Carnifex

Tenebrae..a 'chip' would infer that my statement has no grounding in reality. We've had this conversation before.... And as long as the English can object to them FINALLY having a Scots prime minister, then I can certainly object to this. I was actually going to mention DT and his accent... but I didn't.... At least McCoy kept his accent. The auld feud is alive and kicking... and not just perpetrated by Scots.

Not only do I have misgivings.. I personally think it's an abomination, an Englishman playing a Scotsman? WFT... You may as well have a Palistinian playing a Jew. Any other nationality, fair enough if they can pull it off.. but not a fuqing Englishman... I mean COME ON... SCOTty.. if they'd changed it to Limey (or soft southern b****d) maybe..:P. (I don't particularly have anything against the English, it's just that there is too much history between us as a culture and country. it comes across too much like more mockery..not intentional I know but still..)

This may have been said before but it was just something that struck me as I was reading some other articles. Star Trek has definitely become less popular with the fans over the years (actually let me restate that.. fans have become more disillusioned with ST over the years..)...it's possibly that despite all of the series and movies that there may actually be a definitive reason as to why. THE FRANCHISE HAS BECOME ALL ABOUT WAR AND CONFLICT. This is diametrically opposite to the reasons why we were drawn to it in the first place... let's have a run down. TOS... Without this show there would be nothing....conflict certainly was a regular part of the show, but seemed to be done in such a way as to highlight the discovery of new things and the awakening of ideas and ideals that was ultimately optimistic for the viewers (and society as a whole.. first interracial kiss.. anyone?) TNG.. The rebirth, and definitely a kick off for the relighting of the ST candle... again conflict was a part of the shows appeal but the war stories were certainly outnumbered by the amount of actual discovery of new world and new situations.. and still carried forth the belief that man could evolve into something better. Even the Borg introduction was a discovery storyline and never devolved into mindless fighting. 'Darmok' stands out as a shining light for me and as far as I'm concerned, highlights discovery, understanding and the evolution of our species...Introduction of the Borg and future staple for the excuse of a square go. (Please excuse exact time-frames, but I'm just really giving an overview...) During this phase of Trek we had 5 movies.. 1.. a discovery story and this proved there was a market for it on the big screen... ok they screwed up the uniforms (lol) Big ideas trying to find their footing. This will always have a fond place in my heart..POPULAR. 2.. conflict (but with a discovery angle.. the Genesis Project and what it could accomplish).. harkened back to TOS with the reintroduction of a popular figure KHANNNNN!!!... a change of costume and a more recognisable Trek universe.. POPULAR (but not necessarily for the conflict, but for the similarities to what we knew) 3.. Klingons, more conflict (but acceptable 'cos it was Klingons) and more discovery of the 'mystical' vulcans.. POPULAR-ish (possibly because it wasn't stand alone and the continuation may have affected general audience figures).. personally I loved it. 4.. WHAT CAN I SAY.. possibly THE most memorable of the whole franchise had everything we had come to expect from the ST universe.. AND MORE.. fun and frolics galore, time travel, some of the funniest moments ever, great interaction (remember it involved plotlines for everyone-ish, poor Uhura got marginalised).. AND NO CONFLICT AT ALL (unless you count the probe, and that wasn't really conflict, just everyone getting twatted by this thing, who as it turned out wasn't malevolent at all)... POPULAR AS HELL. 5.. STUNK... lame plot, stupidity abound.. and a half brother for Spock, which pissed people off (and the fact that a full Vulcan dared to laugh!!).. SANK (understandably.. it was terrible, I mean come on.. GOD?!?!? WTF?? but it was the plots fault.) Then we got more series.. DS9.. personally I REALLY (mostly) enjoyed this show, nice characters, still about the discovery... but then we began to see the cracks towards the end of the run.. we saw a complete 180 turn in the direction of the federation.. it turned out NOT to be as evolved as we all thought and the militaristic motivations proved some pretty underhanded things (Section 31 (had originally written Bureau 13, but that was B5,lol).. very unexpected and very un-federation like )...Marked a change in the Trek universe that was to be continued as a staple of all further trek... WAR.. It was a mixed bag and polarised (split) the fan base fan..but we hadn't become used to the fact yet that there was so much war in the Federation, so it was all still kind of new and the storylines hadn't yet become interchangeable (kill baddie, celebrate, end with smile.). CERTAINLY NOT AS POPULAR AS PREVIOUS. VOY.. war, war, war..a bit of discovery..and war.. also it marked an upturn in technobable, which although a draw for some, it seemed over used or too convenient.. and a female captain, who for the most part was generally considered unlikable.. FAIRLY POPULAR (because it was still 'new voyages' and not on a space station), BUT MARKED A HUGE DECREASE IN FAN LOYALTY. More movies.. 6..More Klingons (personally I was kind of tired by the same old, same old by now).. HOWEVER the whole thing had darker overtones than previous, it was fundamentally a whodunit, but emphasising character traits in humans that we had come to believe were, at the VERY least, dying out.. and not holding power in the very heart of Federation power, at times there were Klingon elements that seemed more evolved than human beings and that was rather startling, more conflict, but this time with added manipulation by 'Federation forces' AND A VULCAN..WTF happened?. An (ill fitting) end to a cast of icons (sob)....NOT POPULAR AT ALL (I think mostly because people were sad to see he end of an era) I enjoyed it.. but it was very UnTrek like. 7.. Destruction and conflict for a reason (?) (the nexus idea seemed a good idea but was executed with as much death and destruction as the writers could hammer in).. hand over to a new crew and the shoehorning in of Shatner to round things off... POPULAR (for reasons that escape me, possibly 'coz it's got new crewz, lolz'... no Spock :() 8.. Borg, conflict, time travel, (solely) new crew and a WAR SHIP (face it that's what 'E' was)...ok, it had big ideas, but it was wholly for the benefit of a plot that was based solely on the destruction of everything and if it didn't have TT it would just have evolved into a massive battle.. the new uniforms also emphasised the increased militaristic motivations of what Trek had now become... VERY POPULAR (but with a different type of fan).. but fans were getting used to the 'death and destruction' direction and it was showing in the murmurs from the fan base. 9.. turned everything on it's head and finally portrayed the Federation as scheming, backstabbing, scumbags.. no difference really to the point we have reached at the moment.. the Trek crew seemed like an island of morality in a sea corruption.. they definitely didn't seem like 'the Federation norm'.. PRETTY MUCH DERIDED BY EVERYONE WHO WAS ACTUALLY A FAN OF TREK. 10.. OMG!..MOAR WAR..but with (the very underused) Romulans (who as it turns out are really nice.. 'it's all the fault of those bad people who used to be our slaves').. by now the typical 'we're gonna kill yooz' storyline, with added lameness and darkness... and a very un-clone like clone of Picard (two baldies for the price of one, you can't beat it... said the writer.).. PEOPLE JUST LAUGHED. And then we got ENTERPRISE... The whole show was simply an exercise in war, canon humping and nudey bits.. and the producers wonder why it wasn't popular, giving reasons of 'Star Trek (as a concept) has become less popular'.. instead of it being entirely down to the plots and direction the Federation took ALL OF A SUDDEN. So (in my opinion, lol), you can see a pretty well formed pattern, the more the show strayed from what made it popular...discovery and optimism, with a spattering of action (conflict).. to war, more war, darkness and some big ideas (if the writers could be bothered).. the less popular it seemed to become.... ST became all about who'd got the biggest weaponry and less about the sheer awe and possibility of an inhabited universe, and it suffered for it. ... and the only thing I'll say about XI, is that someone took an ST script, wee-ed all over it and decided to shoot that as a homage to anyone who'd never seen Trek before. :(

So far I have been appauled by the Dr. Who reboot, as far as I'm concerned they hung it on a meat hook and flayed it to death, Eccleston should have had his arse kicked for only doing one series (not that I wanted him to do more, but his contract was obviously just to revive the character and I don't think he was very good at it either.)... and Tennant is exactly what I would expect from a children centric, canon raper of a show that it has become. However saying that I'd certainly at least be willing to give Nesbitt a chance playing the role.. he absolutely can't make the show any worse.... RTD MUST go though.. I'm sick of having his gay agenda forced down my thoat (no pun intended.).

I'm sorry, have you not met Rodney? I also believe this was explained when she first joined Atlantis. Pardon? Geniuses have at least an excuse for their character foibles. Doctors by definition have to be STABLE, levelheaded and pretty much unshakeable... Jewel Staits character is the diametric opposite of all of that. As for it being explained... firstly, I don't remember it ever being explained, secondly, NO explaination could excuse such erratic unprofessionalism as the doctor portrays, and thirdly, even given the ubsurdities of the actual shows premise, there is no way in hell a character so unforgivably flawed and unreliable would, A) make it as a doctor in the first place.. the boards are too strict, and B ) be chosen for such a monumental assignment. Nah.. the character only exists because they wanted to shoehorn JS into SGA, and as actors very rarely do any actual acting these days, what you see is always what you get... the same actor playing the same character (which is usually just a tweaked version of their own presence) over and over again.. the only differences being occupation, friends and locale. Jewel Staite was brilliant in Firefly... I really liked her character and I warmed almost instantly to her, but she fits in SGA about as much as my foot into a size 1 shoe.

Jewel Stait is REALLY annoying me as the doctor.. all she does is act like this pathetic and scared little girl, yet she's supposed to be so cream of the crop that she get's sent to another galaxy? I'd rather have Ronan as my doc than her, he at least inspires confidence.. I'd be too afraid that Stait would get an attack of the fears mid treatment and I'd pass on from inaction. That kind of dippy character (which strikes me as more Jewel than not) might have been ok as the young eccentric engineer in Firefly... but for a supposedly professional REAL doctor.. yeah right.. pass me the whiskey and a knife and I'll do it myself.

Ok I've got some recommendations.. 'The Gap' series by Stephen Donaldson Chung kuo (8 books) by Peter wingove Stephen Baxter.. any of his The broken Gods/The Wild by David Zindel Good books, all of them.

Genghis the orion pirate?.. or Saddam the borg king?... the reboot is going to be about propaganda and new enemies to fight.

wow, you sure you've got all the right drivers installed there? both pc's i'm currently using have xp installed, but 1 idles between 0 and 1 %, the other between 1 and 3. No idea about Vista, but +25% seems a bit excessive while doing nothing. Maybe it's trying to optimise the filesystem or sumtin or indexing? Yep all drivers were present and correct with no conflicts... the system was fine apart from running slow. Vista just does far too much behind the scenes to by resource ecnonomical.... to much going on that I didn't call for. Out of curiosity, as were talking percentages.. what specs are you using? I'm running a 3500+ with 2 GB of ram.

Yep, absolutely.. I just didn't want to drone on any more than I already had. :P In terms of cycle, well, I'd probably have to disagree with you on that point. because the only measurements we have are in terms of percentages and while my XP install idles at between 4 and 7% when I tried Vista, it idled at between 26 and 32%..on the same hardware, to me that's quite significant. As for the Apple thing, when I said 'open' I was really talking about having a valid sufficiantly supported alternative to MS, rather than open in the terms of Linux.

Not really wanting to nitpick, TetsuoShima, but the specs needed to run Vista have been artificially inflated because of all the hardware polling the OS does (persistant and constant hardware inter communication, just to make sure that your don't run anything that they don't want you to).. with out all that excess work that os has been estimated to be able to run 5 times faster.. the hardware specs alone when run with something like apple's os of linux and even XP blows Vista's performance out of the water. The OS doesn't NEED all that extra horsepower to function the way it does.. it just utilises more to control what you do with your hardware and software through artificial limitations. I'm hoping W7 (which is based on something called MinWin.. a drastically stripped down version of the kernal) uses a completely different architecture to Vista, which I think it does. Vista bombed and I think MS will be looking for a way to restore some faith in their software, otherwise the mass (relatively speaking) migration from Windows will get worse and MS will lose even more of their market share. Although if I speak for the freedom of future computing in general I have to hope that W7 is worse than Vista.. that way their will be more developers willing to develop for Apple and Linux because their market will be bigger.

Wii comes with a bowling game that really fun and tennis is good too.. and I usually hate games like that. If I was going to steep my head in the console market, it would definately be for a Wii.

Vista is already obsolete.. Windows7 comes out in 2009 and Vista won't even be in a decent usable state i=before then so Vista is rather pointless. Either way I'd NEVER touch Vista.. it's far to instrusive, bloated with 'features' like hardware polling and DRM (what sucusseful business model can get away with assuming that all of their customers are criminals??) not to mention removing control from the user and giving it to Redmond.. I'll tell my machine what it can and can't do, not some faceless corporate entity.. The only pluses Vista has is it's security, which is dubious and can be compensated for on any machine by a third party app, and the shiny's (and I already have them in my Black XP).. Vista is less than useless. When I MUST change from XP (and it'll be supported, or at least compatible up to 2014) then I'll be moving to Linux.. Wine will be past v1,0 by then and gaming won't be such an issue (that's IF they still develop pc games by then.) Vista can suck my globes.

I had a Vic 20.. real keyboard, none of that rubber shit... boss.

I just threw up in my mouth.