This is one of the reasons the polling numbers are so low - people think that atheism is absolute, while agnosticism leaves room for doubt, so they call themselves agnostics. Lots of disagreement on these terms, as we see in this thread.

Agnostics and just plain don’t cares are not included in this number. Agnostics double the number, and don’t cares quintuple it

And Rory in Centurian garb.

I don’t think anyone suggested keeping the Mukhabarat, or some of the generals, around at all. Bump a few colonels and jr. generals and there you go.

The Army did, and basically told the administration so. So they replaced a few generals and cast about until they found a yes-man in Tommy Franks, who Foreign Affairs magazine has listed as the worst general in American history as a result.

We kept the friggin’ Wehrmacht together after WWII because we knew we needed them, so freaking out about a few Baathists was a bit much. Just pure incompetence.

a lot of us don’t like being spoon fed, we’ve graduated to meatier films. This was just pandering. Easter eggs are fun, it’s a little much when it’s like 20 minutes of the movie, and for no reason plot wise.

All of the Culture novels can be sort of treated as stand alone.

Stop giving Texas ideas.

Agreed, and I’m assuming that most people that want to “live in space” are thinking of living on some sort of O’Neill Cylinder or torus or something, where you don’t have to deal with the whole body deterioration thing. Basically fun and games up in the hubs now and then, normal everyday living in the full grav areas.

The EU was ‘93, but it’s precursor before Maastricht was the European Economic Community, which promoted heavy economic integration at least in part to avoid war or conflict between member states. Economic integration makes war really hard.

Well, none of the other major powers went to war with each other, either. Yes, it has to be looked at in terms of the cold war of course, but things like the purposeful and amazing economic integration of the EU were specifically designed to prevent future conflict between European states.

For me, Tomorrowland at least looks a bit different and potentially interesting, so I think their trailers are ok. The issue with the Carter trailers was that they looked way too generic, like standard cheesy action flick without much content.

Young Jack Ryan is great; it’s refreshing to see a real expert and policy wonk operate and have greatness thrust upon him, while staying above all the BS. Older Jack Ryan becomes a transparent stand in for Clancy, a neo-con/pseudo-libertarian/Ayn Randian fan wank figure. The “Right” sort of man, and with all of his…

I can’t either, but my wife wanted it, and I wanted a dog, so it was a fair trade.

Pretty highly debatable, as there are also factors like population growth, more screens, etc. That’s not saying that the new movies haven’t done well, but to make a grand claim like them outgrossing all prior movies is just ridiculous. And the STITD numbers were in fact a bit south of what the studio had hoped.

Well, in this case the figures were pretty clearly wrong. Someone had to do it. It is true that the movie business is different these days, but not allowing for any inflation adjustment at all is just silly.

I really don’t see a whole lot of people here criticizing it for fanboy reasons, it’s mostly due to plot and character issues. I actually really liked it right up until the Khan reveal, where the plot fell apart. Not because it was Khan, but because the plot and motivations became really convoluted at that point, like…

I’m with you, was mostly script issues. The only issue I have with Abrams is that he doesn’t seem to really care about script at all, just powers right through problems and tries to gloss them over.