Is this a tech conference or the Oscars? After the jump, Forest Whitaker, Lawrence Bender, Meg Ryan, Jeff Skoll and Kareem Adbul-Jabbar — all snapped, yesterday, at this year's hottest tech confab, TED in Monterey.

Forest Whitaker and Lawrence Bender — Oscar winners for Best Actor and Best Documentary respectively. Photographed by Esther Dyson.
Actress Meg Ryan with Jeff Skoll. He's put part of his eBay fortune into Hollywood movies such as Syriana, and Good Night And Good Luck. [Photo by Pierre Omidyar, who brought in Skoll as eBay's first president.]
Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, the former LA Lakers NBA star, second from left, beside a display designed for geeks way shorter than he. [Photo by Pierre Omidyar.]
Google founder Sergey Brin with Murray Gell-Mann, a winner of the Nobel prize for physics. The book on their heads? Tech literary impresario John Brockman's What Is Your Dangerous Idea? I think Brin's dangerous idea was Google's motto — Don't be evil — which will come back to haunt the Mountain View search engine.

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