"It's my opinion that a lot of science has gone undone that would have been done if the SX series had been available in this country," said William Buzbee, a former scientific computer director of the Boulder research center.
"Frank still doesn't know how to use a computer," Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim museums worldwide, wryly observes, "except to throw it at somebody".
Inside, an engineer worked a computer while a director, Khris Brown, patched in remotely and led Reubens through his 26 lines.
"Even if you had a ban, how would you enforce it?" asks Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist and director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Tech.
But it maintains an academic flavour, says Ina Schieferdecker, a computer engineer and director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin, which investigates ways to improve telecommunications networks.
China already has almost twice the number of Internet users as in the United States, and Dr. Wu, a computer scientist and director of the Chinese Educational and Research Network, points out that his nation is moving more quickly than any other in the world to deploy the new protocol.
"To come up with a clever algorithm, you have to spend a lot of time with pencil and paper before you ever approach a computer," says Josef Raviv, director of IBM's research lab in Haifa, Israel.
"Initially when electronic trading started, it gave all players access to the marketplace with a computer, argued Heather Koch, director of protectagfutures.com.
Seen entirely through a computer screen, Russian director Levan Gabriadze's US debut follows a few teenagers' group Skype session as it's haunted by the ghost of a friend who cyberbullied into suicide after a cruel video was posted online.
"Shhh," it says, "is a four-letter word". "It's very common for people to say, 'Why do I need a library when I've got a computer?' " said Pam Sandirectorith, directof of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District.
