Yes, it works for particles, when you have sufficient energy. Technically a plasma can ionize it, and then deflect/repel it along an magnetic field, much like a particle accelerator does. Yet the same can be accomplished by EM radiation alone (ionizing radiation), which could/would subsequently create said plasma. Although I'm not sure what you could to against subatomic particles that have no charge, like neutrons.

The difficulty would not only be in stopping lasers, it's stopping any kinds of EM radiation.
For example they use their main deflector shield to protect the ship from particles at superluminal velocities, implying that these particles can penetrate the warp bubble, that bends space, around the ship.
But how does it protect them from EM radiation? Can EM radiation penetrate the warp bubble? From the series we know that you can see something from the inside of the ship, implying that EM radiation is well able to penetrate the bubble and reach the ship.
As we know from wave phenomenons like the Doppler effect, every form of EM radiation in line of the travel direction would become hard radiation (gamma rays) at high speeds, being able to penetrate thick layers of mass. Even impulse speeds could reach 4/5 c, according to VOY.So what do you do against incoming light with your shields? Remember that you can't adapt your shield to the incoming frequency before it even hits you.
Certainly with an incredible source of energy such shields might be possible, without any frequency gap, after all they couldn't use weapons and transporters during warp. But it all becomes fantastic and magical and less scientific at this point. With such kinds of energy you probably could use 'artificial wormholes' for travel.

Star Trek used a lot of magic wands during its various series and movies, it's more of a Science Fantasy than Science Fiction. And some of us probably spent too much time thinking about logical consistencies, unless they're writers themselves.
Assuming that there is some magical energy source that can provide enough power and that Star Trek technology works like described in the TV series and movies:

Getting the shield frequency (gap) would be technically valid, against EM radiation weapons with a very narrow spectrum of frequencies, like lasers. In that case you could 'rotate the frequency' forcing your enemy to find the algorithm used for the rotation, if they wanted to continue exploiting your frequency gap.

However besides of Photon Torpedos, EM radiation weapons aren't that common the Star Trek universe. Phasers are particle beams, they fire "nadion particles" or are classified as plasma weapons. Disruptors use sound vibrations, plasma, particles like Nadions, antiprotons, hadrons and generally 'ions'. An energy shield would certainly work against these weapons. The only problem would be that you can't fire with these weapons, unless you take the shields down. Here you could disable the shields at a set frequency for a set pulse width and use this window to fire your weapons.

For matter it's true, especially matter that isn't electrically neutral (ions, leptons like electrons) is 'easy' to deflect and to repel and we've done it for a long time like in cathode ray tubes. We even manipulate molecular dipoles every day in our microwave ovens, but electromagnetic radiation is a lot more difficult.
For EM radiation you basically have 3 methods:

1. Absorption, which can be simply imagined as some kind of armor
2. Deflection/refraction, like with meta materials, you could also bend space but let's not talk about that
3. Reducing or canceling the waves out with interference from other electromagnetic radiation. The latter would be the "energy shield" where you have to perfectly match amplitude, wave vector, frequency and phase. This is extremely difficult to achieve and would require a lot of energy to work as an effective, impenetrable "shield", which would act much like extremely strong white noise generator.

I think a combination of the first two could be feasible, but effective energy shields alone probably will remain science fiction for the next few decades..
Then again if you think about the difficulty of creating efficient weaponized lasers, you probably won't have to worry about that anyway.

Yes, metamaterials. The problem is that the bandwidth is quite narrow as far as I know, covering a broad spectrum of frequency is far from trivial. Here the rule of thumb is that the structures in meta materials have to be smaller than the wavelength, they're supposed to affect. Photonic crystals also have to be created with a very specific bandgap.

Another problem is that metamaterials are matter, a magnetic field by itself isn't matter and can only change the polarity of electromagnetic waves, which won't do much. Now you could say that you manipulate the matter around with with said magnetic field, make the former "energy field" into an "energy-matter-field", which raises a problem in space, since space isn't known for its high density of matter. Then you'd have to emit matter and keep it in place around your ship. Thank god Star Trek also invented replicators, eh?

Certainly you aren't forced to pirate it per se, but you can feel compelled to.
When I try to access HBO GO I can read this: To access HBO GO, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America. If you reside in this area and are still experiencing difficulties, please contact your television provider.
So I use proxies to 'bend' the rules. HBO does get money from me but technically I committed tax fraud and violated local licences. This almost equals pirating it since the local license holder doesn't get his share and neither does the state. I caused them to suffer opportunity costs, which they calculate as financial damage, even though I would never have watched it on television there, but simply buy the BluRay to get the uncut version with the original audio tracks. But they don't care about that, they still perceive it as financial damage caused by a "pirate". You see, just because I paid HBO doesn't make it any more legitimate than piracy from the economical and legal point of view in my country.

Other people simply say to themselves "fuck it, I'm simply going to download a ripped version off the internet" and do so.

Now you might ask why do people do that? What's their motivation? Well the internet is a wonderful platform for communication around the world, national borders become almost irrelevant. I know people from all around the world, among them are US Americans, I consider them as peers and friends. I talk to them almost on a daily basis and on Mondays (from my timezone) I can't listen to them without getting hearing and reading spoilers of all your favorite TV shows. To fix that I basically watch the shows 'with them'. Doing so I play by the rules of HBO, but not by the rules of my country, and to be perfectly honest I couldn't care less. As I see it it's their fault to act like dinosaurs, unable to adapt to the circumstances, trying to change the rules, failing to realize that the internet will never bent to their will.

I'm not sure if just installing the necessary Wine libraries to run the game counts as 'native Linux port', because that's what EVE Linux did.

I'm also playing EVE Online, for over 6 years now and I'm hardly interested in any other MMO. There I am a newbie friendly teacher, trader, industrialist, thief, scammer, scumbag pirate, suicide ganker for profit and fleet coordinator.
EVE can offer a lot, but it has serious shortcomings in twitch based gameplay. In the beginning it may be challenging to manage and use all the information that the game throws at you, but after a while you simply can't get beyond the 1 second server ticks that cam become as long as 10 seconds in larger fleet engagements. Therefore I also play games like CSGO and Arma III or Hack and Slay like the F2P Path of Exile.

Generally on MMOs:
Ever since World of Warcraft was released and easily took over the market, most MMOs seem to be all the same with different graphics and names. Theme parks that don't allow or even discourage creative game play.

John Smedley, inventor of Everquest and probably the whole theme park MMO genre recently wrote in his blog that he is going to pursue more sandbox approaches to his newer games instead of following the theme park trend. The mind-boggling thing about this is that apparently no other major game designer came up with this crazy idea.

Oddly enough the only offline games I play are things like: Garry's Mod, the Portal Games and Solitaire.

Well that's basically how I waste my time when I'm playing games.

Well, energy prices on the market don't quite reflect the prices for private end users.

In 2014, as a regular German citizen I have to pay about 0.3 € per kWh, which is about $409.8 per MWh. Combined with all the other living costs here, I can guarantee you that it doesn't feel like "almost free" at all.

I did. Alright, I'm just going to stop typing for today.

Just a type, didn't mean to be offensive.

In games like Counter-Strike: Global Offense, I take hostages, set up bombs are willing to give up my virtual live to protect it from being defused, kill people.

While in reality I'm not a suicide bombing terrorist. Who would have guess?

That statement makes me want to burst out in laughter or tears.

Most creative writing classes on descriptive writing will tell you that adjectives and adverbs very often are lazy and sloppy descriptions. They teach to use strong verbs and nouns, and not to rely on adjectives. It is taught that a good writer uses adjectives and adverbs to support verbs and nouns, but never as a description.

Imagine this: Your wife wants to log into her gmail account, you didn't remove your account from the account management, she doesn't notice that she tried to login to your account.
Gmail: What kind of porn were you looking up when you used your gmail account the last time?

I wrote a long reply yesterday in the evening, but somehow it got lost in the process of posting. I will break it down to the basics.

I do not believe in those neoliberal ideals anymore, because that doesn't seem to work over here, in fact it does appear to have been the cause of the fast social decay in Europe, every approach in that direction made it worse. Every little lenience that was given to the economy was exploited to the maximum extend within the shortest time, mostly at the cost of employees.
Here in Germany there are indicators that higher wages don't destroy the economy at all, throughout the states of Germany there is a positive correlation between average wages and economic power. Meaning that here in my federal state for example, unemployment is fairly low, risk of poverty is low, the average income is the highest of all states, which aren't merely a city; economically we are the 2nd strongest state.

Today it appears to be far too late to fix things just by deregulating the markets, give everyone sudden freedom. This would required radical changes in international laws since companies had the advantage to design the whole system for decades. Just take a look at the messed up financial market, it's probably the most deregulated marked, caused the most recent crisis and continues to use most ridiculous theories, because they seem to work most of the time.

I don't say that economic liberalism can't possibly work, just that it won't work under the current circumstances. At the moment it's an utopia, similar to the different directions of Anarchism, while it is very nice in theory it doesn't fit human mentality.

I suppose you could only perceive it the way German people do, when you've actually been living here for the past two decades, were able to observe how things changed first hand.

Trade Unions, that are composed by people working those jobs, decided that 8.5€/hour would be reasonable, the Social Democrats and the Green Party agreed, The Left wanted 10€ per hour. A lot of working class people are in Trade Unions, join strikes, that are very rare, like this one, but people in Trade Unions aren't welcome in all companies. Often they simply don't get employed when they state to be a member of one of the Trade Unions, since they're potential trouble makers. Officially it would be discrimination, but due to the free market the employer may find any other reason to not employ them.

On politicians attempting to plan the economy: Politicians have been planning, and are planned by, the economy for decades, accepting donations from company owners, coincidentally changing regulations in their favour. Today it's called Lobbying and has a clear direction "serve the economy, screw the public". It's legitimized corruption, since large companies can afford top notch Lobbying, representing the facts from their point of view, convincing the politicians that those new CO2 regulations would kill a lot of jobs, or even force them to move to another country where the regulations are less restricting. Then suddenly those new regulations are postponed or even canceled. The working citizens have nobody to represent them other than Trade Unions, since working class citizens simply lack the cohesion and leverage to achieve anything, all the do is to cast their vote every 4 years. One might think that politicians are representatives of the people. Here in Germany we also call the process of voting "die Stimme abgeben", which literally translates to "cede your voice", since hardly any politician cares about what you have to say once the election is over. And this isn't the case only here in Germany.

One of the reasons behind the idea of minimum wages in Germany are to counteract the development in the recent years where the labour force is exploited more and more. No job is stable anymore. Where unlimited working contracts were common a decade ago, even as an unskilled worker, and employers needed a reason to get rid of someone, which was still pretty easy in the case of lazy workers, today you can be glad if your contract gets extended beyond a single month as an unskilled worker. Because if you're employed longer then a month the company would have to grant you special rights. Due to the fear of losing their job a lot of people accept every crappy job they can, quit after a short time again, get moved around.