It's not really the same. Firefly's system has lots of planets and moons, but presumably there aren't planets sharing an orbit, as the two Earths are here. You could easily have planets with orbits spaced only a few million miles apart without issue, and if some of those planets are giants, they could each have dozens…

"Though I don't know how far across space those signals can travel and still be very strong. "

Ooh, Spin is one of my favorite books ever. The sequel wasn't quite on the same level, though.

I'd really like to see Mary Doria Ruseell's The Sparrow made into a film. Brad Pitt's company is supposedly going to produce it, but I really don't see him in any of the roles. Maybe John Candotti. Ideal director: Alfonso Cuaron.

Oooh, yes.

I wouldn't mind seeing Desolation Road in the hands of someone like Danny Boyle. Or perhaps Cary Fukunaga. You'd have to cut a lot, though, and probably rework it a bit to get a single narrative that could fit in a feature-length. I think the characters and world are more important than the plot, anyway.

Cool episode, but bah, you can't start a civilization with what, 150 people... to avoid massive inbreeding (leading to extinction a few generations hence) you need a seed population of 2000 or so.

"A few other odd little scenes feel out of place, too — like the conversation between Ned Stark and Jaime about tournaments, in which they engage in a random bit of dick-measuring that feels weirdly un-Ned-like."

I enjoyed the third, once it got past the opening half-hour of setup, but the second was terrible. Still some great one-liners, but sucked as a whole.

I do understand that Doctor Who would, at the moment (and probably even after Game of Thrones has run its course), have many more fans than GoT, being an extremely long-running show and a fixture of British pop culture, but it's exactly because it is so long-running that I figured yet another season would be generally…

If you hated BSG then yeah, you probably won't like GoT.

Jailbreaks of updates tend to roll out faster than Android upgrades to a lot of phones, depending on how new the phone is and whether it has a manufacturer UI skin over it (like Sense). You can pretty much rely on getting a jailbreak for iOS updates within a month or two of release, whereas some Android phones will…

That's not correct; other apps update their badges without the app running in the background. It's done with push notifications, presumably this app pushes out temp updates every so often.

You have a point on the capacity, but what actual applications are there that take advantage of dual-core Android processors to do things iPhones just can't do?

Are those scenes from one of the movies? I was assuming they were made specifically for this. CG of that quality isn't that expensive anymore, I figured they got somebody like Zoic or Blur to do it. I'll bow to the superior Trek knowledge of others to tell me whether that's the case or not.

I don't know about your last paragraph. When I say they're far beyond us, I don't mean they evolved to be much more intelligent than us, which I think is unlikely. Rather, in a universe billions of years old, any intelligent civilization is likely to be millions of years older at least. If you buy the whole…

Those are some big chimps.

Yay for Dresden Codak :)

I think anyone sending interstellar messages would have to assume there won't be the possibility of follow-up messages for clarification- even if you're only twenty lightyears away, back-and-forth conversation becomes impractical. Any message would have to be self-contained.

I've heard that it's costing less than half what Rome did, and HBO realized their mistake with Rome when the DVD sales ended up paying for the show by themselves. They'll give this two seasons at the least, for the same reason Fox gave Dollhouse a second season after the backlash over cancelling Firefly, and also…