Hellburner by CJ Cherryh. Actually got there on recommendation from these boards. Love the characters and the world, though I wish the plot would kick in a little sooner. Plan to read either Use of Weapons or Abaddon's Gate next. Actually, I see a lot of Cherryh's influence on the James SA Corey books: the use of…

I want to punch you in the face.

I haven't read it, but now I will. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm kinda teasing around an idea about itinerant space miners who locate asteroids and then figure out oddball ways of landing, extracting large chunks of valuable rock, and then safely getting away with the rough equivalent of today's tech. They would live in a far more technologically advanced spacefaring universe,…

Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan. More of a lesbian chamber drama until the nutso final action scene. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intimate_…

Really blown away at how epic the Culture series is. Didn't get to it until the announcements of Mr. Banks' illness and death started rolling in. Non-stop action but also a lot of heady stuff.

Kinda sad. I grew up on Tolkien's books, but the racial and cultural implications of fixing Middle Earth so closely to real history are off-putting in their selectivity. There doesn't appear to be much racial or linguistic diversity within Middle Earth populations. As it is, the only brown people in the books or films…

He doesn't succeed. He fails, but keeps fighting the good fight.

This is a problem of capitalism. False choice. Faulty supply fulfilling false demand. Failure of imagination.

Traditionally, exhibitors take 50% of box office. For an A-list, star-driven movie exhibitors are often bargained down to 40% or less, but the point is the box office take is not pure profit for the studio. Foreign box office typically is much more profitable, as the studios can drive a harder bargain. B.O.…

Not a huge fan of states rights arguments. From a purely functional perspective, states are pretty darn big entities as well, and exhibit many of the same political stalemates and scandals. And why not "County Rights" or "Municipality Rights"? It's not really about local control at all, more about promoting right-wing…

This is a completely ahistorical argument. And I'm not sure that a pronoun switcheroo can ever truly "victimize" men in the sense of, you know, suffrage or reproductive rights and so on and so on.

I think that calling it "philosophical" is probably a bit overstated, but I get your point. I get the sense that if most Americans woke up tomorrow and there was a national health service, there wouldn't be rioting in the streets or anything.

All joking aside, and there have been some snide ones, I think the use of these detectors is proportional to political instability. Authorities want to seem like they are doing something, even if that something is totally fake, because they have no workable political alternatives.

I think a lot of the shows you mentioned were international co-productions in some form or another, and it seems like those types of productions are going a little more upscale in budget: Dracula on NBC that just got canceled was an international production. I think the rise of original cable programming along with…

I think a lot of the objections to GMOs are based more in business practices than the qualities of the crops themselves. The big corps are basically copyrighting anything and everything, marking up prices, and limiting what alternatives people can plant or buy because it messes with their business model. I think it's…

Is the flop itself the problem, or the fact that referees need to blow a whistle anytime someone flails their arms? A no-call is usually the thing to do. And players would think twice about flopping if they realized that all they were doing was laying on the floor while the offensive player has a clear path to dunk.

Pretty much sums it up.

Michael Bates won a bronze medal in the 200m at the 92 Olympics, then played football the following season, I think. He was All-Pro kick returner several times in the 90's. Don't think he ever went back to track once he started pro football, though.

Awesome one here.