Mod parent up! :) To me, this has always been one of the coolest (and most unique) things about Star Trek. It's cheesy I know, but the conception of a (relatively) peaceful, hopeful future where the heroes were more so explorers and ambassadors and less so warriors - that's really cool. Especially keeping in mind that this was made in the thick of the cold war, where a lot of people thought there might not be any humans left in two decades. That whole concept has kind of been lost in more recent Star Trek ("Enterprise", mostly) and maybe SF in general, which partly makes sense since it doesn't make for really exciting television, that's for sure.

But still. The thought of an optimistic, bright future universe is really something. Props to Gene Roddenberry for being ahead of the curve on that one.

No F-16s for us here in Canada, just CF-18s. Unless they're American, and visiting here on joint exercises.

Holy cow - thanks for writing this! That's really something. I hope the other post (about you being on the wrong site) was being fascetious - consider me among the Slashdotters genuinely interested in what you're saying here. Keep it coming.

Actually, the company that makes it (MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates' space division) was very almostly sold to a US defense contractor last spring. Which would kind of have sucked for Canada's space industry, since that company is basically ...our only one.

So really - back off, get your own robot space arms! : ) Cool, thanks, eh?

A bit of canadian history - in the late 50s, Canada had developed the world's most advanced jet interceptor (the Avro Arrow). When it was cancelled in 1958, almost every single scientist and engineer working on it moved to the States to work on the US space program. The Canadian aeronautical industry never recovered (but at least we can take credit for all the cool stuff NASA did in the 60s!). People really worry that if MDA Space ever gets sold off, the same thing will happen again.
http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2008/04/10/mdablock.html

Best wishes to your wife. And kudos beyond words to you for putting in that kind of time and care and love.
All the best to you both.

Sorry - I meant if Activision wanted to release the source code for it now (or if anyone wanted them to) they wouldn't be able to work it out with Paramount. I imagine that most abandonware games die that way. You're right though - definitely was officially released, and highly popular. :) And then gone.

No doubt - which is tragic.
My two favorite computer games (by far) are Fighters Anthology (1997), and Star Trek: Armada (2000). Just absolutely phenomenal games. :)
But the first was abandoned when EA disbanded its military-simulation division ("Jane's"), and Armada was completely abandoned after a legal dispute between Activision and Paramount (one day, all the Armada-related materials on the website just disappeared).
On second thought, that's probably why games like Armada couldn't be officially released - too much of a copyright hurdle between Activision's code, and Paramount's art/storyline/characters/etc. But it's nice to dream that they could be; both Armada and Fighters Anthology still have active modding communities (and that's saying something with FA, which had no mod tools) a decade later. Imagine what people could do with the full sources. They're good games; it's a shame that they'll eventually just be forgotten and lost forever.
If I was a game developer, I'd want to snag a copy of all the source code just as a product finished, so I could share it around a decade later and see what happens.

Canada too - it really is interesting. Not a week after having won the election (where they campaigned on their economic responsibility and prowess), the Conservative government here released a number of reports showing that the state of the economy was far worse off than expected. Some say that they knew for a long time, and called a quick election* so they could be re-elected before people realized how bad things were.

The sad part is, I can't see any of our political parties *not* doing the same thing if they had been in power. Canadian democracy is a downer.

* It's pretty funny - while we've been watching the US election run-up for pretty much 3 years, we can pull off a Canadian election in a month and a week between announcement and election. All my friends here watched the US debates instead of the Canadian ones. : )