I also came from a top computer science school, but I only worked for a year, before having it out with a new senior developer (who wanted me to hold his hand when it was not my job to train asshole senior developers).
A professor happened to offer me a masters program the same week everything exploded at work. The happenstance of it was uncanny, so I took the opportunity without a second glance, and quit my job. My topic is hydrodynamics engineering. Numerical simulations for fluid dynamics is one of the most satisfying fields of research. It can be very graphically oriented, or purely math based.
If I were you, I would email a few professors in fields that interest you. Find their email address es by combing over the faculty lists at schools that interest you, and check out their personal webpages, since they will list a lot of the research they are currently involved in.
The other step is to check out major conferences like chi or siggraph (and some minor ones). Check out videos online, read some papers and presentations that interest you, and then contact the individuals involved.
The tipping point is indeed dangerous for MS. Gotta love Gladwell.
Unfortunately, it is erroneous for the masses to think osx is more secure than windows. It destroys part of my soul to think such misinformation floats around in Google's sea of employees. Windows with microsoft security essentials is much more secure than os x. Snow Leopard only just recently caught up to windows in regards to dep(nx bit) and aslr.
Unless you write your own firewall, there is no way to completely protect yourself, since only you actually know exactly which applications you use. The specific list of ports is almost impossible to predict without detailed user input, so the iptable is not easily compiled automagically.
Complete protection is obviously any browser which supports a total script blocking application like noscript (regardless of the os, though I highly condone linux usage). A packet filtering program (peerblock for windorks users) is also a must, and a proxy to hide yourself if you are worried about spooks.
I wish technology was not so directed by fashion... Is this a technology website or a fashion show? Did Apple pay you guys to list this article?
Apple spent billions developing their commercial development platform and hardware to ascertain their position in the celluar pda market, and Google has only focused on an open source platform (AOSP), relying on end user contributions to fix a lot of their problems with their system.
I recently purchased a Nexus One, over the iPhone, since I already had a iPod Touch that I use for development, and I wanted to play around with Android for a while. I doubted my purchase while I waited it to be delivered, but upon arrival, I am unbelievably impressed. I am sorry but the previous article saying that the apple A4 processor is going to be better than the Snapdragon is nonsense. It may be slightly more energy efficient, but I sincerely doubt the comments in regards to performance. Also the Android market has everything I could imagine. It is not as saturated with garbage applications, so future development is still lucrative. I agree that the sorting routines in the android market application are limited, but come on, that is such a pathetic argument. It will be no time before Google improves the Android market from comments such as these. And if we compare the proprietary software from Google over Apple, there is no comparison at all (Gesture Search, Voice Search, Places Directory, MAPS, Earth, YouTube, Translate, Sky, Goggles, etc). Remember Apple was reliant on Google letting them use their software with their product (MAPS, YouTube), it was not the other way around.
The main reason why in my opinion the android market has already become superior to the market is that there is no ambiguity in the legal and illegal markets. There is only the one android market (plus marketing websites which also provide application downloads and software repositories, which is something Apple seems to frown upon). Google provides full access to their os (minus default root privileges, which is in my opinion the obvious choice for both devices, since people should not go where they are unfamiliar), and there are applications for everything. For the iPhone to stack up, it needs to be jailbroken, but I do not want to worry about the incongruities with the AppStore and so called "illegal applications". But to Google, its all legal as it should be. I should probably have left that part out since this isn't YRO, and I do not want a bunch of capitalists (ie. wealthy people) throwing their opinions down my throat.
Apple are relying on the thought that some developers will only develop for their system due to the initial quality, but over time, as Android catches up to the iPhone OS and SDK, it may even surpass it.
Anyways, this is just my opinion. And I AM NOT GOOGLE biased. I LOVE the iPhone, but I just happen to think that the Nexus one with Android market is a better product that the iPhone and AppStore for various reasons that I stated above (plus the awesome live wallpapers). The Nexus One with Android is the developers dream (though Java makes me puke a little in the mouth, but so does objective C, though at least with the iPhone you can use C++ as well). I can't wait for the next generations of these devices when we have front facing cameras, which will then be fully fledged communicators and with depth perception applications from head tracking!
I can look for you, but it would be on one of a half dozen drives sitting on my shelf.
I was surprised they took it out of public circulation. Now you have to pay for it, or be associated with an institute that has access of the above IEEE digital library.
You should check if you have a document delivery service at your college or university, since they tend to be able to find most anything.
In regards to your comment, divergence is only a problem for ray tracing due to branching with SIMD. But the upcoming GTX 300 is going to have a MIMD hardware architecture, and we will then enter the world of photorealism. There may be some issues for CUDA at first, but I gather OpenCL is more than sufficient for the task at hand.
The second link requires access through a university network or personal account.
In regards to your last comment, I believe light fields are more significant for volumetric displays. The day I get to play with an interactive volumetric display is the day I die a happy man.
RTFact is based on a research paper from the University of Saarland. The paper describes the implementation of a generic real time ray tracing framework with source code in C++. The goal or objective is an interactive real-time ray tracer.
From the different implementations I researched (Manta from MIT, OpenRT, Arauna, RTSL, plus many more), RTFact is by far the most legitimate implementation. There are a million papers out there on interactive ray tracing, but only a few really take into consideration some of the major problems. I played around with OpenRT, but the amount of artifacts and aliasing really take away from the interactive experience. I have not played around with it recently, so maybe they now have an improved adaptive anti-aliasing solution, so my comments may be outdated.
The base code for RTFact is supposed go open source, but I have been waiting around for a long time without even a remote tidbit of information until this post. They actually even went backwards as they removed the paper from public distribution. Whenever it does go open source, it will be posted here. http://www.rtfact.org/
Now the generic ray tracing api/framework is RTFact, but from the sounds of the article posted above, they are actually integrating the scene graph RTSG into WebKit, which has also been developed by the university of Saarland. This is only speculation and I could be completely wrong.
If you want the original paper, the only link I could find from Google seems to be broken, but it may be due to the servers being overloaded by downloads after the announcement. I have the paper somewhere here on one of my drives, but it would take me a while to find, so if you want me to spend the time looking for it, you would need to give me some incentive by proving to me that you are in fact doing research.
In regards to your question, without a doubt, rasterization will eventually be replaced by ray tracing. Just look at Pixars evolution into photorealism. When the frame rates improve with better hardware for the general public, the framework will begin to be used in game engines, and not just scene graphs. The reasoning is aesthetic as much as it is technical. Ray tracing is truer to the physics of light than rasterization, so even though you can "fake" effects, the graphics will always be more appealing being rendered backwards than forwards. I do numerical simulation (with a background in CS from UW, where my heavy graphics knowledge comes from, plus a few years in real-time simulaton), and the true physics of the problem always gives a better solution than assumptions, approximations, correlations, and correction factors. It is a comment that my prof continually reiterates. For example, caustics will never look as good rastered as they do ray traced, since the ray tracer will map the full motion of the photons.
I could go on for hours, but I will leave it at this....
Awesome quote.
The stuff people imagine is hysterical.
For a robot to evolve a free will, it will be given to him by humans, so in essence it is not free at all. If robots are evil, it is because people are inherently evil and program it to think methodically instead of compassionately.
It is easy to program the functionalism of a human mind, but behaviorism will never be fully understood.
Computers are already superhuman in many ways, but to compose music, write classic literature, cook lavish meals, it will never ever happen. Keep dreaming dreamers.
Any creativity a robot contains would have come from our own instruction.
After I installed windows 7 ultimate it completely wiped my drive which had windows 7 RC, and installed some bloody system files.
I foolishly was using the drive as storage at the time. One of the worst losses I've been hit with.
I had disconnected all other drives during the actual install of windows 7 ultimate (since windows is infamous for altering boot sectors), and I did not reconnect the other drives until many startups afterwards. Still it managed to completely wipe the drive without me even noticing until a day later.
It could have been much worse. Thank God windows does not understand the ext fs.
(And yes, the steps Apple does to clamp down their devices from the users themselves, who want to explore and not through misuse, absolutely sucks and should be called on it every step of the way).
This is a pure contradiction to the initial part of the comment. Take an opinion and defend it. Those who stand on middle ground are devoured by the masses.
I initially developed for the iPhone on a Linux system, since at that point I still did not have a Mac and I had to go down for interviews at Apple. It was bad enough I had never used a Mac, but I needed to make sure I was at least familiar with their language of choice and their frameworks. All the components of the tool chain were free (which included the required frameworks downloaded with xcode).
If youth require specialty PCs to "tinker", and do not have a computer savvy older brother, uncle or father, they will NEVER be able to find the rights tools or the right hardware. Just because a system is open, does NOT make it harder to use. It is only harder to use since the term "open" is the antithesis to business.
With Apple's steps towards capitalism, they are going to keep so many youth from toying around with their new platforms. I imagine this may have severe reverse effects. It is a growing concern of mine that most youth do not care as much about how a system works, as long as it performs a task.
I want to make it clear I am not an Apple hater. I love OS X. I just hate the monster that Apple is becoming.
Flash H.264 hardware acceleration is only implemented with the Windows version of the plugin. It is not a feature for the Linux or OS X versions.
I'd say it will be a very short time before it is implemented in the Linux and OS X versions, but it will be even longer before the iPod Touch, iPhone, and the pathetic iPad, support flash.
I am not sure if this is a windows/adobe agreement, or if it is just another sign that flash is on its death bed.
I made the switch from Firefox to Chrome, and I have not looked back.
The idea of an individual process per tab intrigued me when Chrome was first released. The fluid tab/window transition is an awesome feature, which dragged me over to the other side.
I tend to have 3+ windows with 30+ tabs each. Is a individual process per page really the most viable solution. I want my web applications to be even distributed across all my cores, not abstract nesting.
Each page is free to crash on its own, though if a plugin crashes, the plugin crashes for all tabs. Sometimes, when I close 50+ tabs, Chrome takes a crap right in the middle of the parade (something Firefox did somewhat less of).
I seem to be completely satisfied with Chrome, and I have no reason to return. Implementing a feature I already have in Chrome is not going to excite me enough to make the switch back.
When browser games become even more popular, and they start accessing graphics hardware directly, individual processes are a good idea since they would nest the abstract layer.
The only thing that ever brings me back to Firefox are the wonderful addons like firebug, imacros, and noscript. But the large number of addons I had installed was also a determining factor for me to leave firefox, which I felt was kind of like leaving a wife after she puts on weight.
Your idea is right on the money, but too bad the money is not yet on the idea.
I doubt they will be allowed to even test the idea unless there is a high probability that a rock may hit the earth (one is 250 000 is rather low). I agree that some of the solutions are only temporary, and the asteroid could eventually converge back to its original path.
The idea of using light/heat to alter the course of the asteroid is pretty interesting. They may even paint the rock to absorb more energy. Your point about mining the rock could have dual benefits. We would collect valuable minerals, and it could even be used to offset the objects center of gravity to alter its course.
The Russians are definitely using Hollywood ideas, but they have said NO to using nukes (unless it becomes necessary). The other ideas are very practical, and can be pulled off with today/tomorrow's tech (all they need is the power of a car on a probe).
In my opinion, we are fools not to take them seriously.
If influencing the highest number of people in the world is the main factor in the poll, then I agree with it. A lot of people from some countries could care less about what is happening in other countries, but everyone in the world wants an iPod or iPhone! As sad as that is, it has directly affected culture everywhere.
Now, I wish the poll would reference the masterminds behind Steve Jobs like Steve "Evil-Eye" Bertrand, or many others who have rallied behind Steve Jobs to make one of the most powerful companies of the decade.
The iPod has influenced culture everywhere, where significant events mainly affect the nations involved. Since it is a finance poll, I'd say it would be the number of people in their market share.
Is this a joke? It has to be... well I hope it is.
I hate when stereoscopic imaging is refereed to as being three dimensional. It is just depth perception, which creates the appearance of three dimensional objects. I also would not call it an illusion, since it is the natural effect of having two eyes.
If you hold an apple in front of you, you can see more than 180 degrees around the apple. If you close one eye, you can only perceive a solid angle of 180 degrees. This is depth perception. This allows us to perceive the distance to the object. Our minds naturally calculate the distance by the degree of parallax perceived by our eyes.
Using anachrome glasses is not a viable solution for high end movies due to the reasons cited by other posts. Shutter glasses are a perfect solution, where each eye is shut for the drawing of the viewpoint for the other eye, which happens fast enough that both sockets for the glasses are perceived as being open all the time. The problem with shutter glasses is that they break easily. Our CG department at school had a system, but it was useless since the shutter glasses where broken almost immediately after they spent thousands of dollars for the system. They just kept the system as a relic afterwards. I hope they finally coughed up the money for new glasses.
The alternate solution for depth perception without any type of glasses linked in a comment below is a viable solution, but only for one viewer, and it is still not true 3D as the post claims it to be.
Another perfect solution for depth perception is virtual reality glasses, where there is a screen for each eye, but this is only realistic for video gaming, and is not a solution for viewing movies with friends, since we would look retarded and it would restrict communicating with friends while watching the movie (eyes speak just as much as the mouth).
There is another solution where there are two screens, and one is placed perpendicular to the other, and a transparent screen is placed at a 45 degree angle between the two screens, which reflects the frames drawn on each screen. This is a terrible solution for depth perception, and does not get us any closer to three dimensions.
The only real three dimensional solution is a volumetric display, but it also has limitations, since it has a limited viewing space, and horizons/backdrops would still have to be two dimensional. I wont even begin to discuss this, as it would require a much longer post, and there are multiple different solutions for this type of display. It will be a long time before we see these in theatre, since you could pay off God with less money than the cost for these systems.
Slashdot Mirror
I also came from a top computer science school, but I only worked for a year, before having it out with a new senior developer (who wanted me to hold his hand when it was not my job to train asshole senior developers). A professor happened to offer me a masters program the same week everything exploded at work. The happenstance of it was uncanny, so I took the opportunity without a second glance, and quit my job. My topic is hydrodynamics engineering. Numerical simulations for fluid dynamics is one of the most satisfying fields of research. It can be very graphically oriented, or purely math based. If I were you, I would email a few professors in fields that interest you. Find their email address es by combing over the faculty lists at schools that interest you, and check out their personal webpages, since they will list a lot of the research they are currently involved in. The other step is to check out major conferences like chi or siggraph (and some minor ones). Check out videos online, read some papers and presentations that interest you, and then contact the individuals involved.
The tipping point is indeed dangerous for MS. Gotta love Gladwell. Unfortunately, it is erroneous for the masses to think osx is more secure than windows. It destroys part of my soul to think such misinformation floats around in Google's sea of employees. Windows with microsoft security essentials is much more secure than os x. Snow Leopard only just recently caught up to windows in regards to dep(nx bit) and aslr. Unless you write your own firewall, there is no way to completely protect yourself, since only you actually know exactly which applications you use. The specific list of ports is almost impossible to predict without detailed user input, so the iptable is not easily compiled automagically. Complete protection is obviously any browser which supports a total script blocking application like noscript (regardless of the os, though I highly condone linux usage). A packet filtering program (peerblock for windorks users) is also a must, and a proxy to hide yourself if you are worried about spooks.
Apple spent billions developing their commercial development platform and hardware to ascertain their position in the celluar pda market, and Google has only focused on an open source platform (AOSP), relying on end user contributions to fix a lot of their problems with their system.
I recently purchased a Nexus One, over the iPhone, since I already had a iPod Touch that I use for development, and I wanted to play around with Android for a while. I doubted my purchase while I waited it to be delivered, but upon arrival, I am unbelievably impressed. I am sorry but the previous article saying that the apple A4 processor is going to be better than the Snapdragon is nonsense. It may be slightly more energy efficient, but I sincerely doubt the comments in regards to performance. Also the Android market has everything I could imagine. It is not as saturated with garbage applications, so future development is still lucrative. I agree that the sorting routines in the android market application are limited, but come on, that is such a pathetic argument. It will be no time before Google improves the Android market from comments such as these. And if we compare the proprietary software from Google over Apple, there is no comparison at all (Gesture Search, Voice Search, Places Directory, MAPS, Earth, YouTube, Translate, Sky, Goggles, etc). Remember Apple was reliant on Google letting them use their software with their product (MAPS, YouTube), it was not the other way around.
The main reason why in my opinion the android market has already become superior to the market is that there is no ambiguity in the legal and illegal markets. There is only the one android market (plus marketing websites which also provide application downloads and software repositories, which is something Apple seems to frown upon). Google provides full access to their os (minus default root privileges, which is in my opinion the obvious choice for both devices, since people should not go where they are unfamiliar), and there are applications for everything. For the iPhone to stack up, it needs to be jailbroken, but I do not want to worry about the incongruities with the AppStore and so called "illegal applications". But to Google, its all legal as it should be. I should probably have left that part out since this isn't YRO, and I do not want a bunch of capitalists (ie. wealthy people) throwing their opinions down my throat.
Apple are relying on the thought that some developers will only develop for their system due to the initial quality, but over time, as Android catches up to the iPhone OS and SDK, it may even surpass it.
Anyways, this is just my opinion. And I AM NOT GOOGLE biased. I LOVE the iPhone, but I just happen to think that the Nexus one with Android market is a better product that the iPhone and AppStore for various reasons that I stated above (plus the awesome live wallpapers). The Nexus One with Android is the developers dream (though Java makes me puke a little in the mouth, but so does objective C, though at least with the iPhone you can use C++ as well). I can't wait for the next generations of these devices when we have front facing cameras, which will then be fully fledged communicators and with depth perception applications from head tracking!
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4625376/4634600/04634631.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4634631&authDecision=-203
I can look for you, but it would be on one of a half dozen drives sitting on my shelf.
I was surprised they took it out of public circulation. Now you have to pay for it, or be associated with an institute that has access of the above IEEE digital library.
You should check if you have a document delivery service at your college or university, since they tend to be able to find most anything.
In regards to your comment, divergence is only a problem for ray tracing due to branching with SIMD. But the upcoming GTX 300 is going to have a MIMD hardware architecture, and we will then enter the world of photorealism. There may be some issues for CUDA at first, but I gather OpenCL is more than sufficient for the task at hand.
Here are some good papers on the subject by NVidia:
http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~timo/publications/aila2009hpg_paper.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1413968
The second link requires access through a university network or personal account.
In regards to your last comment, I believe light fields are more significant for volumetric displays. The day I get to play with an interactive volumetric display is the day I die a happy man.
If you are interested in light fields, check out:
http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay/
http://scripts.mit.edu/~raskar/lightfields
RTFact is based on a research paper from the University of Saarland. The paper describes the implementation of a generic real time ray tracing framework with source code in C++. The goal or objective is an interactive real-time ray tracer.
From the different implementations I researched (Manta from MIT, OpenRT, Arauna, RTSL, plus many more), RTFact is by far the most legitimate implementation. There are a million papers out there on interactive ray tracing, but only a few really take into consideration some of the major problems. I played around with OpenRT, but the amount of artifacts and aliasing really take away from the interactive experience. I have not played around with it recently, so maybe they now have an improved adaptive anti-aliasing solution, so my comments may be outdated.
The base code for RTFact is supposed go open source, but I have been waiting around for a long time without even a remote tidbit of information until this post. They actually even went backwards as they removed the paper from public distribution. Whenever it does go open source, it will be posted here.
http://www.rtfact.org/
Now the generic ray tracing api/framework is RTFact, but from the sounds of the article posted above, they are actually integrating the scene graph RTSG into WebKit, which has also been developed by the university of Saarland. This is only speculation and I could be completely wrong.
If you want some info on RTFact, check out:
http://tiny.cc/gHMrW
For info on RTSG, check out:
http://tiny.cc/3ezO8
If you want the original paper, the only link I could find from Google seems to be broken, but it may be due to the servers being overloaded by downloads after the announcement. I have the paper somewhere here on one of my drives, but it would take me a while to find, so if you want me to spend the time looking for it, you would need to give me some incentive by proving to me that you are in fact doing research.
In regards to your question, without a doubt, rasterization will eventually be replaced by ray tracing. Just look at Pixars evolution into photorealism. When the frame rates improve with better hardware for the general public, the framework will begin to be used in game engines, and not just scene graphs. The reasoning is aesthetic as much as it is technical. Ray tracing is truer to the physics of light than rasterization, so even though you can "fake" effects, the graphics will always be more appealing being rendered backwards than forwards. I do numerical simulation (with a background in CS from UW, where my heavy graphics knowledge comes from, plus a few years in real-time simulaton), and the true physics of the problem always gives a better solution than assumptions, approximations, correlations, and correction factors. It is a comment that my prof continually reiterates. For example, caustics will never look as good rastered as they do ray traced, since the ray tracer will map the full motion of the photons.
I could go on for hours, but I will leave it at this....
Awesome quote. The stuff people imagine is hysterical. For a robot to evolve a free will, it will be given to him by humans, so in essence it is not free at all. If robots are evil, it is because people are inherently evil and program it to think methodically instead of compassionately. It is easy to program the functionalism of a human mind, but behaviorism will never be fully understood. Computers are already superhuman in many ways, but to compose music, write classic literature, cook lavish meals, it will never ever happen. Keep dreaming dreamers. Any creativity a robot contains would have come from our own instruction.
After I installed windows 7 ultimate it completely wiped my drive which had windows 7 RC, and installed some bloody system files.
I foolishly was using the drive as storage at the time. One of the worst losses I've been hit with.
I had disconnected all other drives during the actual install of windows 7 ultimate (since windows is infamous for altering boot sectors), and I did not reconnect the other drives until many startups afterwards. Still it managed to completely wipe the drive without me even noticing until a day later.
It could have been much worse. Thank God windows does not understand the ext fs.
(And yes, the steps Apple does to clamp down their devices from the users themselves, who want to explore and not through misuse, absolutely sucks and should be called on it every step of the way).
This is a pure contradiction to the initial part of the comment. Take an opinion and defend it. Those who stand on middle ground are devoured by the masses.
I initially developed for the iPhone on a Linux system, since at that point I still did not have a Mac and I had to go down for interviews at Apple. It was bad enough I had never used a Mac, but I needed to make sure I was at least familiar with their language of choice and their frameworks. All the components of the tool chain were free (which included the required frameworks downloaded with xcode).
If youth require specialty PCs to "tinker", and do not have a computer savvy older brother, uncle or father, they will NEVER be able to find the rights tools or the right hardware. Just because a system is open, does NOT make it harder to use. It is only harder to use since the term "open" is the antithesis to business.
With Apple's steps towards capitalism, they are going to keep so many youth from toying around with their new platforms. I imagine this may have severe reverse effects. It is a growing concern of mine that most youth do not care as much about how a system works, as long as it performs a task.
I want to make it clear I am not an Apple hater. I love OS X. I just hate the monster that Apple is becoming.
Flash H.264 hardware acceleration is only implemented with the Windows version of the plugin. It is not a feature for the Linux or OS X versions. I'd say it will be a very short time before it is implemented in the Linux and OS X versions, but it will be even longer before the iPod Touch, iPhone, and the pathetic iPad, support flash. I am not sure if this is a windows/adobe agreement, or if it is just another sign that flash is on its death bed.
All I can picture is the tiny conductor from shining time station driving around the toy train as the thermal reaction is occurring.
I made the switch from Firefox to Chrome, and I have not looked back. The idea of an individual process per tab intrigued me when Chrome was first released. The fluid tab/window transition is an awesome feature, which dragged me over to the other side. I tend to have 3+ windows with 30+ tabs each. Is a individual process per page really the most viable solution. I want my web applications to be even distributed across all my cores, not abstract nesting. Each page is free to crash on its own, though if a plugin crashes, the plugin crashes for all tabs. Sometimes, when I close 50+ tabs, Chrome takes a crap right in the middle of the parade (something Firefox did somewhat less of). I seem to be completely satisfied with Chrome, and I have no reason to return. Implementing a feature I already have in Chrome is not going to excite me enough to make the switch back. When browser games become even more popular, and they start accessing graphics hardware directly, individual processes are a good idea since they would nest the abstract layer. The only thing that ever brings me back to Firefox are the wonderful addons like firebug, imacros, and noscript. But the large number of addons I had installed was also a determining factor for me to leave firefox, which I felt was kind of like leaving a wife after she puts on weight.
Your idea is right on the money, but too bad the money is not yet on the idea. I doubt they will be allowed to even test the idea unless there is a high probability that a rock may hit the earth (one is 250 000 is rather low). I agree that some of the solutions are only temporary, and the asteroid could eventually converge back to its original path. The idea of using light/heat to alter the course of the asteroid is pretty interesting. They may even paint the rock to absorb more energy. Your point about mining the rock could have dual benefits. We would collect valuable minerals, and it could even be used to offset the objects center of gravity to alter its course. The Russians are definitely using Hollywood ideas, but they have said NO to using nukes (unless it becomes necessary). The other ideas are very practical, and can be pulled off with today/tomorrow's tech (all they need is the power of a car on a probe). In my opinion, we are fools not to take them seriously.
If influencing the highest number of people in the world is the main factor in the poll, then I agree with it. A lot of people from some countries could care less about what is happening in other countries, but everyone in the world wants an iPod or iPhone! As sad as that is, it has directly affected culture everywhere. Now, I wish the poll would reference the masterminds behind Steve Jobs like Steve "Evil-Eye" Bertrand, or many others who have rallied behind Steve Jobs to make one of the most powerful companies of the decade. The iPod has influenced culture everywhere, where significant events mainly affect the nations involved. Since it is a finance poll, I'd say it would be the number of people in their market share.
I hate when stereoscopic imaging is refereed to as being three dimensional. It is just depth perception, which creates the appearance of three dimensional objects. I also would not call it an illusion, since it is the natural effect of having two eyes.
If you hold an apple in front of you, you can see more than 180 degrees around the apple. If you close one eye, you can only perceive a solid angle of 180 degrees. This is depth perception. This allows us to perceive the distance to the object. Our minds naturally calculate the distance by the degree of parallax perceived by our eyes.
Using anachrome glasses is not a viable solution for high end movies due to the reasons cited by other posts. Shutter glasses are a perfect solution, where each eye is shut for the drawing of the viewpoint for the other eye, which happens fast enough that both sockets for the glasses are perceived as being open all the time. The problem with shutter glasses is that they break easily. Our CG department at school had a system, but it was useless since the shutter glasses where broken almost immediately after they spent thousands of dollars for the system. They just kept the system as a relic afterwards. I hope they finally coughed up the money for new glasses.
The alternate solution for depth perception without any type of glasses linked in a comment below is a viable solution, but only for one viewer, and it is still not true 3D as the post claims it to be.
Another perfect solution for depth perception is virtual reality glasses, where there is a screen for each eye, but this is only realistic for video gaming, and is not a solution for viewing movies with friends, since we would look retarded and it would restrict communicating with friends while watching the movie (eyes speak just as much as the mouth).
There is another solution where there are two screens, and one is placed perpendicular to the other, and a transparent screen is placed at a 45 degree angle between the two screens, which reflects the frames drawn on each screen. This is a terrible solution for depth perception, and does not get us any closer to three dimensions.
The only real three dimensional solution is a volumetric display, but it also has limitations, since it has a limited viewing space, and horizons/backdrops would still have to be two dimensional. I wont even begin to discuss this, as it would require a much longer post, and there are multiple different solutions for this type of display. It will be a long time before we see these in theatre, since you could pay off God with less money than the cost for these systems.