Part of the "jumping the shark" was due to money craziness, and the problems when core actors decide they need to do other things with their career. The switch of captains was an enormous problem for fans and the story line, but we'd come to terms with it. The switch of first officers as well, was crippling.

The reboot of Star Trek was, admittedly, a failure. It lacked Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future as a better place as a more mature place and time with a frontier that tested and showed people who'd learned to engage frontiers with the hard-won wisdom they'd learned, who were actually making the galaxy a better place by sharing that wisdom But I was personally very pleased with the "Enterprise" series as an attempt to restart the series in an earlier period and recapture the exploration of a less mature series.

And for Star Trek/Babylon 5 comparisons, there can only be the Deep Space 9/Babylon 5 comparison. Anyone who didn't see parallels simply wasn't paying attention, and it was fascinating, as fans, to see how much better of a storyline Baboylon 5 was, and how much having a larger studio and a larger budget and franchise was able to help Deep Space 9. I really found myself wishing that Paramount, JMS, and the remainders of Gene Roddenberry's core crew and estate could have worked something out for Babylon 5 to have been told in the Star Trek universe with the larger budgets and resources.

I'm forced to admit that as a fan, I was delighted and thrilled to see Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, renowned as Gene Roddenberry's supportive wife, as Nurse Chapel and Lwaxana Troi and the voice of all the computers in Star Trek, pop up as the wife of the emperor in Babylon 5. It was wonderful to see the woman, herself, show her support of the excellent work at Babylon 5 by appear in a small bit fascinating role.

And Walter Koenig's hop from roles as Chekov in Star Trek to Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 was... well, you have to go watch the shows to understand the _completely_ different role Walter Koenig plays, and to applaud the acting and the writing that created it.

Let's hope that this treatment works well, and is approved for human use quickly. Terry Pratchett's abilities to tie fascinating details of human experience, knowledge, and even science into an entertaining and educational story is an incredible loss to the world. Even if you only recovers enough to enjoy the well-earned adulation of his fans, the chance to thank him personally for his work is worth significant medical research.

I understand he particularly likes banana daiquiris.

> if he had some kind of deadman's switch set up.

That's why I didn't think a deadman switch would be a question. If Snowden retains control of any information or documents he has _not_ already revealed, how can that information be obtained? That's actually 2 important remaining questions which can't be answered by a press interview.

> Well, if Snowden's saying it to the press, I'm not sure the Russians will be able to deduce any more

The press does not, and can not, print everything from every document or interview they receive. They must edit, for reasons of space if nothing else. Careful discussion with an alert, intelligent person can often give details of operations and infrastructure that were never in any document or in previous interviews: that's why I treasure face time and telephone with remote personnel. They often leave out details in written documentation, other interviewers may not know the right questions to ask or to report.

>> What inspiration do minor details about NSA monitoring provide for Russian surveillance?

> Uh, are we accusing him of inspiration via minor details now? That's ... pretty specious. Just gonna leave it at that.

I'm not accusing Snowden of planning this. It's a logical step for intelligence analysis of existing NSA practices. Analysis of NSA's abusive practices also provides metadata about the working technologies to follow those practices.

There are many _questions_ that remain. How much additional information does Snowden have squirreled away in dead drops, that will be revealed if he is killed or imprisoned? How much information can Russian personnel gather about subtle policies of NSA, by indirect deduction of what Snowden says to press or to his handlers? What has, or can, the NSA do to protect its revealed policies and assets? What inspiration do minor details about NSA monitoring provide for Russian surveillance?

The concept that there is "the only remaining question", and posing the question to cast the Russians as aggressive victims, is a straw man. It's a side issue distracting debate from much more important issues.

"Welcome to Bittorrent".

If the specifications are available online to one dealer, within short order they will be available illicitly worldwide.

I've double checked the reviews, especially for Quicken. They match what I remember: namely inconsistent compatibility even after performing recommended manual registry entries and cleanup applications that are not part of Wine or Quicken itself. It's listed at https://appdb.winehq.org/objec....

I'm afraid that Wine remains an unusable option in a business, scientific, or personal environment where basic software _must_ work without frequent manual debugging.

Wine itself has consistently failed my reviews, due to complexity and inconsistency of behavior. The last time I took a close look was roughly 3 years ago: it may have improved. But it consistently failed with MS Outlook, VMware clients, and Quicken.

> consider trying Xubuntu or Lubuntu

On which none of the business critical, no longer available or extremely expensive to upgrade applications will run. I do a great deal with Linux, but old fiscal and CAD software is notorious for failing upgrades.

> As an IT guy you need people to trust you, which means you need to be ethical.

You need to _appear_ to be ethical to gain trust of co-workers, and to improve your position. I'm afraid to say that this is orthogonal to doing a good job at IT. It's often much, much easier and safer to appear trustworthy by being clear, honest, and open. It reduces the complexities of maintaining various approaches to various people.

But don't mistake such approaches with technical competence or business success.

I went to their page. Then I tried to actually _use_ the "switch to us and keep your old phone", which they'd advertised extensively, and I ran into a series of forms and options that did not actually allow keeping phones. I will admit that I was looking for a family plan, that made it more intriguing. (I pay for my parents' phone bills, they're retired and it's the least I can do to stay in touch.)

How long ago did you do this? Your experience is completely opposite from mine, less than 3 months ago.

Dealing with the work paperwork is billable time. I use this as leverage to discourage complex, Gant chart based approaches to micromanagement.

T-Mobile has been taking full advantage of the difficulty of jailbreaking. Their monthly rates are attractively low, but they do their absolute best to _insist_ that you buy a new phone from them instead of migrating your old phone, and their sales people do their level best to discount even the _possibility_ of such an option. So they've turned around the old model of "free or cheap phones, the money comes from their monthly bills" and separating the costs. This allows them to advertise as the "cheapest", with the hidden and often hideous cost of a new phone amortized over the first few years of your plan.

The other vendors are also now doing this, as well, in their "we'll lower your monthly fee". The confusing plans and options among all the carriers are textbook cases in "bait and switch".

> They can get simple things done without understanding the whole system. That deliver something that sort of works. This makes them Java developers.

Fixed That for You.

[ Note grammatically correct but confusing capitalization, another of my pet Java peeves. ]

> I like the part where they are magically going to make OCR work

I'm afraid you could have left it right there, with no mention of cell phones or their cameras. OCR, much like speech-to-text software, has plateaued and not noticeably improved in the last 10 years. It's became more available as software has become more powerful. But the underlying technologies have been quite stable. Despite flurries of new patents with every update to such software, the fundamental algorithms remain unchanged and have been stable for roughly 20 years.