As plenty of people have found, if you reduce your energy intake from carbohydrates (to less than 10% of your energy intake) and eat fat meats, cream, eggs and vegetables instead, you lose your excess weight pretty damn quickly. It forces your body to burn your fat for energy instead of running on glycogen from the carbohydrates you eat.

Of course, you'd have to throw out all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, beer et cetera - things which a modern human consumes tons of.

The fat you eat only sticks to your fat cells if you also eat carbohydrates. The blood sugar from carbohydrates is a signal for the body to start collecting stock piles. So then, what would you tax? The fatty food? Or the carbohydrates? You can eat plenty of carbohydrates if you burn them with exercise. You'd have to have a very intrusive diet/lifestyle inspector in order to be able to tax 'fairly'.

If lasers ever become a serious threat against naval vessels, you could attach mirrors to divert the beams. At least around vital areas. Like those Schürzen the germans attached to their early panzer models (prior to tigers and panthers) to take the edge off of russian anti-tank rifles (and allegedly hollow-charge ordnance like bazooka rounds).

It's an interesting book indeed. Also one of the few stories told from a second person perspective. It's not as bad as it sounds.

Something bad happened two movies ago.

Moe: Phone call for C. Cocks. C Cocks? Anyone?

This poll is available for nonamericans as well. Nonamerican societies are not built on greasing the higher classes with money and then shaming the same people to give that money back to society. Where do all those homeless people come from, you wonder?
These are the Indulgences of our time. Absolution of sin at the price of coin.

Once we find elerium, all the world's energy problems should be solved forever.

There was an old action rpg in the Shadowrun setting on the SNES, it was pretty good for its time. It even had an easy name: Shadowrun.

see subject

It's the usage of it. Who cares that you went out to buy cereals and a carton of milk? It's like in the early web days, everyone had to get a web page with a picture of them and their dog. No one cares, it's just pathetic.

"I'm 98% percent sure this miniature organic meatbag wants you to help find his fellow minitiare organic meatbags. The other 2 percent is that he is just looking for trouble and needs to be blasted, but that might be wishfull thinking on my part."

While I do agree on the characterization part, I cannot agree with you about the plot, because there is none yet.

A bunch of subplots centered in a confused mishmash and a vague promise that "winter is coming".
We don't even know what that means, except that the wildlings are supposed to invade from the north. Only - the wildlings were killed off in the last book.

I see everyone begging Mr. Martin to please finish the series - but how would it be finished? There's no end condition.

I would prefer it if he decided to start the main story.
So far, all the books written have served only to introduce us to the setting, with a vague hint of "winter is coming". We cannot actually say whether the winter is the main plot line or not.
It's like a soap opera. There's nothing happening, except characters acting and reacting. No one is accelerating the main plot (because we dont know which plot that is).
Tolkien said very early on, "here's a ring, the story will concern its destruction". David Eddings - evil god does bad things, here's a story about his demise.
And when we read those books, we form expectations about what is going to happen, and we start to trust the author when that happens. That's an important connection between author and reader.
Song of ice and fire, well, anything can happen. Hell, the bad guy in book X is the good guy in book X+2. I respect Martin because he can pull it off.
I do, however, not trust him to take sufficient care of the characters I enjoy the most - he's proven he has no qualms about killing them off (or leaving them out entirely from a book), then resurrecting them and making them evil. And then the 3 year cliffhangers...

According to Jeff Russel's Starship Dimensions, a Borg cube is dwarfed even by a Super Star Destroyer (such as the Executor). How could a cube hope to stand against the might of a fully armed and operational battle station?

That's no moon...