That was Rachel Nichols. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0629697/

She worked with Abrams on Alias -- which she was Sydney's heir apparent. And she plays Scarlett in the upcoming G.I.Joe movie.

YUMMY!

Some answers...

1) Why the main computer can tell Original Captain Kirk the autopilot is offline. But still synthesize a voice to tell him it's offline. Of those two functionalities.

It wasn't the main processor that had the problem. It what the fly-by-wire control systems that linked the processor to the physical mechanisms to control flight. The network was down.

2) Why they dropped parachuting human bombers instead of... parachuting bombs.

Because it would have been a terrible plot device. ;-) It's hardly unusual to need onsite assets to determine how best to destroy a military target.

3) Why the romulans were drilling in the first place.

To reach the planet's core. Presumably the red matter needs to make contact with material of a certain density/temperature in order to start it's reaction.

4) How they planned to get off the platform after placing the explosives. (All of their parachutes were destroyed. If they blew up the platform... they would be dead. If they don't blow the platform... they can't beam out.)

Dive again off the platform to the planet's surface. The chutes were "reusable." That's why they retracted and auto-folded.

5) Why starfleet has no backup chutes like modern skydivers.

Actually, the entire Star Trek canon is *terrible* about redundant systems. This would be just another instance of not anticipating a graceful failure.

6) Why the parachutes had no release like modern skydivers.

Reusable chute. See point 4.

7) Why the romulans left Spock within walking distance of a base to warn Vulcan.

Would it have mattered? Evacuating several billion people off the planet wasn't going to happen anyway. And they did want both Spocks to survive.

8) Why an escape pod can't land within 1km of a target.

Always a mystery. In all space films, actually.

9) Why nobody on earth didn't shoot the drill

No idea.

10) Why were they drilling!? Just drop the red matter in low orbit. It'll take an extra 5 seconds to consume the planet.

Minimum density/temperature required to start the reaction. See point 3.

11) Why Old Spock was carrying enough red matter to destroy 100 universes when 1 drop was all he needed.

Well, he was trying to get a star in the process of going nova to turn into a black hole. It's a safe bet he was going to need a MUCH stronger reaction than something that would collapse a planet. Needed 5 orders of magnitude more density doesn't seem surprising at all.

12) Why waves and waves and waves of people from earth didn't beam onto the enemy ship in low orbit over their headquarters and shoot everything on board.

The drill's beam supposedly interfered with communications and with the transporter. Why they didn't just climb into a couple of vintage F-22s and shoot down the drill is a mystery.

13) Why Old Spock would allow his incredibbbbbbly dangerous cargo fall into the hands of the enemy and not just self destruct.

Because the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many? ;-)

14) Why a mining vessel is armed to the teeth with shield penetrating munitions.

Perhaps 200 years into the future we wouldn't consider that large-scale armament -- just protection from pirates.

Take a coast guard cutter with a .50 calibre deck-mounted machine gun back to 1809 and see how you fare against navies of that time.

15) Why young spock would fly straight into a line or torpedos instead of warping to another battle ground to try and get the drop on the ship again.

Because the objective was to engage right there and let the Romulans be destroyed by ramming them. He was transporting out either way.

Not trying to justify anything about the film, but I think a lot of these questions have fairly obvious answers.

Personally, I thought they borrowed heavily from Star Wars Ep IV and V, and that's exactly what made the movie fun. Sure, Kirk getting into the captain's chair so quickly was unrealistic, but Kirk was ALWAYS unrealistic, even in TOS. They made fun of that in the very first episode of TNG, when Riker refused to let Picard leave the ship.

Since the ID3 tag is part of the MP3 file, the MD5 hash approach could be easily foiled using a batch tag setter to change, say, the release year of every song.

The simple utilitarian answer is that the pain you feel in not being compensated for your software is less than the aggregate marginal benefit to the users who didn't pay you but still use it. The simple rights-based answer is that you have no right to restrict the behavior of a 3rd party with whom you have no contract -- which is what govt-enforce intellectual property is.

For deep reading...
http://techliberation.com/2006/11/22/a-practical-argument-against-copyright-protection/

and...
http://libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html

So 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and a 50% increase in revenue generation over the last 5 years, totaling about a billion dollars/year in license sales is the definition of "isn't selling anymore?"

Do you speak English?

Domino 8.5 has a very robust implementation of JSF called Xpages. It's going to be a major part of next month's annual Lotusphere event.

The Domino Web Access client was one of the very first commercial AJAX implementations and didn't use any Java whatsoever. It came out in 2001 with release 5.0.8, and could be implemented by applying a new template to your mail -- a process that could be performed by a competent administrator in about 15 seconds across an entire server.

False. The native language to Lotus Notes is C, and there is a comprehensive C API that has been made available since version 1. The original end-user programming language was @formulas, and was styled after the 1-2-3 formula language back in 1989. In 2002, IBM released Notes/Domino version 6, which included a comprehensive rewrite of the @formula engine to dramatically improve performance and flexibility. It also added looping constructs.

However, it's not like you couldn't do loops before. Notes 4 came out in 1994, and included Lotusscript -- a VB-like scripting language, which provided a sophisticated class model and extensive OOP capabilities. Lotusscript remains the dominant language in Notes/Domino development worldwide (though many devs on the platform are moving to Java & Javascript with the latest versions.)

Wow. Sounds like you kept top-notch entity relationship diagrams.

If you were running a MySQL database on the backend, would you know every single application in your environment that queried every table? Would that be MySQL's fault?

Yeah, let's kill a platform because zildgulf doesn't know how to write and document a computer program. So it must be bad!

Yeah, because it would be a smart idea for IBM to give up a billion dollars year in licensing and still have 800 full-time developers on the product. That would be a great business move, and would surely lead IBM Software Group to greater success.

That's still a fairly old code base. The Notes client underwent a massive UI update over the last two years. Here's a good demo video example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODy1-__aOX8

The Notes/Domino product line generates somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars a year for IBM in pure software sales (not services.) It's also recorded 15 consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, and has grown by over 50% since 2004.

You can see more at the long-running blog of Ed Brill, former worldwide head of sales for Notes/Domino, and currently Director of End-User Messaging and Collaboration. He just finished a year-in-review post http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/2008-the-blogging-year-in-review

The Domino server is one of the most reliable server systems ever built, particularly considering the complexity of the services it provides.

Try upgrading to a version released in the last decade.

Dumb idea. Whether you love Notes or hate it, open sourcing it would just be dumb when there's already 800 engineers working on it inside IBM. The number of developers that would contribute to it would drop dramatically.

If you want to develop open source applications ON TOP of Notes/Domino -- you can just look to http://www.openntf.org/