Yes, and they barely ever used it.

If you're going exploring, let alone into battle, you start in the protected bridge, not in the pimple on the top of the ship that has arrows pointing to it that say:

"Please target disruptors here for maximum effect."

I don't argue the point too much. I know its a TV show, and it did look fairly neat. It just never made any sense for the sort of battles that Starfleet would frequently get into.

In a modern navy, your captain sits in CIC, unless he's interested in the more navigational aspects of what is going on. I guess having a CIC was too militaristic for Roddenberry, but it would have made more sense.

Alternately, the whole battle could have plausibly been executed by the computer and they could have decorated the bridge like a sitting room, but that would have completely disconnected the audience from the action. Not to mention the crew.

TNG was great, and I watched every episode I could. However, shows like B5 and DS9 were better for me, because I enjoy more fleshed out plots than 40 minutes can give you.

I agree that having TNG was a pre-req for the others because it showed that you could make money in first-run syndication. B5 and the other Treks rode that business model, and indeed, it allowed those shows to take the plotting further.

Dominar Rygel XVI would like you to know that he is nobody's puppet!

Good point. If her powers worked though deep space, she didn't need to be on the bridge, taking up space.

It would have been better if she had been some sort of Federation ambassador who was in charge of the mission, as opposed to the ship. That would have made more sense for her sitting on the bridge, but would have reduced Picard's role, which certainly would have changed the series considerably.

I suppose it doesn't really matter, because ST bridges make no sense even from an exploratory aspect. They might as well have had Troi up there, as well as a playpen with a bunch of little kids being babysat in the corner.

Well, the scouting was the "fleshed out" part. You don't create an actual war plan without doing your homework, and scouting your next door neighbor is probably easier than scouting anyone else would be.

Creating plans to invade or defend against other countries, even (currently) friendly ones, is the job of a military staff. It provides options for leaders, and good plans can't wait until two weeks before you realize that you need to go to war. If you've waited that long, you're screwed. Modern militaries don't operate without advanced logistics support and mobilization plans.

More to the point, it's good practice for those whose job it is to plan things. Its not exactly friendly sounding, but every country's military does it. The UK even had a plan for war with the US before WWII, although even then, the plan was "try to get the US population to lose interest in the war by holding out long enough to not be blockaded into starvation".

Just think of it as the US playing a friendly game of Warhammer 40K with their best bud Canada.

I'm well aware that PC doesn't equal Windows and nothing I said indicated I believed that. The point is that PCs still exist, and Windows still dominates them for anything but servers.

I'm a sys admin who uses Linux every day. I've had Linux desktops running on machines and in VMs for years. I have a bunch of Linux desktop VMs at the moment. Its better for development, but I much prefer Linux as the VM and not as my actual workstation.

Linux has done a lot of things well, but creating a desktop worth using regularly is one thing that seems to elude it for some reason. For what it is worth Win XP was "okay", but Win7 was actually pretty good. Even Win 8.1 is decent, if you can ignore some of the irritations. But I have yet to see a Linux desktop that even really compares to XP, let alone later iterations of Windows.

Aero is fine... if you can turn it off.

If you have the machine that can feasibly do all that fancy graphical shit, then why not? As long as they don't make you have to use it.

Sure, Windows isn't all over mobile, but most people still have PCs. Including the one I am typing on right now. It is still quite relevant. Until you end the PC, somehow, it will continue to be, if nothing else changes.

It is still by far, the best OS for business workstation use. And I say this as a UNIX admin who has been waiting for a Linux desktop worth using for the last decade. And its not half bad for personal use either.

Windows has come a long way, although not without its share of missteps. I'm actually okay with it now. I might not switch to a Mac even if someone gave me one. Although that says more about what I think of Macs these days than it does of Windows. And mind you, my first three computers were Macs.

Thing is... nuclear war would bring serious climate change, and due to the massive amount of deaths and casualties, disease would probably kill as many, if not more, than the bombs themselves. This would be like the Black Death, with radiation.

However, people would almost certainly survive. Possibly a lot of them, but at least a few. Humanity has survived at least one supervolcanic eruption, which would be very comparable to the amount of dust you might get in a nuclear exchange.

Compared to what might happen after such an event, actual working martial law would be more "society" by far. It would actually be something of an achievement in that scenario, if it avoided breaking down into warlords and roving bands of killers.

Europe was tired out and broke after WWII. The US probably did some nudging, but the reality was that there was a new world after WWII and true empires of the 19th Century sort were no longer supportable, if they ever really were. Europe was a literal wreck, and the UK was broke.

In the end, they exhausted themselves and ended their own empires through their bad decisions.

It was a General Staff plan. It was just a fleshed out thought exercise. It could have been turned into action, if need be, but does not imply any sort of intent.

The various staffs of the armed services constantly run "what-if" scenarios like this. They are not evidence of any sort of intent, they're just thought exercises on how to carry out an attack on or defense against any particular opposing force. This is just war-gaming at a professional level which can be used to sharpen planning skills when they want to break out of planning yet another Middle East scenario.

The truth of matter is that most people are screwed in a big enough scenario. Indeed, even the leaders or the rich would not be guaranteed to get out of it. The government will do its best to keep things going, but the reason there is a succession plan is that even the most highly ranked individuals face their demise.

Yes, I'd feel better if this was not about opening a garage, but was used to open something like a drop box where it isn't part of your house, and the package is still safe.

Of course, you could just invent a dead drop box for this too.

I don't think letting people into my garage is a good idea.

I don't disagree with you too much. The new movies are fun, and I feel they resurrect a part of TOS that I think got lost in later Trek, but you're right, I think they tell the story in a way that says:

"You already know who all these people are, so let's ignore the part where we bother to fill the holes in the plot."

For instance, Kirk goes from cadet at the Academy to Captain of a starship. It was almost like he Riddicked the Enterprise and "kept what he killed" or whatever. I mean, sure... maybe he got to be temporary captain for that mission. That made a modicum of sense. But no, at the end, he's now the captain. Unlike "real" Kirk who was a youngish man, but still had a full military career before becoming captain.

Khan, of course, suffered from the "okay, we already know who he is because we saw Space Seed and The Wrath of Khan," except that, of course, James T Kirk in the new timeline had *not* seen those episodes and Old Spock pointing out that Khan was a really bad man, was probably not going to be enough to explain why Khan was now Sherlock.

I have to admit that I did have a bit of a subversive chuckle at the military style uniforms they used for Starfleet in "Into Darkness". For some reason, I'd have thought that would have had more people howling, because it made Starfleet look a lot more obviously military.

For all of that, though, I do sort of still get a TOS vibe from the new movies. I just hope if they do another one, that they do get a little more introspective, between explosions. But I still totally want explosions, and green Orion girls.