To Boldly Go…

Star Trek Captains — Original Series (Shatner), Next Generation (Patrick Stewart), Deep Space Nine (Avery Brooks), Voyager (Kate Mulgrew), Enterprise (Scott Bakula), new movies (Chris Pine) From left to right, top to bottom: NBC/Paramount; Paramount; Paramount Television; Braga Productions/Paramount Network Television; Paramount Pictures/Skydance Productions

Matt Yglesias provides a delightful, yet long winded, romp through the history of the Star Trek franchise. It’s a must-read for any serious Trekkie. For the rest of you, suffice it to say that what made Star Trek great was its vision of a somewhat utopian future.

Trek envisioned a world not based on economics and acquisition of stuff, but a world where people were motivated by a desire to learn more, to better themselves. It was more about cooperation than competition.

This didn’t mean the Star Trek universe didn’t have its share of bad guys, but success was often about diplomacy and respect of alien culture. Blowing stuff up was a last resort. Granted, it wasn’t an uncommon last resort, but it wasn’t the primary point of the show.

Yglesias also observes that the new rebooted movie franchise, while great fun, has sort of lost this vision. It’s become more a series of sci-fi adventure flicks than the morality tales that defined the 5 TV series. It’s great popcorn entertainment, but it’s not really what Trek was all about. Yglesias blames this on the medium—that feature length films don’t lend themselves to the same type of storytelling as the small screen. Maybe he’s right.

All this got me to thinking about why I’ve always preferred Star Trek to Star Wars. While I’ve enjoyed the Star Wars movies, they simply aren’t as personally compelling to me. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says for him it’s because Trek stays more true to science as we understand it. Phasers just seem hard to build, while light sabers seem to require different laws of physics. As a science geek myself, I like the bad science explanation, but I don’t think that’s it.

In the end it’s rather simple. The universe of Star Trek is a place I’d like to live. Star Wars? …not so much. And it’s not even that Star Wars is always centered on, well, wars… and frankly, war zones aren’t appealing places to live. But the overall culture is maybe too familiar. In some ways it’s too similar to the world we live in. Governments are corrupt. Power struggles and armed conflict are rampant. Everyone is constantly angling for an advantage. Thanks, I can turn on CNN and see that.

Yet in the Trek world, I can explore, learn, grow, and I still occasionally get to blow something up. It may still have dangers, but it’s an inviting and appealing culture. It emphasizes the best in humanity while recognizing that the worst still lurks.

It’s not clear this difference is because Star Wars was spawned from feature films rather than television. Each writer built their universe to suit their vision and the story they wanted to tell. Roddenberry was an optimist. He believed the best in people would always prevail and projected a future where it truly blossomed. Lucas was more of a realist. He reprojected the culture of man onto a different galaxy and gave them hyperdrives and blasters.

Bottom line: If the Enterprise (any of them, NX, NCC, A, B, C, D, E, or Q for that matter) drops into orbit and offers to take me on as a crewman, I’ll be texting Kim from space that I will be out of town for awhile. I will be boldly gone. Hell, I’ll even agree to wear a red shirt. But if the Millennium Falcon drops by, I may well go for a joy ride, but I’ll be home for dinner.

Losing weight with caffeine-laced pants: Your butt still looks enormous

There is apparently no end to the amount of money people will spend to convince themselves they are doing something about their weight. Witness, leggings with impregnated caffeine micro-capsules, designed to slim inches off your hips and thighs.

The marketing premise is that the micro-capsules are essentially made of Shea-butter with a metabolism boosting caffeine center. As you walk around during the day, (Wait! you still have to walk?) your natural body heat melts the Shea butter which is absorbed into your skin along with the caffeine. The result being that you’re then delightfully jittery with smooth supple legs. Or maybe your cottage cheese riddled butt is now just sloshing around inside greasy skin tight pants all day. I report, you decide.

These puppies will set you back $70, and according to the instructions should be worn 8 hours/day, 5 days/week , for a month to get the full benefit. This means you’ll need several pair, or you’re gonna work up a funk by month’s end that will make your weight problems the least of your anti-social attributes. P.T. Barnum was right.

Yet, don’t get me wrong, the notion of clothes with built in aerobic benefit is brilliant. But rather than caffeine, they should have gone with “Ants in the Pants“. Let’s be honest, you get a few dozen creepy-crawlies toolin’ around your tuckus and you will be out of your chair and dancing in no time. Feel the burn.

Poking your way to the pokey

Today’s local newspaper reported that federal prosecutors are alleging that a Hell’s Angels member threatened a witness—through a Facebook page “poke.” Seriously… you can’t make this stuff up. How lame of a Hell’s Angel do you have to be that your preferred intimidation tactic is a button on a web page?

Wait… Facebook still has a “Poke” button? And people use it? I can’t remember the last time I was poked, but maybe I’m just inherently unpokable.

Then again, my immediate family has a lingering bad taste about poking as my youngest used to instigate serial poking episodes from the back seat of the car. His opening volley would be to stick a pointed finger into a fellow passenger and then issue the drawn out low-key utterance, “po…ke”. This would then propagate randomly through the vehicle for what seemed like an eternity as everyone poked everyone else while I gripped the wheel and muttered, “Are we there yet?”

So, maybe it’s just that my circle doesn’t poke. But either way, this notion of Facebook poking as harassment has to be a bit of a legal stretch, no? Apparently not. Google “Facebook poke considered harassment” and you get a ridiculous number of hits. People being arrested and sued for all manner of virtual abuse. This is just one out of control poke-analia, to the point that it’s rather amazing CNN hasn’t devoted a full news segment to scourge. After all, they spend most of their time reporting on Facebook and Twitter anyway.

I guess the upshot here is just a word of warning to all your serial pokers out there. Trespass on your friends’ cyberspace with care. One poke too many and you’ll be headed to the pokey.

Lady Gaga makes a splash as a Tech Consultant; Humanity is doomed

Last week, Grammy award-winning singer Lady Gaga confessed that she is an avid fan of Ubuntu, the Linux-based operating system. Reports are that Ubuntu’s desktop market share has shot up from 1 percent to 7 percent in just two days. Furthermore, due to a huge rise in traffic, Ubuntu’s website suffered a downtime of about 8 hours on Tuesday.

While Ubuntu is a really slick OS, made slicker by its price tag (free), it’s hardly a new kid on the block. The Linux distro has been around for years, struggling to make inroads against Microsoft and Apple. It’s got a fair following among the geek crowd, but has yet to make big inroads into the mass consumer market… until now.

Many Ubuntu enthusiasts as well as developers and investors are overjoyed, and understandably so. But what does this say about the sanity of the average person? Lady Gaga’s advice might be worth following if she opined on music, popular culture, or fashion. But if we’ve intellectually regressed to a point where we will change our computer operating system based on an offhand remark from a celebrity, what else will we buy?

It’s hard enough to figure out which experts to trust in a sea of competing voices on a topic, but there has to be some ability to discern who should warrant consideration as a person to whom we should listen. Or have we really reached the point where we are unable to discern that Lady Gaga shouldn’t even get a voice as a tech expert? Alternatively, are we just so awestruck by celebrity that we’ll do anything a celebrity says?

Even sheep are smarter than that.

Zediva tweaks the nose of Hollywood studios

DVD Monkey — A peek behind the curtain at Zediva's operations center.

A new video on-demand service called Zediva was introduced this week. It’s kind of like if Netflix and Redbox got together and turned Slingbox inside out. The key feature of the new service is that you can rent new movie releases without ever leaving home. They are employing a delivery method that appears completely legal, but is sure to get the movie studio executives running hair-on-fire to their legal departments looking to find some means to stifle them using copyright law..

The consumer advantage is access to a movie selection similar to Redbox or Blockbuster, including the latest DVD releases. That’s something neither cable or satellite video on-demand services, nor streaming services like Netflix are able to offer. You see, Hollywood studios impose a release window around new DVDs such that streaming services are not allowed to play them for a period of time. The theory being that this allows the studios to get people to buy DVDs, on which they make a tidy sum. Studios correctly assume that if you could watch the movie without getting off of the couch, you would opt for that instead. Meaning, if you’re in a rush to watch a new release, you either buy or rent a physical disc, or (heaven forbid) download a pirated torrent.

Zediva gets around that release window by actually buying DVDs and renting them to you. However, rather than having to wait by the mailbox or run to the store for the disc, Zediva helpfully pops the disc in one of their networked DVD drives and streams it to your house over the Internet. The key being that during the playing of the movie, that DVD and player are only playing to you, the renter.

Thanks to legal precedents established when Slingboxes were introduced years ago, place-shifting is perfectly legal. In the case of Slingbox, it was ruled that copyrights couldn’t prevent you from sending video content to your phone or remote computer from a box located in your house. You were paying for the content, and studios couldn’t restrict you to watching it locally, as long as you weren’t sharing or reselling it. It’s hard to see how this is different. Zediva is a DVD rental store, nothing more. They just provide Slingbox-like capability (also legal) to allow you to watch the movie remotely.

The initial popularity of Zediva is huge. They have already cut off new registrations as the demand for the service has far exceeded their capacity. Thus it seems enormously likely we’ll soon hear the screams and howls from the studios of how they will go bankrupt if this sort of thing is allowed to continue. (For reference, they screamed that when writable DVDs were introduced… and VHS tapes… and color television… Hollywood? Still solvent.)

Yet, there is a larger message here that should not be lost. The Zediva model is clever, but technologically stupid and inefficient. It exists only to do an end-around to existing copyright rules put in place to prop up dying business models. These are business models designed to create artificial scarcity and inflate prices. Zediva also illustrates a pent up market demand for access to this sort of content. People want the convenience and are willing to pay for it.

The theory of capitalism is that some new business will come along and leverage the consumer demand, thereby driving the dinosaurs to extinction. But Hollywood studios are an effective monopoly. The barrier to entrance in that business is huge. So the reality is that as long as they stick together, they can continue to abuse consumers in defiance of capitalist principles.

Kudos to Zediva for finding a way to give consumers what they want, but they may want to open up that legal defense fund now, just to get a head start.