Word: virtual
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ancient cultures, as in India and China, are eager to invite the future to come to stay, so long as it doesn't interfere with the way things have always been; software technicians in the Silicon Valley--many of Indian or Chinese descent--try to bring neighborhood to a virtual borderless world (even as their parents are cursing Sikhs, or debating about Mao Zedong). As James Gleick describes in his sobering new book Faster, a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure...
...have to develop it, just as Isaac Newton was pushed by his investigations of the laws of motion to develop the calculus. As if that weren't hard enough, there is yet another major impediment to progress: unlike quantum mechanics, string theory and its offshoots have developed in the virtual absence of experimental evidence that could help steer theorists in productive directions...
...Still, as cyber-millennium films go, it's megabytes ahead of Strange Days, which is one of those movies that give fresh meaning to the term "guilty pleasure." This time it's millennial New Year's in Los Angeles. Ralph Fiennes is Lenny the virtual reality dealer, delivering taped real-life experiences directly into junkies' cerebral cortexes, while Angela Bassett counters as, well, as the Tina Turner character she played in What's Love Got to Do With It? Director Kathryn Bigelow's action scenes are mesmerizing, but the movie itself is stranded in a dark gloomy netherworld that...
...this point, I realized I needed a real-life Jeeves. Who better to serve food with snootiness sufficient to obscure its Internet provenance? Ironically, my virtual Jeeves couldn't produce a human one. He did tell me of a school in the Netherlands where I could "learn the true art of butling." Smarty pants. I located a domestic agency in Beverly Hills on my own, but its best price for a footman in a morning coat was $500, minimum. In a panic, I had our bureau administrator, Judith Stoler, call the caterer she uses for TIME functions, which...
...politically correct Terminator of all things racist about Tinseltown. His first mission: to strong-arm the networks into hiring more minorities to work in front of and behind the cameras. Mfume's early salvos had the fire of civil rights rhetoric of the '60s, as he railed against the "virtual whitewash" on network TV. In private he was just as confrontational. "I don't like this diplomacy s___," he whispered to an aide before a meeting with CBS Entertainment president Leslie Moonves in August. "We should just bring out the picket signs, bar the doors, get arrested and make...