Don’t get me wrong. ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation‘ (TNG) had some appalling episodes over the years, especially in its first two seasons. But it seriously showed its true colors in seasons 3-5 and became a classic because of some of the best-written episodes ever that were broadcasted during that time.

Below I present the best 10 episodes of TNG in my personal opinion. No, these episodes are not actually the best in terms of action or good direction. But they represent the best television work in terms of offering food for thought to the viewer. After you watch one of these episodes, your brain somehow stalls for about 10 minutes, because it rewires itself to new ideas and new points of view. These episodes are pure social commentary, not sci-fi. You educate yourself by watching, you don’t just have some fun watching 1 hour of TV.

If you are looking to just have some fun and indulge yourself to pure well-done entertainment, I can certainly recommend the TNG episodes “Cause and Effect”, “Best of Both Worlds”, “Deja Q”, “I, Borg”, “Clues” and according to some, the best TNG episode ever, “The Inner Light”. But let’s find some episodes where the viewer actually learns something useful. These are episodes that have immensely inspired me in my life.

- Who Watches The Watchers?
The team of anthropologists are secretly watching a race that it’s still in its Bronze Age. When one of them gets injured because of an explosion in the anthropologists’ lab, Enterprise decides to beam the man up and cure him. While he is sedate and treated, he sees Picard for a few seconds, and after he is returned in his planet, he believes that Picard is a God. He talks about his experience with everyone, and they believe him. Now Enterprise is responsible for interfering with the natural development of the species, a species that were not deeply religious before.
The question posed: At the very end, Picard and the crew reveal their true selves as mortal beings, but has the damage is already done? And if the Federation is watching other species without their knowledge and consent, who is watching them?

- The Offspring
Mr Data decides to build an android, his daughter. Unfortunately, the Federation is interested in the technology and they want to take his daughter away. A similar theme was later explored in the episode “The Quality of Life”.
The question posed: Should artificial life-forms have the same rights as humans do?

- Transfigurations
An alien takes refuge in Enterprise, while many of his species want him back. Apparently, his species –after a period of time– are naturally transfiguring themselves into another species. But their society have grown to try to not allow this to happen.
The question posed: Should we be afraid to evolve and become different or should we embrace changes?

- Suddenly Human
A human kid is rescued by the Enterprise among other alien kids. They soon find out that he was kidnapped while a baby and his parents murdered by the species who are now raising him. Picard is trying to get him to agree to go back to his grandmother, but the kid is confused by this new, strange, human world.
The question posed: When a person is raised by an alien set of social rules for years, should we push him/her to adopt a new set of rules just because genetically he is one of us instead?

- Devil’s Due
After 1000 years the Devil is coming back to a planet to claim it as its own because its inhabitants signed a contract 1000 years ago with the Devil, in exchange of 1000 years of prosperity. Like the above episode, this is a slow-going episode, but with deeper meanings nonetheless.
The question posed: If you witness bed time stories or religious folklore come to life, do you become a believer to these stories, or do you keep your brain in place and try to find a scientific explanation for what you experience?

- First Contact
One of my absolute favorite episodes. While Riker was on a planet with pre-warp technology (just a few years ahead of us today), he is captured and examined. In the surprise of all people involved, their belief that they are in the center of the universe begins to shatter. Some of these people are ready to accept the Federation and bring out the big secret that “aliens exist”, but others, don’t want this to happen because they are traditional, religious people that live happily in their small world. At the end, the president of the planet decides to not let the secret out to his people, he (correctly) moves money from the warp project to social studies and progress, and asks the Federation to reveal themselves only when they deem that his people are ready emotionally, physiologically and socially.
The question posed: Do you just tell everyone that aliens exist, or do you wait until your subjects are ready for such a major change?

- The Host
The Trills are a host-based species. Some Trills are allowed to carry another, small being in them, which it then blends its personality and memories from previous hosts to new hosts. Dr Crusher falls in love with a Trill. When he dies, in order for the small being to not die (until a new Trill arrives to the ship), she plants it in Riker. But the personality blends with Riker, so feelings of the previous host carry on to Riker. At the long last, a new host arrives, but to Crusher’s dismay, she is a female!
The question posed: When you fall in love, do you fall in love with the body or the mind? If you know for certain that the mind of a person you once loved exists in another person, will you be able to love this new person too? And what happens when this other person is of the same sex as you are?

- The Outcast
An androgynous species do not allow its people to act either as males or females exclusively. When one of them falls for Riker, she is dragged away from him, she is deemed “sick”, and she is medically treated to not have such feelings.
The question posed: Being gay, is it just a state of being, or is it sickness? The episode concludes the former via this ironic scenario.

- The Game
There is a new video game in town and it’s extremely addicted. But only Wesley Crusher is able to see that this is not just a game, but a mind control tool in the hands of the wicked.
The question posed: How much faith do you put to technology just so you can have some good time?

- The Chase
Romulans, Cardassians, Klingons and humans are racing to find what each think that they will find (Klingons think it’s a weapon, humans think that it’s an artifact etc), in this archaeology-driven episode. But what they find instead, it’s that all species in the galaxy (including the worst enemies) are having the same, common ancestor.
The question posed: Not a question is posed really, but the episode is amazingly inspiring and far-reaching. Here is a quote of the common ancestor alien at the end of the episode, appearing to the four enemies through a hologram. Read it and shiver:

“You’re wondering who we are; why we have done this; how it has come that I stand before you - the image of a being from so long ago. Life evolved on my planet before all others in this part of the galaxy. We left our world, explored the stars and found none like ourselves. Our civilization thrived for ages, but what is the life of one race, compared to the vast stretches of cosmic time?
“We knew that one day we would be gone, and nothing of us would survive - so we left you. Our scientists seeded the primordial oceans of many worlds, where life was in its infancy. The seed codes directed your evolution toward a physical form resembling ours: this body you see before you, which is of course shaped as yours is shaped, for you are the end result. The seed codes also contain this message, which is scattered in fragments on many different worlds.
“It was our hope that you would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this message, and if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish - that you too would know life and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other. Remember us.”

In conclusion: let your kids watch TNG (just do them a favor and don’t let them watch the cheap first two seasons).

There are over 50 million SIP users today. This is the open protocol that it’s widely adopted by the tech industry; it’s a hit in the Enterprise market too. Well, bad luck for SIP and its divided & semi-incompatible community, because Skype has 136 million registered users. Skype is the natural choice for desktop users today.

The next big idea for a startup is to try to bridge the two different services (at least one-way). The idea is this: they register a domain name (e.g. www.sip2skype.com) and they install a SIP server in there. In the meantime, their engineers are reverse engineering Skype’s protocol by creating a library that is able to place a call to the Skype network and hang up correctly. The startup must create about 100 Skype accounts (”lines”), and then change their Alias skype names on demand via their library, so when a SIP client is connected to the Skype network, his name is changing on the Skype side (so the Skype user can recognize the SIP caller). Then, they tunnel all this to Skype and they make it work with their SIP server. Then, they let any SIP user to use their SIP server for free: each time a SIP user dials with his SIP client sip:skype_username@sip2skype.com, they will be automatically ringing on a Skype handset/client!

Of course, Skype Ltd might not like this, because right now SIP is their big enemy. But they don’t seem to bother by other SIP-2-skype solutions like this one (the problem with this solution is that the skype user must have this utility installed, otherwise they can’t get called by SIP users). Another idea would be to give Skype a share of your profits so they don’t disable your ~100 accounts. When a SIP user is trying to connect to a Skype user, you play to them a 15 sec ad before you connect them. That’s how you make money. IMHO, there is a big market for it. There are many forum posts online about people trying to call Skype to Gizmo and the other way around… But of course, it requires some strong brains to reverse engineer Skype. If you don’t have the brains, find the money from a VC and license the damn thing.

Ok, time to go grill some lamb chops for dinner. L8r.

At last, today was the first time I made a successful Clafoutis (french dessert). All the previous times I tried ended up in a disaster because as I later realized, I was using frozen cherries. This time JBQ bought some (fresh but very expensive) cherries, and I retried. It was delicious.

My JBQ has the cold. I am pretty sure that it’s a matter of time before I contract it too. I am not looking forward spending Christmas being sick. I got a roast duck to prepare for Christmas lunch!

Damien Sandras (the Ekiga maintainer) today helped me out configuring the Nokia E61 with Ekiga. He had knowledge of the URL of an open SIP proxy and he trustily shared it with me (no, I am not going to reveal it). His trick worked, so now I have Ekiga up and running on the phone. Works well. Hopefully, a solution will be found soon so all E61 users can use Ekiga…

It’s my name day today. Name days are traditionally more important than birthdays in Greece. I got a massage office chair as a present from my JBQ and I am loving it. My mother and grandmother called me already for best wishes, my brother will be calling later.

Mmm, what else… let’s see… I need to fix 3 teeth. I am not looking forward to going to a dentist… I hate dentists.

Regarding my general health, is as bad as always. The medication my doctor suggested months ago for my stomach didn’t have any effect. Sometimes I feel that our understanding in medicine is still in medieval levels. Modern science is able to fix quite a lot of symptoms, but very rarely actually they find the source.

I am eating shit from zealots of all OSes (windows, osx, linux, bsd, beos etc) for over 6 years now because I speak my mind on my blog or on editorials and comments on osnews (and back in the day, on benews). Readers can not comprehend that editors actually have opinions, and strong opinions at that. I became infamous mostly in the BeOS and Linux community because I kept writing and saying things the way I see them: as raw as I could. People prefer editors to be politically correct and to wrap anything bad they have to say in sugar. But that’s not me. So after a few years (as I have blogged in the past about it in detail) I got burned out and left OSNews (I only contribute occassionally for the past 1.5 years).

Now that Thom got my place, he gets all the shit in the world instead of me. While we don’t always agree on everything with Thom, he reminded me of myself in many levels. Always ready for a good fight, and also ready to protect his opinion. He is able to see clearly about some things in the industry, and I liked that. So, I gave him the job. Now he is being accused of “being anti-Linux” (while he is using Linux as his main OS daily), of being “anti-Mac” (after having owned two Macs), of “being anti-gnome” (don’t forget that I am the maintainer of gnomefiles.org), or “being writing controversial articles in order to drive ad revenue” (while no one gets paid on osnews). Thom gets exactly what I was getting for years. I don’t know for how long he will last this war towards him, a war by people who don’t want their lovely world get shuttered by some editor of a news site. They will close their eyes and live in the bliss of whatever they believe in, and they will fight with all their strength so their Utopian world never gets destroyed, or other potential new OS users who might be reading Thom’s opinions don’t get baffled. These people want to preserve the status quo, while we want to shake it.

Someone might ask, if you know that you will get all this shit from people, why do you keep writing controversial editorials? Well, I don’t know about Thom, but here is why I do it:

1. I have strong opinions about things and I feel like expressing them when I know I am right about some things. OSNews has a special section called “Editorials”, where EVERYONE (not just the editors) can submit long opinion articles for publication. We have published many controversial articles over the years written by readers, sometimes articles that we, the editors, didn’t really agree with. But we did so anyway because that’s why the section exists.

2. Because I am a perfectionist. Where people see a “great Gnome/kde/osx/vista desktop”, I see an unpolished and unintegrated desktop. I want things to work out of the box, I want things to work well, and I want to find the feature I need exactly where I expect it to find it. No, I am not a feature creep, neither I don’t understand how OSS works, but the point remains, I am a perfectionist when it comes to software. Bugs, ugliness, usability issues, driver issues etc are IRKING me beyond belief. In fact, I might start shouting how BAD a software is, and forget to write its good points. Not because I am biased against it, but because the bad points OVERWHELM me as a user. This is the reason why in the last year I only care about gadgets and not OSes (I don’t give a shit about OSes anymore — I have never experienced recent Vista builds for example and I never installed the betas Apple sent me). Gadgets are aimed towards Joe/Jane User and therefore they have a very strong sense of usability, plus they are simpler, and so applying usability standards and bug fixing is easier. So I prefer using a phone that works well — as I expect it to– rather than using a complex OS/desktop that has a garabazillion bugs and usability issues in it.

3. Because hopefully, the article will create such a stir, that usually the developers eventually LISTEN and they fix the things we shout about. This has happened again and again and again the last few years via my reviews and editorials. Developers will just shrug off my bug reports, I will just burn them alive publicly, and what do you know: next day they have the feature implemented or the bug fixed. I can do that, so I do it — if that’s what it takes to get their damn asses moving. Immoral you say? Not at all!

4. Because being infamous is more fun than being famous. I don’t want to be “popular”, I want to think different instead and always try to see the big picture on things.

I stand by my opinions 100%, even if I don’t have the ability to express myself in English as well as other bloggers or journalists do. This has created a lot of misunderstandings over the years, but the funny thing is that when I usually got face to face with some people that were violently disagreed with my articles, we actually found that we… agreed!

I thought that the worst thing a person could battle with is either configuring IrDA under Linux, or trying to make his Mac OS X connection share to Bluetooth PDAs. Well, no. It’s even worse trying to get real interoperability and compatibility between VoIP SIP clients. It’s simply impossible to get any random (configurable) SIP client and try to connect to any random SIP service. The chances that this will work are about 10 to 1.

I spent 4 hours today trying to get my E61 to work with Ekiga’s SIP service, and not only it wouldn’t, but it triggered a bug in the Nokia VoIP stack that it would not let my Gizmo account to connect either anymore. I had to hard-reset the phone and lose all my data in order to get VoIP back. And that’s after waiting months to get the v3.x of the E61 firmware released which at last has STUN support in it (the E60/E70 Nokia phones still don’t have a firmware upgrade available to get STUN support — poor users).

Then, it was time to get Gaim’s SIMPLE/SIP plugin to work with Ekiga. Nope! It just won’t connect to Ekiga either. Wanna make Gizmo’s SIP Presence to work with Gaim? Good luck, Gizmo uses Jabber instead of SIP for its IM service and Gizmo doesn’t wanna let you know the exact server configuration they are using. It’s a non-standard decision to use Jabber instead of SIMPLE for SIP’s IM service.

Then, I tried calling Gizmo via my Linux’s installation of Ekiga. It worked, but when I hanged up with Gizmo, Ekiga thought that it was still on a call. And when I tried calling back with Gizmo, it wouldn’t connect at all.

Then, try with Articulation on PalmOS or any of the available Pocket PC SIP clients. The chance that things will work is fifty-fifty. Usually clients work well only when they talk to another same-version client. Same crap happens between other clients, both VoIP hardware wifi phones or desktop software clients. There is no real interoperability between SIP providers and clients, even if they all supposedly follow the same protocol. Each one uses its own tweaks, tricks and bugs, that make things nearly impossible to work well together.

Skype has the right idea for having its own proprietary protocol and only works with itself and its licensed and tested clients. It sucks not being able to talk to the SIP clients or not having the protocol documentation, but you know, the reason it became so successful it’s because it f*cking WORKS, exactly because these guys were able to CONTROL their protocol instead of having every Joe and Jane releasing another ‘SIP stack of the week’.

VoIP is not going away. Cisco is using it (also under controlled circumstances), and the cellphone carriers will do so too when WiMAX will be deployed in 2008. But that implementation ain’t gonna be a yet-another-kinda-working-but-not-quite SIP stack. It’s going to be a well-tested proprietary technology.

Let me just say that the Cornfed SIP client for Linux and X-Lite for Windows are pretty good, but anyways, that’s it, I am done with SIP. Not having quality control over the client/services implementations it has opened the door for bugs, incompatibilities and badly configured servers over the last 4 years. The whole SIP universe today SUCKS. If you want to keep your sanity, stay away from VoIP SIP (except if you only use a single provider and you don’t have plans to call other external SIP services).

Haarvard of Opera Software was very kind to snapshot two pictures for me, showing OSNews rendering on his TV, through the Nintento Wii and the newly released Opera version for it. We already had over about 10 unique hits with it since the browser got released last night!

“A man who went missing in western Japan survived in near-freezing weather without food and water for more than three weeks by falling into a state similar to hibernation, doctors said.”

Now, here’s a man who’s DNA is worth expanding. Hopefully, he will donate some sperm to do his part in the evolution of the species (I am not kidding).

After reading more sad stories in the news about judges not allowing euthanasia,

I hereby make my wishes known, should I ever get into a coma or vegetated state and the doctors believe that almost certainly I won’t wake up from it, to euthanize me via lethal injection (much preferred over removing the machine support, which is slow and torturing).

Evgenia Loli
21 December 2006

Here is a great example how democracy just doesn’t work. Not because democracy is bad (I prefer it over other forms of ruling), but random people are just not good-enough to administer. Democracy is as good/bad as the quality of its subjects.

So, Thom submitted his editorial to digg.com, story got live after 11 hours, only to get buried within 15 minutes from the front page and not to be seen again. The story is legit, it’s not trolling (don’t let the zealots fool ya). It’s an honest, personal opinion on the state of the Linux desktop. And I also happen to agree with it, along others too.

But, some readers buried the story. Burying is not provided by Digg for people who disagree with the editorial, but as a tool to report abuse/spam/lameness. And yet, the Linux zealots buried the story, simply because they didn’t agree with it, or because they didn’t wanna damage Linux’s image to the world at large. That’s Digg’s democracy for ya.

This is also the reason why I also don’t like OSNews’ own thumbs up feature. People don’t vote for the story quality, but they vote if they agree with the story or not. For example, you might have a very controversial, but extremely well-written linked story, and yet it would get 0 votes just because people think they are voting for their own opinions instead of the quality of the story. They don’t want “food for thought”, they want “peace of mind”. It gets personal when you, for example, do an extremely interesting interview with let’s say, a Microsoft employee, and yet no one votes it up because they don’t like Microsoft, even if the article was insightful. It makes the editor –who spent time lovingly working on the article– feel bad for getting hammered for the wrong reason.

But then again, I don’t need to be “popular”. If I was to have “popular ideas and opinions”, I would just be like the rest of the non-thinking mass. I never allowed myself to be one and the same with the mass, not even when I was 12 (one of the reasons I left Greece was because I didn’t fit in with my ideology and interests). I got myself popular with my unpopular ideas and strong opinions, and I am proud of this. I better die rather than go along with the tide.

Violet has put up a blog post about her top-10 sexiest geeks of 2006. I will have to disagree with her No2, the guy looks yucky… As for the women in her list, well, I don’t like women (remember, I see myself as a gay man )… In my own list, Red Hat’s Havoc Pennington (with sexiness that derives from his strong persona) remains No1 and Novell’s Nat Friedman (his mommy made him baby-good-looking) is No2.

My beloved JBQ is not on that list because he is mostly a nerd, not a geek (I found a loophole, hehe).