It's not so much that a problem happens once a year, it's that 20 or 30 things each fail once a year on their own, and many of them in-turn cause failures in other things, so if the Rube Goldberg of devices and processes that have to work each morning are interrupted partway through, it starts adding unnecessary stress to the individual. When each device operates independently of the rest then the failure of the coffee maker isn't that big of a deal, but if individual has spent a lot of money to make everything just work, and everything doesn't just work, it's aggravating and it sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Back when I was paid hourly, parking at work was a huge problem, and one was expected to park before clocking-in. The hourly employees were left angry every single morning due to this, and morale at the office was unnecessarily low. Worse, those that could address it were not hourly and had assigned, enforced parking, so it was not a problem for them. They never could understand why their employees were always in such a bad mood. It was a disconnect that has never been fixed.

I don't think that even the most efficient and simple electric circuit would be able to do anything meaningful with that small an amount of power. Maybe a wakeup circuit to bring up a long-sleeping computer that is powered from another source, but it may make more sense to just use something nuclear that provides sustained higher current for a long time.

You know, I had no problem with a female captain, that was never an issue. A captain that couldn't delegate and had to be the diplomat, scientist, warrior, engineer, etc was what bothered me. Even the way Kirk was written, as a captain that left the ship far too often, didn't generally work on engineering-related problems or science problems, he left those to his engineering and sciences staff.

And I know that there were a couple of TNG episodes where Picard kicked ass, but usually it was very unusual circumstances that prompted it, like in, "Starship Mine," when he was the only one of the crew left aboard when some terrorists tried to steal something explosive from Engineering and he was forced to think outside the box to stop them.

Each of those three Star Trek series ran for seven seasons and concluded on its own terms, not simply being cancelled out of the blue. Farscape ended on a cliffhanger and was lucky to get a miniseries to finish it. Space: Above and Beyond only lasted a season. Would you have added Mercy Point to the list? How about Deadly Games, or Homeboys from Outer Space?

I suppose that they could have made ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:VOY one entry as each was spawned off of the next and there were crossover episodes and characters that crossed shows, but they chose not to and the site admins didn't choose to fix it for them. I'm a little surprised they didn't include Sliders actually, given its five year run.

It's the Noughties.

pronounced like "naughties".

ST:TNG worked better specifically because it was not serialized for the most part, and individual episodes were not building toward some specific thing that had to be modified and rewritten and adjusted every time the network messed with the show or cancelled it. It was also generally possible to enjoy episodes after having missed several, as for the most part there wasn't a lot of long-term backstory to need to be acquainted with just to follow the plot.

And as much as B5 was revolutionary in its use of CGI, that CGI has not aged well, and the physical models and film-capable special effects of ST:TNG. On top of that, they didn't keep the files so they can't spruce-up and rerender the scenes in newer versions of the software for higher resolution and alternate aspect ratios, so it'll never look better than it did as-recorded in the nineties.

If Michael O'Hare hadn't been forced to leave with no good explanation at the time (I have heard about his mental illness subsequent), if Mira Furlan hadn't gotten tired of being a Minbari and forced them to write a way for her to have her hair again, if the show hadn't gotten cancelled at the end of Season 4 and also saw both Claudia Christian and Jason Carter leave, and if a whole lot of loose ends had gotten tied up (like making a point of recording Talia Winters but never making use of that after she was de-fugue-stated by the Psi Corps), then perhaps it would have had more of a chance up against ST:TNG, but it just had too many off-set problems and those issues affected what we saw.

Don't get me wrong, I like the show and plan to introduce my wife to it once we get the TV movies and the other miscellaneous bits that aren't in the five individual-season boxed sets, but it's far from perfect.

Actually I deal with real-world problems daily as a network admin. I do not manage the building controls themselves, but the network that they're supposed to communicate on. Trouble is, they're implemented quite poorly and those who are supposed to maintain them end up calling me because their device in some far-off site isn't responding anymore or isn't behaving properly. I routinely have to deal with problems with security cameras that continue to draw PoE after they malfunction but don't respond to IP anymore, keypads that stop responding, gate and door solenoid controllers whose relay channels burn out and stop signalling or else stop sensing gate or door status, HVAC controllers that shut off when the network has a problem so that the buildings get hot or cold when they can't communicate with a central controller, marquees that stop associating with the wireless point-to-point network and can't be updated, and commercial freezers that stop responding over wireless to their controllers monitoring their temperatures. And that isn't even getting into the wireless access points, point-of-sale terminals, and everyone's one-off server that they've got stashed somewhere that is still set for DHCP.

In short, the bulk of it is garbage. Trash, clear and simple. These devices are not ready for prime-time.

I feel sorry for all of you south of the border. Verizon was, without exception, the worst telco I ever dealt with as far as internet goes. When Canada was rolling out DSL and cable like crazy, Verizon in Delaware was offering up 28.8 dial-up. No options. No choices. That's all you could get. You couldn't even use a 56K modem because they used the high compression voice codecs on their lines, and you couldn't get a data line. You couldn't even get ISDN if you were willing to pay for it. :(

Slower photons in fiber optics means a slower, more relaxed pace for my web browsing.

And this isn't even accounting for the Internet of Broken Crap, or the Internet of Badly-Implemented Crap.

Think it's annoying when that one door at work won't open because cheapass RFID controller has a channel burned out that's supposed to trigger the solenoid? Imagine when your coffee maker won't work because it doesn't detect that you've gotten up and into the shower, or the HVAC doesn't kick on for the room you've just entered because the house computer didn't detect occupancy, or the surround sound system malfunctions and thinks there's a party, so it turns on the music loudly at 3am, or the fridge's inventory list gets corrupted and it reorders everything that you have in an already full fridge...

I expect the future to be more like Brazil than like Star Trek.

> Likewise, when scammers call me up about my [insert model year] [insert make] [insert model] and how my
> warranty is up, I ask them to name my warranty company

I had fun with these guys once. I was tired of hanging up on them so I decided to hang on the line and try to get info out of the guy after they thought they might have me. So I get put on with this guy who....asks about my car!

Lol the audacity to claim my warranty was expiring then to not even know what kind of car I have? wow. So I told them.... a 1992 bucik lesaber (this was about 5 years ago so almost a 20 year old car, and one I never owned). and I ask "oh btw what company is it you work for" I forget now, but I wrote it down and then told him, thanks for the info now you can add me to your do not call list. :)

Despite that, he saved the car info, and I started getting calls about my 1992 buick lesaber!

$80K in the early '90s was serious money.

Bullshit.

Those jobs I lost paid $80K/yr. and were undercut by Indian sweat shops paying their people $20/hr. without overtime.

Both Canada and the US have no shortage of tech workers. What they have is a shortage of companies willing to pay the prevailing wage, benefits, etc.

I've lost three jobs over the years to "lowest price" bidders -- every single one of which was an Indian-run sweatshop bringing in their workers from overseas and working them to death without paying overtime.

I worked in the US on temporary visas for up to three years at a time (annual renewals), spending over 12 years in the US in total. Was I ever sponsored for residency? Of course not -- then I'd have had some rights and freedoms. The money was good, and I don't regret the time I spent there, but I'm firmly on the side of the anti-H1-B crowd -- it's all a scam to benefit the bottom line of big business, not a legitimate shortage of skilled workers.

Bingo! At least one person gets my point! :D