That's because Voyager didn't have characters, it had character roles.

Agreed. Better Off Ted was fast realizing itself as a decent replacement for Arrested Development.

Wow, that's a highly effective explanation. And a car analogy to boot.

It's a video, but a very well done post-mortem tutorial on what Google Wave was and why it was (potentially) awesome.

http://www.cracked.com/video_18209_google-wave-pissed-off-tutorial.html

"Google Wave: You Don't Deserve It"

The computer they're running on does.

Preemptive: yes, you can buy older mac hardware too. You can get macs sub $500, and even sub $200 depending on what you want.

Whoa, driving on the road charged by GPS? Hell yes please! Take that money and push it back into developing a modern travel infrastructure. Awesome.

They weren't going to Earth until Kirk took command.

Sounds like documenting a nice CLI is easy and a crappy GUI is hard.

Not 7.1 surround sound?

I use blu-ray for the quality movies that I want to max out my home theater. For watching anything else Netflix or Hulu is perfectly adequate.

Naked DSL (or dry loop DSL): no phone, just DSL. Cheap, fast, easy. Verizon has plans from $20 to $40 per month.

I'm pulling down a mere 50K as a web developer for a major university. I have a wife, a kid, a mortgage, monthly payments into retirement and other savings accounts and we manage to do alright on my single income. Budgeting: it's not that hard.

Yeah, but in this case the free software is really subpar.

Anecdotes? Yeah!

When I'm doing reading for a course I write out my thoughts and key points in simplenote or notational velocity, then go over the reading again, then go over my notes again with new insights. I can close my eyes and visualize the ascii diagrams and notations and salient points; and also reference them quickly in class.

With Kindle and iBooks I can highlight and attach notes (timestamped notes!) to passages of text and then search *them* in addition to the actual text. Win, so much win.

We've got that now. d20srd + myth-weavers = rules and character sheets on the iPad

I could even tie in a dice rolling application that tracks statuses and their corresponding effects on the dice, but I still prefer physical dice.

That situation is the end result of really bad planning; that doesn't mean that that's the only way to do it.