Doctor Who. The Doctor may be the king of the MacGyvers, constantly improvising incredibly complex devices out of whatever garbage he finds. But his craziest moment of jury-rigging is probably in "The Time Monster," when he builds a space-time disruption machine — which renders time-travel impossible — out of a wine cork, a yoyo and a fork. I loved that scene so much when I was a kid, but now it's a bit embarrassing. And yet, still kind of inspiring!

Star Trek. Over the decades of Trek, there's been a lot of people building weapons out of translators, or technobabbling their way into creating Everything machines. But the man who says the phrase "jury-rig" or "Jerry-rig" the oftenest, and in the craziest situations, is Scotty, our ingenious engineer. He's the guy who builds a nuclear reactor pump out of bits and pieces in "Devil in the Dark," and coverts an ancient ship's shields to hold a Dyson sphere open in "Relics." Not to mention retooling a transporter to keep him in stasis, in that same episode.

Stargate: Atlantis. Rodney McKay famously asks "What am I, MacGyver?" in this spin-off from the Richard Dean Anderson-starring Stargate SG1. But he actually does work technological marvels at regular intervals, making sense of Ancient technology. He built an atomic bomb for his sixth-grade science project. Not to mention, in "Condemned," he totally one-ups Scotty when he says it'll take two days to cobble together a new "Dial-Home Device" from secondary systems... and then downgrades that estimate to ten minutes in a pinch.

Can Of Worms. We have to send a shout-out to Mike Pillsbury, who manages to transform his family's satellite dish into a communications device to contact alien life forms. Watch our awesome video here.

Eureka. Henry Deacon, a former NASA engineer, is the mechanic for the small town of Eureka, and literally every other episode revolves around him building some crazy gadget out of nothing in particular. Need a pocket-sized gizmo to erase someone's memories of an alternate timeline? Or a quick cobbled-together device to undo the effects of a paranoia ray on a whole bunch of bigwigs? Henry's your guy.

E.T. Okay, you don't really think of that wormy-faced, big-eyed cute alien with the glowing cockfingers in the same breath as Scotty and McKay. But just think: who builds an interstellar communications device out of an old Speak & Spell toy using a coat-hanger? It's not Scotty.

Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure. The only people less likely than E.T. to come on your MacGyver radar are Bill and Ted — but they do fix their time machine using only a fruit can and some bubble gum. You have to give them props for that.

Fantastic Four. I hesitated to include Reed Richards, the super-scientist who's always building rockets and weird toys out of bits and pieces, because he has a huge lab and doesn't really just use scraps. But then I saw this panel, from the alternate-universe Last Planet Standing, and had to give it to him:

Buckaroo Banzai is another wacky inventor who has a lab and an ample supply of parts, but we're still blown away by some of the things he throws together, like the Oscillation Overthruster, which transports matter into parallel universes. Not to mention the Jetcar.

Thanks to Angel and Kevin for research help.

Starblazers. Desslok, leader of the Gamilons, tried to crush the puny humans over and over again, but finally lost his empire. So in season two, he decided to take revenge on the crew of the Yamato, who defeated his ambitions. He finally catches up to them in an episode auspiciously titled "Desslok's Victory," and pounds them with his gunships. Then he surrounds the Yamato with magnetic mines before the humans can fire their famous Wave Motion Gun. And then taunts his adversaries mercilessly. "Go on, take a shot." Ha ha ha ha. (I know it's sacrilege, but I actually prefer this scene in the English dubbed version.)

Battlestar Galactica. It takes less than an episode for things to go south between the Galactica and the newly discovered Battlestar Pegasus. Admiral Cain decides to execute the Chief and Helo, leading to a tense confrontation complete with the whirly cam. Commander Adama shows why you don't mess with Galactica, with his terse "I'm getting my men" speaking volumes. And then the phone comes down, because the space battle is on.

Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan. Star Trek pretty much perfected the art of hailing-frequencies bravado, as early as "Balance of Terror"'s Romulan Sub-Commander Tal. "Your ship is surrounded, Captain. You will surrender immediately, or we will destroy you." With Kirk responding, "Save your threats. If you board this ship, I'll blow it up. You'll gain nothing." But Trek's masterpiece of comm-taunting has to be TWoK, where Kirk keeps needling Khan's poor marksmanship, until finally he lures him into a disabling nebula by laughing at his superior intellect. "We tried it once your way, Khan. Are you game for a rematch?" The script says: "Khan's eyes bulge." And they do.

Serenity. This one's a bit different. Chiwetel Ejiofor's Operative is mournful and regretful after he slaughters dozens (maybe hundreds) of innocents to get to Mal. But he still needles Mal via the viewscreen, suggesting that all the carnage is Mal's fault. And he's successful in goading Mal to take rash action — just not maybe the action he was hoping for.

Avengers #94, part of the Kree-Skrull War saga. The Skrull emperor appears on a view screen to warn the Avengers that the Kree warrior, Mar-Vell, is creating the ultimate weapon, an Omni-Wave Projector. And then when the humans don't respond to his threats fast enough, the emperor launches Plan Delta, which sends an all-consuming fireball spiralling towards Earth.

Farscape, "Die Me, Dichotomy." In the second season cliffhanger, Scorpius takes over Crichton's brain via a neural chip, and the mind-controlled Crichton tricks Aeryn into letting him go. She chases after his module in her Prowler, leading to a harsh exchange. Scorpius asks her how the skull fracture is doing, and she threatens to shoot him down. "Make no mistake." Scorpius/John replies: "I believe you'll pull the trigger. I just don't believe - you'll hit anything." And then he goes into a dive. Sadly, this is just a few moments before Aeryn takes her chair-dive into the frozen lake.

Halo 3, "The Crow's Nest" level. The Chief and Johnson reach the Command Center and start making plans to attack Truth's army, but then Truth appears on all screens and says: "You are, all of you, vermin. Cowering in the dirt, thinking...what, I wonder? That you might escape the coming fire? No! Your world will burn until its surface is but glass! And not even your Demon will live to creep, blackened, from its hole to mar the reflection of our passage; the culmination of our Journey. For your destruction is the will of the gods! And I? I AM their instrument!" Okay, so that's not a space battle. But I love that speech.

Galaxy Quest. Jason and Sarris have many great confrontations over the viewscreen, including the first one, where Jason thinks Sarris is just acting, and the second one, where Jason calls Sarris stupid and ugly because he thinks the sound is off. But the best, by far, is the final jaw-dropping confrontation. Sarris reminds Jason that he's a General, who's seen war and death that Jason can't imagine, and Sarris won't blink no matter what. (This scene is lengthier in the original script, actually.) But Jason retorts that it doesn't take a great actor to recognize a bad one, and Sarris is sweating. And then we get to the classic exchange, "You fool. What you fail to realize is that without your armor my ship will tear through yours like tissue paper." To which Jason responds: "Yeah. Well what you fail to realize is... I'm dragging mines."

Babylon 5, "Between The Darkness And The Light. We're totally embarrassed that we missed this crucial showdown between Earthforce and Susan Ivanova, and super grateful that commenters Michael and BcBeBop pointed it out to us. I am going to start calling myself "the right hand of vengeance" and "the boot up your ass" in the same breath now:

Doctor Who, "Bad Wolf." Another one we're embarrassed we missed originally. Thanks to commenter AspiringExpatriate for pointing it out! I love how Christopher Eccleston's Doctor is just like, "No." As if it's not even worth arguing. It mirrors his awesome "No" in "The Long Game" when The Editor asks that long-winded philosophical question about whether a slave is still a slave if he doesn't know he's a a slave. I have to admit, every time I watch this scene I wonder why the Daleks don't just say, "Okay then," and exterminate Rose right then and there.

So what classic space talk-downs did we miss? Feel free to let us know in the comments, but only in the most trash-talking, mouth-running, space-taunting way possible. You fools! We're laughing at your superior intellects.

The page design doesn't look like much, but the video looks great. Even without the polished design, this is a clear shot at Hulu, which currently hosts content from News Corp., NBC, and some other partners — but not CBS.

Is it just a coincidence that these episodes go live so soon after the writers' strike ended? That's the great thing about running the classics — the scripts, and the contracts, are already written. CBS runs ads before the show starts, and in mid-episode, likely commanding a healthy CPM. But enough about business: Pull up your office chair and watch Kirk battle some bizarre alien dragon. It'll bring back your childhood. Alas, no embedding allowed — likely because CBS also makes money on the banner ads surrounding the video player..

A Brief History of the Reality Distortion Field

• 
  
• Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field: Apparently the Star Trekly-esque named Bud Tribble was working on a software project for Apple in 1981, and thought he had been given an unrealistic ten-month schedule from inception to ship date. When asked why he didn't just ask Steve to change it, he reportedly said "Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field." Although it turns out no one could find a connection between that term and Star Trek, and thus a legend was born.
• 
  
• The Scramble Suits from A Scanner Darkly: In Phillip K. Dick's novel about drug addiction and the paranoid world on both sides of that issue, government narcotics agents wear "scramble suits" that change every aspect of the reader, shifting at a moment's notice so that people looking at someone wearing one will never be able to tell what they look like. In the novel they shift extremely quickly, but they slowed it down in the movie to show how they work. They alter your voice as well, making you the most visible invisible man/woman around: they scramble reality for everyone except you.
• 
  
• The Matrix in The Matrix: Nothing distorts reality more than entire system of machines set up to grow you from a fetus, nurture you, and feed your brain signals that tell it you're growing up normal inside a world that doesn't exist. As Morpheus says, "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Sounds pretty distorty to us, although if they decided to make us some sort of science fiction superstar inside this simulation, we probably wouldn't mind. Then you'd all be invited to the rad parties we'd throw.
• 
  
• The Holodeck in Star Trek: Seriously, we could never understand why people just didn't stay on the holodeck 24/7. Sure, it's technically "not real," but it does everything you'd want a real world to do. You've got an entire library of billions and billions of option of things to simulate, plus you can even disable the security protocols making it possible to actually die while you pretend you're inside Alice in Wonderland. It's like a portable Matrix To Go (tm), so how did they ever manage to get any work done with one of these things around?
• 
  
• The world of They Live: You can blame our current obsession with this film on the fact that it's been showing up on cable a lot lately, but there's something about this Roddy Piper/John Carpenter film that makes it hard to hate. In their world, an alien signal is being beamed out that makes humans as complacent as cattle, and stops them from seeing the aliens as they actually are. Thankfully, Roddy gets some magic glasses that help him kick ass and thwart the fugly aliens. Although in retrospect, they just wanted to make him rich. Was that so bad?
• 
  

Image above from the Joy of Tech website. Full version can be seen here.

The startup has released a Star Trek-themed search toolbar for Web browsers. Every search made through the toolbar means a donation to the production of Star Trek: New Voyages. The fan series is better-produced than the original series it honors, but it cranks out episodes at a glacial pace: three episodes in as many years.

We doubt there are enough hardcore Star Trek fans to make a real difference in ChaCha's numbers. An easier explanation? Scott Jones, ChaCha's CEO, has to be a Trekkie himself to be pursuing this. I hope the citizens of Indiana are happy knowing that their tax money is funding Jones's geek obsessions.

The following was sent to Valleywag's tip line with the subject "Spock Misogyny Part 2."

1. Founders of the search engine didn't bother searching for themselves.
2. I tried to warn them and get them to do the right thing: Arrogance or Apathy, you decide.
3. The ones who accused spock of misogyny were more right than they knew.

Ever since their Web 2.0 demo at San Francisco, where one of the founders of Spock, Jay Bhatti, gave a demo displaying a page full of Victoria Secret's models, the company has been accused of being misogynists.

http://valleywag.com/tech/spock/human-females-prove-highly-illogical-253339.php

http://watchyourmouth.livejournal.com/203514.html

A commenter, Leanne, wrote on Tim O Rielly's blog: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/why_im_so_excit.html

Further investigation of Spock's web site demonstrates that they have dug up a decades-old misogynistic joke about how men at one place are better looking than girls at another place — this hateful joke has probably been around longer than Jay has been alive and it's disrespectful to to past sexist history dredge it up again — I first heard a variant of this "joke" 20 years ago:

Brian - "When Jay tried to convince me to leave Microsoft to join Spock, he said Spock had much better-looking women than Microsoft. Only when I joined, I realized Spock had not hired any women at that time. But even without any women, the guys at Spock were better-looking than the girls at Microsoft." http://www.spock.com/do/pages/jay

Apparently Jay, the founder, is also clueless about Ruby on Rails and is the subject of another dumb joke:

Jon - "When I interviewed with Jay and told him about Ruby on Rails, he thought it was an adult video."

Is this really a tech company with a serious search engine? They don't demo or promote themselves as one.
———-
(Which they took down. But not fast enough.

http://valleywag.com/tech/cubicle-culture/spocks-frat+geek-humor-253380.php

So, after going through many of the blogs, I wondered was this a one time mistake, or perhaps the demo really represented their attitudes toward women?

A simple google search located the founders of Spock: Jay Bhatti and Jadeep Singh on MySpace.

I found very questionable content, which I've enclosed later in this story.

I thought perhaps I would try to get them to do the right thing, so I contacted one of their advisors, Dave McClure.
http://500hats.typepad.com/

On 4/26/07, Michael Takamoto wrote:
Dave,

...

I think Spock has very innovative technology and I want to see the company succeed. I also am a father of 2 in San Carlos and am active in the community.

I would like to meet briefly with you concerning some more information you may not be aware of with regard to the Spock and the behavior of key management staff at Spock that could be easily misinterpreted.

I'm approaching you with this information because you seem to be very reasonable in your writings on this topic and and I believe you will take appropriate action.

I have some specific ideas I would like to share with you for getting some positive PR for Spock and smoothing over rifts with the community of women in technology.

I would appreciate 15 minutes of your time. Today or tomorrow.
I live in San Carlos, and work in Belmont.

I can meet you at a place of your choosing.

Thanks much,

I had a pleasant conversation warning him about spock posts and i followed them up with this email:

On 4/26/07, Michael Takamoto wrote:
Dave,

Was a pleasure talking to you.
I understand that you are an advisor to Spock, and they are not obligated to take your advice or for that matter, mine.
However, they clearly value your advice, otherwise you would not be an advisor.

I would like you to make the request from me advising them to:

1. Put an apology on their HOME page for 1 month, there is none to be found on the current spock.com site. I think the one written by Spock's marketing person was well done, and if it came from the CEO of Spock, even better.

2. That Spock make a significant contribution to the Anita Borg Institute. http://www.anitaborg.org

There are many options available: http://www.anitaborg.org/getinvolved/donate/total-investment.php

This is a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
I have no affiliation to this group, other than that I respect what they do.

They would be in good company along with HP, Cisco, Sun, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Juniper. (See their logos at the bottom of the page)

I think this would go a long way towards repairing some of the damage done by the demo, and help lend credibility to the perception that Spock, in addition to having cool technology, is a responsible corporate citizen and doing the right thing. By contributing, they are putting their money where their mouths are.

I think putting a good spin with a positive well crafted press release with a quote from someone at the foundation could gain some good PR for Spock. I understand that they already have done some sponsorships with this group, and I just encouraging them to do more. I feel very strongly about this, and want Spock to be regarded as one of the best companies in the Valley to work for and a firm supporter of women in technology.

If you think it would be helpful, I would be open to meeting with Spock's management team.

Thanks again for taking the time.

Michael Takamoto

————————
I followed up again:
———————-

On 4/27/07, Michael Takamoto < takamoto@inreach.com> wrote:
Dave,

I see that Jaideep has modified his myspace account and Jay has deleted his.

Any word on the actions below? I would really like to see Spock take action.

I'd appreciate an update.

Thank much.

-Michael Takamoto

————-
To which Dave said he'd have the principals, Jay and Jaideep contact me.

Naively, I hoped they would do the right thing, but they quickly changed their myspace pages, ignored me then did nothing else.
No apology, no donation, not even an email to me.

So, what's the big fuss about:

First Jay:

Nothing too much to note, except note the clubs: "Make Out Club" , well, sounds a bit immature but perhaps innocent enough, but then I checked it out.
A racy picture of two women kissing in their underwear is displayed. Forum topics I saw: Rawk out with cawk out!
Would You Do Me?

Not exactly wholesome, but for someone who is developing a people search engine, Jay should have known better.

Jay then took down his myspace page.

Jaideep:

Jaidep's profile is even more interesting.

He writes the he works hard and plays hard. "Besides work, I can always be found at a bar with friends or getting down on the dance floor with hotties like Leena."
He belongs the the group: No Strings Attached (Sex). That pretty much sums up what this group is about. You have to be 18 or older to see it.
It also show that he's single, and that he does not want kids.

Today, his profile is changed. I hope he married Leena, because he now no longer hangs out at bars, and is suddenly married.

To sum up. The women who accused them of misogyny had good reason.

It puts the name of my favorite Star Trek character to shame, and so much for Vulcan IDIC.
Spock.com should know better and so should their investors and customers.

Feels like the Congressman who said "There are Klingons in the White House!" So what's the verdict, waggers?

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