Let me help you over the bridge. Science fiction is often just fantasy, but with lasers and pod racers instead of swords and horses. Star Wars itself would lose little if it happened in a medieval setting (storywise, special effects would have suffered, and sadly that was 80% of the cool factor for me). I mean they already have a princess who keeps getting captured and needs rescuing by a knight...uh, I mean jedi knight. Lucky the old master is there to train the young apprentice in the way of the sword...er...force! He struggles to become strong enough to take on the black knight...um, Lord Vader. But only once the old master is defeated can the new apprentice rise above his master and defeat the black knight...fuck it, I mean Vader.

There's an old saying, if it's fantasy the women are dressed in fur bikinis. If it's science fiction, they are wearing metallic bikinis.

So, just take any science fiction story, and if the storyline itself could play out just as well in medieval Europe, Middle Earth or some spell casting land (swap guns and gadgets for wands, staves and magic items) then it's really just fantasy.

Spoiler alert: Bambi was from house Stark!

"We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia."

If only that book wasn't so popular, I could read it...but alas.

[quote] I think they misunderstand the word "troll." "Trolling" meant "fishing."[/quote]

This must be the part of the post where you start to introduce factual errors. I think the word you're thinking of is "trawling" which though similar isn't even a homophone.

Curse you rectangle, you win again! That's it, just put square fucking sensors on all the cameras from now on.

We used Trumpet WinSock back then. It worked a treat. We ran Netware Lite as our network, again, it worked great - though I think we switched to the built in stuff at some point and never had any problems. That was just a 4 man shop however.

Our uni had 4-6 computer labs. Most were 8086 with one lab having VT100 terminals for the VAX. Two labs were open 24 /365. It seems strange that a uni wouldn't have that now, even though I guess most students would have their own laptops these days. So many happy nights spent in those labs with the other strange denizens of the night. I played Ultima III from start to finish in one intensely long marathon session on one of those machines. Good times.

The smart students will take the option to not pair up; they won't let some idiot drag their grade down. There is no penalty for doing so as long as you hand your work in on time.

If it's longer than it is wide, it's a phallus; that's why our office is switching to square monitors and paper and no longer provide pens for employee use.

Apotheosis is here, at last!

They're quite right not to allow some shimmy shammy clone to register on the merits of it's DNA, just look at what happened with the Storm Trooper fiasco. They took one incredible bounty hunter, with mad skills and fantastic aim - and churned out millions of copies that couldn't hit the side of the huge desert crawling robot factory. They also had no appreciable hand to hand skills or the same muscle tone.

Android - it's just Linux with a shiny front end slapped on it. Most of the work was done by volunteers outside of Google. I doubt even 3% of the code found on any given Android device was made at Google, and that's being very generous. If you count the apps downloaded to it, it would be under 1%.

Chrome - wasn't this a fork of webkit or some other browser written by other people? They did a lot of work on it, but it's by no means a Google product.

Maps - I know they acquired some companies for this, not sure the extent of it though. Streetview might well be their own baby. I don't really see it as a killer app though, it's kinda fun.

I actually switched a little while ago to DuckDuckGo, after using Google for the last...um, when did Altavista start to suck? You're pretty much spot on about the first two result pages, they are filled with paid for placements. I can't seem to search on something without some retailer site(s) coming up willing to sell me the product, and I mean like 30 of them. Search for the manual for your television and you'll have to scroll right down past all the people wanting to sell that model of TV to you.

The reason is because Aero can take up 600MB of very precious video card RAM, depending on screen resolution and other factors. That's a *lot* of RAM to be losing access to just for a desktop you can't see while playing a game. That's 600MB out of the 1-2GB a typical card might have.

It doesn't matter whether the icons have a flat look or a sculpted 3D light sourced look or whatever, they are still just bitmaps that are blasted to the screen using a bitblit operation which is stupidly fast on any card made since the late 80s. Aero sucks for many other reasons, but flat icons in not even remotely one of them.

I'd rather stab myself repeatedly in the thigh with a fork than write web site software or boring old business apps. Web software is a particular kind of super dull hell, and business apps tend to be the same old thing every time, but without the added crap of having to triple handle all the data to get it from the database onto the screen.

These days I work with the CRYENGINE game engine and are working on making my own RPG game with it. There's a *lot* more challenge, and always something new and interesting to learn. I feel like I stagnated while writing all that business software, and am finally getting to grow as a programmer again.