I found this quite scary. One of the petitioners in the case was sentenced to just over 3 years for receipt of child pornography. Essentially, for possessing verboten images. Fine. He knew it was illegal or should have known, so 3 years in prison for possessing images--not touching a child, just obtaining illicit images of a child--is arguably fair and just. But...now he's subject to civil commitment FOR LIFE, not for sexually abusing a child (life incarceration for that would be arguably fair and just), but for possessing images?

The possibility of life in prison not for harming a child, but for merely receiving images of such harm--and after a sentence limited to 3 years was justly imposed by a judge knowing the facts of the case, and served by the offender--does not seem at all fair and just. V for Vendetta was on BBC America last night, and as much as it pains me to make the comparison, I'm reminded of the secret hoards of illicit art and verboten books kept by V and by Stephen Fry's character--will possessing a copy of Nabokov's Lolita one day make you subject first to a short obscenity sentence and then an indefinite civil commitment because anyone who enjoys the book must be a potentially sexually dangerous person? Will there be secret collections of David Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Jock Sturges prints, because their owners have to fear being civilly committed if they're ever incarcerated for an unrelated crime? Exactly where will these lines in the sand be drawn, once the tides come in?

This is a dangerous precedent. And, there should be truth in sentencing, period--ten years in jail should be ten years in jail, not five in jail and five on parole, or ten in jail then indefinite civil confinement.

The *only* reason that people are saying that Trek is "dead" is that there isn't a spinoff in production to take over the franchise once Voyager is retired--this does *not* mean that there isn't life in the old girl yet. Here's why:
Despite the comments by many about how supposedly "bad" Voyager is, it is now an excellent show with good ratings. It used to be bad, though--it started out being totally unlike the rest of the Trek series, with very little Federation-related stuff going on; it was like Babylon 5 on crack. But the show was revamped a couple seasons into the run, the episodes now actually feel like Trek, and it is a great and worthy show now. Plus, Seven of Nine can assimilate me any time, a sentiment shared by almost everyone here...
Yes, The Next Generation is dead and should be put out to pasture. Yes, the original series produced a very very bad movie and now everyone in it is too ancient or too dead to make another that might salvage their reputation. Yes, a DS9 film is likely to go nowhere. But Voyager is now a testimony to what the franchise can do when they stick to hardcore Trek--it took a crappy series less interesting than my left testicle, and turned it into an *excellent* show.
All that's left is to find a compelling time and place for a new series--and the Trek universe is full of them--and to examine what made the early Voyager so bad and what made the rest of them so good to come up with the right kind of theme. Maybe they could even skip a century into the future from where current offerings lie, and evolve Trek in such a way as to interest everyone all over again: there was nothing like seeing the early TNG series and "filling in the blanks" to see how we got from NCC-1701 to NCC-1701-D (oops, was that supposed to be E? ;)
Look at the evolution of the series to see what I mean--in the 60s it was primarily a children's and young adults' show; it wasn't at all technical, and the reason they added baby-faced Chekov was that he looked the age of most of the audience. It was a show that was cancelled with extreme prejudice after just a couple seasons. Then it became a very embarrassing cartoon and comic book--you can't get much lower. Then the middle-aged crew came back in a film meant to appeal to those adults who grew up with the Trek universe, and it was a great comeback and the movies became serious sci-fi meant for grown-ups as well as kids. TNG brought it to a new TV generation who loved it, and a Golden Age finally hit--thirty years after the original series--with the original crew in films and two crews on TV. The early Voyager was the first sign that anything was wrong--but not much is wrong now. No, Insurrectuion wasn't a good film. So what. Thirty years from now, Trek will still be around--time has *proven* its resilience.