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Despite the nattering apologetics of the fans, Trek's near-future chronology has always been very inconsistent. TOS says that the Eugenics Wars happened from about 1992 to 1996, and expressly identifies them with World War III. Later, this was divided into two separate instances, with the Eugenics wars stuck in the '90s, and WWIII relegated to some nebulous 21st century date.

Interplanetary travel was completely unremarkable and common by the 1990s, as evidenced by the Botany Bay, and we're told that the first *MANNED* mission to Jupiter happened in 1980, however according to the "Enterprise" timeline, we still haven't been anywhere else in the solar system by the early 21st century, and we were still sending crappy little R/C rovers to Mars.

It's implied that Warp Drive was discovered in 2019 in TOS (Debatable) but it certainly had nothing to do with the Vulcans, and Zephram Cochrane is said to be from Alpha Centauri, presumably a human colony there.

Clearly Trek takes place on a timeline divergent from our own, where space exploration was fundamentally more robust, and where we didn’t simply abandon it after we went to the moon. (This seemed the obvious bet back in the day. Who’d spend all that time and money and risk getting to the moon, and then just abandon it? Who’d go that far, and not go on to Mars?) That’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that. All SF universes become alternate histories eventually. Once their earliest fictional date is passed by the real calendar, that’s it. What bugs me about Enterprise (Among the many things, really) is that they keep attempting to shoehorn ‘real’ history (Crappy R/C rovers on Mars, the ISS) in with Trek history, presumably to make the show seem more relevant. Or perhaps just because they aren’t paying attention to their own backstory. That’s happened a *lot* in Trek. This is a stupid and distracting thing to do, however, because obviously if we’re exploring in person Jupiter by 1980 (And presumably having explored Mars in person at some point prior to that), then why the heck would we need to send remote rovers or the crappy ISS? The DY-100 Botany Bay is *larger* than the ISS, and that’s just a ship, a completely unremarkable freighter. Unremarkable because there was a lot of freight traffic in space by the 1990s. Actually, probably earlier than that, since there’s nothing to indicate the ‘Bay was particularly new.

Kirk once says that TOS takes place about 200 years after 1966, elsewhere Khan says that he was a prince on earth 2 centuries earlier, which would mean that TOS takes place somewhere between 2166-2196. Split the difference, call it 2181ish, yet by the movies they'd somehow decided they were in the 23rd century.

All that is leaving aside the obvious chronological problems like the Federation being at war with the Cardassians, evidently, during the first four years of TNG, and no one ever bothered to mention it, or Q mentioning the Federation’s defeat of the Klingons in the years between TOS and TNG, which was later erased from continuity by ST:VI The Undiscovered Scooby Doo.

Part of this was that in the early days, no one gave a crap about reasonable prognostication, they were just banging stuff out to throw on the screen with precious little thought given to continuity or implications (And such as their was came entirely from DC Fontana) Of course in any case where you have a lot of different hands working in the kitchen, whenever a story is written by committee, or by people working on more than one end of history at the same time (TOS movies were still coming out when TNG was on the air) you’re going to run into these problems. Every future history runs into ‘em - Known Space, Heinlein’s Future History, Varley’s Eight Worlds, Pournelle’s Co-Dominion, you name it. There’s a whole lotta’ retconning going on.

Trek, having to burn through 22 to 44 stories a year, for *decades* has obviously run afoul of this, and ultimately you get to the point where your timeline is completely irreconcilable.

Some shows come up with ways to dodge this - SG1 is probably the cleverest at it, Dr. Who can and does reboot its history quite a bit, though given the nature of the series it still makes sense internally even after that‘s done.

So there you have it: Why Trek‘s chronology is so sloppy.

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eldavojohn writes "MSNBC spoke with the senior producer of a new stereoscopic 3D game called 'Killzone 3' and highlighted problems they are trying to solve with being one of the first FPS 3D games for the PS3. The team ran into serious design problems like where to put the cross hairs for the players (do they constantly hover in front of your vision?) and what to do with any of the heads up display components. Aside from the obvious marketing thrown in at the end of the article (in a very familiar way), there is an interesting point raised concerning normalized conventions in all video games and how one ports that to the new stereoscopic 3D model--the same way directors continue to grapple with getting 3D right. Will 3D games be just as gimmicky as most 3D movies? If they are, at least Guerrilla Games is at least making it possible for the player to easily and quickly switch in and out of stereoscopic 3-D while playing."

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Hugh Pickens writes "Members of 4chan aren't known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming and when they decide to go after someone, it's typically to subject them to ridicule. But not this time. Someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and soon Lashua's local branch of the American Legion was deluged by birthday calls from people as far away as Sweden. The account someone set up for Mr. Lashua's birthday on Facebook had 3,956 'likes' and over 500 comments, most of which wished him a happy birthday and thanked him for his military service. It's not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot of a flyer that was on the bulletin board at a store in Ashburnham, Massachusetts asking for guests to attend the nonagenarian's birthday on at the American Legion hall and the post took off. In contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members 'were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes' and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. 'They were all being.. well, shucks, awful nice.'"

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An anonymous reader writes "One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals - such as amino acids and nucleotides - have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation? In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents."

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Kilrah_il writes "The fine-structure constant, a coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, has been measure lately by scientist from University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia and has been found to change slightly in light sent from quasars in galaxies as far back as 12 billion years ago. Although the results look promising, caution is advised: 'This would be sensational if it were real, but I'm still not completely convinced that it's not simply systematic errors' in the data, comments cosmologist Max Tegmark of MIT. Craig Hogan of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., acknowledges that 'it's a competent team and a thorough analysis.' But because the work has such profound implications for physics and requires such a high level of precision measurements, 'it needs more proof before we'll believe it.'"

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lewko writes "Our company is about to build a central monitoring facility and I'm looking for ideas/suggestions about the best hardware and the best way to make it comfortable for those manning a screen. It will be manned 24x7 and operators will be monitoring a variety of systems including security, network, fire, video and more. These will be observed via local multi-monitor workstations and a common videowall. This is going to be a massively expensive exercise and we only get one chance to get it right. The facility is in a secure windowless bunker and staff will generally be in there for many hours at a time. So we have to implement design elements which make it a 'happy' place. At the same time, it has to be ergonomically sound. Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients, so without undoing the above objectives, it would be nice if it was 'cool' (yet functional). Whilst Television doesn't transfer to real life always, think 'CTU' from 24."

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The North and South magnetic poles swap places every 300,000 years, in a process that takes as much as 5,000 years. But evidence from an ancient lava flow suggests the poles were once moving 53 degrees per year. More »

lewko writes "Our company is about to build a central monitoring facility and I'm looking for ideas/suggestions about the best hardware and the best way to make it comfortable for those manning a screen. It will be manned 24x7 and operators will be monitoring a variety of systems including security, network, fire, video and more. These will be observed via local multi-monitor workstations and a common videowall. This is going to be a massively expensive exercise and we only get one chance to get it right. The facility is in a secure windowless bunker and staff will generally be in there for many hours at a time. So we have to implement design elements which make it a 'happy' place. At the same time, it has to be ergonomically sound. Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients, so without undoing the above objectives, it would be nice if it was 'cool' (yet functional). Whilst Television doesn't transfer to real life always, think 'CTU' from 24."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

pickens writes "The LA Times reports that 84-year-old Cuban ex-President Fidel Castro consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the World Wide Web. In a recent interview he called Web communication 'the most powerful weapon that has existed' and extolled its power to break a stranglehold on the media by 'the empire' and 'ambitious private groups that have abused it' adding that the Internet 'has put an end to secrets.... We are seeing a high level of investigative journalism, as the New York Times calls it, that is within reach of the whole world.' Well, not the whole world. Cuba has the lowest level of Internet penetration in the Western Hemisphere (lower than Haiti), plus severe government restrictions and censorship affecting those who do have access. In addition Cuban law bans using the Internet to spread information that is against what the government considers to be the social interest, norms of good behavior, the integrity of the people or national security."

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If Nevada gubernatorial candidate Eugene "Gino" DiSimone gets his way $25 will buy you the right to drive up to 90mph for a day. DiSimone estimates his "free limit plan" will raise $1 billion a year for Nevada. From the article: "First, vehicles would have to pass a safety inspection. Then vehicle information would be loaded into a database, and motorists would purchase a transponder. After setting up an account, anyone in a hurry could dial in, and for $25 charged to a credit card, be free to speed for 24 hours."

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destinyland writes "In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. 'Put another way, a month's broadband service costs more than three years' average wages in the country,' notes one technology blog, 'compared with less than two hours' earnings in Macau.' A United Nations' technology group released the figures in a new report in advance of a September 19 summit on the digital divide in developing countries. ('We are trying to avoid a broadband divide,' said Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunications Union.) Their agency noted that the rate for broadband penetration is below 1% in many poor countries, with monthly costs higher than the average monthly income. 'By contrast,' notes the BBC, 'in the world's most developed economies, around 30% of people have access to broadband at a cost of less than 1% of their income.' And the report also estimates that there are 5 billion cellphones in the world — though some people may own more than one."

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Peter Cus writes "Cluny Lace, an English lacemaking manufacturer, has reverted to 19th-Century Leavers machines in order to stay competitive. These 19th-Century machines use Jacquard punch cards. Ian Elm, thought to be the last of the card punchers, says young people don't want factory work: 'Younger people coming into a trade want a guarantee of a career out of it, and this is so uncertain.'"

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jamie passes along this excerpt from DiscoveryNews: "If you thought the geysers and overblown threat of a supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone National Park were dramatic, you ain't seen nothing: deep beneath Earth's surface, the hot spot that feeds the park has torn an entire tectonic plate in half. The revelation comes from a new study (abstract) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that peered into the mantle beneath the Pacific Northwest to see what happens when ancient ocean crust from the Pacific Ocean runs headlong into a churning plume of ultra-hot mantle material."

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I have a terrible confession to make - I watched Power Rangers for a long, long time, well past the age when I knew better. Why couldn't I quit this obviously terrible show? The toys were just too damn cool. More »

cybernanga writes "A group of researchers in South Africa has developed a filter that can purify water straight from the bottle. The filter sits inside a tube fitted on top of a bottle and purifies water as it is poured on a cup. From the article: 'The designer behind the filter, Dr Eugene Cloete, from the Stellenbosch University in South Africa, says the filter is only as big as an ordinary tea bag. He says the product is cost-effective and easy to use. "We are coming in here at the fraction of the cost of anything else that is currently on the market," says Dr Cloete on BBC World Service.'"

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theodp writes "Network analysis uses data about your social network interactions to make assumptions and predictions about your behavior. The Economist notes the upside for companies looking to sell products. But don't forget about the downside, warns Adrian Chen, of living in a world where network analysis is used by financial firms to determine risky borrowers by looking at social ties, or by Internet businesses to determine which customers are more equal than others (nice to see Microsoft's back on the forefront of some tech!). So, did Mom envision Social Network Analytics when she gave you that you-are-the-company-you-keep lecture?"

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theodp writes "In this article Vivek Wadhwa laments that short shrift is paid to management training these days at many high-tech firms. You can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and IP law, says Wadhwa. All this has to be learned. Stepping up to address the problems of 'engineering without leadership,' which may include morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover, are programs like UC Berkeley's Engineering Leadership Program and Duke's Masters of Engineering Management Program, which aim to teach product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, finance, team building, business management, and motivation to techies."

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