So yeah. They "rebooted" the franchise in such a way that it means none of the TNG, DS9, or Voyager crew will ever be born, much less live the same lives they did. And they tried to make it more about campy fun than about Sci Fi. I can deal with those. Those aren't the things I had a problem with. What I had a problem with was the terrible plot itself.

Okay, it starts out with a contrivance to get all of the traditional Enterprise crew onto the Enterprise. They haven't even graduated yet. They're 3 years into their Academy studies. Implying that the only starfleet officer on or around Earth is Captain Pike. You can't tell me that there aren't four or five officers in the Sol system to help Pike run the flagship of the fleet on a mission to rescue one of the most important planets in the Federation. I could see 'em putting cadets on a beater ship with some faculty advisors to do a milk run to a well-defended colony world at this point in their training, but to entirely crew the Enterprise to rescue Vulcan? No.

So okay. I take a moment to suspend my disbelief. And then Pike promotes Kirk to first officer (under Spock as Acting Captain). Even though Kirk was under investigation for academic dishonesty and snuck onto the ship without permission.

Fine. Okay. Pike's got a hard-on for the Kirks. I guess I can cope with that.

Then Kirk instigates a mutiny against Spock and gets tossed out for the authorities on a nearby outpost to deal with... which just happens to be an outpost crewed by none other than Scotty, who hasn't gotten a supply run in a long time.

(Which, I suppose, backs up the "Starfleet consists of one officer, some teachers, and a shitload of cadets in red shirts" theory)

Then he sneaks back onto the ship and back onto the bridge and taunts Spock, who attacks him.

Then...he's captain?

What?

No. There is no universe in which it works that way. The prisoner doesn't become captain when the rightful captain recuses himself. There is no "Well, technically, the previous Captain promoted him to First Officer, so even though he's currently under arrest, I guess he's Captain now".

So fine. Choke back the bile. I guess they're cadets, so they have no idea what they're doing, so they might just accept that Jimmy's in charge because he's charismatic. I keep watching.

(Aside: What's that? Some sort of phlebotinum that turns whatever it touches into a singularity and for some reason Spock Prime was given a shitload of it instead of the tiny drop he apparently needed and for some reason it only works if you put it all the way in the core of a planet because I guess a black hole on the surface is just a minor annoyance that could be dealt with by putting some cones and a warning sign near it?

Oh, and it also lets you travel through time. But they couldn't use it to travel through time to get to Romulus early enough to save it. Goddamn, I hate poorly done time travel stories. End of aside.)

Anyway, heroism ensues, and they save the world and they get back to Earth and... They make Kirk a captain?

He... he hasn't graduated yet.

He's flown on one mission. Which he survived 90% through dumb luck.

Right to full-on Captain of the flagship, just like that? I mean, acting captain, I can sort of let go. Wartime and all that. Sometimes you need to sling around some field promotions to keep things running. But he gets home, a mutiny and a half under his belt, still not graduated, still technically on academic suspension for academic dishonesty, still technically under arrest and they make him captain of the fleet's brand-new flagship.

No. Fuck you. This isn't just me being a fanboy upset that someone's messing with his franchise. This was just bad writing.

My guess is that if the FCC declares that Skype has to be allowed to work over 3G too, AT&T will force Apple to drop it from the App Store so people won't be able to use Skype even on WiFi.

So...not really a win.

Get all of the "X Digit UID club" achievements on my primary account!

Wait, what?

Be careful presenting that WSJ "article" as fact. It's an op-ed piece in their Opinion section, which means there's no implication of journalistic impartiality there.

There's just so much wrong with that response I don't hardly know where to begin...

1. Thumb drives are often not partitioned. There's no particularly good reason to do so. Just put a fat32 right on the bare drive and it works fine. Most people don't know what a partition is. In Windows, you only really need to deal with partitions when setting up a new hard drive, which most users never ever actually do because the drive comes pre-loaded from the store.

2. "Download this confusingly-named external piece of software" is not really a good counterargument to "Ubuntu has some spots that will still trip up a non-techie user".

(I know that G=Gnome (or Q=Qt), PART=Partition, ED=Editor makes perfect sense to us nerds, but it does not to normal people)

3. "Choose between either the Gnome one or the KDE one or some other partition manager" does not make the user happy. They just want to format a damn drive, they don't want to explore the ideological rift between KDE/Qt and Gnome/GTK. And to head off a potential response that they should use the one that corresponds to their desktop environment: They should not have to know what their desktop environment is.

4. Even disregarding all of that, this is just one thing. There are other little things like that. Even if each little problem has a solution, it's still a separate solution for every little problem that shouldn't bloody well be there in the first place. About 50% of the time, my laptop decides that networking is flat-out disabled when I bring it out of sleep. About 25% of the time, gnome-power-manager dies and it won't go to sleep when I hit the power button. Every once in a while pulseaudio dies and nothing will play sounds. Changing my Windows Networking workgroup requires a trip to the config file in a text editor. There's no obvious way to change the number of desktops without a trip into gconf-editor.

These are all just little things off the top of my head. There are probably more I've forgotten, and there are certainly more I haven't personally encountered but others have.

I dunno. Maybe you can. I'm too much of a pussy to try it.

And, well, the kernel they install has worked fine for me. That's the upside to it--I haven't *needed* to recompile my kernel. It's nice not to have to go through and decide each individual damn "Do you want to install driver for X?" question in make xconfig...

s/a medium sized installation of Slack machines/a single Slack machine/g

That's why I switched over to Ubuntu. Firefox kept crashing and wouldn't run Flash Player 9, presumably because some library somewhere wasn't updated enough. Every time I wanted to upgrade something, I'd spend days in Dependency Hell trying to track down all of the other software that I needed to upgrade too to make it work.

Eventually I just said fuck it.

Problem is that Slackware is so low-level that to do anything with it requires the knowledge and confidence to fiddle around with the system. With distros like Ubuntu, people who would think nothing of recompiling their kernel under Slack are uncomfortable doing something that might put the package management database into an inconsistent state.

This one just came up for me: Formatting a USB thumbdrive. Required dropping to a shell to run fdisk and mkfs.vfat.

(Which I could do, since I was a Slackware user from about '96 until this year, but I was expecting the procedure would be along the lines of 'Right click, select "Format"', not "Determine the device name, fdisk it, and run mkfs" like on Slackware)

True enough. But Uncle Max might, because he thinks he's good with computers but actually isn't.

And you do realize that you just responded to my complaint about Linux not being user friendly by telling me to download some *extra software* that has a name which--while it makes perfect sense to us geeks (G for Gnome, Part for Partition, Ed for Editor)--would confuse the hell out of a normal person, to do something that's a fairly basic part of using a computer?

That does not help your argument.

I did find gparted as a solution when searching, but for me, doing it from the CLI was easier. So I did. I'm talking about the people for whom CLIs are scary. Something like gparted is gonna be just as scary.

So have it only work on unmounted volumes, or have it only work on removable media. There's a much bigger chance of fuckup when you have to figure out it's /dev/sdi from the dmesg or df output and then type that in than when you're pointing right at the little icon that looks like a removable USB stick.

Hell, I'm a professional programmer, so presumably I could do it myself.

Go ahead and do a google search for "format usb ubuntu". You'll find some pages returned that are people posting in the appropriate forum that this would be a good feature to have. From February. I.e., it's been suggested to the developers, and apparently, like me, nobody else is motivated enough to fix it.

And really, this is the crux of my argument. Yeah, making it so anyone can fix something is, in theory, how open source improves. But in practice, most people don't care enough to work on the little things that are the key differentiator between mediocre-to-bad user experience and great user experience.