Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983. It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Cyberpunk works are well situated within postmodern literature. Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

William Ford Gibson (born 1948) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans – a "combination of lowlife and high tech". The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre—steampunk—with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s, he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near-future urban environments and late capitalism. His most recent novels— Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) —are set in a contemporary world and have put his work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, or a potential threat, or it may simply be something entirely unexplained.
The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Usually, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and then declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. It may come back into play at the climax of the story, but sometimes the MacGuffin is actually forgotten by the end of the film. Multiple MacGuffins are sometimes—somewhat derisively—referred to as plot coupons. The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique, with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept. Hitchcock explained the term "MacGuffin" in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: "[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

Patina is a tarnish that forms on the surface of bronze and similar metals (produced by oxidation or other chemical processes); a sheen on wooden furniture produced by age, wear, and polishing; or any such acquired change of a surface through age and exposure. On metal, patina is a coating of various chemical compounds such as oxides or carbonates formed on the surface during exposure to the elements (weathering). Patina also refers to accumulated changes in surface texture and colour that result from normal use of an object such as a coin or a piece of furniture over time. The word "patina" comes from the Latin for "shallow dish". Figuratively, patina can refer to any fading, darkening or other signs of age, which are felt to be natural or unavoidable (or both). The chemical process by which a patina forms is called patination, and a work of art coated by a patina is said to be patinated. See beautiful pictures of the Statue of Liberty and a bronze coin at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patina

In the simplest terms, a pixel is a dot, but you rarely find just one. They travel in packs. Your computer screen, most likely, arranges them in a 1280 x 1024 phalanx - a megapixel, roughly. The word itself is a portmanteau, a blending of the words "picture" and "element." And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first introduced to the reading public in the pages of Science magazine in 1969, in an article that explained just exactly how NASA spacecraft beamed the first pictures of Mars back to Earth. These days, the pixel has gained heft, something analogous to mass. Our advanced computer graphics systems describe their 3D worlds as an array of "voxels" - short for "volumetric pixel," the atomic unit of cyberspace. Even more advanced systems map light with "luxels" - think photons. Surfaces are rendered with "textels". Yet even if you exclude all the newfangled "els," there are likely more pixels in the world than any other flavour of digital information. Twenty five percent of all internet traffic is pixelated, and will exceed all other traffic combined by 2012. http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=423&id=3880

The terms bit and byte are common in computer networking. Both terms refer to digital data transmitted over a network connection. For example, bits and bytes both may represent network addresses or port numbers.
A bit is a single numeric value, either '1' or '0', that encodes a single unit of digital information. A byte is a sequence of bits; usually eight bits equal one byte. http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/basicnetworking/f/bitsandbytes.htm

Convert between bits/bytes/kilobits/kilobytes/megabits/megabytes/gigabits/gigabytes http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/

President Obama on April 27 posted online a copy of his “long form” birth certificate from the State of Hawaii, hoping to finally end a long-simmering conspiracy theory among some conservatives who have asserted that he was not born in the United States and was not a legitimate president. The birth certificate, which is posted on the White House Web site, shows that Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu and is signed by state officials and his mother. “The president believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, wrote on the Web site Wednesday morning. Mr. Pfeiffer said on the site that Mr. Obama had authorized officials in Hawaii, who had routinely made available a shorter version of the birth certificate, to release the longer, more complete document. Mr. Obama said Wednesday that he had decided to release the document in an effort to end the “silliness” about his birth, which threatened to distract the country from serious issues. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/obamas-long-form-birth-certificate-released/?hp

Certificate of live birth, 61 10641, State of Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama II
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/042711obamabirthwsj.pdf