A spectacular computer-generated dust storm in the new Mad Max movie provides a novel backdrop for a car chase.
Given that Hollywood spends millions of dollars on spectacular computer-generated special effects to attract summer crowds, some of that digital creativity might be expected to trickle down to the Internet.
Thursday's £56m fine from the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England over the spectacular 2012 computer blow-up is the latest in a series of punishments for failure and misconduct stretching back years.
Yet alongside the hype, there has been spectacular progress: computers are now better than any human at chess, for instance.
Five years ago Time Magazine, echoing the novelist Douglas Coupland, asked, "Is Google God?" This week, the mantle has passed to IBM's spectacular quiz-show computer, Watson.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, for example, argues that despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields, technological progress has actually stalled because the internal combustion engine still rules our highways, the cancer death rate has barely changed since 1971, and the top speed at which people can travel has ceased to improve.
Android tablets, as popular as they seem, just aren't all that spectacular as a couch computer.
This is in contrast to the spectacular progress of desktop computers, for instance, which nonetheless "crash" every now and then, or marvels like heart transplants or cloned dogs, in which the impressive part is completion of an extraordinary feat.
It is a spectacular demonstration that electronic and computer music has come of age and has entered the mainstream of music history.
The planetarium show is a visually spectacular demonstration of the way computer power is transforming the sciences, giving scientists tools as important to current research as the microscope and telescope were to earlier scientists.
