Lots of vaccines are government mandated. If they weren't, how many people would get them? If enough parents decided that, because their children weren't required to get the vaccines to attend school, they weren't going to get their kids vaccinated for, say, measles, we would lose herd immunity. And literally millions…

Seriously every one of them has had a big influence on my life, from Bill piquing my interest in science at a young age, to Neil to whom I feel like Carl Sagan's torch has been passed, to Pam whose Astronomy Cast I've been subscribed to and Phil whose blog I've been reading for I don't even know how many years, and…

One bone to pick:

I don't disagree with you, but I want to point out that just being an io9 reader means you probably know a lot more about this stuff than a 'regular person'.

I love the shit out of every one of these people.

walker herd #corrections

Correction: iPhone ringtones can actually be up to 40 seconds long, not 30.

Yep, same here.

Ooh, I did really love that score. Probably would have made it into my top four, but my last choice is Up instead. If io9 had linked only the music and not the whole scene it might have been different, but damn, I tear up every time I see that.

I'll tolerate scenes with the whiny son because scenes with the whiny son also tend to have Alison Miller's character in them, and that's... well, that's just alright.

Maybe he's being inspired by aliens, or something? I'm hopeful there's a cool sci-fi mystery in there. As if dinosaurs plus the badassness of Stephen Lang plus the hawtness of Allison Miller wasn't enough.

I really liked the pilot of Outcasts. Unfortunately I felt it squandered pretty much everything it had going for it by the third episode.

I've both read the book and seen the movie, and I agree with Nivenus. He's exactly right when he says a major theme of the book was how meaningful and worthwhile military service is. The movie was far from a recruitment commercial; it was a satire of a book that the director obviously saw as a recruitment commercial.…

He was only in one or two scenes, and I don't remember if his name was actually Mick, but there was the kid who gave Ender 'advice' and stole his dessert.

Outcasts had a better pilot, but I'm reasonably hopeful this show will not become as bad as Outcasts did immediately thereafter.

This is true.

Just so long as he stays far away from the role of Emilio Sandoz in The Sparrow. I'm fine with him producing it, and maybe playing one of the smaller roles (he could be good as John Candotti), but I just do not see him pulling off the role of a physically-and-emotionally-devastated Taíno genius linguist-cum-Jesuit…

I'm not really sure whether it's worth it.. it definitely is disturbing and foreboding on a deep level, but at some point all the craziness just becomes a little too much.

I actually disagree about the character development. Sure, there's Sam, and the show can't seem to remember who the hell he is from one episode to the next. Same goes for Sookie to a lesser extent. And of course the Eric mindwipe. But Jessica breaking up with Hoyt and Hoyt's subsequent breakdown felt real, and so did…

I'm glad to see Virtuality getting some recognition; that pilot was fantastic and I'm still bummed that we'll never get to see more of it. Other pilots that would have been fantastic films by themselves: