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**** Except that, as mentioned, Starfleet is to a large extent a meritocracy, and ''doesn't'' give you promotions just for time served. It is most definitely ''not'' the US military, so saying Thomas should have gotten a promotion according to US Military rules is sort of like saying that the US Military should have to obey ancient Lakota warrior social guidelines.
**** That implies that the US military is ''not'' a meritocracy, which is absurd. Also, the US military does not give promotions merely for time served either... ''except'' for personnel who are imprisoned or missing in action, because they are still serving but conditions render it impossible to evaluate exactly how well they are serving and write an efficienty report on them, which would normally make convening a promotion board for them impossible. Since the only two alternatives in this situation are thus 'automatic fail' or 'automatic pass', such personnel are given a benefit of the doubt because Jesus wept, the guy's already been stuck in a POW camp for years and the last thing he needs is ''more'' getting shit upon.
***** And again, what the US military does means fuckall to Starfleet. Period.
 
== Practicing starship combat? When was the last time ''we'' fought anyone? ==
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*** As Tasha discovered.
** Pulaski, is that you?
* Information theory estimates that it would take approximately 10^90 years to brute-force all the possible combinations and permutations in chess using modern computing technology. Even assuming that Data's brain is a ''quadrillion'' times more powerful a computer than the 21st century's best (and while he's obviously ahead of current computers by many orders of magnitude, putting him a full 15 orders ahead of contemporary is still a generous estimate), that still leaves us with one thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion (10^75) years' worth of number-crunching to completely solve chess. As a comparision, the estimated remaining lifespan of the universe is somewhere around 30 billion years. Short version: Data might be a science-fiction supercomputer, but being 100% unbeatable in chess is a job that even sci-fi supercomputers don't have the size for, unless you bring in something ridiculous like Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Troi's win is still ''extremely unlikely'', in that she's taking on somebody with at least grandmaster skill in chess while she herself is not a ranked player that anyone knows of, but its still mathematically ''possible''.
* It was also likely intended as a callback to Kirk beating Spock in chess despite Spock's far superior logic, memory, and computational ability, because Kirk had intuition. The problem is Kirk was famed for his own brilliance (and luck), and Spock was not actually an android, so it's not as much of a stretch there as here.
* In conclusion: its still one hell of a long shot, but at least its not violating the laws of thermodynamics or anything.
 
== Here's a conundrum for you ==
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