@corpore-metal: Indeed. Although we have more than no data, I'd say, but certainly need more. I wish I had more conversations like this IRL - I'll be lucky if the New Year's Eve banter rises above the level of reality television and the weather.

@GM_Pax: Good points. I really like Footfall. Niven & Pournelle did an excellent job of creating a scenario in which we could plausibly win.

@corpore-metal: Yes, need more data! I fully support SETI - I run SETI@home on and off, and I wrote an article on it when it launched, mainly to encourage people to join up. My working hypothesis that we're alone is ripe for disproving! I definitely think it's worth looking for beacons, although I doubt we'll ever…

@corpore-metal: Well I don't think we're alone, technically... after all, I suspect the cosmos is infinite in extent.

@Dr. Grizzly:

@corpore-metal:

@frankenstoen: True. But the ending sets up the Roaring Rampage of Revenge in the morally ambiguous sequel, and whatever happens in the Unwritten Third Book....

@ijustwritebooks: You are not alone... the River Song character irritates me enormously. Do not want.

@frankenstoen: "And I'm still waiting for a movie or TV series that can come up with a good excuse for keeping the humans alive."

I concur: we wouldn't even know what killed us. They'd just hit the planet with a relativistic kill vehicle. That's not even a war: it's disease control, and we're the germs.

@Squirrelbot3000: I honestly can't remember if I saw Tron at the cinema, but I must have seen it at some point in the eighties. I saw it on TV a few months back but it didn't do that much for me.

Just seen it with a bunch of people.

@Atrum II: The DVD writers' commentary on Curse of the Black Pearl is really good. Well worth a listen if one is interested in such things.

@Belabras: Yeah, I liked 'em all. The first one is by far the best - it's got a much tighter script -but I enjoy the fantasy setting. It's fun.

It looks fun... I loved the first one. I enjoyed the sequels too, and they've grown on me with time.

@justvisiting: This was too my first thought.

@izikavazo: I really liked all 3, and don't quite understand the backlash.

Ohgodno?

I used the Peter Still HQ one. It's pretty cool, and it's much simpler than it looks on the page. You can compress all the required algorithms into a short sequence of steps you can write on an index card, so in the end there's not even that much to remember, and some of the algorithms are very similar. I think it was…

@Bigdamnhero: