Charms bar? Continuum?

Names used to be fairly intuitive, and even when they weren't completely intuitive their names were derived from their technical function. I'm thinking "context menu", "start menu", "task list", "quick-launch menu", and "system tray".

Now they're just marketing doublespeak.

boiling != scrambling. Your analogy is safe for now.

Besides, like brute-force crypto, in some instances it may be possible to un-boil some aspect of the egg, but it appears to be an extremely expensive process carried out by only highly trained professionals and only workable in very specific circumstances, so it's very unlikely that it'll be commonplace in the total number of instances of boiled eggs or encrypted data.

I guess the next step is to un-fry a chicken.

There's a particular Wendy's that I won't eat at; they seem to have mastered this technique based on what I've been served between two pieces of bread.

That still doesn't mean that you're going to make good decisions.

I don't like hierarchy where it serves no purpose, or serves to promote cliques.

I'm in a social club that has four elected officers, and those are the only people with any sort of actual rank in the organization. Those people are elected annually, but their authority in the organization is solely based on agreement by the members. They can't spend more than something paltry like $20 of club funds without membership approval, they can't call unscheduled business meetings, they can't order anyone around. Many of them have duties that actually make being an officer in the club a chore, as they're responsible for the refreshments, the minutes of the meetings, the newsletter, keeping the small bank balance maintained, and communicating with other organizations for when we want to do things. By contrast, being a member is simply paying one's $15 annual dues and showing up to events.

Voyager was primarily written by the executive producers. TOS was primarily written by science fiction authors and third-party script writers. There's a gradual gradation noticeable from TOS through Enterprise where one can see the quality drop as fewer external science fiction authors wrote and more executive producers wrote instead.

I suspect that this became a problem because instead of the executive producers being the 'keepers of continuity' and the barrier through which bad scripts got filtered or fixed, as the source of scripts they were crap, and there was no one else to tell them that it was crap.

You can kind of see that with Doctor Who, there are occasional episodes that are just bizarre (like the Tennant/Tate episode with Agatha Christie and a giant bee) that should have been revised further, but due to having such a small group of writers, made it through despite being subpar. With American TV, the need to push 20+ episodes per year with less than two weeks to shoot and finalize each episode, when those producers are also the writers they simply can't police themselves, if they even want to.

There is no requirement for one to drive or to buy alcohol, and no ID requirement to rent a home, to perform some kinds of work, or to transact business with cash. There's no ID requirement to file your federal or state taxes, and one's social security card for the tax filing number doesn't cost anything and is issued at-birth. You don't even need that card to file taxes, though some states require that card, that was freely issued, to be presented when beginning most forms of employment so that the employer can file taxes.

It's possible to live a full life without resorting to criminality without ever having ID. It's not the kind of life that I want to live, but for those that want to live that way, who am I to tell them not to?

People in the South tend to have guns within reach at all times; what could possibly go wrong? :)

Oh I donno, how about being unconscious for approximately a third of one's day?

I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly at my best when I wake up, and definitely not when I'm woken up off-schedule.

Until government-issue ID is completely free and requires almost no effort on the part of the individual to attain it, then the mandate for that ID in order to vote is a form of disenfranchisement. The right to vote predates the mandate to have ID.

I think that voting should be mandatory, and to get an exemption one needs to file to be a voting-equivalent of a conscientious objector.

They were never called 'foobies' until they moved them to their own domain.

The Q-making-fight seemed a lot more like the original TOS pilot, "The Cage," than anything else, when the Talosians made Pike relive an experience where he fought against an odd primitive humanoid warrior.

Part why early TNG episodes felt like TOS episodes is that some were essentially unproduced TOS scripts reworked for the new characters, or were originally created for Phase II . Decker and Ilia stories were adapted into Riker and Deanna stories.

I've never liked clubs that have rank structures for that same reason. Social clubs that happen to like a given subject and meet to enjoy the subject is fine, don't need saluting or sucking-up to senior ranks just to have a good time.

They could have done so much with that; they could have played the self-doubt and fall-from-grace that violating such rules should have led-to, but chose not to. That's part why I think they should have stayed with the planet in The 37s, as at least those people were the descendants of humans and bending the rule on the Prime Directive for an offshoot of a founding race of the Federation wouldn't be completely out of character.

Instead we ended up with ultra-evolved Paris and Janeway gettin' it on, and abandoning their ultra-evolved offspring on an alien planet, and making veiled come-on jokes after the fact.

I always found that there was a rough ratio of screen size to viewing distance, and it varied between conventional television viewing and "home theater" viewing. Those two have blurred in recent years with the advent of inexpensive large TVs, we we can err more toward the home theater size.

I have a 100" projector at 4:3. At 16:9 it's about 92" diagonal. We sit about eighteen feet from the screen. When I had smaller screens over the years we sat proportionately closer. I also have a 30" HD tube television, I sit about ten feet from it. When I had smaller televisions over the years I sat closer generally for movies, but for conventional television shows it could be further away. So, for a ratio, distance to viewing ratio seems to fall between 2:1 and 3.5:1 or me. I expect that most people are similar, based on my friends' setups.

I have computers running at 1920x1080 on both setups. The resolution is so high for the distance that I have to zoom-in the web browser to use it. Fonts are almost unreadable without walking up to the display. I don't think there would be a lot of practical advantage to increasing resolution on either setup, and remember, that's with a 92" screen in the mix. There is just no better viewable image for me. I'm also young enough that my eyes are still pretty good, for what that's worth.

We don't really buy new DVDs anymore unless it's for TV shows that just aren't available in better quality anyway, but I don't see a lot of benefit over Blu-Ray. Hell, I still have a ton of Laserdiscs and they're watchable on these setups.

John DeLancie steals scenes excellently. He also bookends the series as Q, which does help add closure to the end of the show.

I just wish that they hadn't brought him into DS9 or Voyager. It was a rather naked attempt to boost ratings by doing it, but it didn't work very well and there wasn't a lot of reason for him to show up there. To me it made more sense that he would continue to torment the same people repeatedly (ie, Picard and company) than to find a specific other set of humans to torment.