All Star Trek Episodes from Every Series to Stream on Netflix | Hacker News Reader

All Star Trek Episodes from Every Series to Stream on Netflix

tekgoblin.com

181 pointsmhb73 comments

When I was growing up my father had dubbed copies of Star Trek: The Original Series. I watched every fuzzy episode dozens of times. Eventually enjoying TNG/DS9/Voyager/Enterprise as well. One of biggest hopes in life was to own every single episode of each Star Trek series on VHS so I could enjoy them at will. The boxed VHS sets were always way too expensive for me then.

It's strange to think back because now I have all of them sitting on a tiny little corner of a 1TB drive.

I still often watch them to this day while I program. I'll go through a dozen episodes (playing on a second monitor) in a day.

Kids growing up today have it so damn good.

It of course remains to be seen whether it's actually good.

Perhaps I'm looking at things through rose-colored glasses, but things like having to look in the dictionary to learn about things and words (and I wanted to learn about a LOT of words), hunting snails for nickels, working as a stableboy... it's usually said these days with a mocking tone, but I have become at least a bit of a believer in the old, "it builds character".

> things like having to look in the dictionary to learn about things and words

Do you think that using a print dictionary builds character better than using Onelook.com?

19,089,129 words in 1062 dictionaries indexed: http://www.onelook.com/?d=all_gen

The dictionary offered two things:

1) I'd find lots of other cool words as I searched for the one I wanted

2) I had to work to get the answer. Sure, it wasn't a LOT of work, but I had to invest something to get something. Searching a word online requires practically no investment.

Which is not to say I don't use online dictionaries, Wikipedia, Google "define:", etc.

1) Accidental discovery is a major virtue of the internet.

2) But you didn't have to walk fifteen miles to a small library to do it. The generation you grew up in had a major barrier to entry removed, but the effort and time was shifted elsewhere. The same thing is happening to this generation.

Perhaps sliverstorm was talking about availability of information. Growing up in the 1970's, there was only the public library, 2 TV channels, and 2 daily newspapers. In the eighties, there was the university library, which had a lot more but the best books were always borrowed, and desk copies only. And only so many bought books were within budget.

Recently, I spent a couple months at my Mum's country house without a car or internet at home, bringing only a stack of newly bought nonfiction books with me. The only entertainment was the intro cable TV package, excluding the movies and sports. I got more out of those books than I had since before the internet and wikipedia etc became widespread. It brought back memories of earlier times, when there was LESS knowledge at my fingertips than I knew what to do with, instead of FAR MORE knowledge.

Definitely reading any book is in a way like meditation, you get more out of it than googling some facts on some random website.

I had an interesting debate with some friends after sharing this Tom Waits quote: "This is what's wrong with the world. Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now."

Via http://www.bnox.be/2009/11/tom-waits-and-deficit-of-wonder.h...

I tend to agree that there can be some value in the gap between wondering about something and actually finding out (or never finding out). Letting your mind chew on a question means you have an opportunity to imagine your own answer or your own story. When you tighten that gap those creative mental wonderings get clipped short.

I don't think he is saying a world where you can never look things up in 5 seconds is preferrable, but noting the effect this has on the underappreciated benefits of wonder.

Ahh yes, but wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure unavailable in times past.

Not when that thing nobody knows is how to compile that damn library in your specific environment :(

But when I finally figure it out, I get the elation of knowing a tiny thing that no one else knows... and then going and posting it on stackoverflow.

>wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure

What is not rare is finding out that nobody else knows only after wading through 100s of web pages by people who think they know but do not.

>wondering something, running to the computer and finding out that its very likely that nobody else knows either is a rare pleasure

What is not rare (sadly) is finding out that nobody else knows only after wading through 100s of web pages by people who think they know but do not.

I'm not sure I quite agree. Any time I read anything about space, black holes, relativity etc. (which is way outside my field, I'm a programmer) I get that same sense of wonder. It's not gone, it's just that we don't have to wonder about the little stuff anymore. :-)

I prefer Eliezer Yudkowsky's take on it,

Ignorance should not be celebrated in the first place; I've made this point before. It is a corruption of curiosity to prefer the question to its answer. Yet people seem to get a tremendous emotional kick out of not knowing something. Worse, they think that the mysteriousness of a mysterious phenomena indicates a special quality of the phenomenon itself, inferring that it is surely different-in-kind from phenomena labeled "understood". If we are ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about our state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kj/no_one_knows_what_science_doesnt_...

Eliezer is commenting on the perpetual state of ignorance, not initial ignorance followed by pursuit and locating of an answer.

The paragraph I quoted was more about valuing wonder for its own sake - I thought he had an essay explicitly about that, but none of the ones I found seemed to hit that note as well as that paragraph.

When I was growing up, a friend of mine actually had to pay a guy in the US to tape all the episodes and mail over the VHS tapes to us in Europe. (German TV showed the shows years later, cut out a couple of minutes to fit their schedule, dubbed over with mediocre voice actors and randomly ordered and dropped episodes without any recognizable pattern.)

We've beaten geo-blocking and regional licensing over 15 years ago and it's getting easier by the minute. Truly great times we live in.

Oh God, the German dubs (and the Hungarian ones for that matter) are truly atrocious.

Totally did that. My friend in the US would fill an 8 hour tape, disassemble the tape and send just the one tape spool to me in Germany. I'd reassemble the tape, load it into the precious NTSC player and Trek my brains out.

YESYESYESYESYES

Sorry, but Picard influenced me as much an any person in my life. This makes me so happy.

One could pick a worse role model than Picard.

Best of all, any negative traits he might have (besides a self-professed awkwardness around children) seem to stem from being too idealistic, which are very hard to replicate when based only on a role model. Stringent ideals typically require some deeper conviction.

Fictional characters make for really good role models purely because they they embody an ideal that is largely unobtainable, which is easy when the hero always needs to win by the end of the episode. That being said, any decent critique of TNG in relation to Picard would have to admit that Picard is both overly idealistic and pragmatic to a fault. But the medium is its own worst critic: there are numerous episodes where Picard skirting what are essentially his own ideals is challenged.

WWPD?

Picard is both overly idealistic and pragmatic to a fault

Yeah, that was half my point. I probably phrased it poorly, but what I mean is if we accept his faults are idealism and pragmatism, we can then suggest his faults will not transfer. It's really hard to be that pragmatic IRL!

WWQD?

Words to live by.

It would be interesting to do a poll in relation to favorite star-trek character (TNG) and then cross-reference that to respondent’s job/career.

I bet there is a strong correlation between Data (the character) and a programmer.

What do you think the correlation to Riker, Picard, Worf would be?

I bet there is a strong correlation between Data (the character) and a programmer.

seems a tad cliched, don't you think? i'd bet that most people wouldn't want to self-associate with an emotionless android

Emotionless? This proves that you're not a Data fan. He had tons of emotion.

Data is too logical. I always prefer Geordi because he just figured shit out and made it work.

Data didn't really do much, he was just there as a foil to other characters. He was basically Scooby Doo (Wesley was Scrappy).

Contrast to TOS where Spock was a fully developed character and an equal participant in the Kirk-McCoy-Spock trinity.

I disagree. The majority of the really good, well written episodes are about either Picard or Data. Picard and Data stories seriously advanced the plot of the TNG series, and had a greater influence on later episodes.

Although, I do really like your comparison to Scooby Doo and Scrappy.

I liked all the various configurations of Trek; some more than others.

It's interesting to see in this thread the split between TOS trekkers and a STTNG trekkers. I was always more of a TOS person myself: I think the creative tension that the networks put on Gene by making him "dumb it down" actually made for better, sharper analysis of the sci-fi involved. TNG seemed to meander a bit. But that's me.

What I find interesting about looking at the shows from decades later is the way the topics were addressed. Things like the episode where Daystom's M-9 computer took over the Enterprise and basically was a smart machine with a weapon -- we seemed to have come down on the side of that being okay, at least for now. But back then there were a lot of very important questions raised -- questions that are still valid. Or the Darmok episode, where the culture spoke only in metaphor. That still twists my noodle because that's all any culture really does -- speak in various metaphors. When you're asking a bunch of users from a certain societal niche to tell you what they want, not only is their jargon going to be unique, but the way they compare things and discuss things are too. (Insert Wittgenstein discussion).

Taking a short dramatic format and making a bunch of pimply-faced teenagers start thinking about what's important in their lives is an awesomely good thing. Let's hope Trek keeps doing that for years to come.

I always thought TOS fans are usually called "trekkies" and TNG "trekkers"

Oh dear gosh I hope my wife doesn't know I know that.

Trek has always had two important elements which explain its continued popularity.

On the one hand there are rich, deep characters that we come to care about, become interested in, and become invested in. Just about every character in TOS fits this mold. They are all iconic in various ways. Later series did nearly as well, the characters in TNG and DS9 are also largely iconic, Voyager and Enterprise somewhat less so with a few exceptions. This creates the opportunity for rich story telling and character development and also greatly facilitates people becoming attached to the characters and the show. The last season of DS9 is an excellent example of this phenomenon with long running story arcs rich in development of multiple characters.

This in turn facilitates the flip side of Star Trek. A cast of characters that viewers are heavily invested in and a setting that viewers are intimately familiar with creates the opportunity to put on one-off stories that are more engaging than they would be otherwise. In this way most Star Trek shows become a kind of science fiction anthology. So the show can explore various standalone stories within a familiar context, elevating the emotional investment in the story.

This combination elevates Star Trek to an amazing level and many other SciFi shows have adopted a similar format to attempt to recreate Star Trek's success. Many of people's most memorable and favorite episodes of various Star Trek shows are one-episode short stories founded on their own unique premises (Inner Light, City on the Edge of Forever, Hard Time) rather than stemming from pre-existing story elements or being part of a multi-episode story arc.

How far will anyone make it through watching them, before they all start showing "Available until a date two weeks from now", like 20% of my queue almost always does?

They will be streamable for at least two years, under the deal.

Star Trek was my favourite television show back in grade school. Never got to see them all as a kid, because TV was limited to a few (crappy) channels where I grew up, but I really loved it. To this day, an episode of ST can side track me fairly easily. So I was pretty pleased by this headline.

Unfortunately, it turns out this release is only for the U.S. Seriously, wtf Netflix? You don't need to translate the episodes into Canadian, just let me watch the damn things.

It's indeed too bad. I'm from Europe and I don't think such a service will be available here in the forseeable future.

Due to sticky politics it's impossible to have a proper global video streaming service. Sad, really.

It is certainly possible - you just have to ignore copyright.

At some point we are going to have to realize that we have enough movies, books, etc that we can't read/watch all of those which interests us and just kill copyright.

It is already half happened because most people flatly ignore it and the amount of draconian enforcement necessary to uphold it is too large for people to accept.

Ignoring copyright is what I'm doing right now. Downloading movies/series is not illegal in the country where I live.

But I would like to pay for streaming sci-fi series online, to support them and make sure they are continued being produced. It's sad that the laws that are meant to protect copyright status are preventing me from doing that.

You could probably find some poor US based star trek fan that is pirating their content and pay for a netflix streaming account for them. I know it sounds a bit odd, but you could kind of look at it like buying carbon credits.

Which would acquiesce the moral issues, but not the legal ones. Sorta like papal pardons <g>.

Don't know of a better idea though if the content isn't reasonably available in your area.

Downloading movies/series is not illegal in the country where I live.

Is that country not yet part of the WTO by any chance?

Making a copy for private use is legal in the Netherlands, regardless of the source. That includes downloading movies and tv-shows. Distributing (uploading) however is illegal.

I expect there are other european countries with similar laws.

IANAL, but I don't see how that kind of law can pass the three step test of the TRIPs treaty. Copying movies for personal use clearly conflicts with "a normal exploitation of the work".

Then again getting EU countries to stop subsidizing their farmers will probably take decades, so this sort of violation is probably pretty far down the list. I'm not saying I agree with the current IP, but it's highly doubtful that acts violating international treaties are "legal" in the strictest sense.

Neither of my comments were profane or misleading, the first was an honest question and the second one supplied a reasoned point that was likely informative for at least some who read it.

Both are downmodded to zero. Is this some sort of knee-jerk nationalist response or was there something wrong in either my question or my analysis?

You can what I do, I use a ssh tunnel to a server that I have in the us to watch them... Netflix does geoip but doesn't check the country of the credit cards paying the subscriptions...

I live in Canada

/facepalm

Germany - same here.

Same (Japan). I wonder how much this sort of nonsense (i.e. region-specific releases) increases piracy in the places that don't benefit. It's not like it's any harder to hop on a torrent in one place than anywhere else, and seeing one region get the release while you're left out in the cold pretty much ruins any moral objection you may have had to just grabbing it.

Anyway, I hope it's a lot (the increase in piracy, I mean).

It is not just this, each time they do something stupid a few people learn how to download and hide their tracks and it is not like they are going to go and buy it if it later becomes available legally.

Heck, in Denmark you can't buy a single video on iTunes, not even old out of date stuff or even public domain videos.

I wonder how many people learned to pirate based on that? At the very least they are loosing revenue (especially since this stuff isn't something people will actually find in a normal store) most likely they are training future pirates.

I go to Australia fairly often and know quite a few people who live between the US and AU. Finally frustrated beyond the breaking point by iTunes and Netflix goe-location nonsense, I got one of these small servers(1).

I loaded openvpn(2) server on it and put tunnelblick(3) on all our macs (and a few openwrt type devices)

Cost of a tiny dedicated Atom server payable with paypal: $39/month. Having an IP address that that says I'm in New Jersey wherever in the world I happen to be: priceless.

1. http://www.interserver.net/custom-managed-dedicated-servers....

2. http://openvpn.net/

3. http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/

For what it's worth, you're paying too much; if you don't need much CPU or RAM, just a network connection, you'd be fine with a cheap VPS or EC2.

I also live in Canada --- and would love to re-watch TNG.

The best-looking option right now (that doesn't entail copyright infringement) is Zip.ca, which has a bigger selection than Netflix Canada (at least for DVDs-by-mail), and has all the seasons of TNG on DVD. Zip.ca starts at $11/month.

http://www.zip.ca/DVD/Browse.aspx/1/s/Next$20Generation

When Netflix first came out, I used the 3-at-time plan to watch every single episode of Star Trek available on DVD. I think I watched 4 a day for a very long time. Nice to see I can repeat the process now without even having to go to the mailbox =)

This is the perfect Hacker News article. I learned something new and mathematically-interesting about the world, the author came up with a niche development to get us excited, and we learn how to apply that to improve our own lives.

How far we've come:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014567

[dead] Hackers News with Vuvuzelas (vuvuzela-time.co.uk)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419815

Wake me up when Netflix moves outside the US.

(To add to that list: Pandora, Hulu, Spotify. Atleast last.fm is available as a paid subscription option.)

Spotify and last.fm are both European

And spotify only works in 7 EU countries, due to copyright laws.

Not really due to copyright laws more down to licensing rights, historically licensing rights have been sold on a per-country basis.

If it makes you feel better the record companies hate it too, I know the popular fad is to blame the music industry, but there's so much legal red tape over contracts it's actually very hard for them to innovate.

> Not really due to copyright laws more down to licensing rights

Without the copyright laws, there would be no need to obtain licensing rights.

> I know the popular fad is to blame the music industry, but there's so much legal red tape over contracts it's actually very hard for them to innovate.

The whole copyright-based legal infrastructure needs to be torn down and new ways to pay artists need to arise which don't rely on freedom- and innovation- resricting laws.

The Spotify situation is very interesting given the open internal market for services in the EU.

What, no ST:TAS?

They can be watched here: http://www.startrek.com/videos/star-trek-the-animated-series...

What a find!

Unfortunately I'm not in the correct geographic region to enjoy this.

All I can say is http://i.imgur.com/eCOz1.jpg

You can also hit http://www.allstepisodes.com/

Not sure of the legality though.

EDIT: seems to be more ad laden than I remember.

full of annoying ads, unsynced audio, constant buffering, low resolution. it's a very poor viewing experience, and it's copyright infringement.

Agreed on the ads, which are thankfully only on the website and not during playback. I don't have any issue with unsynced audio or buffering. The TNG episodes only appear crappy if you full screen it, but NTSC resolution is crappy anyway. The Enterprise episodes are terrible quality because those were all filmed in HD, so of course. It's no worse than watching just about any random copyrighted infringed video on Youtube.

It's the modern equivalent of staunch's dad's dubbed copies.

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