Why? What in what passes for modern journalism would cause you to be astonished?

You're thinking of 'deus ex machina', which is a plot device along the lines of "and suddenly a god-like being appeared and fixed everything". It's the fate of all lazy fiction and, sadly, it's not restricted to sci-fi

You mean like BSG's "ending"?

From TFA:

You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech -- make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail -- without changing the scripts significantly.

Um, yeah ... there's a reason why Roddenberry pitched it as "Wagon Train to the Stars".

But geeks ultimately represent a loss of control. Geeks love to tinker...

Which is why only one Steve is still at the top of the Apple org chart ...

Don't forget Kubuntu [kubuntu.org]! It's got KDE 4.2 now!

Really? I was all excited when 8.10 came out, installed it ... then had to go back to 8.04 after a few days. Why? Simple. My existing desktop environment was unavailable in the "new" KDE (Keramic? Crystal? Which actually tells you the name?)

Sure, KDE 4 is all new, super-duper coding, but if I can't get my desktop to behave the way it has for years it's useless to me. I can't afford to spend a day or three learning a totally new desktop environment and customizing it to my needs. And when I say years, I mean back to the first release SuSE under the then-not-evil Novell bought it.

I don't care what the devs do behind the scenes as long as I can work.

/bleah