I agree, it works fine for Star Wars III, and there is precedent in SW for the ships using anti-grav a lot for hovering. Not so much Star Trek though, as they warped in over by the moon. Then suddenly they just kind of happened to be over by earth when the plot required it, for no particular reason. If that was the…

That’s what I’ve heard as well - apparently there weren’t even very many mines left at all, and the naval force probably could have proceeded without much opposition if the initial losses hadn’t gotten the Brits and French bickering. The ground invasion probably should have never happened, though.

Yeah, it always blows my mind how many Voyager fans are out there, has to be an age thing or something; there was a big article on here a few months ago defending Voyager fandom I think. For me, it had terrible writing all around, and even the "good" episodes were not very well thought out, especially compared to the…

Yes, funny that he ended up sort of being in both movies!

Some of it is/was due to economies of scale as well. 10 units of a customized widget/wrench/toilet seat is necessarily going to cost far more per unit than 50k units sold in Home Depot, as the cost includes mold manufacture, design, testing, etc and it's not spread out over a lot of units. The gov can now buy things…

Pretty much, yeah. Very frustrating for us spaceship fans. Total bait and switch.

Some hanger or big building or something like that on Earth. It's all part of some conspiracy/secret project/secret breeding program. Shadowy organizations, plot twists, all that stuff that we've seen in 80 different shows since Lost.

I quit as soon as they blew the guy out of the airlock in the first ep, and [spoilers] it was revealed that they weren't really on a spaceship. So much for space opera, and welcome to crappy twisty plots. No thanks.

The guy brings up Star Wars as well, which is a very very basic example of settlement, tech, etc arising BEFORE the Empire took control. The Empire was only around for 30-40 or so years. Following a Galactic Republic that lasted 25,000 years.

In the Foundation books, travel is pretty cheap and universal, but it was well before the Empire formed, too, and points were made about stagnation in tech. We're basically dealing with a pretty full galaxy, with little settlement after the formation of the Empire.

I had Tyrannix, and it was pretty cool, though it eventually lost out to my growing Lego Blacktron collection. The thing that Lego had that none of the other construction toys I dabbled in had was sheer VOLUME and variety. There was just so much of it that it was easy to create endless combinations. This stuff was…

The canon in both is actually pretty clear - the Foundation series exists in the same universe as both the Robots series and the Galactic Empire series, both of which deal and hint at the colonization of space and later the formation of the 1st Galactic Empire around Trantor. As for Dune, even ignoring the crap…

There's a lot in the books too about tech stasis within the empire, and even it's gradual degradation (the loud trains for one I remember, that used to be quiet). Then later, the Foundation had much better tech development, with personal shields and such that were unheard of in Empire space.

My thoughts exactly - one of the major plot points of the Dune sequels was that Empire led essentially to cultural and technological stasis for millennia. They used very old tech, and newer tech was outright forbidden. This basically continued under Leto II, and at his death, with the harsh restrictions lifted,…

I've seen it like 5 or 6 times for some reason, each time all the way through. I especially like when they're all quiet so the enemy ships won't detect them when they're hiding.

Except it doesn't in the case of natural monopolies, like ISPs, where there is very little market and very little competition. Every industry is not the same.

Not really feasible - telecoms are what is called a 'natural monopoly', meaning that by their very nature and the nature of a business they often obtain monopoly or near-monopoly status by default. Essentially, the start up costs would be astronomical - think wiring all of those poles. Additionally, a given suburban…

There are probably a few Californians who are REALLY lucky that HIPAA privacy laws are a thing. If my 6 month year old got measles from some anti-vaxxer I'd be pretty damn pissed.

My favorite SkyMall experience is when I came across their "Home Security" two page spread. It included magnetic GPS tracking devices, iPhone hacking devices, a USB keylogger, and a bedside clock radio with a built in spycam. All for "home security". Aimed at businessmen who travel frequently...