They’re also much smarter than our ones. One episode had a kid worried about doing exactly the thing shown in the meme, where he’d fallen, caught himself on the control panel, and thought everyone had died as a result of him fat-fingering buttons.

He was reassured by Riker telling him it’s impossible, because computer consoles can detect that, and have authorisation codes, so won’t trigger the buttons otherwise.

Plus, there’s aliens who have no eyes, and presumably cannot see in Starfleet. It would be unfair to them if they can’t use anything except by voice controls.

Only slightly though. It hardly seems practical to try and infer gender from names, in a way where it can’t be obtained through historical records, or the user.

Getting it to format documentation for you seems to work a treat. Nothing too complex, just “move this bit here, split that into points”.

Trying to monetize the piracy of your users. That’s a bold business strategy.

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely, Plex were trying to legitimise themselves, by adding streaming from official sources, etc.

I would be curious if this is meant to be a deterrent, or just to look like one by making piracy expensive, so they can eat their cake and have it too.

There is always the front door.

If they really wanted to go into canon, you could say there was the augment era during ENT, then they fixed their ridges with a hypospray, and then just before SNW reaches TOS times, there was a recurrence of the augment craze on Qronos. Or a COVID like virus escaped from a lab. It would be odd because all the characters we know from TOS never comment on this oddity - Spock, Kirk, Uhura have all seen ridged Klingons, then the smooth kind, and then ridged again in the movies.

There’s also an in-universe explanation where a lot of the Klingons we saw were supremacists who specifically focused on their Klinginess, and had the technology to genetically engineer themselves. In the aftermath of the augment virus, they could well have overcorrected to exaggerate their Klingon features.

This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

IMO, that was pushing the line as it was, since it still implies a distinct visual difference. It would have been better for Worf to use TOS-style make-up, and misdirect the remark as referring to the uniform instead or something along those lines.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

TOS, I think, generally gets a pass because it’s considered a relic of the 1960s, whereas the whole TNG-era was when Trek made it big, and they more or less defined the visual aspects for a lot of the franchise. If you talk about starships, people generally think you’re talking around the time of TNG, not TOS, or 32nd century Discovery.

Animation, meanwhile, gets a pass both because they’re not quite as big, and that any differences can be dismissed as stylistic alterations made to suit the medium. People didn’t care that TAS made tribbles neon pink, instead of the more realistic fur colours that their real-life counterparts had.

The most fuss, in my experience, really tends to happen when a visual alteration is thought of as being a retroactive change that “ruins” the existing image someone might have of something. Discovery’s Klingons and Enterprise get some controversy because there was already an Enterprise and Klingons around that time in-universe, and the new design is taken as replacing the old thing.

By comparison, the Enterprise suddenly changing in TMP, or in TNG accepted not as replacements, but as being spurred by technological development, like with phasers/transporters being massively different. Or, that the change/original characters were minor enough that it’s not considered significant. There wasn’t a spat over Discovery’s revision of the Saurians, since the only prior depiction was as a background character in TMP, and in DS9, Trill/Ferengi were only shown a small handful of times, so changing them was accepted quite well.

Personally, what I also find interesting, is what things people don’t question not changing. Like starships using the exact same technology in the exact same way, for 300 – 900 years. No-one building the human ships in the Federation has thought to significantly change the warp nacelle design, either based on the engine designs of other species, or just to shift it around a bit in all that time? No Vulcan inspiration, different successful engine technology, etc?

It’s only been 100 years since we invented the auto-motive car, and we’ve already had variants of them for decades that aren’t just changing the wheel count, or making them slightly fancier. It seems weird that the Federation, for all its technological prowess and allegedly superiority by co-operation, has barely touched them for all that time, and that everything remains separate and species-linked. You’d expect at least one Federation space-vessel that does have mixed technologies, and a human framework to put them all together into a functional whole.

The basic story ideas are pretty solid, they just get hampered by the execution (and the mess that was production).

In fairness, it was literally magic.

The whole no money utopia thing happened later. They were still using credits at the time.

In Enterprise, they made an augment virus that went wrong, and to avoid going the way of the Illyrians, they made a cure, that basically turned them human/into the TOS Klingons.

I’d argue that it was hurt by specifically trying to fit TNG-era Star Trek, or people expecting that of it.

It would have worked perfectly fine as a TOS/TAS show, since they never really shied away from there being unexplainable magic with the science out in the universe. Witches, wizards, and the devil are all real, and one universe away, so too is actual magic.

Whereas TNG and post-TNG would always try and hammer that into the work of a godlike entity such as a Q, or some grounded science. Q abilities are the work of highly sophisticated subspace interactions that have yet to be technologically replicated. There are particular neurotransmitters, psychology, and brain structures involved in telepathy, and it’s not simple ESP/psionics.

And people wanted the latter. This is most notable with the cause of the Burn. People hated it because the idea of a child being able to psionically disrupt dilithium galaxy-wide would have been silly in TNG, without them being a child Q, or something like that.

But as a TOS/TAS plot, it fits in fine. Lazarus briefly caused the entire universe to blink out of existence, and Charlie X, due to the powers bestowed upon him needed to keep him alive, could explode ships with his mind, and would have destroyed the Federation if left unchecked.

TL;DR: It worked as Trek, but people basically wanted TNG and got TOS.

The brain equivalent of doing a burnout.

What’s the point of being sane if you can’t be a little mad sometimes?

The glass is also speaking, as opposed to a third person.

Very far. We’re not given numbers, but Deanna’s range might actually be on the lower side, because she’s not wholly Betazoid, and her empathic abilities are due to her telepathic abilities only being semi-functional.

If the books and extended media are to be believed, Betazed passed First Contact restrictions because they were already reading minds for light years around.

It’s likely that most of the time, all the nearby minds just get drowned out or metaconsciously tuned out. So unless you have a condition that impairs that, you’re not picking up every thought for light years.

But type of telepathy matters too. Vulcan-type telepathy doesn’t have nearly as large a range, and is good for about a few metres, or requires physical contact, for example.

Tin Man’s telepathy was able to reach across at least a whole star system.

He does also have a condition where his telepathic abilities are unusually sensitive, so his range might be larger than the norm.

Everyone in McKinney Romulus is dead.

He certainly seems to think so, though. When he was sharing his emotions with Picard, he was distraught that he wasn’t as open about his fondness for Amanda, before she died.

At least if Sarek is any indicstor, they are definitely very restrained. He was quite distraught over not being as affectionate with Amanda as he could have been.