Not my living room, that's sadly occupied by an ex-marine on unemployment, Sony, and Nintendo.
Honestly if the combined efforts of Iger and Pixar can breathe some new life into a company that hasn't had a true box office hit since probably The Lion King (excluding Pixar hits such as Toy Story) then I'm open to seeing what they'll do. People here are fussing a little too much over what Jobs will do rather than the people truly at the helm of Disney. Jobs may be a shareholder, but I think he has enough issues at Apple that will keep him busy and leave Disney to restart itself post-Eisner
Well if the japanese animated seires PLANETES is any indication, we'll have companies employing debris collectors by 2050 with government contracts to clear space of debris for commercial flights to the moon and back.
To set the stage, I'm a 22 year old guy from divorced parents. Despite a lot of issues surrounding alcohol abuse and anger management with my folks, I managed to come out of it pretty unscathed. I credit that to entertainment and games.
See, I understand your viewpoints very well, in fact I respect those who have such ideals. However when you say that we have no respect for our elders and we merely use our parents as ATM's, that offends me. My parents allowed me 5 bucks a week growing up, of which I could get what I wanted (within reason) and special things like games and systems were usually birthday or Christmas gifts. as soon as I turned 16 and started working, everything I got, I bought with the money I earned. Since 16 I have paid for all my car, insurance, random junk, and now I am in my own apartment. You'd be surprised to know that most kids from my and below generations understand the concept of money and the concept of value very well, but you will always get a few kids who have been spoiled so bad that they do expect everything to be handed to them when they cry hard enough. Sadly I know a girl who is like this.
I am not a player of violent games, though I have tried several titles for curiousity. I happen to think they are a bit over the top and unneccessary especially when so many kids can get ahold of them. Should they be banned? No, they have just as much right to exsist as any Friday the 13th movie or similar scary or violent movie. That is what really is on trial here, the state wants to pin video games for something that is an entertainment-wide issue.
How much more scapegoating must this country do before it becomes right? How much more finger pointing and blame games must be played after every fatal shooting in a school because "he's not crazy, video games made him do it!" Is this the kind of national and state government that my "elders" have created? Sadly that disappoints me that the generation that touts responsibility and moral values to our generation can't be bothered to follow it themselves.
Again, I am certainly not disrespecting you or anyone else, especially since you are the few good people out there giving a damn about how children are raised in this "not me!" society. However you have to look at this from both sides before you get an accurate picture of what exactly all of this is. Sometimes in order to do that, you have to crossover to the dark side.
PS: MTV before the mid 90's was mostly harmless. After that though it turned to crap. Total agree with you on that.
The problem is, parents are still not as aware of video game ratings as say, movie or tv ratings because video games are still defined by much of their and their parents' generations as being "children's activities" that should only be played by kids under the age of about 12. It's for the same reason that animation can't get past Disney here in the US without being "Americanized" for content and marketablity, best example beitg any anime from Japan licensed here and shown on TV. Parents dismiss the notion their children are capable of playing violent games because "Games are children's activities, they can't be violent!" So when games like GTA come out, even intended for a higher auidence, suddenly they find their children playing and don't know what to do. In a society today where parenting has been more about how to divert your kid's attention away from you and onto something else, it's not surprising kids pick up violent games at a young age and then want to imitate what they see, sometimes with fatal results. The core issue of this debate has been and always will be parenting. It's a parent's job to look after their children and teach them morals and right from wrong. Not the video game industry, not the government, and certainly not Jack Thompson. Frankly, this whole issue would of been less of a hassle had it not been for the involvment of lawyers and politicians, the two foremost groups of people who have no idea how to deal with this issue half of the time.
A good friend of mine who works with many anime cons across the country and is now a translator for ADV and freelances for Geneon told me once that there are so many definitions for the word "otaku" its hard to translate it literally. One particularly funny one was that is roughly translates into "house" because of something to do with being "shut-ins" I find that hillarious to say to anime newbies.
"I am such a super-otaku!"
"What, your a super-house?"
Not drop dead hillarious, but it causes them to stop and think, which is an improvement from waiving "Will hug for Pocky" signs.
So what if Word crashed destroying his paper? Autosave right, what if that fails? Or XP crashes with Word?
Honestly, it doesn't matter what OS you use, they all can crash and will. The only difference is Linux machines crash less than Windows machines, but only under identical usage and stress. A person who only surfs the web and checks e-mail could use a Debian machine fine, but a person who plays games, runs a bunch of other programs, may have a harder time with the change.
I have to agree with a comment below, why didn't you leave with that guy?
Padme's constant outfit changes and outfits for that matter reminded me of Deanna Troi in STTNG, especially the outfit she wore to the lava planet, was just as skin tight as Troi's from "Encounter at Farpoint"
Not that I'm sure many people minded. Always gotta have one female in Star Wars for eye candy. Except Leia was more useful.
I'm rather surprised they turned it down as well, considering Trek isn't the only failing property of the UPN Network, now that any reason to watch it has been taken over by SpikeTV.
>>Makes you wonder what Roddenberry would say at this point.
Honestly, I'm willing to guess he would of probably supported the idea, just given the fact that he was the type of personality to accept new ideas and create new things. Trek has always been centered around the idea of "seeking out strange new worlds and going where no man has gone before" which he fostered in TOS and TNG. Berman tried to carry that same idea through into DS9 and Voyager, but he got caught up in Paramount's quest for TV supremacy against the bigger networks. This was especially the case of Voyager since it was the flagship show of the then new UPN Network. With all that ratings crap, the show had to please fans often by retooling the same shit, like Borg, timetravel, etc. It's no wonder the series never lived up to TOS/TNG, they weren't given the freedom to make a creative story.
So really it's hard to blame Berman or any of the successors to Roddenberry for the past 2 series completely, because as we should know, no matter how good of a story you write, it can only go as far as the limitations given to you by Big-Wig Hollywood.
yeah that's my problem, comcast advertises a higher speed but i want to go with speakeasy for my new apartment. I take it that Speakeasy, even if it's slower is still the better idea?
Is it worth losing a $49 monthly fee from each customer who leaves because of this?
I've dealt with every major ISP now except Roadrunner (this being Cox, Comcast/ATTBI, SBC, Verizon, and the former @HOME) at least once tech support wise. They were nicer back then when broadband was fresh and new and fast overtaking dial-up. Now it's a race to see which one can charge high prices, low service, and monopolize small regions of your state. I had to deal with Comcast on several occasions when I lived in Massachusetts, being in a small town outside of Springfield, the only broadband provider, was Comcast. With no competition from any DSL company and few people who wanted to use dial-up, they decided to charge us roughly 55/month for then 1.5-2mbps down/256kbps up. When my modem kept dropping and reconnecting and I knew it wasn't my computers or routers, I tried calling them and chatting online tech support at least 3 times. Not only can they succeed in not being able to solve the problem but they won't even offer to FIX the problem such as replacing the modem.
Now living in Central Connecticut I use Cox, which marginally isn't much better, however their service is pretty stable and their customer service responds a lot nicer than Comcast ever will. Sadly the apartment I'm moving to next will likely have either Comcast or maybe Speakeasy DSL, though Speakeasy advertises less bandwidth for the same price that Comcast is supposeally promising more (6mbps down/384kbps up for Comcast versus 1.5mbps down/384kbps up for Speakeasy, @ 49-59.99/mo) The other alternative is SBC/Yahoo DSL, which of the four people I know with it, they hate it.. a lot!
Someone needs to do something to cut costs on broadband, improve service, and end these strangleholds on some regions of the country.
Many webcomic artists have been trying to find a method to finance webserver costs, but it usually comes down to "direct donation" via paypal, or buying stuff through a storefront for related goods. Most authors don't mind hitting up people for a few bucks, but others have spoken in the past that donations "rip off" the readers of what they believe to be "free media" Personally I support the storefront option for that kinda site, but for something like a piece of software, donations work all of the same. I guess everything needs an ethnical debate these days.
yeah, a girl in our AV department did that as a senior prank my sophmore year, she took the air compressor and blew up a couple and tied them to her car and drove around. she had taped them all underneath the seats in the auditorium (the senior class has a class called "Current Issues" that's supposed to simulate college lecture style classes, mandatory for seniors, the class sucked -alot-)
Agreed, Verizon bringing out FIOS will most definatly put pressure on cable, because FIOS is set to debut at almost 3 times the speed of cable for about the same price. Around here, it's only Cox HSI , SBC:Yahoo, or Comcast in some other areas around Hartford, and frankly they all suck. However the increase of DSL users around here prompted Cox to improve their service and even up the speed of their lines for the same price. Works out well considering SBC:Yahoo here really sucks, almost every person I've talked to around here quotes it horrible.
However where I used to live in Massachusetts, there was only one broadband provider, Comcast (on the former ATTBI lines) and since there was no other provider cable or DSL, they had subpar connection and shitty service.
So they can spend money on a lawsuit brought to them by whoever really invented it, after all, they spend 100 mil. on patent lawsuits, even though they filed 3,000 last year, and I bet 1/3rd of them are not theirs to patent. Funny how that works.
wow, that is pretty messed up, sure they COULD sell illegal material for profit, I have a buddy in Iraq who says there are people out there who sell bootleg DVD's and CD's daily, some it could be finding its way to insurgents, but most of it is probably just people trying to make a few bucks. Here though, it's just an issue of people using their internet to download stuff for free, I imagine there aren't that many who then attempt to resell it, as they're more likely to get caught then just passing it to friends.
the court ordered her to pay damages of $750 for each of 30 songs she was found to have downloaded illegally, for a total of $22,500. That's more than the poverty line income for a family of five in 2004 ($22,030), but it is worth pointing out that damages of $750 per infringement is the minimum the RIAA could have received, and that the original complaint filed against Gonzalez claimed that she had nearly 2,500 downloaded songs.
That right there is what makes me shake my head, they are willing to extract nearly 20k from someone instead of spending more money to update their practices, move into THIS century, and stop artists from releasing shitty music, as well as making that shitty music for sale at insane prices. The RIAA will only continue to lose to P2P mostly because they made everyone previously unaware of it, aware.
Make it DMV style, that way you have to keep going back every week except Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays through Thursdays after 5pm all because you forgot 14 different forms in which to settle with. They can even use Brittney Spears' voice for the intercom "Now Serving D-2-2-4!"
Well you know, we gotta fight terrorism on a global scale and get every country involved says Bush. Of course that is after piracy = terrorism, which isn't far off I imagine, I'm waiting for the RIAA/MPAA to slip some clause into a bill that pretty much gives them complete legal authority to break down doors.
I am a bug Trek fan, and contrary to most people, I actually liked Deep Space Nine and Voyager, of course they weren't as great as TNG and the original, but they held their own, and the fact they went 7 seasons to Enterprise's 4, means they apparently worked. Perhaps the plan would of better to have named the ship something other than Enterprise? I think that's why DS9 and Voyager did ok, it was different, some people like different.
When it comes to Enterprise, what did it in for them was UPN. Let's face it, UPN is a piece of crap network. Nearly no major cable company carries it, it has few supporting networks, hell, in the Connecticut area the only UPN station is WTXX, which of the late I don't even think shows UPN programming anymore (doubly so during UCONN anything seasons, they were always showing the UCONN games instead of UPN or FOX programming) the network has had nothing but WWE wrestling and horrible black comedies. I'm not being racist, The Cosby Show was quality, the crap UPN puts on, isn't.
You also have to factor the shift in television ratings now, everyone watches these silly reality shows on the major networks. More people mindlessly watch American Idol than anything else. Episodes of Survivor hands down beat anything on UPN, including WWE shows, which says a lot.
Fact is, don't blame Enterprise and it's crew solely for it's demise. If anything those fans should be doing is donating to move the franchise from Paramount to someone that might give a damn and be able to market it on a network more capable of showing it. Which is not UPN.
There is no Janet Reno to stop them, and Bush and the rest of the US Government is worried about Iraq. Three huge telecom mergers have happened in the last 3 months, AT&T was aquired by SBC, CVS and Dunkin Donuts populate every block of the Northeast.
I'd say that it's "big business" in control today, it has been ever since the government declared that we are in a financial crisis and money needs to be shoveled to the people and then put back into the economy, and then the PATRIOT Act was signed. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft tried to compare hackers and pirates to terrorists and use that as more means to jusitfy their goals of market domination.
It doesn't matter how many Trek sequals you make, you will never shut up the old fans of the original series (and some TNG fans) from still bitching about how "Kirk is better then every other Captian, Spock rules, and Scotty is the bomb diggity" Personally I like all of them, the original told a good story and had some good action, TNG also told a good story and was very diverse. DS9 started off really shitty, but it picked up when they got the Defiant and started applying some wartime plots to the middle and end of the series, though I think the character development was the best part of DS9. Voyager remains one of my favorites, it was a "new technology" series that backed a lot of action with very capable characters, it's first few seasons were great, sadly it slipped during the infamous "Time Travel" 4th season, but it ended very nicely. Enterprise to me just didn't gel. Unless you purposely want to spend 100 bucks per episode you can't make a series that can take place before the original and look authentic enough, not to mention breaking the timeline to hell in order to do it. I for one won't miss it when it leaves.
Point is though, doesn't matter how many more Treks are made, they will still fall short of fans' high expectations set by the originals. It is not a series problem, it is a fan problem.
This is why I like the books. And I second an ealier thread, New Frontier is an awesome series.
Speaking from expierience, Dell notebooks are a sorry excuse for their exsistance. I bought a Inspiron 8000 back in 2001, computer went for about 2 years, had a battery go and a DVD drive go, getting a replacement battery was fine, getting the DVD drive was a pain in the ass. They had me send the entire unit to them, and all they did was upgrade the BIOS.
Woooow, cause I can't do that on my own.
Eventually I had to yell at them somemore, and sure enough they finally sent me a new DVD drive.
The last and greatest issue came before it's demise, the computer decided that when you so much as touched it, it powered off. I called their support, wrote e-mails, posted on forums, and every idiot tech seemed to think it was either Windows or someone equally stupid. After going through nearly 2 months and 6+ techs each stupider than the last, they finally said "oh, it's the motherboard, you are out of warrenty now, so we can fix it for 700$"
Wrong. I took all of the parts out of it and used them for a Inspiron 5000 that I bought off a friend for 150$ until I can afford a better one. The i8000 currently awaits an "office space style" death as soon as I get the chance.
Moral of this story, their support sucks, their hardware sucks, their desktops are ok, but stay away from their laptops. I recommend HP or Toshiba, surprisingly, HP after merging with Compaq are now starting to make some kickass hardware. Goes to show when you sit at the "top" you start slacking off.
Slashdot Mirror
Not my living room, that's sadly occupied by an ex-marine on unemployment, Sony, and Nintendo.
Honestly if the combined efforts of Iger and Pixar can breathe some new life into a company that hasn't had a true box office hit since probably The Lion King (excluding Pixar hits such as Toy Story) then I'm open to seeing what they'll do. People here are fussing a little too much over what Jobs will do rather than the people truly at the helm of Disney. Jobs may be a shareholder, but I think he has enough issues at Apple that will keep him busy and leave Disney to restart itself post-Eisner
Well if the japanese animated seires PLANETES is any indication, we'll have companies employing debris collectors by 2050 with government contracts to clear space of debris for commercial flights to the moon and back.
To set the stage, I'm a 22 year old guy from divorced parents. Despite a lot of issues surrounding alcohol abuse and anger management with my folks, I managed to come out of it pretty unscathed. I credit that to entertainment and games.
See, I understand your viewpoints very well, in fact I respect those who have such ideals. However when you say that we have no respect for our elders and we merely use our parents as ATM's, that offends me. My parents allowed me 5 bucks a week growing up, of which I could get what I wanted (within reason) and special things like games and systems were usually birthday or Christmas gifts. as soon as I turned 16 and started working, everything I got, I bought with the money I earned. Since 16 I have paid for all my car, insurance, random junk, and now I am in my own apartment. You'd be surprised to know that most kids from my and below generations understand the concept of money and the concept of value very well, but you will always get a few kids who have been spoiled so bad that they do expect everything to be handed to them when they cry hard enough. Sadly I know a girl who is like this.
I am not a player of violent games, though I have tried several titles for curiousity. I happen to think they are a bit over the top and unneccessary especially when so many kids can get ahold of them. Should they be banned? No, they have just as much right to exsist as any Friday the 13th movie or similar scary or violent movie. That is what really is on trial here, the state wants to pin video games for something that is an entertainment-wide issue.
How much more scapegoating must this country do before it becomes right? How much more finger pointing and blame games must be played after every fatal shooting in a school because "he's not crazy, video games made him do it!" Is this the kind of national and state government that my "elders" have created? Sadly that disappoints me that the generation that touts responsibility and moral values to our generation can't be bothered to follow it themselves.
Again, I am certainly not disrespecting you or anyone else, especially since you are the few good people out there giving a damn about how children are raised in this "not me!" society. However you have to look at this from both sides before you get an accurate picture of what exactly all of this is. Sometimes in order to do that, you have to crossover to the dark side.
PS: MTV before the mid 90's was mostly harmless. After that though it turned to crap. Total agree with you on that.
The problem is, parents are still not as aware of video game ratings as say, movie or tv ratings because video games are still defined by much of their and their parents' generations as being "children's activities" that should only be played by kids under the age of about 12. It's for the same reason that animation can't get past Disney here in the US without being "Americanized" for content and marketablity, best example beitg any anime from Japan licensed here and shown on TV. Parents dismiss the notion their children are capable of playing violent games because "Games are children's activities, they can't be violent!" So when games like GTA come out, even intended for a higher auidence, suddenly they find their children playing and don't know what to do. In a society today where parenting has been more about how to divert your kid's attention away from you and onto something else, it's not surprising kids pick up violent games at a young age and then want to imitate what they see, sometimes with fatal results. The core issue of this debate has been and always will be parenting. It's a parent's job to look after their children and teach them morals and right from wrong. Not the video game industry, not the government, and certainly not Jack Thompson. Frankly, this whole issue would of been less of a hassle had it not been for the involvment of lawyers and politicians, the two foremost groups of people who have no idea how to deal with this issue half of the time.
I was thinking more of what years of Mobile Suit Gundam have taught me.
Dropping colonies onto Earth = bad
But if they build bi-pedal robots with these colonies, I'm game.
A good friend of mine who works with many anime cons across the country and is now a translator for ADV and freelances for Geneon told me once that there are so many definitions for the word "otaku" its hard to translate it literally. One particularly funny one was that is roughly translates into "house" because of something to do with being "shut-ins" I find that hillarious to say to anime newbies.
"I am such a super-otaku!"
"What, your a super-house?"
Not drop dead hillarious, but it causes them to stop and think, which is an improvement from waiving "Will hug for Pocky" signs.
So what if Word crashed destroying his paper? Autosave right, what if that fails? Or XP crashes with Word?
Honestly, it doesn't matter what OS you use, they all can crash and will. The only difference is Linux machines crash less than Windows machines, but only under identical usage and stress. A person who only surfs the web and checks e-mail could use a Debian machine fine, but a person who plays games, runs a bunch of other programs, may have a harder time with the change.
I have to agree with a comment below, why didn't you leave with that guy?
Padme's constant outfit changes and outfits for that matter reminded me of Deanna Troi in STTNG, especially the outfit she wore to the lava planet, was just as skin tight as Troi's from "Encounter at Farpoint"
Not that I'm sure many people minded. Always gotta have one female in Star Wars for eye candy. Except Leia was more useful.
I'm rather surprised they turned it down as well, considering Trek isn't the only failing property of the UPN Network, now that any reason to watch it has been taken over by SpikeTV.
>>Makes you wonder what Roddenberry would say at this point.
Honestly, I'm willing to guess he would of probably supported the idea, just given the fact that he was the type of personality to accept new ideas and create new things. Trek has always been centered around the idea of "seeking out strange new worlds and going where no man has gone before" which he fostered in TOS and TNG. Berman tried to carry that same idea through into DS9 and Voyager, but he got caught up in Paramount's quest for TV supremacy against the bigger networks. This was especially the case of Voyager since it was the flagship show of the then new UPN Network. With all that ratings crap, the show had to please fans often by retooling the same shit, like Borg, timetravel, etc. It's no wonder the series never lived up to TOS/TNG, they weren't given the freedom to make a creative story.
So really it's hard to blame Berman or any of the successors to Roddenberry for the past 2 series completely, because as we should know, no matter how good of a story you write, it can only go as far as the limitations given to you by Big-Wig Hollywood.
yeah that's my problem, comcast advertises a higher speed but i want to go with speakeasy for my new apartment. I take it that Speakeasy, even if it's slower is still the better idea?
I've dealt with every major ISP now except Roadrunner (this being Cox, Comcast/ATTBI, SBC, Verizon, and the former @HOME) at least once tech support wise. They were nicer back then when broadband was fresh and new and fast overtaking dial-up. Now it's a race to see which one can charge high prices, low service, and monopolize small regions of your state. I had to deal with Comcast on several occasions when I lived in Massachusetts, being in a small town outside of Springfield, the only broadband provider, was Comcast. With no competition from any DSL company and few people who wanted to use dial-up, they decided to charge us roughly 55/month for then 1.5-2mbps down/256kbps up. When my modem kept dropping and reconnecting and I knew it wasn't my computers or routers, I tried calling them and chatting online tech support at least 3 times. Not only can they succeed in not being able to solve the problem but they won't even offer to FIX the problem such as replacing the modem.
Now living in Central Connecticut I use Cox, which marginally isn't much better, however their service is pretty stable and their customer service responds a lot nicer than Comcast ever will. Sadly the apartment I'm moving to next will likely have either Comcast or maybe Speakeasy DSL, though Speakeasy advertises less bandwidth for the same price that Comcast is supposeally promising more (6mbps down/384kbps up for Comcast versus 1.5mbps down/384kbps up for Speakeasy, @ 49-59.99/mo) The other alternative is SBC/Yahoo DSL, which of the four people I know with it, they hate it.. a lot!
Someone needs to do something to cut costs on broadband, improve service, and end these strangleholds on some regions of the country.
Many webcomic artists have been trying to find a method to finance webserver costs, but it usually comes down to "direct donation" via paypal, or buying stuff through a storefront for related goods. Most authors don't mind hitting up people for a few bucks, but others have spoken in the past that donations "rip off" the readers of what they believe to be "free media" Personally I support the storefront option for that kinda site, but for something like a piece of software, donations work all of the same. I guess everything needs an ethnical debate these days.
yeah, a girl in our AV department did that as a senior prank my sophmore year, she took the air compressor and blew up a couple and tied them to her car and drove around. she had taped them all underneath the seats in the auditorium (the senior class has a class called "Current Issues" that's supposed to simulate college lecture style classes, mandatory for seniors, the class sucked -alot-)
Agreed, Verizon bringing out FIOS will most definatly put pressure on cable, because FIOS is set to debut at almost 3 times the speed of cable for about the same price. Around here, it's only Cox HSI , SBC:Yahoo, or Comcast in some other areas around Hartford, and frankly they all suck. However the increase of DSL users around here prompted Cox to improve their service and even up the speed of their lines for the same price. Works out well considering SBC:Yahoo here really sucks, almost every person I've talked to around here quotes it horrible.
However where I used to live in Massachusetts, there was only one broadband provider, Comcast (on the former ATTBI lines) and since there was no other provider cable or DSL, they had subpar connection and shitty service.
Sounds like the world is going to end up like Serial Expieriments Lain... WE'RE ALL CONNECTED.. and then the "Start" button appears.
So they can spend money on a lawsuit brought to them by whoever really invented it, after all, they spend 100 mil. on patent lawsuits, even though they filed 3,000 last year, and I bet 1/3rd of them are not theirs to patent. Funny how that works.
wow, that is pretty messed up, sure they COULD sell illegal material for profit, I have a buddy in Iraq who says there are people out there who sell bootleg DVD's and CD's daily, some it could be finding its way to insurgents, but most of it is probably just people trying to make a few bucks. Here though, it's just an issue of people using their internet to download stuff for free, I imagine there aren't that many who then attempt to resell it, as they're more likely to get caught then just passing it to friends.
That right there is what makes me shake my head, they are willing to extract nearly 20k from someone instead of spending more money to update their practices, move into THIS century, and stop artists from releasing shitty music, as well as making that shitty music for sale at insane prices. The RIAA will only continue to lose to P2P mostly because they made everyone previously unaware of it, aware.
yes, it will change her breast size... again!
Make it DMV style, that way you have to keep going back every week except Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays through Thursdays after 5pm all because you forgot 14 different forms in which to settle with. They can even use Brittney Spears' voice for the intercom "Now Serving D-2-2-4!"
Well you know, we gotta fight terrorism on a global scale and get every country involved says Bush. Of course that is after piracy = terrorism, which isn't far off I imagine, I'm waiting for the RIAA/MPAA to slip some clause into a bill that pretty much gives them complete legal authority to break down doors.
I hope not.
I am a bug Trek fan, and contrary to most people, I actually liked Deep Space Nine and Voyager, of course they weren't as great as TNG and the original, but they held their own, and the fact they went 7 seasons to Enterprise's 4, means they apparently worked. Perhaps the plan would of better to have named the ship something other than Enterprise? I think that's why DS9 and Voyager did ok, it was different, some people like different.
When it comes to Enterprise, what did it in for them was UPN. Let's face it, UPN is a piece of crap network. Nearly no major cable company carries it, it has few supporting networks, hell, in the Connecticut area the only UPN station is WTXX, which of the late I don't even think shows UPN programming anymore (doubly so during UCONN anything seasons, they were always showing the UCONN games instead of UPN or FOX programming) the network has had nothing but WWE wrestling and horrible black comedies. I'm not being racist, The Cosby Show was quality, the crap UPN puts on, isn't.
You also have to factor the shift in television ratings now, everyone watches these silly reality shows on the major networks. More people mindlessly watch American Idol than anything else. Episodes of Survivor hands down beat anything on UPN, including WWE shows, which says a lot.
Fact is, don't blame Enterprise and it's crew solely for it's demise. If anything those fans should be doing is donating to move the franchise from Paramount to someone that might give a damn and be able to market it on a network more capable of showing it. Which is not UPN.
There is no Janet Reno to stop them, and Bush and the rest of the US Government is worried about Iraq. Three huge telecom mergers have happened in the last 3 months, AT&T was aquired by SBC, CVS and Dunkin Donuts populate every block of the Northeast.
I'd say that it's "big business" in control today, it has been ever since the government declared that we are in a financial crisis and money needs to be shoveled to the people and then put back into the economy, and then the PATRIOT Act was signed. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft tried to compare hackers and pirates to terrorists and use that as more means to jusitfy their goals of market domination.
It doesn't matter how many Trek sequals you make, you will never shut up the old fans of the original series (and some TNG fans) from still bitching about how "Kirk is better then every other Captian, Spock rules, and Scotty is the bomb diggity" Personally I like all of them, the original told a good story and had some good action, TNG also told a good story and was very diverse. DS9 started off really shitty, but it picked up when they got the Defiant and started applying some wartime plots to the middle and end of the series, though I think the character development was the best part of DS9. Voyager remains one of my favorites, it was a "new technology" series that backed a lot of action with very capable characters, it's first few seasons were great, sadly it slipped during the infamous "Time Travel" 4th season, but it ended very nicely. Enterprise to me just didn't gel. Unless you purposely want to spend 100 bucks per episode you can't make a series that can take place before the original and look authentic enough, not to mention breaking the timeline to hell in order to do it. I for one won't miss it when it leaves. Point is though, doesn't matter how many more Treks are made, they will still fall short of fans' high expectations set by the originals. It is not a series problem, it is a fan problem. This is why I like the books. And I second an ealier thread, New Frontier is an awesome series.
Speaking from expierience, Dell notebooks are a sorry excuse for their exsistance. I bought a Inspiron 8000 back in 2001, computer went for about 2 years, had a battery go and a DVD drive go, getting a replacement battery was fine, getting the DVD drive was a pain in the ass. They had me send the entire unit to them, and all they did was upgrade the BIOS. Woooow, cause I can't do that on my own. Eventually I had to yell at them somemore, and sure enough they finally sent me a new DVD drive. The last and greatest issue came before it's demise, the computer decided that when you so much as touched it, it powered off. I called their support, wrote e-mails, posted on forums, and every idiot tech seemed to think it was either Windows or someone equally stupid. After going through nearly 2 months and 6+ techs each stupider than the last, they finally said "oh, it's the motherboard, you are out of warrenty now, so we can fix it for 700$" Wrong. I took all of the parts out of it and used them for a Inspiron 5000 that I bought off a friend for 150$ until I can afford a better one. The i8000 currently awaits an "office space style" death as soon as I get the chance. Moral of this story, their support sucks, their hardware sucks, their desktops are ok, but stay away from their laptops. I recommend HP or Toshiba, surprisingly, HP after merging with Compaq are now starting to make some kickass hardware. Goes to show when you sit at the "top" you start slacking off.