There's no motion, just still photos, though. Still impressive, but I think realism with people is a lot easier to achieve when you don't have to also recreate all of the nuances of movement.

Small correction, the 2011 Solar Decathlon was held in West Potomac Park and not the National Mall (previous years were on the National Mall). This will be the last year it is held in the D.C. area apparently.

1) Camera?! er, not quite...that would be projector. 2) Why is this a DRM issue? It sounds like a (really bad) implementation issue. All the other projector models still have to deal with the same DRM (Hollywood is notoriously twitchy about this and there is no additional DRM on the Sony projectors that I've heard about...), but they don't have this issue when switching between 2D/3D films. The Sony 4K with Real D setup just isn't designed well from a usability point of view, and many modern multiplexes have shown they can screw up even the most basic of things. Also, it doesn't help that Real D needs a silver screen; that's a whole new source of image degradation that would be nice to do without (that's not unique to Sony).

Sort of, but ever try running Amiga emulators? There's a lot of options! And many games simply won't work with defaults; in the emulated world I have found it to be every bit as complicated as DOSBox. It seems like DOSBox simplifies the DOS experience while WinUAE complicates the Amiga experience.

Not quite true; Amiga was typically better in the mid 80's, but that changed long before 1995, especially once VGA became available in 1987 and not long after sound cards started beating out the Amiga's internal sound; Amiga had the advantage at first but it didn't really keep up. It really depends on the developer/game; some developers did a miserable job porting to other platforms, leaving the PC or Amiga version well below what the platform could do. It also depended what PC you had, some games could be much better than Amiga or much worse than Amiga depending on the specific configuration being used.

Remember how different the Mac and Windows versions of IE were back when both existed? Even if they did release a Mac version (which I think it's safe to say they won't bother doing) I'm not sure I would trust that each work the same and would still want to test both of them individually.

Dismal at best? Avatar-DVD-and-Blu-ray-smash-sales-records or how about 'Avatar' DVD sells big, despite paltry two dimensions or Avatar Crushes Yet Another Record: DVD and Blu-Ray Sales. Just a few random links, google revealed quite a few saying the same thing. I'm sure some people bought a copy and then regretted it, but it seems a lot people didn't seem to mind (or didn't expect to mind) the lack of 3D.

Ah, so most movies play all the way through with no problems then!

I like my Xbox 360, but to be fair it also sounds like a jet engine and sucks up electricity.

It may! It did for our forums at least. We used to allow anonymous access and started getting a lot of spam. After requiring authentication this dropped significantly. We also modified the registration process to add a captcha. I didn't think this would work as spammers can be a frustratingly crafty bunch, but apparently our forums weren't worth the effort as those two measures reduced the spam to almost none.

Page flipping was probably the biggest advantage Apple II had over CGA, and CGA wasn't the greatest possible, but the comparison isn't quite so simple as Apple II had more colors (which isn't always true).

First, do you have the CGA card connected to a composite or RGB monitor?

If a composite monitor, CGA wins big time in number of colors. You could get 16 at a time (even more with some programming trickery, though I've never seen anyone really take advantage of this). Also, there were quite a few different palettes available, you didn't have to always have the same set of 16 colors. Resolution is slightly lower (160x200 vs 280x190) though. A couple years later Apple introduced the double hi-res mode which would bring 16 colors to the Apple II.

If an RGB monitor, you can get 16 colors in 40 or 80 col text modes (compare to black and white on Apple, plus 80 col text was much sharper on CGA), but only get 4 colors at a time in 320x200 graphics or 2 colors in 640x200 graphics. Resolution is higher (320x200 vs 280x190) than Apple II. Also you can make each pixel whatever color you want without affecting other pixels, something not possible on the Apple IIe due to the oddities of using a composite display and the manner in which Apple II created some of the colors. While some clever programmers made this an advantage to apparently gain two more colors (yellow and pink if I recall) there were certain pixel combinations that just weren't possible without some bizarre unintended consequences. You were not limited to just cyan/magenta/white/black as you implied, this was the default, but other combinations were possible; background color could be any of the 16 colors, and 6 foreground color palettes were available.

Up until the late 80's the ST did have some nice advantages over PC, but I'm not sure this is a great example: the ST version of Starflight came out 4 years after the PC version and was improved quite a bit over the 1986 PC original (which did not really push the platform to its limits to begin with). By 1990 a PC version could easily have been much better than the ST release.

I have found maintaining Confluence on Linux and Windows to be about the same. Plone is a pain to use, I greatly prefer Confluence. Haven't used Plone in about 4-5 years though, so hopefully it's made some progress since then. I found customizing the layout/CSS with Confluence to be pretty easy. Also on one of our instances we use the Adaptavist Theme Builder plugin which allows some pretty extensive customization abilities.

For patches? I don't see any reason that's necessary, the few I've applied involved dropping some class files in place and restarting the app (easy); I always test them on our dev instance, but unless if you're upgrading to a new version then yeah of course you'll need to do that but I've found the same with all the major software I've worked with where we had customizations (including Plone).

I'm not sure that's a great example though; that's the style of the comic, the image quality is actually very high (the comics are shown in PNG format ie. lossless compress; they are pixel perfect!) If the quality was poor imagine the same style but with excessive jpeg compression artifacts.

Depends; to a color blind person, very difficult. Some types aren't so bad and have labels also on the wire which is fine, but without that a friend of mine is completely unable to differentiate the green and red wires. Would be convenient if it was standard practice to label those things in addition to using color!

Emulating the clear plastic templates should be relatively easy; could look something like this. What I find tough (nearly impossible currently?) is emulating the look of the vector display itself. Up until recently I had a crt, and despite its high resolution the scan lines still gave it away. I have a nice lcd display now, but the pixel grid can still be noticeable a bit. As displays increase in resolution and quality it will probably become possible to get pretty convincing emulation, but for now it seems vector displays have a look that's downright difficult to emulate.