Dear god no.

I actually think Voyager needed a character like Q a lot more than TNG did. Voyager needed a recurring villain that they could meet up with every now and then even though their main goal was to travel as fast as possible back home. Q could have done that, while tempting them with instant transport home if only they'd sufficiently prove their humanity out in the oh so dangerous delta quadrant. That might still qualify him as a dumb plot device, but it would have made a little more sense. Instead, Voyager kept meeting with the same dumb villains over and over again even though they should have fled their territory after three episodes, and killed off potentially interesting shipboard recurring characters, like Brad Dourif's psychopath crewman.

Agreed! OK, so I work at a planetarium too. We really need a secret handshake or something.

Never thought of that - that would have saved me no end of grief.

But I did have a Winky Board - a little circuit board to go between the ZX81 and the cassette player, presumably to improve reliability of loads and saves. For all I know it just made a couple LEDs blink.

I had both a ZX81 and a TS1000. (and the TS1500 printer.) One of the computers couldn't use the memory expansion pack, and the other one couldn't use the cassette deck. And me with a stack of tapes of games that required 16K memory...

There would also be some difficulty in getting each of the computers to run the same game engine simultaneously, taking in the same input and outputting its appropriate piece of the dome image, in real time and all synchronized. It's certainly possible, but I doubt with some unmodified, off-the-shelf game.

My dome has a GOTO Chiron hybrid system + E&S Digistar 3, that communicate together to keep digital constellation figures and other graphics aligned with the mechanical star field. The Chiron has a reasonably small profile and doesn't get in the way like some of the old beasts did. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

You forgot about the color of the old Digistar stars, uniformly pale green. Digistar 3 is significantly better, but no substitute for a optomechanical star ball. About the best attempt at digital stars I've seen is in the newly renovated theater in Chicago, with 8K resolution, distributed over NINETEEN video projectors. Each requiring automated alignment, registration and color balance. The projectors also have an insane contrast ratio so that the stars are bright and the black in between is black (not washed-out grey)

Not a NASA study There seems to be an increasing problem - people who happen to work for NASA do some other side projects, and NASA gets credit/blame for it.

That's local news from a Fox affiliate, not Fox News.

I don't know. Can you repeat the question?

Not that I agree with the French policy (or RTFS), but it's recently bothered me (in a very slight way) that we now have forms of communication that can only be referred to through the brand name. We could chat, text, fax, phone and blog without referring to a company name, but Tweets and Facebook posts seem harder to generalize. Just saying something's been "posted online" seems too vague. The proper generic verb hasn't been invented yet.

I can't. Three miles south of downtown of a state capitol and I don't have coverage. Comcast, Clearwire, or dialup. Them's the choices.

I'd wager that 95% of those who give up on Blender right away do it because they couldn't left-click on an object to select it. Face it, you're in weird territory if you can't even assume *that*.