If its as hydrophobic as they claim, I want a glass bottom boat made with it. It'd be awesome- just like a mag-lev, but on water!

Then why during the Dominion War did Starfleet officers have to try to stage a coup to take control of the Federation, and then get arrested and jailed when their plot was revealed? If they were in charge all along, they'd just do what they want and the puppet president would have gone along with it. Admirals certainly wouldn't have gone to prison for attempting implement martial law if the civilian government wasn't actually in control.

Did you once see the president or any other democratically elected figure even participating in them, much less leading them?

Sure, at the conference at Khitomer in "Undiscovered Country". Kirk and friends have to prevent the president's assassination during talks with the Klingons.

No, you didn't, because it was always admirals or some other higher-ups from the Navy/Starfleet.

Except for when it was ambassadors or other representatives. C'mon, the galaxy is a big place, the president can't be everywhere (not to mention, it's a TV show, it's more interesting to watch Picard do things on screen than have a new political representative on every week that Picard just follows around saying "Yes Mr. Ambassador" to over and over).

So while there may be a token civilian democracy in the Federation, it's really the military that exercises all the executive power. How could you miss that?

I didn't miss it, it's not there.

same for the other rights that suffer when all of space is controlled by a military dictatorship, aka, 'the federation'

You fail at Star Treks. The government is the United Federation of Planets, which has an elected President and representitves. It's not much different than today's democratic governments. Starfleet is the military/exploration arm of the Federation. Please turn in your geek card.

Carriers have built a market structure in which consumers gladly accept a new bauble every 18 months in exchange for paying for text messaging (which literally costs carriers nothing) and overage charges in which 300MB of data for $20 is a fair market value."

Why do I suspect that under this interesting new vision, the above would all still be true with the addition of a hefty cost for the bauble. The carriers will give up their long term lock-ins and overpriced data/text when you pry them from their cold, dead hands.

That was the Democratic party platform. The Republican party was founded on abolishing slavery.

...before the two parties went on to essentially switch positions, as demonstrated by "The Southern Strategy"
"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats." -- Kevin Phillips, Nixon political strategist.

Isn't marijuana a Schedule 1 drug according to the Feds? Which would essentially ban it? But states can then override it (see California), correct?

No, the states can not override federal law. Medical marijuana may be left alone by state authorities in California, but the feds can swoop in any time they like and shut down any MM operation they want and prosecute them in federal court. For a while, it seemed that they were backing off of this sort of "unwelcome enforcement" in Cali, but recently word is that they're about to return to business as usual.

State laws are always trumped by federal laws.

Also Apple is very unlikely to agree to make custom military units with whatever requirements the military has. It's just not their thing.

Well, not saying you're wrong about them being willing to do special builds now, but there's the Black Mac, which may have been made by Apple (although last time I heard, nobody was completely sure).

For the same reason we have tax discs. They replace the whole plate every year, we replace a small piece of paper.

No, we do a similar thing as you, although implementation varies from state to state. In some states, there's a sticker that gets put on the plate, in others, it's just the actual registration card that gets changed, but AFAIK, there's no place in the U.S. where the actual plate changes year to year. As another poster pointed out, the main difference really is that here, plates are usually assigned to a person (I say usually because someone else mentioned California being different), meaning when you buy the car (new or used), you get plates for it at the DMV and keep them, usually until you get rid of the car. You can also (again, may not be true in *every* state) keep those plates if you want and put them on your new car rather than turning them in and getting new ones (probably more popular with vanity plates than normal ones, but you can still do it either way). This compared to other countries where the plate is permanently attached to the vehicle and is reassigned to the vehicle's new owner when it's sold.

You'd still really have to fail the attitude test in a big way to be arrested for an out-of-date tax disc.

I'd say the same thing is normally true in the U.S.. I've known plenty of people who were caught driving with an expired registration, and unless there was something entirely else going on (outstanding warrant, open container, drugs) I've never heard of any of them getting more than a fine, and perhaps being told the car has to be towed.

Cavemen knew how to operate in a world that we cannot even phantom, not by choice but by necessity.

It's true. The average Slashdotter wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance in their environment.

Look into AziLink (free) and EasyTether (easy).

Neither of these do wifi tethering though from what I saw. True, it's not a big deal to use a cord when you want to get your laptop online (and it's better for battery life on both devices), but if you want to share the connection with other devices, like a tablet or ebook reader, the WiFi tether is pretty much your only choice. Unfortunately, it's absurdly expensive to buy the plan from the carrier if you're just going to use it once in a while for a quick download. Sprint used to let you turn the feature on and off as needed, and pro-rate your use which worked out to about a buck a day, but from what I've heard they're not allowing that anymore :(

Take a piece of double-sided tape, apply it to the back of your iPhone. Firmly press a second iPhone against the first, back to back, and offset so as not to cover the cameras. I got the idea from watching war movies where they'd tape two ammo clips together and flip them when the first goes empty, and it works great for them, so I figure it'll work fine here too. Added benefit that if one iPhone is cool, a double iPhone should be double cool...

"Gary Morgenthaler, a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and a Siri board member

Wow, board member of company says company's technology is the most amazing and groundbreaking thing since sliced bread. What a surprise. This just in, Bill Gates says Windows is the best OS, and Larry Ellison says Oracle databases are hands-down unbeatable.

I don't blame the guy for saying it, of course he probably thinks his product is the best. Maybe he even believes the thing about the two-year advantage, but he's also got a pretty vested interest in making other people believe it too.

Completely plausible actually.

IDs not checked?

He does present ID. The fact is though that as long is it looks "official", most people will believe that it is what it says it is. Assuming you're not on your local fire department, do you know what your town's fire-inspector's ID actually looks like? It's not like this guy was handing them a piece of notebook paper with "Fire Inspekter" written on it in crayon.

USB ports not disabled?

Plenty of computers use USB keyboards, so there's your enabled port. A keylogger plugs into the port, the keyboard plugs into the keylogger, and done. Same thing went for the old PS/2 ports. Even if your average bank employee looked at the back of their PC (which isn't very likely to begin with), they probably wouldn't recognize anything out of the ordinary.

What I think is unreal is that the guys could go around picking up wallets, cell phones and laptops and walk out of the bank without anyone noticing anything and suspecting them - even if it's the next day.

I don't think they were doing anything of the sort. They were testing security of company (bank) information, not just general security. I think by "grabbing everything" he was talking about things like USB sticks or disks, not wallets. It would be a stupid test if they took personal items as well, might as well just walk in wearing ski-masks.

(just food slots, which weren't full replicators)

I'm not sure this is entirely true. If you look at what comes out of the food-slots, it's always in the appropriate serving container, usually specialized to what's being ordered. Unless there's one hell of a big china cabinet somewhere on the Enterprise, I would think that the dishes the food is served on is synthesized at the same time as the food. I think the reason why you don't see a big replicator somewhere else used for more complex durable goods was probably either a) Roddenberry didn't think of it at the time (just wanted a "magic food gizmo" to look futuristic), or b) It occurred to him that it was possible based on the food replicators, but he thought it would be "too powerful" of a tool to give the characters (removing the ability to have plot points that require work to get some kind of tool or gizmo because they could just replicate it).