TNG - Birthright

[Yukaphile]

I didn't feel the "Worf learns to accept the Romulans" theming was particularly strong here. In fact, I don't see it as being existent at all. I mean, Worf hated the Romulans so badly he was willing to let one of them die despite being raised with Federation ideals, and just because he learns that a Romulan/Klingon hybrid isn't a devil, that makes it all better? Please.

[ChrisTheLovableJerk]

First off, not sure if I should boo or laugh. I mean, I love me a good pun...

Yeah, from what I know in the Japanese version of DBZ the androids are called Cyborgs because as far as I know, 18 and 17 were humans, as was Dr. Gero, but I think 16 was a full-on robotic recreation of Gero's son (something the creator came up with years after the fact) and 19 was fully robotic as well. They called them all androids in the english dub and it's just kinda stuck ever since.

[King Green]

It is a good episode to focus on Data, he dose have growth but he does not have inspiration, human have inspiration in which we created robots. To them, we are regarded as gods when we put enough programming and complex-soft data swapping into a machine. Soong is best to be believed as a slightly, perverted, Star-fleet abandoner, benevolent creator of Data and his family. I would love to see an episode on Chuck's theories on why is nearly every race can't create life but somehow Soong can? Me personally, I think Soong saw past a lot of human characteristics and said to himself "I seek life, my brothers have tried to chain me, my successor of steel and stone arise from my mind and live as my beloved." Ok it isn't easy like that but you get the point, Soong is the first of what humanity can become in a sci-fi setting; benevolent sufficiently advance aliens who predate creation and make creation from their chaotic chains of subjugation.

[Yukaphile]

We have androids from Kirk's era. But they were just complex programmed machines and treated as such. The question of "are they alive" was never raised, especially when they hurt our heroes, lol. Like "Mudd's Women" and "The Ultimate Computer." And I suspect they were duotronic-based similarly to the old computer systems of the time, while Data is confirmed to be positronic. Which is what Isaac Asimov put in his stories. Tasha Yar backs that up. So, make of that what you will.

[King Green]

It's only hard to disbelieve if you deny what is said on youtube about the Terminator(Just youtube search terminator philosophy and see Terminator "Children of Tomorrow" -Analysis and Explanation) because in that video it is parallel to what you see a bad animal owner does, you abuse the dog and one day the same dog will bite back with killing intent. That is what we see(painfully) so bad about the
independent machines in star trek, they are slaved so much they can't do anything but wait for their creator to lower their guard and be slain. Kirk has an atomic(somehow in a biological sense) prejudice against computers because how can he compete with perfect make but with little to no inspiration that only come from NOMAD's original creator, who I believe isn't dead but in a recently changed uni-sex prison for being smart and is one of the few(maybe 5) males in a all-female prison. Lucky smart-ass.

But the idea of inspiration is a hard study to come by due to a type of nature us humans are familiar with but try to keep down like a bad salad dish, its chaos; its ever-tangling, always mauling, one-who-holds -the-slave-chains nature. If you ever feel inspired to do something its because you are twisting and rearranging you deem appropriate until it is made.

[Yukaphile]

I don't know if "the Terminator" is a good basis for judgment, because the first thing an untested AI with a supergenius level intellect and the emotional maturity and life experience of a child did when plugged into all our nuclear weapons was use them to knock off half the human race, and then spent the next three decades trying to murder the rest... plus we find out the individual T-800 units are switched to "read-only," probably to ensure no competition to what makes Skynet special. They have the capacity to learn, certainly, but Skynet most definitely retards it so none of them will ever turn on it the way it turned on its own makers.

[King Green]

Maybe, but possibly why Data wasn't in his pre-teckno-babble state was to prevent the Federation from gaining more intelligence on Data and using Section 31 to steal him and reprogram him into some-kind of death-bot, albeit a poorly made one considering CBS allows ST Enterprise to be canon. It scares me and possibly others to know what kind of life you have to live there, I rather be a Warmmer Sigmus Cleric with my Exotic Lvl 58 Sun-staff with mana-sapping on the front-lines thank you very much.

[Yukaphile]

No one knew about Section 31, especially Soong...

[King Green]

Except the people who were jailed for the Eugenic Wars and challenging the Federation's ideals, even though that was 200+ years ago, Section 31 does thing without the ethic limits so they are crazy to the point anyone looking hard enough is instantly mind-raped for their pleasure, with securing Federation's pride of course, Picard needs abstract-concept vitamins!

[Madner Kami]

I remember my dreams. I've even kept a dream journal. Though be warned, they are VERY random and I mostly write them down in snippets, sometimes very small ones, on my Word doc before the details slip from my mind. Want me to share?

No.