How does the T-1000 function when made out of a liquid? Or how does the movie make him look like that with computers? What program?

I'm not really sure what the T-1000, I'm guessing some kind of transformer. You're probably thinking about maya or flash 8... I can get you these programs once my servers up. Just keep in touch. corruptxen@gmail.com

Wow, a banned member posted something that could be hijacked in to be useful! I've always wonder how the transparency tool works on MS paint.

T-1000 was the villain in the second Terminator movie btw.

if you drag your selection around something that has a white background (imagine lets say homer simpson on a white background, and you select around him) and go to *Cut* when you go to *paste* again you will be able to choose the transparency tool, when selected, homer won't be on a white background anymore, the background will be transparent, so you could then paste him onto another picture, say, a background of a beach? and he wouldnt have a white square around him where you cut him out...he'd just perfectly paste onto the background as if he was there x

A replicator.  Yeah, I know it doesn't really exist, but that's the things I'm most interested in.

I wish I knew more about the central processing unit of a computer.  Sure, some massive combination of relays and switches too small for the naked eye to see.  But how did the UNIVAC do that on a scale visible to the naked eye?  I understand the integrated circuit and computer chip simply miniaturizes what the UNIVAC did.

I think I kind of understood looking at one URL.

I am sure that the keyboard is a shortcut of sending 8 bit ASCII codes to the CPU (A is 65, B is 66, 97 is a, 98 is b)
and any number can be expressed by one or more zeros or ones like this

0 = 0 (0 * 1)
1 = 1 (1 * 1)
10 = 2 (because 0 * 1 + 1 * 2)
11 = 3 (because 1 * 1 + 1 * 2)
100 = (because 0 * 1 + 0 * 2 + 1 * 4)

so you see the higher the number gets, the more 1 and 0 you use, and the last 1 or 0 always represents 1 or 0, the next to last always represents 2 or 0, the nextmost 4 or 0, and all the way ad infinitum

eight bits
0    0 or 1
0    0 or 2
0    0 or 4
0    0 or 8
0    0 or 16
0    0 or 32
0    0 or 64
0    0 or 128

Essentially anything that could be an alterable switch can be used to make a computer. The earlier computers like the UNIVAC used vacuum tubes to do this - each switch could be set to allow air through or not allow air through a tube by means of vacuum sealing (i.e. they could be set to "on" or "off"). Once all the switches are set, another burst of air through the right channels is used as the "input", and where the air comes out is considered the "output". The output can then be put through a new set of switches as new input, enabling complex calculations.

Essentially you could make a computer out of anything that let you "set" switches - like water streams, wooden balls rolling down ramps, etc...

Modern computers use transistors to do the same thing - a transistor has two electrical paths going through it, and running an electrical current through one path allows electricity to flow through the other. A silicon chip is millions of very small transistors linked together.

As an interesting side-note, the phrase "a bug in the system" comes from the old vacuum tube computers - sometimes insects and other "bugs" would get stuck in the vacuum tubes, stopping them from sealing properly, and causing errors in calculations.

There's only 10 types of people in the world - those who know binary, and those who don't. *grins*

Well...not quite.  The "vacuum tubes" in this case are of the electronic sort (valves).  Most of the UNIVAC tubes were common 25L6 tetrodes.

Right.
As an electrical engineer, I feel compelled to further clarify the clarification.

Go to a flea market and you might find some vacuum tubes, either in bulk or inside old radios from the 1960s or prior.  The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947, but didn't gain widespread use until the 1960s.  Anyway, the tubes are usually little glass bulbs filled with small metal parts.  

There's lots of different kinds of tubes.  The simplest is a diode which lets electrical current flow through it only in one direction.  One step above that is the triode which can be used for tuning, oscillating, amplifying, or in the case of computers, switching.

The triode is called such because it has three main parts: cathode in the center, surrounded by a wire grid, surrounded by an anode plate.  It is a fundamental property of physics that if you heat an object, it will emit electrons.  If you heat a specially coated metal cathode in a vacuum tube and apply a high negative voltage to it in reference to the anode, the cathode will emit a great many electrons.  Think about a 400 volt battery with the negative terminal on the cathode and the positive on the anode.  The cathode is commonly a narrow metal tube that contains a filament.  This is similar to the filament in a toaster, but uses a separate low voltage power supply.  The great number of electrons supplied by the battery are able to flow freely through space in the tube because it is a vacuum inside.  The are emitted by the hot cathode and attracted by the positive charge on the anode, so that is where they go.

The only thing to stop the electrons from reaching the anode is the grid which is a long spiral of thin, widely spaced wire.  Put on the grid a negative voltage with respect to the cathode, very few electrons will reach the anode.  Put a positive voltage on the grid and many electrons will reach the anode.  Changing the grid voltage, either very negative or very positive, gives us very little or very much electron current flowing from cathode to anode.  Thus we have a binary signal on which to base a computer that occupies the space of a large room and serves as the building's ventilation heat source during winter.

I want to be able to visualize electromagnetic waves. Not exactly a know how it works question but know how in practice it actually functions and interacts with the world. I keep trying to put it all together to form a cohesive picture but there's just too much. Too many different types and different effects on objects and each other. One day I will be able to sit down and see them.

Google.

I'm a programmer so I generally understand how computer programs and computer type devices work.  Not search engines, how they can take any search string and find dozens of web pages which contain that instantly in a fraction of a second is beyond me.  I do know they cache/index websites locally, but that's only part of the question.

Actually, my NT son is currently into trying to understand how plasma TV's work.... that and building a 3D hologram machine similar to what is shown on the show Bones in the basement.  Mom

Cool.  Best of luck to him.  I didn't know Bones had a 3D hologram machine (I've only seen one episode), but I have for many years been wanting to build a 3D hologram machine similar to the ones in Star Wars.  But I gotta say, understanding plasma is a good place to start.

Like that old radio Carl had in Men of Honor, which Billie Sunday broke and repaired, A Son Never Forgets