The GP is right for one thing, though: homeschooling has a self-selection bias. Specifically, few people are willing to take the time to home school their children and have the capability to do so efficiently. Hence, those that do are more likely to be very involved in their children's schooling and probably would be just as involved if they didn't home school them. It's a logical argument and you don't need to always cite studies to provide an argument (as though studies were the only way of substantiating anything).
The data to validate or invalidate this argument might even be present in the study, but would need to be split in a different manner. The problem is quantifying the involvement of parents who are not home schooling their children to determine if similarities arise.
It's computer science for a reason. You don't do a MSc or a PhD in CS to learn programming; a BSc is more than enough for that (and you'd be much better off going for an engineering degree or just a trade school). You do those to go above and beyond this, to do research and advance the field. Someone working on quantum computing in CS likely won't be a particularly good programmer (I have friends in those fields and their computer usage is limited to Mathematica or Matlab). Someone working on compiler design would run circles around your sorry ass and you wouldn't even realize it until a few days later (they're rather scary, but thankfully there's few of them). I, as a grad student in computer graphics, am competent at a variety of languages, but my strength is in graphics algorithms and linear algebra, not hacking out thousands of lines of code. Different fields, different specialties. This doesn't make any of those diploma worthless, as many people in the/. crowd often imply. CS can be as remote from programming and IT as physics in certain circumstances, yet I don't see the same spiel on physics.
All those algorithms and paradigms you're using right now didn't invent themselves. They were designed, often by mathematicians (before CS became a discipline of its own), and trickled down slowly to wider fields as applications for the initially abstract algorithms. It's not the only path for new discoveries, but it's a potent and common one.
It's amusing because you've perfectly repeated the myths that are constantly being trotted out against nuclear. Let's break them down.
1.a. Nuclear is expensive, there's no denying it, but well-designed, modern nuclear power plants can last for decades. Some designs can even run for decades off the same fuel! Compared with many other techs, nuclear is taking the "long view" approach to power generation.
1.b. Safety in a nuclear power plant isn't the most expensive thing, really. Just about every nuclear incident can be attributed to utter and complete negligence or downright wilful disregard of safety.
The Chernobyl incident was a result of an experiment taking place: before it had even begun, a series of problems and errors caused the reactor to malfunction (but not yet in any dangerous manner). The operators decided to press on, manually overriding many safety measures, ignoring the numerous alarms warning of abnormal parameters and forcing the reactor to a certain thermal level which was still below the minimum safe level for the experiment. When the experiment started with all of these problems, and due to the design's positive void coefficient, the reactor entered a positive feedback loop which caused the explosion. The aftermath was worsened by the political context; the operator and later the government did not want to be shown wrong, and thus they hid information or convinced themselves that things were not as bad as they were (for instance, the operator thought the reactor was intact despite graphite and fuel pieces lying in the building, despite all the dosimeters reading "off-scale", etc.). Many people died as a result, wearing no protection and taking no precautions.
The Fukushima incident was largely a result of corner-cutting. TEPCO repeatedly ignored problems with the plant's design, even going as far as falsifying safety reports. A study warning of issues with the plant's safety with regards to tsunamis was also ignored. Moreover, TEPCO and the Japanese government were extremely slow to react and communicate, again attempting to save face by not reporting the problems as they were but instead trying to minimize the dangers and issues until they were no longer able to hide them. Despite this, no deaths have been registered that were linked to the reactor's leak thus far. It's hard to find reliable numbers for estimates of long-term (cancer, etc.) death rates, but they seem to hover between 100 and 1000. Let's keep in mind that all of this happened through a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a tsunami with waves as high as 40 meters that killed nearly 16,000 people.
Now, if we were to build new reactors, we'd have a few advantages. Most notably, modern designs completely side-step the notion a positive feedback loop and should be able to withstand complete coolant failure without meltdown. Note that I'm not saying they're perfect: we need to do more tests, but this will require funding and an actual political movement towards nuclear. It can be made safe and extremely resilient to human error, but not without appropriate oversight and research. China, India and others are already following this path due to their increasing energy demands.
2. Not necessarily. As you've said, nuclear is costly, which is a strong deterrent for any area which has another reliable energy source (be it solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.) available at a cheaper up-front cost (even if the running costs may be higher). Furthermore, many technologies related to nuclear power do not lead into weapons and cannot transition into being used for weapons. If they can make the leap from, say, thorium to nuclear weapons, they could've made the leap from nothing to nuclear weapons too. Plus, as it is right now, you're basically saying that the West should have the ability to deny other countries access to a very powerful and efficient energy source all because we got there first.
Microsoft the corporation sadly seems to have forgotten about their research arm ages ago. All the cool stuff Microsoft Research makes tends to go die in a corner.
There are dozens of kernels available for each phone out there. You can't just install any kernel, but you can most definitely make your own that'd work with your device, it's just a lot of work.
This is the first time I've ever heard of that, and I tend to lurk in the XDA boards a bit (I have a N4 too). Would you care to substantiate this claim?
Best forego Nexus devices entirely then. Google won't add an SD card: they WANT you to use the cloud. They'll bump the internal storage every so often (like the N5 which goes to 32gb), but no removable media. Not only would it add a cost to the devices when only a very small proportion of users would benefit, it'd go against their own services.
The Nexus devices are distilled a Google experience, both hardware and software. This means very connected (the Nexus were amongst the first phones with NFC, for instance), very reliant on the cloud and Google services and open to modification (largely software, mind). If you want something that differs, such as an SD card slot, I'm afraid the only choice is to go to one of the (sadly dwindling) hardware manufacturers still including one.
Except he's quite far from an academic. Academics tend to have a modicum of common sense and won't insult other academics for no apparent reason. Remember, many academics could run circles around your coding/physics/mathematics/ skills. The entire point of academia is what you seem to dislike: honing one particular skill to the very apex of its field, be it literature, mathematics, computer science, theology or whatever else. It's an important part of our society, as at this point our pool of knowledge is so large that we can't reasonably expect most people (or heck, most academics) to understand enough in multiple disciplines that they can actually do breakthroughs. It takes years of learning in a particular subset of a field to be able to move the field along.
It's not because you haven't noticed the influence of academia that it isn't there. You may simply have to look a bit further.
It's not about "turning every kid into a programmer", it's about exposing them to as many things as possible. This is how they can form opinions on what they want to do with their life, it's how they find hobbies and passions, it's how they learn. The more varied we can get education, the better.
The environmentalists you're talking about definitely don't want nuclear. But they also don't want coal. Or gas. Or oil. Or hydro. Wind and solar are iffy. Basically they want us to use dynamos strapped on bicycles and maybe geothermal.
In other words, they don't seem to realize that their uncompromising attitude is marginalizing them all while making the situation worse.
Exactly. Most reviews don't really cover long-term usage and that's where AMD has issues. I've gone AMD/ATI since the X series and I'm probably going to move to NVIDIA next time because I've had a lot of driver issues across numerous computers (including laptops). It's quite frustrating too because if their drivers were roughly on par with NVIDIA's, AMD would be crushing the competition.
Irrelevant. The Titan was never meant to be a consumer-level card, it's something that's meant to be sitting between the consumer (sub-700) market and the professional (1000+) cards. Its performance is within 10% of the GTX780, which makes it a bad buy even amongst NVIDIA cards. The real reason to buy one is that it has full speed double-precision, whereas all the consumer cards are significantly slower (an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards).
I'm not saying that the whole slowing down double-precision stuff is great, but it really is an apples to oranges comparison. If you're a gamer, there's no reason to grab a Titan whatsoever.
Malarkey - I've actually seen the episode, and not only do they not put the car through anything more rigorous than other cars tested, Jeremy Clarkson (you know, the guy who would rather have his testicles eaten by a million angry bees than compliment an electric car) actually praised both the car and the company at the end of the show.
Not to mention, a wheel really did lock up at speed and almost kill the Stig, which Tesla readily admits did happen.
I'm specifically talking about the bit where they push the car around. It's been revealed that the whole thing was faked and the car did not inaccurately report remaining charge nor actually fail to do the whole run, they just filmed it like that anyway. I've not watched the whole thing (not a UK resident, not a car fan, and most certainly not a Top Gear viewer), but what I have seen of it points at a fair amount of "malarkey", as you say. I'm not saying the Tesla was perfect, remember? Just that Top Gear did some not-so-great things to prove a point.
So, he did but didn't overspeak the features of the vehicle then renege? Not really 100% what you're trying to say here.
I remember a lot of people thinking that the mileage figure was being overrated because you couldn't do that at -30C in the snow or that the batteries could never, ever catch fire or other such things. Exaggerations, basically, which I'd blame equally on Tesla's boasting and on critics' misrepresentations.
In reference to the Texas fiasco, no - it would be undeniably good if he was trying to get the law changed because it's wrong, but that's not the case - he was trying to get a special exception made for his company, and fuck everyone else.
Just like one would expect from a self-serving capitalist.
I can't find a source that says that, amusingly enough. What I did find seems to point at an exemption made for "American-owned manufacturers who exclusively make electric vehicles". To me, this sounds tailored to actually pass. Anything broader and the TADA would jump in guns blazing saying how they're destroying America. They're already opposing the bill with such a ludicrously small scope, imagine if the American-owned restriction wasn't there or the electric restriction wasn't there? Texas happens to be both ultra-patriotic and an oil baron's paradise, what did you expect?
"The speed of light", outside of pedantic Slashdot comments, is usually an accepted shorthand form for "the speed of light in a vacuum", just like "the speed of sound" would be "the speed of sound in air at STP".
By commenting, you stop being a Godlike observer and interact with the system, changing its state. Hence, you can no longer use your other Godlike powers.
He's got a massive ego, there's no denying it, but your rebuttal is quite terrible. The whole fiasco surrounding Top Gear was bad, but the Top Gear guys have their fair share of the blame: they did do this so that the car would end up behaving as they wanted it to behave (ie. badly), not as it actually did. It may be comedy, but it's still misrepresentation, and we are all fully aware that electric cars (or basically anything but a fuel car) is going to have to fight an uphill battle for adoption, so why make it harder for no good reason beyond your own obstinate vision of a car being noisy, gas guzzling machines?
Likewise, I don't recall him making excuses for the car's performance, either the Roadster or the S. There's been a lot of talk about both models and sometimes expectations went a bit overboard. They have a lot to prove, so they're going to defend their product tooth and nail, which honestly is to be expected (and if it were somebody you liked, you'd be the first taking their defence for being gutsy).
Lastly but most importantly, his wrestling with car sales rules in many states is undeniably good. These rules have been bent and twisted to hell and back by the incumbent auto makers and their dealers to make it nigh impossible to compete with any other business model. For a place like Slashdot, with so many promoters of the "FREE MARKET", this thing should cause almost unanimous uproar. Tesla wants to cut costs on incumbent, useless, overpriced dealerships and modernize how cars are delivered, supported and maintained. It may work, it may not work, who knows? Regardless, however, laws shouldn't be designed to stack everything against that model in such a fashion, and saying that it's just whining and not a serious concern is childish at best, utterly irresponsible at worst.
No, not the same thing at all. Hydrogen is usually produced directly from fossil fuels within the chemical reaction itself (see here for details). This is in opposition to electricity for batteries, which is just as good coming from a solar plant as it is from a coal or gas plant. Hydrogen can also be produced from electrolysis, which is actually the most popular way to talk about it in schools, but it's very inefficient and expensive in terms of energy.
Sadly, you can't apply that much correction in software. Warping can be done to a certain extent, but you cannot fix chromatic aberrations, which are inherent to any wide-angle lens, and other such optical effects. Even quality lenses would not eliminate everything and will still cause uneven pixel density across your field of view.
The Oculus Rift, like most VR head gear, is based off two small screens, one per eye. Those screens are rectangular and that's it. If you output a rectangular image, the image, once warped through lenses, will not have the same discretization: some pixels will be much larger than others. This cannot change even with higher quality lenses, and not distorting the image would completely eliminate the immersion and appeal. What happens instead is that the software outputs pre-warped images to mostly correct the problem, giving more pixels to certain areas of the image so that once warped everything is more or less equally dense. This comes at the cost of software preprocessing and not fully utilizing the available pixels on the screen (the OR's projected images aren't rectangular, so there are "wasted" pixels in the corners).
There was an article on another technology which holds a lot of promise, I think. It was demoed this summer by NVIDIA and is based off the principle of a lightfield. Instead of outputting two flat planes, the system outputs a higher dimensional image (can be 4D or 5D depending on the tech, I forget) which is used by a series of layered OLED displays to reproduce not only binocular vision, but also different depths. This allows for all sorts of nice new things, such as correcting vision in software from your prescription, or giving the eyes the ability to focus on different depths of the image. This is different from current technology, which only uses the brain's ability to interpret two images rendered from slightly different points as a 3D space. It should also help with the headaches and sickness people are getting from current 3D glasses and VR. The disadvantages are numerous, though: it takes a lot more computing power (we're talking about adding extra dimensions and fundamentally changing the rendering pipeline), it takes a lot more pixels to produce a small resolution image (even 1080p screens don't actually produce 1080p, a lot of the resolution is used to provide the depth) and it's a lot more expensive overall. Yet, I think it holds a lot of promise and I hope to see it in the future.
Despite having been tinkered with for decades, VR is still very much in its infancy. I think we'll see rapid evolution in the next decade or two as technology catches up with the dreams of people regarding virtual reality.
Wait, what? Pornography is very much legal, but prostitution is illegal in all but one state: Nevada. Considering the GP is speaking of a man operating in California, he was acting illegally, assuming he is indeed guilty.
You're either confusing words or countries here. How the hell was this modded Informative in the first place?
Who's to say you don't have a sleeper program implanted into your very brain, designed to leak information in a non-obvious way when you do something bad?
Slashdot Mirror
The GP is right for one thing, though: homeschooling has a self-selection bias. Specifically, few people are willing to take the time to home school their children and have the capability to do so efficiently. Hence, those that do are more likely to be very involved in their children's schooling and probably would be just as involved if they didn't home school them. It's a logical argument and you don't need to always cite studies to provide an argument (as though studies were the only way of substantiating anything).
The data to validate or invalidate this argument might even be present in the study, but would need to be split in a different manner. The problem is quantifying the involvement of parents who are not home schooling their children to determine if similarities arise.
It's computer science for a reason. You don't do a MSc or a PhD in CS to learn programming; a BSc is more than enough for that (and you'd be much better off going for an engineering degree or just a trade school). You do those to go above and beyond this, to do research and advance the field. Someone working on quantum computing in CS likely won't be a particularly good programmer (I have friends in those fields and their computer usage is limited to Mathematica or Matlab). Someone working on compiler design would run circles around your sorry ass and you wouldn't even realize it until a few days later (they're rather scary, but thankfully there's few of them). I, as a grad student in computer graphics, am competent at a variety of languages, but my strength is in graphics algorithms and linear algebra, not hacking out thousands of lines of code. Different fields, different specialties. This doesn't make any of those diploma worthless, as many people in the /. crowd often imply. CS can be as remote from programming and IT as physics in certain circumstances, yet I don't see the same spiel on physics.
All those algorithms and paradigms you're using right now didn't invent themselves. They were designed, often by mathematicians (before CS became a discipline of its own), and trickled down slowly to wider fields as applications for the initially abstract algorithms. It's not the only path for new discoveries, but it's a potent and common one.
It's amusing because you've perfectly repeated the myths that are constantly being trotted out against nuclear. Let's break them down.
1.a. Nuclear is expensive, there's no denying it, but well-designed, modern nuclear power plants can last for decades. Some designs can even run for decades off the same fuel! Compared with many other techs, nuclear is taking the "long view" approach to power generation.
1.b. Safety in a nuclear power plant isn't the most expensive thing, really. Just about every nuclear incident can be attributed to utter and complete negligence or downright wilful disregard of safety.
The Chernobyl incident was a result of an experiment taking place: before it had even begun, a series of problems and errors caused the reactor to malfunction (but not yet in any dangerous manner). The operators decided to press on, manually overriding many safety measures, ignoring the numerous alarms warning of abnormal parameters and forcing the reactor to a certain thermal level which was still below the minimum safe level for the experiment. When the experiment started with all of these problems, and due to the design's positive void coefficient, the reactor entered a positive feedback loop which caused the explosion. The aftermath was worsened by the political context; the operator and later the government did not want to be shown wrong, and thus they hid information or convinced themselves that things were not as bad as they were (for instance, the operator thought the reactor was intact despite graphite and fuel pieces lying in the building, despite all the dosimeters reading "off-scale", etc.). Many people died as a result, wearing no protection and taking no precautions.
The Fukushima incident was largely a result of corner-cutting. TEPCO repeatedly ignored problems with the plant's design, even going as far as falsifying safety reports. A study warning of issues with the plant's safety with regards to tsunamis was also ignored. Moreover, TEPCO and the Japanese government were extremely slow to react and communicate, again attempting to save face by not reporting the problems as they were but instead trying to minimize the dangers and issues until they were no longer able to hide them. Despite this, no deaths have been registered that were linked to the reactor's leak thus far. It's hard to find reliable numbers for estimates of long-term (cancer, etc.) death rates, but they seem to hover between 100 and 1000. Let's keep in mind that all of this happened through a magnitude 9 earthquake followed by a tsunami with waves as high as 40 meters that killed nearly 16,000 people.
Now, if we were to build new reactors, we'd have a few advantages. Most notably, modern designs completely side-step the notion a positive feedback loop and should be able to withstand complete coolant failure without meltdown. Note that I'm not saying they're perfect: we need to do more tests, but this will require funding and an actual political movement towards nuclear. It can be made safe and extremely resilient to human error, but not without appropriate oversight and research. China, India and others are already following this path due to their increasing energy demands.
2. Not necessarily. As you've said, nuclear is costly, which is a strong deterrent for any area which has another reliable energy source (be it solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc.) available at a cheaper up-front cost (even if the running costs may be higher). Furthermore, many technologies related to nuclear power do not lead into weapons and cannot transition into being used for weapons. If they can make the leap from, say, thorium to nuclear weapons, they could've made the leap from nothing to nuclear weapons too. Plus, as it is right now, you're basically saying that the West should have the ability to deny other countries access to a very powerful and efficient energy source all because we got there first.
Microsoft the corporation sadly seems to have forgotten about their research arm ages ago. All the cool stuff Microsoft Research makes tends to go die in a corner.
What, you think that consortium would've cooperated with the smaller players that weren't invited? Ha!
Cooperation only happens in the old boys' club. The smaller players get shafted.
There are dozens of kernels available for each phone out there. You can't just install any kernel, but you can most definitely make your own that'd work with your device, it's just a lot of work.
This is the first time I've ever heard of that, and I tend to lurk in the XDA boards a bit (I have a N4 too). Would you care to substantiate this claim?
Best forego Nexus devices entirely then. Google won't add an SD card: they WANT you to use the cloud. They'll bump the internal storage every so often (like the N5 which goes to 32gb), but no removable media. Not only would it add a cost to the devices when only a very small proportion of users would benefit, it'd go against their own services.
The Nexus devices are distilled a Google experience, both hardware and software. This means very connected (the Nexus were amongst the first phones with NFC, for instance), very reliant on the cloud and Google services and open to modification (largely software, mind). If you want something that differs, such as an SD card slot, I'm afraid the only choice is to go to one of the (sadly dwindling) hardware manufacturers still including one.
Except he's quite far from an academic. Academics tend to have a modicum of common sense and won't insult other academics for no apparent reason. Remember, many academics could run circles around your coding/physics/mathematics/ skills. The entire point of academia is what you seem to dislike: honing one particular skill to the very apex of its field, be it literature, mathematics, computer science, theology or whatever else. It's an important part of our society, as at this point our pool of knowledge is so large that we can't reasonably expect most people (or heck, most academics) to understand enough in multiple disciplines that they can actually do breakthroughs. It takes years of learning in a particular subset of a field to be able to move the field along.
It's not because you haven't noticed the influence of academia that it isn't there. You may simply have to look a bit further.
It's not about "turning every kid into a programmer", it's about exposing them to as many things as possible. This is how they can form opinions on what they want to do with their life, it's how they find hobbies and passions, it's how they learn. The more varied we can get education, the better.
The environmentalists you're talking about definitely don't want nuclear. But they also don't want coal. Or gas. Or oil. Or hydro. Wind and solar are iffy. Basically they want us to use dynamos strapped on bicycles and maybe geothermal.
In other words, they don't seem to realize that their uncompromising attitude is marginalizing them all while making the situation worse.
This is Slashdot and you're advocating... big government? *shudders*
(If it wasn't readily apparent, this comment is entirely sarcastic)
Exactly. Most reviews don't really cover long-term usage and that's where AMD has issues. I've gone AMD/ATI since the X series and I'm probably going to move to NVIDIA next time because I've had a lot of driver issues across numerous computers (including laptops). It's quite frustrating too because if their drivers were roughly on par with NVIDIA's, AMD would be crushing the competition.
Irrelevant. The Titan was never meant to be a consumer-level card, it's something that's meant to be sitting between the consumer (sub-700) market and the professional (1000+) cards. Its performance is within 10% of the GTX780, which makes it a bad buy even amongst NVIDIA cards. The real reason to buy one is that it has full speed double-precision, whereas all the consumer cards are significantly slower (an artificial restriction to somewhat justify the cost of professional cards).
I'm not saying that the whole slowing down double-precision stuff is great, but it really is an apples to oranges comparison. If you're a gamer, there's no reason to grab a Titan whatsoever.
Malarkey - I've actually seen the episode, and not only do they not put the car through anything more rigorous than other cars tested, Jeremy Clarkson (you know, the guy who would rather have his testicles eaten by a million angry bees than compliment an electric car) actually praised both the car and the company at the end of the show.
Not to mention, a wheel really did lock up at speed and almost kill the Stig, which Tesla readily admits did happen.
I'm specifically talking about the bit where they push the car around. It's been revealed that the whole thing was faked and the car did not inaccurately report remaining charge nor actually fail to do the whole run, they just filmed it like that anyway. I've not watched the whole thing (not a UK resident, not a car fan, and most certainly not a Top Gear viewer), but what I have seen of it points at a fair amount of "malarkey", as you say. I'm not saying the Tesla was perfect, remember? Just that Top Gear did some not-so-great things to prove a point.
So, he did but didn't overspeak the features of the vehicle then renege? Not really 100% what you're trying to say here.
I remember a lot of people thinking that the mileage figure was being overrated because you couldn't do that at -30C in the snow or that the batteries could never, ever catch fire or other such things. Exaggerations, basically, which I'd blame equally on Tesla's boasting and on critics' misrepresentations.
In reference to the Texas fiasco, no - it would be undeniably good if he was trying to get the law changed because it's wrong, but that's not the case - he was trying to get a special exception made for his company, and fuck everyone else.
Just like one would expect from a self-serving capitalist.
I can't find a source that says that, amusingly enough. What I did find seems to point at an exemption made for "American-owned manufacturers who exclusively make electric vehicles". To me, this sounds tailored to actually pass. Anything broader and the TADA would jump in guns blazing saying how they're destroying America. They're already opposing the bill with such a ludicrously small scope, imagine if the American-owned restriction wasn't there or the electric restriction wasn't there? Texas happens to be both ultra-patriotic and an oil baron's paradise, what did you expect?
As a Canadian, I'm well aware. However, in the context of the GP, laws outside the US are utterly meaningless.
"The speed of light", outside of pedantic Slashdot comments, is usually an accepted shorthand form for "the speed of light in a vacuum", just like "the speed of sound" would be "the speed of sound in air at STP".
By commenting, you stop being a Godlike observer and interact with the system, changing its state. Hence, you can no longer use your other Godlike powers.
He's got a massive ego, there's no denying it, but your rebuttal is quite terrible. The whole fiasco surrounding Top Gear was bad, but the Top Gear guys have their fair share of the blame: they did do this so that the car would end up behaving as they wanted it to behave (ie. badly), not as it actually did. It may be comedy, but it's still misrepresentation, and we are all fully aware that electric cars (or basically anything but a fuel car) is going to have to fight an uphill battle for adoption, so why make it harder for no good reason beyond your own obstinate vision of a car being noisy, gas guzzling machines?
Likewise, I don't recall him making excuses for the car's performance, either the Roadster or the S. There's been a lot of talk about both models and sometimes expectations went a bit overboard. They have a lot to prove, so they're going to defend their product tooth and nail, which honestly is to be expected (and if it were somebody you liked, you'd be the first taking their defence for being gutsy).
Lastly but most importantly, his wrestling with car sales rules in many states is undeniably good. These rules have been bent and twisted to hell and back by the incumbent auto makers and their dealers to make it nigh impossible to compete with any other business model. For a place like Slashdot, with so many promoters of the "FREE MARKET", this thing should cause almost unanimous uproar. Tesla wants to cut costs on incumbent, useless, overpriced dealerships and modernize how cars are delivered, supported and maintained. It may work, it may not work, who knows? Regardless, however, laws shouldn't be designed to stack everything against that model in such a fashion, and saying that it's just whining and not a serious concern is childish at best, utterly irresponsible at worst.
No, not the same thing at all. Hydrogen is usually produced directly from fossil fuels within the chemical reaction itself (see here for details). This is in opposition to electricity for batteries, which is just as good coming from a solar plant as it is from a coal or gas plant. Hydrogen can also be produced from electrolysis, which is actually the most popular way to talk about it in schools, but it's very inefficient and expensive in terms of energy.
Sadly, you can't apply that much correction in software. Warping can be done to a certain extent, but you cannot fix chromatic aberrations, which are inherent to any wide-angle lens, and other such optical effects. Even quality lenses would not eliminate everything and will still cause uneven pixel density across your field of view.
The Oculus Rift, like most VR head gear, is based off two small screens, one per eye. Those screens are rectangular and that's it. If you output a rectangular image, the image, once warped through lenses, will not have the same discretization: some pixels will be much larger than others. This cannot change even with higher quality lenses, and not distorting the image would completely eliminate the immersion and appeal. What happens instead is that the software outputs pre-warped images to mostly correct the problem, giving more pixels to certain areas of the image so that once warped everything is more or less equally dense. This comes at the cost of software preprocessing and not fully utilizing the available pixels on the screen (the OR's projected images aren't rectangular, so there are "wasted" pixels in the corners).
There was an article on another technology which holds a lot of promise, I think. It was demoed this summer by NVIDIA and is based off the principle of a lightfield. Instead of outputting two flat planes, the system outputs a higher dimensional image (can be 4D or 5D depending on the tech, I forget) which is used by a series of layered OLED displays to reproduce not only binocular vision, but also different depths. This allows for all sorts of nice new things, such as correcting vision in software from your prescription, or giving the eyes the ability to focus on different depths of the image. This is different from current technology, which only uses the brain's ability to interpret two images rendered from slightly different points as a 3D space. It should also help with the headaches and sickness people are getting from current 3D glasses and VR. The disadvantages are numerous, though: it takes a lot more computing power (we're talking about adding extra dimensions and fundamentally changing the rendering pipeline), it takes a lot more pixels to produce a small resolution image (even 1080p screens don't actually produce 1080p, a lot of the resolution is used to provide the depth) and it's a lot more expensive overall. Yet, I think it holds a lot of promise and I hope to see it in the future.
Despite having been tinkered with for decades, VR is still very much in its infancy. I think we'll see rapid evolution in the next decade or two as technology catches up with the dreams of people regarding virtual reality.
That's the last line of TFS. Tessellating the mesh so that triangles are approximately the size of a pixel is nearly as costly as raytracing, though.
Wait, what? Pornography is very much legal, but prostitution is illegal in all but one state: Nevada. Considering the GP is speaking of a man operating in California, he was acting illegally, assuming he is indeed guilty.
You're either confusing words or countries here. How the hell was this modded Informative in the first place?
Who's to say you don't have a sleeper program implanted into your very brain, designed to leak information in a non-obvious way when you do something bad?
TRUST NO ONE.
"There were no mass epidemics from snake oil."
That couldn't possibly be because the FDA has been doing its job, right? No way!