Seasons are defined by the length of diurnal periods and the direction of the change:
Winter - Daylight period is increasing, lower than night period (lowest amount of daylight)
Spring - equal diurnal periods, daylight increasing
Summer - Daylight period is decreasing (greatest amount of daylight)
Autumn - equal periods, daylight decreasing

Mine dates to the 80s as well. 61%...

PLATO was born in 1960. By 1973 it had grown to the point that it enabled social networking of sorts - online games as well as its ostensible purpose for computer aided instruction.

I remember PLATO terminals in the university library when I was first using computers - they were big amber plasma screens that did pretty good graphics for the time. Beat punched cards and green bar paper as far as user interface hands down. It was a lot nicer than the dumb terminals that were starting to be available for coding.

Some of us don't live in the UK.

Laws governing city charters vary according by state (both nation state - eg US, Lithuania, and subdivision state, eg Vermont, California, Jalisco, Aguascalientes).

In the US the name "city" also has a federal meaning - Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas as defined by the Census typically are called cities by their inhabitants regardless of their legal status.

I tend to do most of my document processing using local resources. This doesn't mean I don't trust third parties, I just don't need to go off my local resources to work, so why should I?

It actually has gone back in forth between specialized graphics systems and graphics done via special purpose hardware. Sutherland observed on this and called it the Cycle of Reincarnation"

Great "chip technology"? Um, cpus and gpus are both chips, ad general purpose computing does get done on gpus, see CUDA for example. Reminds me of the move to vector systems in the 90s although that used multiple cpu/fpu units on boards rather than single chips.

I'm not sure whether SGI's government support contracts are a positive or negative for Rackable. I'd think someone could find a way to make money keeping SGI supercomputers at Los Alamos, etc maintained.

It isn't the Middle East Conflict - it's the Middle East Culture.