@8x10: Oh. It was pretty brilliant in Atlanta, even with the city light pollution, and it lasted for months.

@adamshaftoe: But octopus isn't a 2nd-declension noun, even though it looks like a Latin 2nd-declension noun. That's because it's a Latinization of a Greek 3rd-declension masculine noun, which became a 3rd-declension masculine Latin noun. In Latin the third-declension nominative singular doesn't have a defined form,…

@Annalee Newitz: Dunno which edition of Oxford's you have, but their website says octopi is wrong.

'Octopi' is not the plural of octopus: it comes from Greek, not Latin. Just use 'octopuses'.

@8x10: At least we all got to see Hale-Bopp, which was way cooler than Halley's is ever likely to be.

@GeorgeDW: Hopefully tech and/or medicine by then will allow me to still have good vision, or at least no worse than my current crappy-but-fixable-with-corrective-lenses vision (My prescription has a power of -5.75).

@fizzlefist: Same here, born eight months (and two days) after Halley's last appearance.

@jabber: Also there was the 'Welcome to _ Mining Station' sign, and the film's tag line. In fact I think all the written text in the trailer was English.

@jay13x: Also there's the whole issue that, with corn ethanol at least, it takes more energy to harvest, transport, and produce it (much of that energy generated by *burning oil and gasoline*) than you will actually get out of it. Currently, ethanol production uses more than a gallon of oil for each gallon of ethanol…

Seriously, I was JUST about to go to bed, and I come upon this page, with those screengrabs... I'mma have to stay up reading something comforting for a while now.

@zegota: Also, The Lost Boys is one of my favorite of his non-Ender books, but I really had to struggle through the bits with the author avatar protagonist's ranting against psychiatry and the straw-atheist psychiatrist who tries to convince the parents that their (Mormon) religious beliefs are responsible for their…

@twophrasebark: Lasers and radio are not mutually exclusive.

@Nivenus: IMO this could be taken as a pro-life polemical as easily as the other way round. That's the beauty of great allegorical scifi.

@corpore-metal: Bullshit. Either you've not thought the concept through at all, or you're a horrible, uncaring excuse for a person.

I liked it later in the season, but I couldn't stand the beginning. I still detest almost all of the teenage actors, especially Torresani, who I absolutely do not buy as the super-genuis teenager who single-handedly invented strong AI.

@DisturbingClown: Some do; Jupiter has a large, strong radiation belt which encompasses some (not sure which) of its moons. This would make sending a lander to, say, Europa difficult; Saturn, fortunately, doesn't have the same characteristic, which is why we were able to land Huygens on Titan.

Crawled through the archives, and I must say I am officially in love with this.

Because, of course, falling eight or so stories isn't fatal if you have the good fortune to land on a dirigible.

Wow, this is really, really good. Nice to know that io9's editorship can create excellent scifi as well as analyze it!

@transitnap: I've always wanted to tell that guy, "Really, Ian? So why don't we hear about mass breakouts from normal zoos, with much lower security, containing animals much smarter than velociraptors such as, y'know, chimps? Why doesn't modern life find a way?"