Melllvar

“Pissing in the soup” doesn’t really work here unless you’re adulterating the software with something malicious.

I’m curious how it’s considered a “layoff” if it’s based on performance rather than the job itself being eliminated.

Scotty: This is the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise. All cities and installations on Eminiar VII have been located, identified, and fed into our fire control system. In one hour and forty-five minutes, the entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed. You have that long to surrender your hostages. [dramatic music]

Bonus moment, DS9:

unnamed extra: The Federation fleet has surrounded the planet.

Random one-episode extra got the best line in the whole fricken franchise.

Robot Chicken did it first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iauuuhpSfRQ

Girlish scream I’ll be there :D

The Voyage Home is the very first movie I can remember seeing, and it’s still my favorite Trek movie.

Yeah, but what about all the episodes where they didn’t detect any danger? That’s like half of TOS. By TNG it’d be hubris if they still believed they could know for sure.

It makes so much more sense to send a shuttlecraft in the first place, in every case, even if the mothership isn’t going anywhere and transporters are fully operational.

Is there air? You don’t know. But you’re going to beam me down in nothing but my pajamas? Hell no. I’ll take a shuttle with its shields and weapons and life support systems.

They also put children on the ship, so maybe the admiralty isn’t so smart.

On the other hand, the few things they do know about him includes that he disobeyed orders cancelling the Farpoint mission, declared red alert in drydock, and that he has conversations with letters of the alphabet.

The thing that gets me about this episode is how it compares to All Good Things.

In AGT there’s a scene where Picard is in the past on the bridge and he’s ordering them into the anomaly, an act which seriously threatens to destroy the ship, and for which he gives no good reason. The crew reasonably objects, and Picard launches into an unpersuasive and platitudinal speech about how awesome the crew is. And the crew goes along with it.

Contrast this with the scene in Allegiance where “Picard” orders them into the anomaly, an act which seriously threatens to destroy the ship and for which he gives no good reason. “Picard” assures them with an unpersuasive and platitudinal speech. And the crew mutinies.

While it’s true that in Allegiance the crew were already suspicious, it’s also true that in the AGT scene the crew didn’t know Picard well enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Not all replicators are created equally.

Starfleet standard-issue food replicators won’t produce unhealthy foods, true alcohol, etc. If you ask for a hot fudge sundae you’ll get something that resembles a hot fudge sundae, but which has the nutritional value of a balanced meal. If you ask for whiskey, you’ll get synthehol. The psychological impact (sugar high, intoxication, tryptophan sleepiness, etc.) of replicated food is muted or absent compared to the real thing.

That’s why people go to places like Quark’s. His replicators produce real food and real booze, with all the psychological effects that come with them.

At first I thought this was an announcement from Microsoft.

Reminds me of the old trick on HTML forms where you use CSS to make one of the form fields invisible to humans and reject any submission that filled in that field.

Information superhighway

E099: PROGRAMMER IS OVERLY POLITE

Start saving for old age now. It might seem like a long way off, and you might not have much money right now to begin with, but being young and poor is way better than being old and poor.

Man it sure is crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.

I got a contact sugar high just from clicking that link.

The problem is that an AI built to maximize paperclips might conclude that converting the planet to paperclips is an acceptable cost of maximizing paperclip production. It might understand why humans think it’s bad to convert the planet, but disagree. It would need to be explicitly programmed to prioritize human life over paperclips.

otherwise we would just switch it off

If it were super-intelligent, it could probably trick us into leaving it turned on.