Sorry, I didn't mean to direct my response to you.

Actually, last time I checked Card wasn't a conservative Republican- he's a conservative Democrat. The endemic racism he perceives in the GOP is enough to turn him away from the party despite otherwise sharing most of its ideals.

A star possibly older than the universe- this sounds like a job for the GSV Sleeper Service.

It's well out in front so far. I know it wasn't as big a hit as Cowboy Bebop or GITS, but I would have loved to see Wolf's Rain on the list; that show has my favorite soundtrack of pretty much anything ever. You said it, Yoko Kanno can do no wrong.

It seems like for Japanese shows they're only using dubbed versions of TV shows; note Robotech's and Star Blazers' presence on the list rather than Macross or Space Battleship Yamato (though in the latter case the theme music is the same, just with different lyrics).

I prefer to imagine an insane Captain Planet more like this.

Well the cast of thousands would be annoying enough, if it weren't for the fact that Weber has never been great at dialogue and is even worse at internal monologue, and now with such a large cast and so much more time proportionally spent with meetings and meetings about the meetings, you're forced to listen to…

I don't know which I'm more excited for, Snuff or Children of the Sky- they both come out on my birthday! Great way to turn 25.

I liked the Safehold series too... the first two books, and even in the second the problems that have plagued all his work over the last few years were already apparent.

Bah. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but while I will continue reading new Honorverse books simply because of the time I've already invested in the series, I cannot say the same for new Safehold books. Weber's recent work has been a mess.

'Live' for a certain definition of the word I guess... from Mars' current position relative to Earth, any broadcast would take 17 minutes to reach us.

I'm all the way up in Massachusetts, and my whole apartment building was swaying. I was on the phone with a friend at the time (he was only in the next town over) and he didn't feel it, so I went on the USGS website to see if there was anything about it. At the time there was only mention there of the quakes in…

Unfortunately, even according to the wikipedia article you linked, ramscoops appear not to be feasible except as a braking system. An Orion starship, on the other hand, we could build right now, given the political will, and the Starwisp concept will probably become workable with another decade or two to improve laser…

I was hoping that Bender's cigars would build to something great in the climax, like Fry's coffee addiction did in "300 Big Ones". That actually might have been the extra that would have turned this into a great episode.

SpaceX might be the way to go for launching stuff into orbit, and maybe even (eventually) planetary exploration, but I don't see even a company as far-sighted as they are (and SpaceX is pretty unusual in that regard) investing in something like the James Webb.

Homeworld.

Yes, the original article is careful to say that they're unsure of how far this can be generalized, though they do cite other research showing that even in zero-g environments humans still "impose a reference 'horizontal' on the environment."

io9's articles on stuff like this usually read pretty tongue-in-cheek to me, I don't think they're actually 'perpetuating' anything.

Where did you hear the direwolves and dragons would be puppets next season? One of the reasons Bluebolt, the VFX company for this season, stated for why they won't be doing the next season is that they can't handle doing lots of CGI direwolves in the time frame required. [www.westeros.org]

The walls and towers that remain when you see the pre-FX shots of Winterfell IIRC do belong to a real castle, they just used FX to make it a lot bigger.