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What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.

Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote

You see Charlize Theron watching the pre-viz on a Mac notebook, watching her 3-D character to learn what she's supposed to do in the shot! ... The cameramen, the actors, even the director, all watch a movie that already exists that dictates what they need to do.

So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.

Actually, I would love to have digital copies of my vinyl. But I don't want my digitizations made from my merely excellent Rega turntable and Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge. I want a digital copy made by someone with a $400,000 half-ton fetishistic engineering turntable bolted to a 5-ton marble slab in an underground vault with a cartridge handmade by the nearly blind Japanese master, running through the discontinued $25,000 Boulder phono pre-amp and then to the latest hand-built by a cranky ex-recording engineer professional ADC converted and stored in some future-proof format like DSD or DXD. And after a team of vestal virgins has lovingly cleaned the record using a record cleaner that costs more than my turntable.

I'm serious, all this stuff exists. I read a review of a $75,000 Sirius System III turntable and the reviewer said the CD-R copies he made from it sounded better than playing the same vinyl on a mere $9,000 Simon Yorke turntable. I'd rather get his digitizations than make my own.

Which raises (not begs) the question, why don't the record companies do this and sell me their even-better digitizations from the original master tapes? There is a small market for better-than-CD digital files, but it requires broad consensus that "This is the closest to the original gold master there will ever be", unlike the f***ed -up debacle that was SACD and DVD-Audio.

When I tried Google Pack I found it didn't bundle the latest versions of the software it installs, so several immediately had to download additional updates!

At one point my Windows PC had 7 different update programs running: Adobe Acrobat updater, Apple Updater, Flash updater, GoogleUpdate.exe and GoogleUpdaterService.exe, Java update (jusched.exe?), LavaSoft Ad-Aware updater, Symantec LiveUpdate (AluSchedulerSvc.exe?), ThinkVantage updater, Windows update. And that's after I turned off several others in MSCONFIG and Services.

Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla's Help > Check for Updates... is the best Windows updater. It only runs when the application runs, it downloads a minimal diff, it prompts you to restart the application and self-updates (unlike some updaters that make you re-run a ^%$#$@! full-blown uninstall/installation program and ask you stupid questions that make no sense in an update), and it doesn't leave megabytes of crap lying around (I had five 70MB Java versions in C:\Program Files\Java and more crap in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java\Update\Base Images).

(I'm now on Kubuntu and KPackageKit, not perfect but an improvement in many ways.)

representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.

Yup. Gibson saw cyberspace as a spatial representation of different corporations' data. He talks quite specifically of jacking into the VR construct and navigating (via keyboard commands!) between the geometric data of different hosts, "great corporate hotcores" and below them used-car lots and tax accountants, and further out black zones of government agencies. That's just not remotely how the internet works and I doubt connecting to different IP addresses will ever be presented that way.

However, Gibson tosses out dozens of resonant ideas in the Sprawl series (some of which the article mentions), like Zeiss Ikon recording eye implants, simstim, holographic porn, cyber guard dogs, microlights in zero G, rogue AIs, artistic AIs, etc. Slotting slivers of microsoft to know stuff ("knowledge lit him like an arcade game"!), then the transition to biosoft making you nauseous with another's emotions is wonderful. Although Neal Stephenson gets the credit for avatars in cyberspace, Count Zero has an eerily prescient description of virtual worlds like PlayStation Home when it describes Jaylene Slide's pad in L.A. Lots of CZ quotations here and here.

representation of information as landscapes has been a repeated dead end.

Yup. Gibson saw cyberspace as a spatial representation of different corporations' data. He talks quite specifically of jacking into the VR construct and navigating (via keyboard commands!) between the geometric data of different hosts, "great corporate hotcores" and below them used-car lots and tax accountants, and further out black zones of government agencies. That's just not remotely how the internet works and I doubt connecting to different IP addresses will ever be presented that way.

However, Gibson tosses out dozens of resonant ideas in the Sprawl series (some of which the article mentions), like Zeiss Ikon recording eye implants, simstim, holographic porn, cyber guard dogs, microlights in zero G, rogue AIs, artistic AIs, etc. Slotting slivers of microsoft to know stuff ("knowledge lit him like an arcade game"!), then the transition to biosoft making you nauseous with another's emotions is wonderful. Although Neal Stephenson gets the credit for avatars in cyberspace, Count Zero has an eerily prescient description of virtual worlds like PlayStation Home when it describes Jaylene Slide's pad in L.A. Lots of CZ quotations here and here.

If you can't prove he exists then you certainly can't prove he doesn't exist.
Just another nice example of twisted, incomplete Christian logic. Can you prove

Remember, Christian proof of God are so-called 'miracles'. You can't prove miracles happened, but also you can't prove they didn't happen. Oh! That means miracles could happen! Wait, we have a proof of God can exist, let's start some religion.

Doesn't that mean they have faith in him not existing? Come on now...... faith in a lack of existence, Thats Funny.
Believing in something is a faith, however not believing in something is a denial, not faith.

Please describe your definition of God, His basic properties and superpowers. I'm sick of discussions about existence or non-existence of something that is not even properly defined. Even this http://www.skierpage.com/images/southparkgod.jpg is more specific than the usual Christian jibber jabber.

Sorry, but religion can never replace science, or even be placed equal, since religion is just a placebo. However even the placebos can have a real effect on some people too.

So true. As part of my solar PV installation, I got a net use meter. Instead of that pathetic stupid antique spinning disk that requires a stopwatch and a calculator, I've got an LCD showing instantaneous consumption in kiloWatts. So every time I walk in or out I check my consumption. Any time it's above 1 kW I try to figure out why. I soon realized the downstairs track lights eat 400 Watts, so I leave them off. It pointed out that when a vacuum cleaner brags about stupendous suction power, that means high electric consumption, so I don't leave it running while moving the furniture and changing attachments. It reminds me to activate standby and switch off my computer power strip. It shows that my Sub-Zero fridge is a beautiful piece of inefficient constantly-running crap. Etc. etc. If every house had one, consumption would take a quick dive.

It's still flawed:

• The display panel should be inside the house and/or have a Web server so I don't have to stand outside with a flashlight while someone else flips switches.
• It's hard to tell which circuit is consuming power. I've got Kill-A-Watt to monitor a single outlet and the electric meter for the whole house, I want a meter built into the electric panel so I can meter the middle—individual circuits.

http://www.skierpage.com/images/mohammed_cartoon.j pg

This may seem a bit obvious, but can anyone compare this console game favorably to the original Carmageddon, circa 1997? And if you mention better graphics, may I point you to Carmageddon II?
This guy summed it all up eight years ago:
http://www.skierpage.com/carma/loving.htm

"Bet that hurt."