hmm the only challenge I could see out of this was to figure out words that were used in one book but not in the others. While that's pretty easy for the Silmarillion and Hobbit, the individual LoTR books are harder.

Off the top of my head:
Silmarillion: maiar
Hobbit: Gloin
FoTR: Goldberry
RoTK: pyre (!)

hmm I can't get anything off the top of my head for TT. Tried Treebeard, Orthanc but oh well.

The main solaris server back in college was kind of like that. I had used 9 character PWs for most of college (I figured one more made it safer :P) , and it was only finally during senior year did I notice that that last character didn't matter. In fact, you could type in anything after the first 8 and it still worked (this led to me showing off that I could still log in after mashing the keyboard)

But yeah, I mean those were the wild wild west days where you telnet-ed in (ssh-ing came around later), ytalk wasn't blocked, and finger wasn't blocked either (hence many girls got creepy ytalk requests from the outside world).

at 2:55 PST, when I go to

www.verizonwireless.com/galaxynexus

which is at the end of their press release, it simply redirects to a mostly-empty page.

Also, if you simply look for the Nexus in the phones, it's not there either...

Motorola Droid owner here. If I don't bring my charger to work, it will die at around 6-7 hours in, and that's with even nearly everything off (must be because I have nearly zero cell reception in my office). Annoying... I can't wait till my contract ends in a month or two so I can dump this slow, battery sucking thing asap. I expect these new multi core phones to at least run things faster, and hopefully save some power when they aren't running things.

It was the "6-8 weeks for delivery" that probably held mail order back (ask anyone who watched those infomercials from the 80's and they ALL said that). I mean, I remember my parents ordering games for me back in (gasp) '87-88 for our Atari ST. I believe they took about a month, and I was kinda confused when I got them (OIDS? Goldrunner? What were these games that I ordered?). That's probably why I eventually only had around 6-7 games for that system (and a whole lot of shareware), versus eventually getting around 25 on my Game Boy, and probably nearly the same number for my ol' Genesis.

Just imagine waiting that long nowadays. No kid would wait a month for anything. I know people now that complain about how long it takes to download and install games via Steam. Crazy.

That sounds about right.

Most Chinese Americans (not the relatively recent Taiwanese or Mandarin-speaking immigrants, but the ones originally from the Cantonese speaking Southern provinces) came to West Coast & Hawaii starting at around the gold rush, until the US passed this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act_(United_States)
That range is about 120-150 years, which is about 5-7 generations.

Most Japanese Americans in HI / CA are about 4th or 5th gen now (Also mostly from Southern prefectures...). They immigrated from the 1880's till this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen's_Agreement_of_1907

It's actually at a point where the newest generations of these groups shouldn't even think about that gen number anymore, as it seems a little ridiculous. This is probably due to lack of intermingling, as it's unlikely for someone to say 'Well, I'm 1/4 7th generation Irish, 1/8th 7th generation Scottish, 3/8 10th generation Dutch, 1/16 American Indian, 1/128th English from the Mayflower..."

As a side note, those exclusionary policies were all nullified by:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1965
so that's why you see many Asians (including SE Asia and India) in 1st, 2nd and even 3rd generations now.

It's like when you bring 10 pickaxes, find mostly dirt, then you realize you foolishly forgot to make even a couple of shovels.

I remember having this new 'CD player' in my parents' brand new entertainment system way back in '85. It was this really heavy, flat, dense thing (it looked like a flatter, simpler version of the CDP-101); I loved it because those few CDs we did have sounded far better than all of those tapes we had... even though all it could display was the track digit and the time on the CD/track.

CD-text would have been good, but hey, expecting CDs to work in a 'computer-ish' manner (like reading files) wasn't happening till the mid 90's. I mean, I didn't have a cd-rom in a computer till '95 I think. Before that you looked at CDs as simply music items, like a tape.

Note that heavy CD player still works today; I think my parents still use it to play music for get-togethers and what not.

I think of that old SNL commercial when I hear about this.

That's the main truth; really, people are only interested in effects if it's pushing boundaries of some kind. Avatar was pushing the realistic 3D boundary (I still haven't seen any other non-animated 3D movie where the 3D is continuous like Avatar (they usually just create multiple planes on which they map different 2D onto them), Matrix pushed that bullet time rotoscoping, etc.

On a link off the end of the OP's story (http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/265869/have_modern_visual_effects_robbed_us_of_reality.html) the author mentioned things like the Bullit car chases and Butch Cassidy crashes were impressive because you knew someone was sticking their neck out to do those things. In a sense, it was their way of pushing boundaries, physical ones.