Word: thingness
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...result is ... impressive. You start getting impressed when you walk in front of the thing and it immediately recognizes your face and logs you in. Very Star Trek. A few months ago Microsoft demoed Project Natal for Steven Spielberg, who in addition to directing movies designs video games, including Medal of Honor and the Wii title Boom Blox. He's one of the few movie people who really gets games as an insider, and Microsoft was looking for his blessing. He gave it. "The technology recognized me as a full person," he says. "It identified me, my legs, my arms...
...takes a few minutes to get the hang of it. You tend to oversteer, since you can't quite believe this thing is going to pick up your movements, so you exaggerate them. But soon you start to trust it, because it does actually work. I couldn't detect any significant latency. And there's definitely an extra edge to playing a game with nothing between you and the screen but your clenched, white-knuckled fists. I'm a hard-core gamer, so I'm not the person Project Natal is targeting. I love my controller...
...almost half the increase in the leading indicators was from the stock market. So people look at the leading indicators and say, "I gotta buy stocks." And yet the stock market is one of the 10 leading indicators, so it almost becomes a self-perpetuating development. Here's another thing to know about the index of leading indicators: in the past, the upturn in this index precedes the economy's upturn by as much as 12 months. So maybe it's telling us the recession ends 12 months from now. It could be earlier. But equity markets, historically, tend...
...recovered, it will be impossible to know what caused the disappearance of Air France Flight 447, says Gourguechon. "As frustrating as it is, we'll need more information before we can imagine any scenarios." But for Learmount, if a short-circuit fire is to blame, one thing is for sure. "We have to look here for the lessons we got from that [Swissair flight]," he says. "Airplanes should have heat and smoke detectors all over them ... so that if a fire started anywhere, you would know immediately." He adds, "That has not been implemented by any of the world...
...which crashed off the coast of Canada after flammable material in the aircraft structure allowed a fire to spread unbeknownst to the crew, remains vivid in the minds of many aviation-safety experts. "[The Swissair flight] rattled a lot of cages in the industry," says Learmount. "A lot of things have changed since that time, but there's still one thing that hasn't changed, and that is, for all the sophistication of today's airplanes, if a fire starts onboard somewhere, behind panels, the only detectors you've got in a large part of the airplane are the cabin...