What's with all the disrespect for secretaries? Have you never been in an office with one, or do you just assume that an office of a dozen plus people just magically holds itself together? A secretary answers the phones, keeps things organized, keeps the copiers stocked, and above all knows enough about their coworkers' business as to tell the difference between a question that can be simply answered and one that needs the coworker's attention. A doctor's expertise is quite a bit more advanced than fielding the same question coming from dozens of people, and that doctor's time is more valuable being spent on things that actually require a judgment call. And while secretaries won't know why patient X needs X medication (at least not until spending years on the job and learning by osmosis), you can be sure that secretaries know every single prescription made because the doctor will have tasked them with sending them all to the pharmacy.

Secretaries spend their entire workday making everyone else around them more productive. It is not something a monkey could do. It is not something every person could do either. And they know an awful lot more about the work their coworkers do then you think. These people silently keep the world running smoothly. The least you could do is say "thank you" instead of running around like a snarky asshole acting like what they do amounts to nothing.

If you see something, say something.

It does make sense that there is money to be made in education. But I've never known anybody who says to themselves, "Gee, you know who makes money hand over fist? Teachers!"

What? You lost me there.

Faith is not the same as superstition. Furthermore, faith can be a very good thing if it is well placed. When you have faith in your friends, you make yourself vulnerable but you boost their self-esteem, pushing them to be better. You also let go of some of the burden of constant skepticism. Now, if your friends might take advantage of your faith in them, you'll probably get hurt. But what if you can construct a perfect entity to have faith in? That's what God is.

God is the perfect entity, the embodiment of certain values we wish to make real in our lives. Of course not everyone has the same view of God; mine is almost certainly very different from the God that jihadists believe in. But the thing is that scripture generally does not support holy war or violence of any kind. Something universal to all religions is that their teachings - all of them - are directed inward, not outward. Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, even Joseph Smith all tried to teach people how to live their own lives, not how to make everyone else live theirs. This is reflected in the scriptures they all left behind.

You can ignore all the metaphysical stuff if it makes you feel better. I do. But the faith component is still just as positive and constructive as the God you choose to believe in. Again, if you want to change everyone else's view of God, have faith yourself and lead by example. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."

So we're still looking at the problem of the massive energy requirements, and the problem of regulating the use of that kind of destructive force, and the new problem of rapidly accelerating to (and decelerating from) near relativistic speeds within the solar system so you don't have to spend five years getting out or in. Not that we shouldn't try to solve those problems, but I still hope there's a better way.

A massive shockwave may not be a problem for one-way trips out of the solar system to uninhabited worlds. But it presents a mighty difficulty in anyone returning home. It also precludes attempts to search for life on other worlds, as the shockwave may obliterate it. And because such a shockwave could easily destroy most life on Earth, the technology would need to be kept under tight control by trustworthy bureaucracy. Which is basically an oxymoron.

If there is no better method than an Alcubierre drive for FTL travel, that may be reason enough why we've never been visited by aliens: they didn't want to risk destroying us. After all, given even optimistic predictions of the number of habitable planets in our galaxy which are already inhabited, it doesn't really make sense to steal planets from other life forms when there may be at least dozens of uninhabited but habitable or nearly habitable planets closer than the nearest inhabited ones.

Not that you have no good reason to think of religion as just another way for humans to divide ourselves based on dogma and, more importantly, trivial social identity, with a bit of metaphysical weirdness sprinkled in, but:

Religion doesn't get enough respect. There is real value to be found in bringing the spiritual into your life. Sadly, as society has become more and more secular, our greatest minds have mostly fled religion and most of who remains are really simple tribal types. But even among the simplistic flocks of vitriolic sheep is a wide diversity of beliefs, experience, and capacity for true altruism. What I'm saying is that all Christians and all Muslims are not the same. And if you want them to more about goodness and less about judging others, the only real way to effect that change is to join them and lead by example.

Of course, you can always just keep spewing hatred over the internet. There's an activity that will always be shared by the religious and the atheistic alike.

Unfortunately an Alcubierre drive would likely take more energy than we have produced in one form in the entirety of human history up to this point just for one trip. And then when you arrive, the resulting shockwave would be more powerful than several thermonuclear detonations. It's not a practical idea at all. But if a small prototype can be constructed and works, it will be proof that FTL travel is at least possible. And if we know it's possible, there may be more practical ways to achieve it.

Uhh, I used to read books when I was a very young child and had no problem understanding them. Magic Tree House, Encyclopedia Brown, Goosebumps, Harry Potter, etc. By the time I was a teenager, I moved on to more complex and challenging stories, like watching Neon Genesis Evangelion and Monster.

It's more likely that complex and challenging stories can be told in any production style, especially in totally different cultures that may not have the same biases we have towards that production style.

Picard wasn't shit at school. The entire TNG cast was remarkably high-cultured, with special reverence for Shakespearean literature, Sherlock Holmes and P.I. narratives on the holodeck, and classical music. The science/engineering talent on the Enterprise was pretty much limited to Geordi, Data, and Wesley (plus the mostly unnamed underlings), but everyone was well educated and spent a lot of time refining their tastes.

Voyager was supposed to be a science vessel, so it makes more sense that most of the crew on it would lean more toward that kind of smarts. But unfortunately Hollywood doesn't (usually) know how to write real science, so Voyager ended up with a huge amount of meaningless gibberish that we just have to assume represents real intelligence on the parts of the characters being portrayed. This is probably what puts some people off the most.

They never had fact checkers in Star Trek. And Voyager was especially bad. I'm not sure why, but I remember seeing an interview with Mulgrew where she was talking about all the nonsense tech words and how it took a lot of getting used to all that tongue twisting the writers were giving her. It was worse than in any other Star Trek for some reason.

But then one doesn't watch Star Trek for science. Star Trek is about the possible social implications of certain futurist ideas like post-scarcity, faster-than-light space exploration, and time travel. And if (or when) any of these ideas become part of our reality, I can guarantee it will not be like anybody imagined. Certainly not Star Trek, but not even as imagined in good hard Sci-Fi like [insert your favorite here].

The reason serialized TV wasn't done at the time is because of the exact reasons TWX wrote. Babylon 5 may have done something really cool and interesting, but it was ahead of its time and suffered because of that. Now we can have much more serialized TV in part because of pioneer shows like B5 (and also ST:TNG with the many two parters, ST:DS9 with its huge arcs, and especially shows like Lost that captured a larger audience).

Also important is that the dynamic of watching TV has changed greatly. It started with the VCR, but managing your tape collection is generally too difficult for the mass market. Then there was online piracy, which allowed people to easily and cheaply catch up on entire shows which are only in syndication (and as we all know, syndicated shows tend to only show "best of" old episodes). And while piracy didn't exactly make any money for the story arc shows, they primed the market for new shows that only became watchable with the mass-market availability of DVR. Now, we finally have streaming services to make it very easy to watch huge story arcs and support them financially, so the format has definitely become more mainstream.

TV used to be very different than it is now and for very good reasons. Don't forget that in the past the typical manner of watching TV was to see what was on at a particular time, and if you missed an episode then too bad.

Let's not underestimate the real power of data. Look at targeted advertising. It was really creepy a few years ago, wasn't it? Back when Target notified a teenage girl's family that she was pregnant (with helpful "she might like this" emails) before she told them? Ever wonder why that stuff doesn't happen so much anymore? It's because the advertising agencies know that it's super creepy so now something like 90% of ads are intentionally random. But they still get the 10% right.

You suggest the thermostat temperature alone may pique the interest of various surveillance agencies. I know you think you're joking, but this may be the one point of data they need to make an otherwise suspicious individual statistically significant. And don't make the mistake of thinking human beings are the ones suggesting what data is suspicious in what ways. The key to the entire data mining explosion is that when you have enough data about everything, you can set up an algorithm to figure out the statistical connections. Maybe it's really only suspicious if the thermostat is set 2 higher on Tuesday from 3am-4:45am. And 99% of the time that happens, it's because of a specific crime in progress.

We live in an age where we have been mostly liberated from the tyranny of humans trying to make those kinds of connections. Finally, with enough data about an individual, the computer knows what you're doing. The danger, of course, is still that humans will use that knowledge toward the wrong ends. First and foremost is the likelihood that human agents will abuse their power. Second is the likelihood that they will willfully misinterpret the results. And third is that they will almost certainly use the data to enforce existing rules rather than to analyze the actual social impact.

We have good reason to fear the invasion of our privacy. We have better reason to fear that anything else will truly understand what we are doing and why. We have the greatest reason to fear that this power will belong not to robot overlords but to people still bound by our legacy of rules instituted before this power existed.