much time I wasted in courses that were of no use to me, I believe that students (who are all adults and thus legally considered to be capable of making adult decisions) should have the choice of whether or not they want to take classes outside of their major.
A university could designate two tracks for the same degree: call them 'liberal arts' and 'technical arts'. Liberal arts would include the core classes on the degree plus all the other absurd requirements that most universities foist upon their clientele, while technical arts degrees would be focused solely upon the subject the degree is in. Students would have the choice (as they should) of what degree they want, while employers would have the choice of which type of graduate they want to hire.
There's no reason there can't be two side-by-side systems for obtaining a degree. Perhaps you don't like the technical degree; well, fine, *YOU* don't have to get one. No one has the right to force you to go the technical route, nor do you have any right to force someone to go the liberal arts route.
These aren't high schools and college students aren't children. Choice should be inherent to the system.
Max
The consumer is never at fault if the model doesn't work; the model itself is. That's fundamental to capitalism. Good models result in a business that flourishes, bad models result in businesses that go bankrupt.
If the ad-revenue model doesn't work because consumers are blocking the ads, the onus doesn't lie on the consumer but rather the model. Eventually the model will be abandoned if it isn't profitable, or the businesses that can't adapt will go under. It's as simple as that.
There isn't a moral argument to be made here. None whatsoever. Unless and until a site posts in big bold letters on the front page 'you must view our ads if you want to use our service' no blame can be laid upon those that block the ads.
Max
Just so long as it ATT's cable network isn't sold off to AOL.
Please, god, not AOL; how many virgin sacrifices are required to prevent such a calamity?
Max
The main purpose of a gun is to inflict harm upon another human being.
Or to prevent another human being from harming you. In 1995 the FBI, not exactly the poster child for 2nd Amendment rights, released a report that conservatively estimated that approximately 800,000 crimes a year were prevented because the intended target used a firearm to protect himself. The firearm was discharged in less than 1% of these cases, and the criminal was actually harmed in only 1/10 of these instances (despite what people may think, Americans really don't like to go around shooting people. Most of the discharges were in the air, to frighten away the criminal).
Laws designed to ban the ownership of firearms will be quite effective with law-abiding citizens. They will be utterly ineffective with criminals because, surprise! Criminals don't obey the law. That's why we call them criminals, after all.
Banning firearms will only increase the effectiveness of criminal activities because the criminals will still be armed, but the citizenry will not.
On a purely anecdotal and thus utterly unscientific note, I've had people try to break into my residence on three separate occasions. On all of these occasions I've been home and I confronted the criminal. No one was hurt during the confrontations; the criminal decided that it was best to flee the scene.
(Well, to be entirely honest the last guy was so scared he ran pell-mell off into the darkness and right into a woodpile. Judging by his screams of pain I think he broke something, but that's just the hazards of B&E. I didn't follow him or try to arrest him; I figured a broken arm or leg was punishment enough).
Max
There's nothing senseless about his logic at all. These sites decide, on their own, to offer up their content for free. No one held a gun to their head, no one bludgeoned them into providing a free service. They had the right and the choice to require payment for their services and opted not to.
That's the business model that these sites decided to follow. Don't ask for money, use advertising revenue instead. To argue that people who use the site are somehow 'freeloaders' if they block the ads, that there's an ethical argument to be made that somehow a person is morally bereft if they block ads, is just plain ludicrous. No, worse: it's laughable. Only a dot-bomber, or someone who invested in a dot-bomb, could argue in this fashion and not sound like a total idiot to themselves.
Economics 101. Most community colleges offer courses on the cheap. Take it and find out how *real* capitalism functions. If the business model doesn't work it has nothing to do with the *consumers* and everything to do with the *model*. Unless you're one of those whiners who lost a bucket-load of cash on a fool's dot-bomb investment.
Max
I don't mind banner ads at all and don't block the ad itself (although I do block any attempts the ad might make to track or gather information about me).
The most inoffensive banner ad system I've seen has to be in an app, not a web site: Opera. I've been using the browser for a year now and the ads in the upper right almost never get annoying. They don't flash, pop up windows, pull stupid animation tricks or whatnot, and roll over only once every 5 minutes or so.
Because the ads in Opera are so inoffensive, I can actually *remember* the most recent half-dozen or so that I've seen displayed over the last month. And I've actually clicked on a couple of them, which I can't remember doing on a website for years.
Maybe these businesses should take a look at how Opera does it and see where a successful strategy might actually be employed where people aren't scrambling to block their advertising schemes.
Max
Don't forget that the whole 'beaming down' thing essentially involves 'faxing' a copy of a person to the destination, destroying the original in the process. Every time someone beams anywhere, they're killed and a copy of themselves is constructed at the endpoint.
Max
Too bad most people are too cheap, or cannot otherwise afford, to play with Macs.
Or simply don't like Macs and would rather play with Linux.
Max
HP's Oregon office is strictly in the hands of an openly Mormon management. What the hell does this matter? According to a number of non-Mormon friends who work at the company, or who used to work at the company, the Mormon management goes out of their way to fast-track other Mormons who may be much less skilled than their non-Mormon counterparts.
An example: a guy I know, incredibly skilled at his job, has worked at this office for 14 years. He's been passed over for promotion the last three times, and every time to a Mormon with far less experience. The last time a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed kid with less than five years of experience got the job even though the kid has no experience in programming at all!
This is all anecdotal but I've heard two-dozen stories along the same lines as the one above, especially in the last five years. How can a company make informed decisions if it promotes, in part, on religious affiliation???
Max
Here's an idea combining the two:
The government has publicly stated that it's goal is to have 1 sky marshal for every ten flights. According to informed sources, the realistic ratio of sky marshals to flights will be closer to 1 in 20.
If I were a suicidal terrorist then a 1 in 10 chance of getting a sky marshal, or better yet a 1 in 20 chance, is good odds. Especially if my group is trying to capture 5 planes at the same time.
So what if we combine the two measures? Have face recognition software which flags *possible* terrorists and then takes a sky marshal from the pool available at that airport and puts the marshal on *that* flight? The odds of getting a marshal onto a flight with terrorists would be substantially higher (assuming you had pictures of the terrorists in question) than through random assignment.
Just a thought.
Max
Low market share and the fact that the OS has far fewer exploitable bugs.
Given the number of linux servers out there right now, do you honestly think that worm creators would give Linux a pass if it were anywhere near as easy to punch into as IIS? Or are you saying that the people who run an IIS box are generally idiots, while those who run Linux boxes aren't?
Max
Oh, please. Indulging in broad overgeneralizations, setting up strawmen to distraction - thinking of running for office, are you?
I doubt the average slashdotter cares a great deal about banner ads. I certainly don't; I run Opera with the ads and it doesn't bother me at all. These ads aren't the problem; it's the POPUPS (please, try to parse the article and the reactions before taking a leak in the pool next time) that piss people off. The damned things drive me insane; it's one of the reasons I'll never go to a tripod or geocities (now yahoo) site.
I vote with my feet. Popup sites go on my ban list, banner sites don't. This by default gives the banner sites (a fraction) more traffic than they otherwise would have. If enough people do it, it becomes something more than a fraction.
But very few here claim that they have a *right* to ad-free services provided by the money of others. If you think otherwise please provide the proof, other than your own unsubstantiated blathering.
Max
Let me guess: ubergeek trekkie who has nothing better to do than spend time online as a trek apologist and can't *stand* the idea that someone, somewhere, might think that
THE NEW TREK SUCKS!!!
Well, it does, in my NSHO. If you don't like that then I suggest you troll elsewhere, or beat off more.
Max
Straw man, straw man, straw man. Didn't take debate in high school, eh?
Max
Any time MS shoots itself in the foot I'm a happy camper. The more often they throw around their weight, the more likely it is for their customers to bail.
You can't imagine how pleased I'd be if I never had to fix another shitty installation of Windows ever again. It almost makes me want to go back into Perl/C++ programming just to get away from Really Bad Software (RBS)(TM).
Max
Precisely. I object specifically based upon the fact that the complete and utter wimp is a woman, and a stereotypical one at that. I grew up with this stereotype (I was around during the days of TOS, if that gives you a clue) and hate to see it played out for the ten-thousdandth time in any way, shape, or form.
But a better solution would be to make the crew the stalwart SOBs they should be.
Max
Look: the leeches were a stupid idea. Really stupid. No amount of justification of modern-day practices can save that scene.
Vulcan behavior has been established over four series and many movies. Redefining it now is a serious mistake. Someone on the staff has a bit too much ego, I think.
Max
So if there are still screaming 'rescue me!' women in the future, where are the screaming 'rescue me!' men? They exist in abundance in the here and now, despite false bravado. Or would that be too much of an insult to frail male egos?
Max
"proof by analogy is intellectual fraud".
Don't be such a fucking idiot. They're all examples of conversations with an expectation of privacy that's fictitious (easily circumventable no matter what you might believe) yet upheld by law. Email is no different in fact, only in legal bias.
I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Max
Yes, it sucked even worse than Voyager's first episode. Christ, but it was *bad*. Just some of the highlights:
- Bakula still can't act, and as a captain he's laughable in his attempts to be tough. Why in gods name didn't they pick some hungry nobody willing to bust his ass for this role?
- The communications chick was a complete loser, the stereotypical pre-Xena "I'm a screaming bitch who needs to be rescued by a big strong man" kind of girl. I thought we'd put those days behind us in SF....
- What the hell was up with Texas boy? Can you get any more wooden than that? He's even worse than Bakula.
- The doctor could actually act, but for chrissakes - interstellar LEECHES? That's what we've come to??? Roddenberry has to be turning over in his grave.
- more hackneyed Vulcan shit. On the brighter side, not only was the Vulcan one hell of a Hot Star Trek Babe(TM), but the best actor of the lot. That isn't saying much, but one can see how she might improve over time.
- the entire Vulcan lot was openly emotional, even when they denied it. For a moment I wigged and thought they were Romulans.
- the Enterprise was just plain ugly on the outside, and doubly ugly on the inside. I mean, it looked like a tramp steamer run by a bunch of lackwits. No wonder the Vulcans kept saying "um, maybe you should wait on this interstellar exploration thing". The graphics design team should be put up against a wall and shot.
- hey, guess what? At warp 4 it's only FOUR DAYS from Earth to the Klingon homeworld! Wow! Completely contradicts anything ever said on the subject in previous series, but hell - who cares? This is Star Trek, birth place of TV paradoxes!
- argh! Time travel in the pilot! Surely a sign of imminent doom if there ever was one.
- "polarized plating" - and it 'goes down', like shields. Metal that disappears! And comes back once it repolarizes! Nifty.
- the chemical composition of the gas giant just isn't possible. Chemistry 101 folks; or hell, spend a quarter, call a college astronomer, ask him what *real* gas giants are made of.
- no actual plot. Maybe one will come clear in the future, but other than 'get the Klingon dude home' the rest was confused wandering.
- the Enterprise certainly can't shoot for shit. Guess we're going to have more eps of "the Enterprise is badly outgunned by everyone they run into" or "power fails mysteriously once again" or "the computer's been possessed again".
- Berman. 'nuff said. This guy turns everything he touches to shit.
Man, I can go on and on. But I'd rather watch Farscape. At least it's internally consistent and the girls can kick as as well as, or better, than any man.
Max