So, if we ever find a real Stargate, and there's an alien scandal of some sort, will that be Stargategate?

I have to disregard those, as they're written at the edge of the kerb. I don't usually stare at my feet before crossing the road, so the one on the opposite side is closer to my eyeline. As I can read perfectly well upside-down when the print is that large, they appear to be telling me to look in the wrong direction (unless it's a one-way street). Bah, say I. Bah.

It fell down the back of the sofa with the punctuation you lost.

I think you're right with regard to the cowboys in space feel to the show, but that's not where I saw the science fiction aspect; that lay in the main plot thread (which never got started in the series) of the results of experimentation on River and the origin of the Reavers. Both of these were looked at in Serenity but neither were really afforded the screen time they would have received during a full series. That's one reason I'd like to have seen the series continue; a full exploration of those stories would have been fun to see develop over the course of the show. It's still just using a science fiction backdrop to show a frontier adventure, but shifting political concerns to an invented universe to better examine them has been a widespread use of (good?) SF since it started.

The other reason I wanted to watch more of the show is that I liked the characters, something I find increasingly rare in any fiction these days. I felt that Star Trek (TOS) had become more about the characters than the science as of the second film, which is why I enjoyed the newest movie; I thought they captured enough of the old character work to make it enjoyable.

The same happened to me (and probably half the rest of the folk on this site). I was asked at least twice a day to move photos from a camera to a PC and, on one memorable occasion, rename a desktop folder.

This did have the advantage that I could stay in the nice, warm office rather than going out in to the cold, muddy field with the chemicals. I ended up administrating pretty much everything to do site IT except that which was already outsourced. It's amazing how knowing a few keyboard shortcuts leads people to think you're some kind of computer deity.

Friends and family get help for easy fixes, which are generally all that come up; they're all too fearful of breaking something to really do anything which might cause real damage. I'll leave the obligatory xkcd to someone else.

The poll starts "The Most Useless Key On My Keyboard Is..."

I never use it, hence I voted for it.

They did. Their communicators were pin-on badges, as demonstrated by the way they removed them in some episodes. We can make those now, for goodness' sake.

I believe you have misinterpreted the meaning of the previous post.

Like the BBC?

I was operating on the understanding that it's because the ball is a foot long.

Link! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrogates

The upcoming film is based on this comic book series, apparently. I'm more interested in that one, as they're apparently examining the harder science fiction in the concept. I also expect stuff to blow up because Bruce Willis is in it.

The other main advantage, of course, is that you don't have the pay the actors as much if you can't see their faces.

I don't think that spelling amongst the populace at large has become any better or worse since the internets made their first appearance; it's just that we're now subjected to so much more of the crap that people produce because they can easily publish it to a wide audience themselves. When everything was in print, it all went through legions of proofing, copy-editing and rewriting to ensure it was saying what the author/commissioner wanted it to say and reflected professionally on the publisher. Now, any idiot can throw something up and correct it later if someone complains (which is, I suppose, the same process in a roundabout way and with more arguments).

I agree with your point with relation to our presumptions about the intelligence of the writer. I know it's shallow, but I often find myself disregarding a perfectly good argument because someone wrote 'they're' instead of 'their' and finished the sentence with 'lol' rather than punctuation.

On a vaguely related note, the number of people who don't know how to use a thesaurus properly is staggering. I spent half an hour, once, trying to explain to someone that just because a word is listed under what you just looked up in the thesaurus doesn't mean you can swap the damned thing out! Gah. I gave up after that and let him get a D (yes, this was a while ago). Did that have anything to do with the topic? No, I just felt like a rant. Gnash, gnash.

My spelling has never been the problem (look out for the *ahem* deliberate mistakes later in this comment!), as I was an irritating little swot at school and learned every word I could get my eyes on. My typing is far more likely to contain errors, however, as I never really learned to do it properly and modern word processing software corrects so much before I've noticed it's wrong that I have little chance to check and correct the errors I'm making. Turning off all of the autocorrect options (half from irritation and half from necessity; it's very annoying when a word processor 'corrects' your capitalisation when you're trying to write out a variable list where M and m mean different things) alerted me to the sheer number of mistakes I was making. I found myself making errors with words I knew and had to look them up to find out why they had a red squiggle underneath them.

I did think that typing in place of writing was causing me to forget how to spell or use correct grammatical constructs, but I've recently started scrawling on a pad with a fountain pen for relaxation purposes and found that as soon as I had a pen in my hand everything on the page was spelled and punctuated correctly. It isn't just a case of my not noticing because errors aren't pointed out to me; they're also fine when I copy-type them later. Doing this has also alerted me to how little I write; my handwriting used to be quite pleasant to look at. Now, it's practically illegible. I broke the thumb on my writing hand about four years ago and have written so little since then that I have yet to relearn the required relaxed dexterity in that hand to write neatly.

Why there should be a link between my method of putting words on the page and my ability to spell is uncertain. As I didn't start typing regularly until I went to university, which was about the same time I started using letters more algebraically than lexically, maybe I just never linked the language skills to typing as efficiently as I did to manual script. Well, that's my theory, anyway. Feel free to tear it to shreds.

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma? I've seen those English dramas too. They're cruel.

Yes, I quote Vampire Weekend lyrics in lieu of wit.