...is this part of the Year of Astronomy, then?

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/31/1332257
...cosmonauts rename themselves to 'astronauts'.
"We're just going with the times. We see this is a value upgrade to our main product, cosmonautics, called "astronautics" starting April 1st 2009."
Oh and yes, we hope that we can also use the toilet too then.

Random Deus ex Machina?
Oh he's gonna hate me for that one.

Indeed.

A friend of mine and me (over- and over-)analyzed Voyager over the years. In fact we found it so involutarily ridiculous that we wrote around 30 parody episodes of Voyager in the absurd humor style, here's an excerpt:

(Janeway and Tuvok are in a room; there's a door on one of the walls.)
Janeway: We're trapped. What should we do now?
Tuvok: I could try to modify the door in such a way that it is open.
Janeway: How do you want to do that?
Tuvok: I will pull this lever.
Janeway: I don't have any better idea myself (hesitates) Try it.
(Tuvok pulls the lever, the door opens.)
Janeway: Well done. I will add a positive record to your personel file, but now we've got to get out of here.

Anyway my point is that a lot was due to the bad acting, a terrible lot. Some stories weren't actually so bad, but the bad execution made it look like nonsense. The same stories with the actors of DS9 would have been actually somewhat decent.

I should really try to promote a "KHAAAAAAAAAN!"-contesting event at one of the local hacker clubs.

Uh, as in Battlestar Galactica re-imagined?

I had enough after page 3. I didn't even remember it's so crappy, but then again I only saw it I think 1 time (maybe 2 but god only knows why).

LOST-like Star Trek, that's like "24"-like James Bond: It's a backconversion. LOST took a lot lot from Star Trek. Nevertheless, I don't think it would be a bad thing or as prominent as I just made it appear; was just a thought.

We'll see! I'm pretty confident about that. I'll try to get a sample of ATTs speech system, wanna hear now it feels like. Thanks.

This is a big blow for future development of AI!

As with everything in capitalistic scientific advancement, and foremost in the military, development works best if there is a future practical application in sight. So far NLP (NOT [god beware] Neurolinguistic Programming, but Natural Language Processing) and AI research didn't make big strides because they are just fiddling around with no real idea what to use this for. But with the Kindle 2, we have the first actual application which would benefit from near-perfect text-to-speech. So this will (or would have, or still will, after Amazon now caved in?) spur development of t2s systems that can actually understand what they are saying, on a certain level. And further from that, that's my prophecy, true AI systems will develop because you just have to start somewhere. But now.. well I guess they will still do research on how to read the books that they may the best way.

"A careful balance must be struck between providing information and not irritating the customer." Says it all to me. They're not users, they're all just customers.

So if i put on Jamiroquai and dance really really fast, I can have Christmas all the time?

You mean different than a 6 year old stealing a car and (I'm sure) trying to jump ahead in time to see how he'll turn out once he's 14...

The summary implies that they created a conventional MRI that has nanoscale resolution, as if they can now image a person's brain and pick out individual cells and molecules. That is not the case! And that is likely to never be possible (given the frequencies of radiation that MRI uses and the diffraction limit [wikipedia.org] that applies to far-field imaging.

I say 'never say never'! An MRI is Star Trek-ish enough as it is.