Miller : Oh. My. God. What happened to your eyes?

Dr. Weir : Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see.

Thinking of spaceflight / combat games with decent Newtonian physics, Warhead from 1990 did that pretty well, although it's been a long time since I played it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I have been wondering for a while about what is it that makes your posts such a word salad?

- Being always drunk or high while posting?

- Dementia or other similar condition?

- Being in fact a somewhat primitive chatbot rather than an actual human?

- Something else?

This is a bit on the nitpicking side, but as someone with very fond memories of Amiga, I can't resist a couple of corrections/comments:

VGA hardware let you have 16 colors at 640x480 and Amiga only had 4

Do you mean the Productivity mode (i.e. 640x480 without use of interlace) that was first present on ECS chipset (which was a minor disappointment as an update over OCS, and in hindsight a bit of an early omen about Commodore's inability to keep the competitive edge)? I'm wondering about this, because even the original chipset did allow use of 16 colors at that resolution (but with interlacing). For still images there was also the so-called Dynamic HiRes that was not a 'real' screen mode, but instead a software trick to use the Copper to switch the 16-color palette for each individual horizontal line with little CPU overhead.

Concerning non-bitmapped scalable fonts, AmigaOS 2.04 (introduced with A3000) did introduce the so-called outline fonts. I don't really remember whether they could also be rotated via OS itself, though.

Where did you get the idea that it doesn't have a terminal application? A bit of googling proves this to be not quite true:

http://flors.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/software-freedom-lovers-here-comes-maemo-5/

I looked at the list of suggested additional columns and chose "Died". Now I know that Linux died as "A modem hung up the phone". Various BSDs seem to still be going strong, though.

On a more serious note, the concept is quite neat (and as noted, not entirely unlike the comparisons provided by WolframAlpha). However, the quality of the results has to improve a lot before I'll use this for anything else than amusing myself.

If you are still using windows 2000- BUY A NEW COMPUTER!

Actually, the W2k machine I have and use semi-frequently is a newer acquisition than my current primary Linux box, so in a sense it might be called the most recent machine I have, even though the hardware and OS are older :) While I wouldn't be satisfied using it as my only computer, it's really quite good enough for surprisingly many tasks.

Regarding Mozilla guys and gals possibly dropping the support for it, it's too bad, but OTOH I suppose the end of W2k security updates is either getting pretty close or has already happened at that point, making it increasingly risky to have the machine connected to Internet anyway, so I can live with that if it happens.

Actually, W2k is getting security fixes until 13.7.2010, as the extended support phase covers them:

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3071

As I have one W2k box (mostly for playing some older games every now and then, but also for some random surfing and other lightweight use; the hardware isn't very new and shiny either; 650 MHz Slot-A Athlon etc), I can confirm still seeing a fairly steady trickle of fixes every now and then.

Regarding worms and viruses, I have yet to see any on that machine, even though the OS installation is now quite a few years old and in semi-active use.

I'd guess that a significant part of people in western Europe have heard about it, at least it seems to be sufficiently mainstream to get mentioned every now and then in (non-IT) newspapers. Elsewhere the answer is probably "not many", due to the geographical restrictions the service current has.

Personally, I think it's a quite nice music streaming service with a rather impressive set of available albums, even though running the client under Wine seems to occasionally crash my window manager (while it does restore the desktop pretty much immediately to the pre-crash state, it's still somewhat disconcerting).

The mirror might go away at some point, but I doubt the viewfinder will be completely replaced by the back-of-the-camera LCD; holding the camera against head gives it some additional stabilization compared of using just arms and hands. I liked the flexible LCD on my old Canon Powershot G3, but my Canon 20D and 40D DSLRs are certainly noticeably easier to hold steady.

However, it's quite possible that the viewfinder itself eventually becomes a miniature LCD (or whatever technology is used), allowing more flexible superimposition of additional information over the image feed from sensor and some other benefits. Currently the technology isn't quite there yet, but things might be different once something like 5-10 years have passed. (I'm aware that there are already some cameras with electronic viewfinders, but most people seem to still find them generally inferior to the traditional optical viewfinders, at least on the discussions I've followed)

Just for the curiosity; do you mean that they never came out into the mouth cavity, or that there's even nothing showing up on X-ray photos? In my case all my wisdom teeth do exist, but three of them are tightly stuck within the jaw bones. The fourth has gone a bit further, but is probably never going to get through the back of my mouth either.

Although I'm 30-something and have only 5 fillings in my teeth (all of which I originally got in my teens; no new cavities since that), sometimes one can just have bad luck. Here's my personal experience:

Some years ago, I had an old, somewhat loose filling replaced in one of my molars. All seemed to be well, until one day my jaw started to swell. It turned out that there had been a small chipping in that tooth (I hadn't even noticed anything). However, it was sufficiently large to allow bacteria to pass between the filling and the tooth. As the original cavity was rather deep, the nerve had eventually got exposed to the bacteria, died silently (I hadn't really had any toothache) and eventually an abscess formed in my jaw. Luckily, an endodontist was able to perform a successful root canal on it, and as the root was already dead, the biggest pain on the whole operation came from having to keep my mouth wide open for an hour or so, which isn't exactly something my muscles are used to.

Then again, bad luck doesn't of course explain having half-a-dozen root canals/missing teeth; I suppose that's caused by either bad habits or poor genes (or a combination of both).