Cleverest response I've seen all day. If only I had mod points! :)

The dawn of the Internet goes back to DARPA around 1970 (give or take). The term "cyberspace" was coined by William Gibson in 1982. The Web happened in the early 1990s.

Cyberspace is a visualization of an abstract environment, not a physical space. Tangibles (hardware) combine with intangibles (software) to enable it. Much of it is defined by how you visualize your "presence" there. Are you just pushing data request packets, or are you really "visiting" sites in distant places? It's a matter of imaginaton and perspective, really.

A pair of goggles and head phones, or pretty graphics on a monitor do not make virtual reality. If someone tries to tell you that, it's just marketing dribble.

When you can walk through a virtual world and you feel the virtual wind as if it were real, and smell the virtual smells and cannot distinguish them from the actual thing, and you can pick up something virtual and feel the texture and the weight, THEN you are in a virtual reality.

The Matrix actually portrayed virtual reality "correctly". WoW and EVE Online and anything else we have nowadays, no matter how "immersive," is nothing even close to the full override/substitution of the senses that would constitute virtual reality.

If cyberspace is not real, then laws are not real, either. Both are figments of the imagination, but that does not mean they have no influence on people's lives.

Only the least imaginative would look at a computer and read the words "Internet" or "cyberspace", and not understand that these are paper thin symbols of the fundamental shift that has been wrought, a shift that governments and corporations are desperately trying to control, but may never be able to fully restrict (constrict) unless they want to kill the promise of an incredible future and ultimately their own lifeblood.

In the end it all comes down to the creativity and liberty of individuals, their willingness to accept or reject what they encounter, and the strength of others to enforce a limited viewpoint, in order to confine the imagination, movement, and expressiveness of the masses.

None of us may live to encounter the likes of Wintermute, but I have no doubt where something like it will be found when the time comes.

Two points:

1. The kilo-, mega-, giga- etc. prefixes are actually metric standards that were adopted and "perverted". I think it is easier for technical people to make the distiction (when it counts), than convince the rest of the world to make an exception and suffer the convenient confusion sowed by marketingdroids.

2. In writing I make the distiction, but I continue to pronounce both GB and GiB as "gigabytes": Techies know to ask ("metric or powers of two?" when it matters) and my mom doesn't really know the difference, but won't feel cheated by marketing tricks.

Yes, it's spelled GiB/gibibytes, but I pronounce it "gigabytes".

/Raymond Luxury Yacht.

What if a bunch of these were dropped into a deep part of the ocean? Would bubbles of hydrogen begin to rise to the surface, continue to rise, and eventually convert all the oceans into acid and free hydrogen?

If you print out all the pages and lay them vertically edge to edge, the redacted black resembles a big middle finger.

There are plenty of coders (especially those new to the profession) who don't understand the value of tidy code.

I wish I had mod points for you, as this particular issue is one of my pet-peeves. Sloppy formatting means sloppy thinking and lack of care, both of which compete directly with my trust of the author's abilities, after which the code ceases to be worth much.

Over the years I've seen code that has followed one standard or another, and more than my share whose only rehabilitating feature was the fact that I could tell it was a cut-and-paste mess produced by someone who frobs rather than tunes an algorithm. Clean consistency, irrespective of the particular style, has always determined my reading comfort, and therefore understanding of the code, far more than blind and across-the-board style-naziism. That and the generous application of vertical whitespace to delineate significant blocks of logic.

When I work on my own code, I use my own preferred style. If I work on someone else's code, I do my best to adjust to that style because I'm awesome that way ;-) or maybe just respectful of other people's preference, as I would like others to treat my style with equal respect.

What all you nay-sayers forget is that this is only the very beginning of (debatable) usefulness. What comes out of this research over the next 10, 30 or 50 years, however, may prove surprising, and not just for how far this "mule" has come, but what other technologies it throws off along the way.

There have been people in the United States, too, who relied blindly on their GPS, went astray in the desert, ran out of fuel, and some ended up dying before being found (the article I recall predates the Apple fiasco.)

The lesson to be taken from all of these situations is that people ought to check the path that the GPS offers before they set out, especially if there is a chance that they are going through, or even headed into a distant wilderness. There's no substitute for a healthy dose of caution, or even skepticism where your life or comfort may be at stake.

Dammit, now you guys owe me a new keyboard!!

No boom today. Boom tomorrow.

Precisely, instead of a Glow In The Dark super power, they should have gone for Immunity To Fire. Cockroach Fail, methinks. ;-)

I remember rather fondly typing on a Model M way back, but I could not use one at home these days because of the racket. If there were one with (most of) the tactile feedback, but nice and quiet, I'd be sold. Any suggestions?