Seconding that! Patterson Joseph would be playful, intriguingly warm (and therefore rapidly defined in new ways), and capable of turning threatening smoothly within one line.

I have. It's very good.

But Glee was *always* fickle. Right from the start it was three writers producing three very different shows, that happened to use the same characters.

Old Republic has earned the right, though, doubly:

To some extent, though, that's the point.

I simply can't agree. It doesn't have anything like the emotional carry-through of Iron Man 3 or Winter Soldier.

Dollhouse - flaws and all - was arguably the first actual science fiction (in the classical sense of exploring the social changes implied by science) to be on TV for many decades.

We were never shown that he was a decent guy, only that he was showing up to a couple of evenings with his daughter.

He's constrained by melodrama, a bit. Whedon basically directs action heros, and he makes their lives as miserable as possible to give them more to rise up from.

Oh, yes, I agree. There's no question he had equivalent command experience. (I think we're meant to assume that his being shuffled to installations and outposts, rather than naval vessel command, is one of the ways his career stalled after the war.)

Good points; much better examples.

Typically human design flaw - the system didn't have any security designed to defend against being ordered to create a hacker that was already inside the system.

While I understand what you mean, you picked a bad example which is factually incorrect. So I'll discuss why before returning to your main point.

I apologise. It must have been an absolutely terrible shock for you to have to read a few facts about maths and physics in a thread about maths and physics.

You didn't complain about imagination; you complained about documentaries. It's hubris to guess that we'll discover a way to break fundamental limits of the universe, just because we wish we could and in the past have surprised ourselves by discovering new and more fundamental rules.

To posit that we *don't* understand the things we already know, just because we wish the answer was different, is also hubris.

If the "fabric of space-time" is being moved in any way that has the _effect_ of FTL travel, you get the same time paradox problem by another route.

If the sphere rotates, then the tensile strength of the material needs to be something _really impressive_, since it has to deal with a system-scale centrifugal force.

No. But if you can build a Dyson sphere, dismantling a few nearby solar systems should be easy by comparison.

You've put your finger on it there. Dishonored is an awesome game; it's just a very different game than the game it looks like.