Word: handing
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...while Hollywood goes mad for techno tricks, directors Nick Park and Peter Lord and their team at Aardman Studios of Bristol, England, are still crafting films by hand. Chicken Run is one of the few features made in the sublimely masochistic form of animation known as stop motion, in which plasticine puppets on miniature film sets must be adjusted 24 times for every second of film. A live-action feature has perhaps 500 shots; this 82-min. movie has 118,080. "The detail is astonishing," says Lord, still in awe of his colleagues' industry 28 years after co-founding...
...expects that of fringe people in Berkeley. The U.S. government, on the other hand, should have been fairer and more honest. The crypto issue, which is still smoldering and poisoning the atmosphere, could have been settled sensibly long ago. We would have found out that some small forms of crypto were useful and practical and that most of the visionary stuff was utter hogwash. It would have shaken out in a welter of disillusionment, just as Flower Power did. But we never got to that point, thanks mostly to the obstreperous attitudes of the anti-crypto forces, who are basically...
...devices that allow people to have sex without being in the same area code. Rheingold imagines putting on a "diaphanous bodysuit, something like a body stocking but with the kind of intimate snugness of a condom" and having a virtual-reality sexperience over the Net. "You run your hand over your partner's clavicle and, 6,000 miles away, an array of effectors are triggered, in just the right sequence, at just the right frequency, to convey the touch exactly the way you wish it to be conveyed...
...will computers be smarter than humans? It depends on what you consider to be a computer and what you consider to be human. By the second half of the 21st century, there will be no clear distinction between the two. On the one hand, we will have biological brains greatly expanded through distributed nanobot-based implants. On the other, we will have fully nonbiological brains that are copies of human brains but vastly extended. And we will have a myriad of other varieties of intimate connection between human thinking and the technology it has fostered...
...other hand, one can hope. This one hopes most of all for cars you can fast-forward through those boring long drives on the interstate. Zzzap! There goes Nebraska! Better yet--say it's 2025 and you're driving to Atlantic City or your mother-in-law's or a Jim Nabors concert. Just flip a switch, and the Zeno's Paradox-based, drive-by-wire, fuzzy-logic antidestination override feature cuts in to make sure you never get there...