Actually there's at least two potential plot lines in the books already to make that... ambiguous. Heck, half the plot is taking seemingly irreplaceable characters and kill them, the world keeps on twisting and turning. But yes, I don't see it happening until after they've sailed for Westeros.

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, it started as one book that outgrew itself and was divided geographically but the timelines eventually merge again in Dance of Dragons with characters from the south appearing after the events of the fourth book. So it will be highly biased towards characters based in the north/east since they're in the entire book, followed by characters travelling north while those staying in the south aren't in the fifth book at all, but who will certainly return to finish up their arcs.

Pretty much nobody argues with the kind of science you can conduct in a lab like physics, chemistry, optics, mechanics, electronics and such, if you can put it in a lab and reproduce it then it's generally not controversial at all. Even when CERN finds some exotic new particle. All the controversy usually revolves around systems that are either so complex we can't meaningfully reproduce it all in a lab so basically parallel world theories or where the results come from a thought process, not compelled by any law of nature.

In the first case we do some partial models that are only approximately right, like for example weather forecasts. And lots of people claiming that flapping your wings this way or that will set off a butterfly effect. In the second case you'll never settle the discussion on applicability because these people might react different than those people based on culture, age, sex, education, experience, history or simply understanding the purpose or confines of the experiment and how applicable it really is to any real world situation.

For example, I suspect you can take pretty much all literature and studies done on airplane hijackings done before 9/11 and throw them in the trash bin, or at the very least put them in a museum. Not because they were in any way scientifically invalid, but because nobody will react in the same way anymore. Granted, that's probably a rather extreme example but there's lots of example to prove those kinds of scientific truths are fluid and change over time. It's a process, not a set of answers and it'll always be noisy.

Well, the company itself is only one piece of the puzzle. They're also connected to vendors, customers, competitors, their particular market and the general economy. All of those give a lot of impulses into the system, if your competitor launches a great new product that's bad for you. If your vendor's got supply problems, that's bad for you. If your customers for some reason get mad at you that's bad for you. If they suddenly want something else like tablets instead of your laptops that's bad for you. Growth and recession drags the entire economy up and down. The effects ripple through like waves in a pond and it's never still. Just because there's waves on the surface doesn't mean the tide stops coming in, but if you measure from the bottom of one wave to the top of the next then it might go against the fundamentals. They exist if you're investing in a far longer horizon where today's waves are of no real significance, in the long term the companies that make money go up and the ones who lose money go down.

That said, belief is often more powerful than the fundamentals until the illusion cracks. For example take the dotcom boom, as long as everyone thinks it's a boom they hold on to their stocks. If it dips, they think now they're getting value and buy more. That happens until the bad news overwhelm the value buyers and the stock really start tanking, which again leads to a stampede out. At every step of the way there's people trying to be ahead of the market, but the day traders don't really influence the long term stock price. They're just there trying to make a margin on the market over-reacting/under-reacting or not grasping all the interrelations at play.

And the space station would do what exactly, pull materials out of a magician's hat? If all the raw materials are eventually going to come from earth anyway, you're just adding intermediary steps to increase costs. Here's a number of reasons why you might want to have a space station, but practically doesn't apply today:

1) We can gather and refine materials and produce parts/fuel with the required tolerances/quality from a lower/zero-g gravity well like the moon or asteroids at a lower cost than shipping it from earth. For example say you discover an asteroid full of bauxite ore. You still have to create a mining ship, send it to the asteroid belt, extract the bauxite through mining, ship it to the space station, capture it, smelt it, roll it to sheet metal and cut it with extreme precision. While launching it from earth is expensive both the setup costs and production costs of doing it in space dwarfs the savings.

2) You can likewise gather energy by for example setting up gigantic solar panels that can charge a space craft. However, none of our current rockets run on electricity and the energy costs of orbiting/deorbiting a space ship probably dwarf the energy gains.

3) You can refuel/repair/retrofit/repurpose incoming spaceships without going down into the gravity well, however we generally don't do return missions because of the costs involved in sending them back to earth. It may be useful if we have big reusable "ferry" ships between say Earth orbit and Mars orbit, though even then it's questionable if we shouldn't just launch resupply rockets directly rather than going through a space station.

4) We could build ships that aren't hampered by the launch forces and are designed for zero-g only, but practically we're pretty good at various forms of fold-out designs that'll survive launch and transform into a more fragile shape in space. Same with the rovers, they hit the ground curled up like a ball then deploy.

5) We could build bigger ships than could be launched through a single launch, however the total launch costs would be the same. Practically we'd probably build it like the ISS though through interlocking modules, with large interlocking sections it should be almost as structurally sound as building it in one single piece in space.

6) If we have a lot of cargo going between many different systems then a hub-and-spoke system is more efficient than direct peering. In the foreseeable future though, everything will either come from Earth or go to Earth so this isn't relevant until we've got major off-world colonies.

The TL;DR version: Nothing a space station could do would lower space exploration costs today, only increase them.

Well, you can make a similar graph for "Death by nuclear weapon by year" but I doubt anyone think that despite the peak in 1945 we've lost our capability or technology to do it again. It seems that many people - for no apparent good reason - think that a moon or Mars colony will lead to the warp drive. All it would do is inch the bar higher to "The universe is probably littered with the one-solar system graves of cultures..." while not bringing us significantly closer to interstellar travel. And I think it's also undervaluing the progress we're actually making:

1) We're making great strides in discovering exo-planets that may be possible targets for colonization
2) SpaceX and others are making huge progress in getting the $/kg to orbit price down.
3) For reasons entirely unrelated to space, we're making huge strides in semi-autonomous and autonomous robots.
4) What used to be a two way race now includes space programs from Europe, Japan, China and India in addition to US and Russia.
5) From 3) and 4) there are several plans for "dry-run" base deployment missions to create the necessary human environment.

I think the last one really indicates where the future of manned missions is going though, the base doesn't need you to function because we're not going to send you there until it's already functioning without you. At least under normal circumstances, obviously if there's a malfunction you'll be the impromptu on-site repairman. Granted it won't be quite like checking into a hotel but you expect it to have air pressure, right oxygen/CO2 levels (scrubbing easily tested with oxygen-eating bacteria), habitable temperature, electricity (lights, power through solar cells) and communications (satellite dish). Perhaps even stores of food, water and other supplies if it's cheaper to send them some other way rather than with the astronauts.

What you say is absolutely true yet grossly misleading and I suspect you know it. Yes, if you boot a machine with no HDD, no OS, no drivers the computer will display something to say "Hey, I have no boot disk" which is obviously built in. To get 2D/3D/video acceleration though you typically need to load a firmware module first, then you can start programming it through the API. As I understand it based on reading about AMD's open drivers which still depend on closed source hardware their opinion it the firmware makes the hardware comply with their "assembler language" GPU API. It won't function without it and explaining the actual bits would mean explaining the hardware implementation which is a tightly guarded company secret. It should also be noted that the firmware doesn't run on the CPU, it runs internally on the GPU so it's a bit like demanding how a RAID card's chip is programmed, not the driver that runs on the CPU but the programming of auxiliary chips. The funny part is that nobody cares if you use an EEPROM to write the firmware blob to that the card will read from. But if you binary dump it directly, then RMS won't be happy. I don't see the big practical difference though.

The truth is somewhere in between. For example the nVidia GTX 980 now sells with 16/16(?) SMMs enabled for 16*128 = 2048 cores. The GTX 970 sells with 13/16 SMMs for 13*128 = 1664 cores. It is extremely unlikely that no actual cards have 14 or 15 working SMMs. Card makers probably do some more binning to see which chips they can up their OC editions and which they put in their reference editions too. The question is how good is your validation versus their validation, if it runs through 3DMark okay does it mean it's good? Or is it going to start misrendering or locking up the card or bluescreen the machine? There's a real cost to answering "Is this caused by my overclock?" even when the overclock turns out to not be the problem. If I had more time to swap for my money perhaps the answer would be different, but I run at stock speeds and I expect the manufacturer to make sure it runs flawlessly at that speed. I agree that sometimes it might be the manufacturer shaping the bins to fit the market, but what's it worth to you to take that chance? I mean, I seriously doubt a manufacturer bin down all their chips. I expect some of the GTX 970 chips to actually have just 13/16 working SMMs.

Serious gaming graphics card makers supporting G-sync: 1
Serious gaming graphics card makers supporting Adaptive Sync: 1

As for the monitor manufacturers, I'm pretty sure they are on the passive end of this - customers choose graphics card first, then a screen that works with that card. So while it is a standard, I doubt consumers will care. nVidia is the top dog, with GTX 970/980 they gave AMD another kick to the balls and they're in a position where they can choose to be the MS Office of the market. How far as OpenOffice's standards compliance gotten them in dethroning MS Office? Not far, around here at least.

Actually, here in Norway last year we became the first country in Europe and NATO to introduce gender-neutral conscription. It was quite amusing to see how first those opposing it was accused of feminism by grabbing all the perks but not doing the same duties of being a citizen. Then as the public opinion turned those in favor were accused of feminism by disregarding the differences between the sexes and weakening our military through physically less able women, like they were only there to fill a gender equality quota. If you didn't want military service you were a feminist, if you wanted military service you were a feminist. Go figure.

I think we made the right choice though, whether you're male or female if you're young and fit you're certainly "good enough" for military service. We're not training people for the elite specials division here, most of them will go into our version of the National Guard and have one or two refresher sessions a year, just enough to remind people what end to shoot the bad guys with. And there's plenty jobs in a modern military that takes more brains than brawn. Yes, I know carrying equipment and supplies still matters but the type of service should go by physical requirements, there'll be something for everyone.

At the bottom of a gravity well? Check. Ages of warning that an attack is incoming? Check. Horribly fragile base where any crack in your pressure dome will kill you? Check. Something tells me the moon will be as militarily relevant to a battle of earth as control of the ocean floors. If you want to get spectacular, I'd rather go out to the asteroid belt and find a suitably big rock (read: not a dino killer, not just a light show) you could aim at earth. The timing had better be just right though, if you're off by just a matter of hours that crater might end up on the wrong side of the planet. Bonus points for drilling into and blowing it up at a suitable distance, it'll do more damage as buckshot.

Couldn't you just as well say "Fantasy is about considering and exploring the human ramifications when certain aspects of reality are changed"? If you don't care about the science, you're just using sci-fi as window dressing to take you somewhere else, like Avatar is essentially Dances with Wolves with a ton of fancy gadgetry. You can do a historic war movie like 300 or contemporary one like Enemy at the Gates or a futuristic one like Independence Day and it's often the same story of a desperate stand against overwhelming forces with everything in the balance. For that matter, so could many of the great battle scenes in LotR that don't deal with the ring. It's only occasionally the science is an essential plot item and rarer still that it has any real scientific substance. In Star Trek, they just say "beam me up, Scotty" and you're back on the Enterprise, it might just as well have been Gandalf throwing a teleportation spell. That essentially just makes it futuristic fantasy, with sufficiently advanced technology to make it indistinguishable from magic.

You forgot young earth creationists, probably the most popular conspiracy theory around. Evolution, geology, paleoclimatology, dendrochronology, astronomy, radiocarbon dating, fossil record and probably a dozen other sciences I forget all a hoax. A false flag operation by either god himself as a test of faith or the devil playing tricks, you don't have to go to the 1% nutters - who mostly lack sanity - to find total rejection of evidence, science and logic.

With TPB mainly running on magnet links, it's not even that it's a hash of pointers to content these days. Even the actual pointers have gone off-site, which reduces the bandwidth by 99%. My guess is TPB actually serves up more ads than content, if you count bytes.

So? It's still inconvenient because now you're stuck in a manual process that they will eventually get around to when you want to play right now. I've done something similar when a game without warning refused to activate - granted, I'd been playing with WINE settings and uninstalled/reinstalled quite a few times but this was Friday afternoon. A few hours later and no reply, I said fuck it and downloaded a cracked version off TPB. Support came back to me on Monday and started asking questions about why I'd used so many activations, I just sent back a reply basically saying I've found a permanent solution so go fish. Okay so fraud prevention is a bit more valid reason but it still doesn't fix the immediate problem.

We've had this discussion many times before here on /. with regards to Linux, no matter how many valid reasons there is for "CANTFIX" problems ranging from crap Linux support, undocumented formats and hardware, "embrace extend extinguish" incompatibility and lockout users don't care. This doesn't work, give me something that works. I must admit my tolerance has grown extremely slim, when you know that there's a not-so-legal alternative that always works flawlessly it really doesn't take much before I say "screw this, I'll get it from TPB. Heck, I still download GoT even though I pay for HBO Nordic.