'cuz the copycats mostly sucked and got canceled, so the bean counters decided to push something else. Sad but true!

Well, I suppose that depends on what you're impressed by. A big closeup with very little movement doesn't impress me (that's just a sculpture which could be seen anywhere in "real life") but a convincing depiction of a 5-ton T-Rex barreling after a jeep that looks like it's moving in an anatomically correct way does…

A.I. really should have ended with Davin in the sub, wishing to the "blue fairy" until he ran out of juice. It would have been a downer, but then the rest of it wasn't exactly happy-happy anyway, and it's not like David's quest could ever have had a happy ending anyway.

"Should have sent a poet. A Vogon poet. "

Well, by your logic we should all be watching Jersey Shore, then, right? That's where the numbers are. Jersey Shore and American Idol, and to hell with all those high-falutin' sci-fi shows with their "ideas" and "themes" and whatnot.

Dude, that's just weird. It's like saying "well I wanted to be tempted with an apple danish, but not with an apple coffee cake!" Spoilers are spoilers. In fact I'd go so far as to say that "spoilers" are specifically plot-related, since things like "they're filming in Vancouver" don't spoil anything because they…

That's damned ironic, really.

Oh, I'm betting that arsenic is worse.

My personal reason for not wanting to replace my bits? Largely because I don't want to have to go in for regular maintenance—artificial parts aren't self-repairing. Then again, I'm one of those guys who never goes to the doctor, so for some it might not be much of a change in that sense.

Wow, how over-sensitive. You know what? Most of the characters *might not* sit on the throne, due to things that happen in the books. There, did I just spoil something for you? Because that's essentially what AcrobaticRabbit said: "I'd like to see this thing happen, but I'm not sure it will now." The Good Rabbit…

Just to ruin EVERYONE's day, I recall that a while back someone won a ticket on the (not-yet-running) Virgin Galactic suborbital flight... and had to forfeit, because the $236,000 value of the prize had to be reported as income, and they couldn't afford the resulting taxes.

Agreed—Hendricks is tailor-made to play a succubus, not an action-hero warrior. She's not built for hand-to-hand combat and gymnastics, she's built for convincing men to do really stupid things.

I may be wrong on this (not an astrophysicist!) but I thought you needed to get to a pretty high fraction of C in order for time dilation to become noticeable, and doing that would take literally-impossible amounts of fuel—in some extreme cases, trying to accelerate a ship to near 1C takes more energy than exists in…

I always wonder what the likelihood is of the crew of a generation ship arriving, only to find that the planet's already been settled by people who got there faster due to improvements in propulsion during the 100+ years since they launched. Like, maybe 20 years after the generation ship launches, someone makes a…

"why people are trying to derive the gravity of a planet directly from its diameter? Mass doesn't work that way! "

Jack L. Chalker's "Rings of the Master" series. I also can't remember the name of the first book, but I'm pretty sure that's the one you mean; they end up going offworld in a mothballed generation ship to try to track down the scattered access/override keys for the AI that runs the human colonial system.

Well... not until we land on their planet, anyway. Then things can get up-close and personal.

While watching the film, and immediately afterward, I thought it should have just ended with the freeze-frame—there is no alternate reality, it's all just a simulation, but Colter finds some peace and joy within the context of the fictitious "reality" that he inhabits and his last (and therefore in some sense…

Right. Science is evil, because it saved millions of lives and gave a heroic but functionally-dead solider a second lease on life. How terrible.

One of the main problems is that Mars' current atmosphere is about 1% of earth's air pressure. There's also virtually no magnetic field, though geology shows that it had a very strong mag field in its distant past; this means no real protection from solar radiation, though due to distance the radiation is…