Like send the Colorado congressional delegation to attack SpaceX for no particularly good reason. ULA has a large operation in Denver and they pay Colorado Republicans handsomely.

Fuck that, I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my Commodore 64. Crapping Commodore 1541 disk drive keeps mangling my installation CD.

That's pretty much how I remember it. There would be all those awkward asides referring to events in the films, as if anybody who hadn't seen the movies would actually be reading the book. I found it fairly distracting.

Get back in your box, Richard Stallman!

Another one of my favorite films. David Niven and Peter Falk were also a riot.

So you see nothing wrong with a professor using his status to obtain sexual favors?

I think The Empire Strikes Back still stands up very well. I agree the other two don't have the same magic they once held, but Episode V, which, ironically, had the least involvement from Lucas of the original six films, is extremely well plotted, with better dialog and much more convincing acting. The only thing that comes close to Episode V is the final confrontation between Luke, Vader and the Emperor in RotJ. Unfortunately, that's only a handful of scenes in an otherwise mediocre film.

I read just one of the Dune prequels and refused to touch another. So far as I am concerned, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson just pissed over the late great Frank Herbert's legacy.

I wish Brian Herbert had done what Christopher Tolkien did, and just simply release the unfinished stories and plotlines, rather than trying to "finish" the series with appalling novels.

Maybe I'll give the Zahn novels another try. I mainly just remember finding the prose pretty stiff.

I have no idea whether Guinness was an asshole or not, but he was a very good actor, certainly the best one on the set of Episode IV. I recently rewatched his brilliant take as George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and was reminded of just how good he was. That's not even mentioning his extraordinary work with David Lean in Bridge Over The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. A personal favorite is the original The Ladykillers.

So far as I understand it, while Guinness disliked the dialogue (who can blame him, a lot of it was pretty bad), he was grateful for the money it gave him.

I'm a white Canadian 40-50 who even owned the Princess Leia action figure back in 1978 because you needed a complete set to be cool, and dreamed at night of getting a Millennium Falcon playset. I'll throw down my money, even if I know I'm going to hate the results, because my childhood until about the age of 13 was defined by Star Wars.

And that's the best decision they made. I've read a few of the books, including the often highly praised Timothy Zahn novels, and for the most part the books are so badly written that they actually make Lucas's scripts look good.

And I don't call it a reboot to ignore all the Extended Universe storylines. Unlike new Star Trek and James Bond films, which literally restart the franchises at the very beginning. The new Star Wars films simply start some time after RotJ, so are more akin to Star Trek TNG.

I suspect that Abrams is going to be given significantly less latitude to play around with the basic concepts. For Star Wars I think he was given carte blanche to do whatever was necessary to revive what Berman and Braga had driven into the ground. I find the results appalling, but the movies have been hits, so mission accomplished.

But Star Wars, even the pretty dismal prequels, has a certain cinematographic vocabulary, heavily influenced by Kurosawa. At times, the vocabulary was about the only thing that marked the prequels as Star Wars films, seeing as Lucas so thoroughly muddied the waters in other ways. I have to believe that Disney has told Abrams that the "Star Wars" feel has to remain intact, so I don't expect any lens flare, or shot length to be cut to the dizzyingly short length that typifies the Star Trek reboots.

The difference between a 10" screen and, say, a 15" is a tough call, though I still think 10" is too big for a Metro style interface. Bump up to the 17"-22" monitors, and Metro is just a horrific experience that makes Windows 3.1 look like an ultra-modern GUI.

Like I said, Microsoft already tried it. It was a disaster. They're not going to try it again.

Except that mobile devices like phones and tablets are fundamentally different than PCs. Microsoft already tried this stunt with Windows 8, and got smacked down hard.

I have my doubts that a "zillion" RT devices are floating around out there, unless you mean in a warehouse somewhere.