Oh man I used to love this mag, I had long forgotten about it. I subscribed for several years. I was in college from '78-'81 and that is that main period I remember reading. I read an article about the development of video games and how flight simulator technology was being applied. When I left college I went in the air force and became a flight simulator technician. I chose that job from the list based on reading about it in Omni.

Definitely the best decision I ever made. I found I had a knack for technology and working on/with computers. At my high school there were no computers, most people had never seen one. I never saw a computer in college except maybe in the administration building when they took my money. If I had not read that article and chosen a technology field in the AF I would probably be a burnt out school teacher.

Just wait. Maybe they got the story listed on Slashdot as a way to shut them down.

The movie is just an action/romance/comedy movie plot. There are obvious historical references with native Americans. etc. there to help pull the audience in and give them characters they can relate to. What makes the movie notable is that the special effects blur the line between animation and live action in a way not seen in previous movies.

I know all of the hype and trailers are trying to show off the special effects, but after about the first 5 minutes the special effects are no longer much of a factor in the experience of watching the movie. When I walked out of the movie with my group no one was marveling over the special effects, they were relating to the characters and plot. This is where special effects have done their job and not overpowered the movie itself.

I don't think there is a great lesson of humanity or technology intended. The movie is pure entertainment. I believe the simple plot was chosen because it is known to work for a wide audience. To have a complex plot plus a lot of new and unproven special effects could have lead to a box office disaster.

The reason for a geek to watch this movie is to have a historical reference of how and when this movie making technology went mainstream and to maybe have a nice date with your girlfriend. Over the next few years many movies will be made using similar technology. Most likely ones with better plots and more interesting animation.

seconded. Avatar is just a typical Western done in an alien world with great special effects. If it a proven format, formula movie that works every time. It is probably the best way to test out new special effects and techniques because the plot is well proven. Romance/Action/Comedy date movie = big box office.

I will take my chances with surviving climate change over surviving increased government. I think history has proven that oppressive government is the biggest threat to humans.

Really? Can you do any useful programming "point and click"? We do a fair amount of development in .NET. Mostly web based. We found very quickly that using the GUI to create any code is completely useless.

We program in .NET because our upper management mandated it back in 2004 for marketing purposes. They wanted to be able to say that we develop in .NET. Prior to that all of our web application were classic ASP, which was also mandated by management when we started developing web apps.

I thought it would be great to get away from .asp hell and have separation of code and design. NOT! I was horrified when I fist saw .NET. .aspx is horrible. Why in the hell did they invent a whole new rendering language rather than just use HTML. Now you have C# plus some jack leg thing that is aspx. So much for having a non-programmer web designer do the HTML coding. At least when we were using asp we could get a graphic artist to create the HTML and then the programmers ad the interactive parts. We had our own simple framework that worked well for authentication session tracking. Now our apps look like crap because programmers cant design and no one will let a designer touch the code.

Also, I just noticed a cool feature in Bing. It has "related searches" in the side bar along with the results. This just helped me refine my search. There is also a "search history" in the side bar! I wonder how this is stored or purged. Hmmm I don't keep any history in my browser settings. There are clear and a turn off features. At least they are transparent about what they are storing. I am not sure if you can retrieve your search history from Google.

More info
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_searchv1&querytype=keyword&query=gnolyrotsih

Most people will like the design elements of Bing.
shopping - so does Google
links to other products - so does Google
I just pulled up Google and Bing search results side by side, some font on my monitor.
I noticed a direct link to a PDF in my results

Have you actually tried Bing?

I just did a couple of searches in Bing and compared the results to Google, got almost the exact same sites.

Never underestimate Microsoft. The worst thing Google can do is get cocky and think MS is not a competitor.

"But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google..."

It sounds to me like this guy is trying to protect his job. "Uh.. don't hire him, we need him outside of Google..yeah that's the ticket". I read between the lines that this guy doesn't want anyone smarter than he is too close to his job.

Why in the world does the summary list to some stupid guys take on Mark Cubans blog post instead of the actual post?

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/13/google-murdoch-madoff/

Not that it answers any of your questions, other than maybe he is a publicity hound.

Back in the day when all we had where albums you had to get up to flip the thing over or put on a new one. So more often than not you listened to the whole thing. You were not analyzing each song to decide if it was any good.

Sometimes the album sucked and you never played it again. most of the time it was good or good enough. Some were over the top good and you could not get enough. I think we viewed albums more the way people now view individual songs. Someone would say lets listen to steely dan or yes, etc, not lets listen to reeling in the years or roundabout.

Now you just make a play list of exactly the songs you want. That was very rare when I was listing to albums, about '72-'82. I dont see anyone going back. albums are a lost art.

oh, okay, I missed the "T". I must admit I have not heard a modem dial in while, thank god.

That is some advanced equipment for a 1200 baud connection, you should be getting at least 19200. All that beep, boop, etc indicates you are connecting two high speed error correcting modems, the aaaaeeeh might even be some data compression. For 1200 all you would hear is a short skuuuussssSSSHHH.

Most likely because they have ads on their web page. This guy is stealing from a revenue stream (in their mind).

The only reason MS did not suffer any real damage from the trial is that it came to a conclusion at about the same time the internet stock bubble burst. If Bush's administration had kept up the pressure and penalized MS it would have been an even harder blow to the stock market. The powers that be decided to drop the issue.