real-time
way back in 1973 the russians put a rover on the moon. it was a good little rover. it logged more kilometers than any other rover so far. i came across and article about it recently. which claimed it was remotely operated by ground controllers in "near-real-time". wtf? how could anyone write such an absurdly innumerate thing? sheehs. okay, i work at onlive. real-time means latency between pulling the trigger and seeing the results in less than 120 ms. near-real-times mean the controls feel like they're under water. the moon is some 380,000 kilometers away. that's 1.3 light-seconds. a round trip between here and there is at least 2.6 seconds. imagine trying to play call of duty with 2.6 seconds of lag. heh. fire! one potato, two potato, three po-boom! yeah. you would never call that real-time. or even near-real-time. you'd shut off the game and do something else.