You need to watch more movies. We can debate at length about the decisions made in these adaptation when compared to the books, and I certainly think Jackson AT BEST could have made 2 movies out of the book, but the fact is: compare these films on their own against other films on the market, and you will ultimately have to concede they are are far better and more entertaining on average than most Hollywood dreck out there now. If you still think otherwise then...man...I dunno, you've got problems.

What you highlight here is a fundamental difference between what can be accomplished in fiction on paper and what works well for film. The scene you described worked well in the book, obviously, but I can't help but feel you're missing something about the experience, the resonance, of reframing the action of the ents on film as it was done. This strikes me as important because when that scene came up in the movie it was powerful...actually the only real scene in the second film that I distinctly remember, and it was precisely because of how Jackson did it that the event went from "story bit that moves things forward" as it was in the book to "defining point of change" as it was in the film. It was a powerful scene. There's a lot I disagree with on how The Hobbit was handled, padding being a key issue.....but the LOTR films were outstanding, and at least partially because they were not (thankfully) done as 9 movies instead of 3. This led to a lot of "short cut" approaches to telling the story, which forced Jackson to reach for quicker but more poignant and resonant, emotional events in those films. Unfortunately, had they been made now in the same manner as The Hobbit, we not only would have gotten that lengthy debate among the ents you suggest, but it would have been 30 minutes long and involved lots of slow motion and drawn out voice-modulated speeches.

Guy probably has terrible eyesight issues or something and is incapable of externalizing the idea that not everyone has the same problem reading on tablets that he does. I have no problem with reading on my Nook HD+ vs. my e-ink readers.

Which is interesting because as an owner of both the Xbox One and PS4 I tend to feel differently about the two by contrast. The PS4 has a smoother, more polished UI and overall experience, the controllers are more comfortable and the game selection is superior. Xbox One meanwhile feels like it has a UI which tried to innovate and failed to do so (in fairness I do not use Kinect) leading to a rather clunky and hard to navigate bastard offspring of the Windows 8 tile system....something the 360 also suffered from. PS4 just feels like it was designed with goal and that goal was reached and maintained. X1 feels like it's goal got shifted somewhere along the way....multiple times....and the end product does not quite match the expectations.

Stross makes the usual mistake of assuming that SF is exclusively about modeling potential futures in all their various aspects. Most science fiction is actually about saying "what if WE as a culture were actually in the future and had cool stuff." It's about modelling our culture today in a different SF-based context. As many others have pointed out this is at least partially to engender familiarity with the intended focus of the SF elements. Social science fiction is its own beast and alive and kicking, albeit with the caveat that they did it better a few decades ago when the SF market was narrower and therefore more tolerant of the concept. Be that as it may, these are all valid forms of SF; at best I'll side with Stross and say we're not getting enough of the social SF elements these days, and it would be nice to see more of that and less of, say, IP tie-ins and military SF which are massively over-represented in today's market.

I'm shocked that those window cleaners make "up to $26.89" WTF seriously? They just bragged like that was a good number for that sort of work....? I guess, relatively speaking, it might be good for the alternative choices those workers have, but I sure as hell wouldn't do that for $26.89. Why is it that all the high mortality rate jobs have such shitty wages?

GOG is not competing with video retailers, they're competing with streaming services like Netflix. GOG, meet Netflix. They get my $8.55 a month and will continue to do so for as long as I can stream videos from them without a price restriction. When you can do this count me in.

It is morbidly disturbing just how many posters here seem to need to see the video to experience emotion or empathy for what happened. Just being told it happened is enough to wrench my stomach....I really don't need to view this in order to experience empathy...at worst watching it might lead to depression and despair.

Then Parent may excuse himself from this conversation for having the temerity to link Mario to an Xbox. Unclean non-gamer, leave this house! There is nothing for you here.

How if you RTFA that's linked the answer is obviously no, and why.

Although ironically the company's insurance does include coverage for vasectomies and viagra.

Everyone else has jumped on you for this, but...seriously: do you really think books are one-off disposables? Really?!?!? I've got an extensive library and I read a ton of content every week. I have a lot of favorites I have read a second, third or sometimes even fourth time. I have reference books and informational books I draw upon time and again. Who reads a book twice? People who read, that's who.

Set up facebook....link to a sacrificial email account. Offer as little personal data as you can (make 'em work for it) and then post a new pic of your kid once a year like I do for gandma. Never, ever bother to check it more than once a year, and never go back to the dummy email you set up.

It doesn't take much effort to figure out that if you bought a Wii for your 9 year old in 2007, then you'll be upgrading to an Xbox or Ps4 in 2014 for your 16 year old. This is not a static audience...and the Wii is looking very old now to new 9 year olds with their android tablets.

Yes, but the Earth is a geologically active world with a lot of churn, an atmosphere and constant active chemistry going on. The moon changes very little over the course of its life outside of occasional impacts. Barring that issue, I think from what i recall the Theia collision theory models around the idea of a large planet effective broadsiding Earth, and pulling off a significant chunk of crust as it does so. The models all seem to suggest that the vast majority of the debris forms the moon itself, while Earth loses some mass but keeps on going. But disclaimer: IAAAA (I am an armchair astronomer) so take it all with a grain of salt; but I'm pretty sure that we have a lot of specific factors that make finding remnants of this collision on Earth really difficult, vs. on the moon where nothing ever really changes even on a geologic clock.