The majority of "flaws" you point out are, I'm afraid, rather
inaccurate.

1) Doors that swing up. There's nobody just upstairs to be bothered
by this; the levels are very well isolated from one another. Also, they
don't go straight up, they're cantilevered, so they swing up and *sideways*
out of the way. Also, from a technical standpoint, this is a better way
of ensuring pressure door integrity. If there's a hull blown out, and
your doors move sideways or meet in the middle, you're going to lose air.
If the door drops down into place, and is held by inertia, no holes or
lines, it's *solid*. (It's a solid seal, which is why you can hear it
close.) It's got nothing to do with trying to not be like Trek; it's
finding what's most accurate and doing it.

2) No, we're not borrowing ST's ideas. You say their communicators
know automatically when you're talking to them. Ours don't. You have
to physically toggle them. Then, once you've done so, you say, "Sheridan
to Garibaldi." This verbally activates the system, and rings Garibaldi's
Link. He toggles his Link and says, "Garibaldi, go." No AI is ever
involved, really; it's a routing system. (And you'll note that Garibaldi
doesn't hear the "Sheridan to Garibaldi" part, only the stuff after it
beeps.) This is not only consistent with the rest of our tech, it's
actually close to being workable *today*.

3) Re: aliens knowing about Earth...remember please that you're
talking about AMBASSADORS here whose JOB it is to know all they can about
their host. So they study. They don't know all of it; Londo and Vir got
cats and ducks confused, and there's holes in their knowledge. That's
why they keep studying, as with G'Kar reading Earth writings. If I
am assigned as ambassador to Russia, I'd damned well better know as much
as I can about the culture, the people, their history, their language,
you name it. Same here. We have not yet to date shown non-ambassadors
with this level of interest or knowledge about Earth.

A lot of the "problems" you cite could simply be worked out by doing
a little thought on the reasons behind such things, rather than just
assuming that it's an error. About 90% of the criticism I see is
kneejerk response, which when you point out how it makes sense if you
just fire a few synapses, gets "Oh....yeah..." as a reply.

4) Zima was a gag. Zima be gone now.

jms

I would suggest that this whole discussion kinda misses the point, as
tends to happen. Sure, I could stick in lots of references to ancient
stuff...but why is it on Trek nothing of cultural value seems to have taken
place after Shakespeare? Doing antiquity is easy. Modern is harder.

But the whole POINT of the exercise goes to the heart of the show's
philosophy: I'm trying, rather desperately, to connect our present to our
future, to say that's US out there, building the future, recognizeably us.
We've lost the thread of continuity that ties us to the future. I'm trying
with this show to tie the two pieces of the string together again. We
have lots of ties to our ancient past (and I try to work those in as well,
cultural and literary references), but it's the *future* that we seem to
have lost touch with today, in our present. So I'm trying to knit those
together.

jms

How they know the person has finished talking is a) we either have
our characters physically toggle off their Link, or b) when you drop your
arm, it senses the change in gravity and orientation like a phone being
hung up, and closes the connectoin.

jms