IIRC, in World in Conflict it's not the Soviets who destroy the Statue, the Americans carpet bomb the island if you fail the mission to prevent the Soviets gaining a beachhead.

First time I got inspired by one of these enough to write on it.

"Look-look! A car!" Helen shouted out. "You guys, come look!" The other children bounced up from the carpet where they were watching Nina open her presents - a friendship holobracelet from Astor; certificate for ballet lessons from Helen; pet Unkillable Grook from her mom - to see the jet-black government car fall…

It's certainly possible, even likely, that the increasingly sophisticated needs of software controlling space missions will be one of the driving forces of AI research. I don't dispute that. But the first sentient machine will emphatically not be one built for a Mars rover.

Sorry, but this whole premise is fundamentally flawed. The computer hardware in space missions has always been and will likely continue to be, at best, 3-5 years out of date by the time it's launched. There are several reasons for this: the designs have to be basically finalized several years before launch, and older,…

Oof, Verizon DSL in Florence, MA (small village within the city of Northampton) had the same issue, they laid fiber right down the main street, but our DSL connection (to a house just off said street) advertised at 768Kbps rarely got that, and dropped service constantly. Fortunately, a few years later 8Mbps Comcast…

Haha! That's one of the main reasons I've wanted to upgrade my aging Core 2 Quad Q6600 Windows machine; exporting to Blu-Ray takes close to a day.

I think this was a MUCH stronger opening than last season. Both of these episodes easily could have been in the original run. Hopefully this implies the rest of the season will be less uneven than the last two.

She was born female, in all respects but some weird internal biology. What right do you have to say she's not a woman?

Except it's likely that Caster Semenya, and some other female athletes, was XY. I'm not talking about transgender people who have undergone a medical transition; there are actually women born to all external appearance physically female who have XY chromosomes. The opposite case, men born physically male with XX, also…

My guess is that it's much easier to guarantee a sufficiently soft landing with the crane system. The crane can lower the rover down slowly whole hovering, while if the rover was on top of a rocket a slight error could cause it to land with too much force.

This is missing Alastair Reynolds' Blue Remembered Earth dropping June 5. Also no mention of the last two episodes of the season for Legend of Korra, airing tomorrow and a week after.

I don't know about the individual episodes chosen, but most of these shows in general 'changed TV'. Without Lost and 2000s BSG we would probably not have Game of Thrones. Without Blake's 7 we probably would not have the Stargates, 2000s BSG, or Firefly. Without The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek we…

Same, I remember a lot of these gruesome versions and also grew up in New England (Massachusetts). Probably a lot of this stuff left over from the Puritan days when parents wanted to really terrify their kids.

The other half of that writing team is Ty Franck, George RR Martin's assistant.

That comes out in June, actually. Along with almost every other book I'm looking forward to this year: new David Brin, Alastair Reynolds, and of course Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF anthology.

A few people are complaining that the show has too much 'gratuitous sex' in it, but most are complaining that the show has too many sex scenes that serve little purpose as scenes.

Indubitably. There also needs to be a boatload of Ayreon albums in this list.

Whedon's arc of Runaways wasn't great, true, but anything he'd do with YTLM would be far better than what most alternatives would do to it. I just want Shia Labeouf and DJ Caruso to stay far, far away. Right now I like Jake Gyllenhaal for Yorick, and of course Gina Torres for 355.

If Avengers is really better than The Dark Knight... then wow, it will be a really frakking good movie.