As a white person I have to say only another white boy would say something this ridiculous.

Every government ever has forced people to pay for things they didn't want. Pacifists funded the revolution at the exact same rate as Patriots. You couldn't get out of paying for the war that conquered the Indians of Ohio by claiming you had a principled disagreement with the policy of Indian Removal to West of the Mississippi.

BTW, the policy of Indian Removal probably would not have worked if the Native Americans had real governments that could do things like insist that the Oglala Lakota of what is now South Dakota send 1,500 number of warriors to a rally point in Green Bay to join the Unified Native Resistance Army. Since they didn't we got to fight each nation thirteen-on-one, with some very rare exceptions (i.e.: Tecumseh), and even those exceptions typically didn't have the political power to enforce taxation or military service. Which meant that when they lost a battle they lost the war.

And this only works if you have a lot of other data in your data set. If you don't know who Scot is, then you can't figure out he's the only person who could go to the bakery on that one exact day and that particular restaurant the next.

I don't think anyone is particularly sanguine about the future of privacy if big companies manage to figure out a way to profit from combining their multiple massive databases. This is particularly true in the US, where it would be virtually impossible to stop the police from using said databases with our warrants. Or worse, using info that the big companies forwarded them as the basis for warrants.

If Apple or Google can silence one of it's critics by figuring out he was paying a hooker with his supposedly anonymous Mastercard gift card, that is a really fucking bad thing.

Best guess?

The number of women buying unique items (i.e.: that one purse that's so cute) is 4-5 points higher then the number of men doing the same thing, which would mean a given data point is 4-5% more effective if the shopper is female.

Thing is there's actually isn't much difference between "paranormal phenomena we could understand with further study," and "magical phenomena that is understood by magicians who have done significant amounts of study." They're just the two ways one would phrase the statement depending on whether one was learning about the paranormal/magical from a skilled practitioner or a governmental scientifically-oriented bureaucracy. Thus my comment they could happen in the same universe.

It's a good show concept. I like how the physicist's story wraps around, and he helps thwart the invasion he was coming back to warn about.

I was actually referring to the main crew. Half the human actors left the show before they could do anything interesting, and the other half didn't change at all.

In a later post I remembered the non-humans. They had some great arcs, particularly the guys who started as Narn and Centauri Ambassadors. I think G'Kar was the name of the Narn guy.

I did watch the entire series. Torrented the whole thing a few years ago. It wasn't that good. The long story-arc was interesting, and it was worth watching once, but it's influence on TV as a whole was minimal, and the writing was terrible. Not everything can be Buffy, but if the best B5 quote relating to poor understanding of a situation you can come up with is "You do not understand," that is pretty clear proof the writing staff needed a guy who did;t suck ass at dialogue.

"Threshold" was Season 2. So yes, it was after.

I wasn't paying much attention to Voyager at the time, because DS9 was just so much better, so I have no idea which cast member made what.

By that definition X-Files wasn't Sci-Fi either, because the show was designed around the conceit that Sculley thinks they're in a Sci-Fi film (and everything has a rational, scientific explanation), while Mulder thinks they're in a fantasy or horror flick. If Sculley was always proven right you could call it Sci-Fi using your definition, but that would have been a really shitty show so most of episodes were ambiguous about whether it was Sci-Fi or fantasy/horror. And X-Files is on the list.

Which means there's no real way to keep Buffy (which, I am insisting on reminding you, had an android episode) off. They could actually take place in the exact same universe.

I got a couple reasons for preferring TNG to B5:

1) There were virtually no episodes of B5 good enough that I remember the damn things ten years after downloading the entire series and binge-watching it. The story-arcs of the non-human characters remain in my brain, as does extreme frustration at the shitty dialogue, but if you asked me which episode I liked most I couldn't even start to answer because they all ran the fuck together. OTOH, there's plenty of TNG episodes I liked, particularly the ones from the 90s which only had Wes 11 times.

2) B5's main advantage it's multi-season story arc. This would never have been approved by the suits if TNG hadn't done the Locutus of Borg thing.

Kes left at the start of Season 4 (she got two episodes), Boobs debuted in the finale of season 3. So you saw at least three of those episodes if you watched them all. And Jennifer Lien was definitely let go due to budgetary reasons -- specifically they didn't have the budget to add Jerri Ryan and keep all their main cast, but they refused to fire that loser who played Harry Kim right after he'd gotten some ridiculous magazine award -- but asking for a raise had nothing to do with it.

The 90s misses most of the really bad episodes, and without TNG there's no way in hell any of the others get made.

Particularly B5. You can convince suits to pay money for a multi-season story arc after Locates of Borg has proven that season-ending cliffhangers are great for ratings, but not before.

If you're counting X-Files, which did not even include the minimal science Star Trek does, and was also a monster-of-the-week show, why wouldn't you count Buffy?

Despite all attempts to create one, there really isn't a sharp dividing line between Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It's more of a spectrum.

They wrote themselves into a corner with her. Her species is only supposed to live 9 years, so three seasons on Voyager should have meant roughly 25 years of aging prosthetics for the actress.

Granted if they'd really wanted to solve it they could have used a deus ex machina, but why do that when you can introduce Boobs of Nine and the Borg?

Wait a sec, you're arguing that the show premised on a long-lost hero returning out of nowhere to save the Minbari by uniting them with their human foes just as the ancient enemy they forgot existed returns ISN'T incredibly cliched?

Don't get me wrong, I liked the cliche, but that don't mean it wasn't a cliche.

The writing on B5 was the absolute worst writing I have ever seen on any SciFi series. The dialogue was crap. All the characters were stock archetypes who didn't develop much (Trek characters typical start as archetypes, but they tend to get some depth by Season 7).

The long story arcs were more interesting then then ones on the Star Treks, largely because the entire show was designed as one long-ass story arc from the absolute beginning; and the universe was in some ways more interesting (because you actually get to hear about the politics, whereas in Trek series you almost never get to see a Federation Councilor or the Federation president); the space ship scenes looked much better then on Trek because actual physics were involved; it's a lot more coherent as a universe then any Trek show because there was only one writer, etc. but that don't mean the writing didn't suck.

If they'd made Star trek one entry there'd be no point to the poll. Right now B5 is within 6 points of TNG, but it's 20 points off the three series combined.

I'm surprised there's no Buffy. If you're calling one supernatural-monster-of-the-week show Sci-Fi why wouldn't you call the other one Sci-Fi?