@bioball: I've not read those. I have read Cryptonomicon, which doesn't really have any futuristic stuff (and some of it is set in WWII), but it is written by an SF author and it has the focus that I associate with SF. It's interested in technology, and it doesn't have to be futuristic technology.

Worthy of note is a failed attempt in the Dr Who story, The Green Death. The company is run by a computer called BOSS. At one point, the Doctor confronts it with a paradox. This doesn't destroy it, but it does confuse it long enough for him to escape.

@jmd1513: For me the original Saw was marred by the first and last few minutes. Basically, the twist didn't work for me. The second film was more pedestrian but at least the twist made sense. The third film is perhaps the strongest of them all, because of its emotional journeys. The fourth I liked too. I should say I…

@Felipe058: It can be. Much of it is "monster of the week". It starts to pick up around ep11 when a pattern starts to emerge in the background, and that series ends on a high. The second series, in my opinion, was a bit worse, with many of the themes which seemed important in the first series getting dropped. The…

@swampthing: Other people have mentioned Saw, which is similar - lots of flashbacks to other locations.

I'm surprised Phone Booth wasn't here. Not only set almost entirely in a single location, but that location is a tiny phone booth. It's also largely shot in real time. Not SF, but very interesting cinematically for this compression of space and time. It is a "killer film", directed by Joel Schumacher.

@Nivenus: What's interesting is that the Antarctic pregnancy rate seems way to high to ascribe to contraceptive failure.

@Zalethon: It's a social thing. We model other people as having free will (because they are too complex to model as purely deterministic or random). When we realise they are doing the same, and modelling ourselves as having free will, we turn the model we were using on them onto ourselves, and so model ourselves as…

@Malcontent79: People still vary. Some make good decisions and some make bad ones. We still need a system of rewards and punishments to encourage people towards the good decisions. There is still suffering, and still morality. We just understand it a bit better now.

@izikavazo: The Prisoner or BSG?

@Grglstr: One of the most interesting snippits: "For example, on Australian stations in the Antarctic seven pregnancies were recorded between 1989 and 2006 (Ayton 2006), although "no one wants to become pregnant down there, no one wishes a baby to be born down there" (Bowden 1999). The general belief is that pregnancy…

@Sheryl Nantus: One of the things I liked about the first series was the way the death of Olivia's boyfriend lingered.

"And as Astrid says, it was all because he cared about Olivia, the real Olivia." - Although, unfortunately, he started off by talking about how she smiled more. It seemed to me fell in love with the new, happy, smiley Olivia, and not the old, reserved Olivia that he'd known for years without ever making a move. (Add…

@John_Hazard: Obligatory XKCD link: [xkcd.com]

@Laconic: Posting weird under my name isn't a big problem. If they post boring or stupid or rude, I could lose my star.

I dimly remember a scene from Brave New World, in which babies are factory-farmed and women are employed to hug them on a rota. The women were sincere: the babies needed love and they gave it to them.

So they downloaded a list of 1,247,897 encrypted passwords, and then cracked 273,789 of them. If my password wasn't cracked, does that mean it was stronger than any of the first 273,789, or have they just not got around to trying it yet?

@aquaclear: In science, theories are rarely provable. The goal is to find theories that can be potentially disproved. They need to make predictions that can be tested.

@Dr Emilio Lizardo: We do seem to get a lot of comments along the lines of "that cool thing you mentioned reminds me of this other cool thing I saw a while ago."

@jblues: It's been 6 months since the zombie outbreak, not 2 or 3 days. I don't think they were waiting for our hero to show up as they'd already written him off as dead. But really, my point is that there was no discussion at all; they just upped and left with no counter-proposals, no planning, not even basic repairs…