The purpose of the GPL isn't to prevent you from making a profit on the fruits of your own labor - you can do that by writing your own applications and putting your own license on them.
The GPL prevents you from making a profit on the fruits of OTHER people's labors (w/o their permission) - and you are lying if you say otherwise.
If you racked up $25k on your credit card in chocolate & cocoa, you'd be dead of a heart attack from the sugar & caffeine - hardly the condition where you could personally pursue a lawsuit:)
(I guess if you were buying it for OTHER people - but then it would be difficult to claim personal injury...hmmm...AGGH! TOO MUCH ANALYSIS!)
Are you referring to the Synthesis operating system designed by Henry Masselin for a dual-processor 68xxx machine? I read his thesis as part of my graduates studies - VERY cool ideas - so many of them, in fact, I could hardly believe they all came out of the same person. I have a copy of his thesis somewhere on one of my bookshelves...
Last I heard, he was working in R&D somewhere & trading piggy-back rides w/his coworkers (no, I'm not kidding about the piggyback rides). I think there is a small group of researchers collaborating across the world trying to figure out all the ways they can use the ideas that he implemented.
"Legal" expiration dates
on
Dumb Laws
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· Score: 2
Too bad it wasn't part of the Constitution (all of them) that all laws have to have expiration dates - each law has to be thoroughly audited by the appropriate legislature & repassed to maintain its existence.
That situation might be a good incentive for the Congressional Critters(tm?) to keep the laws simple, so they can review them w/in their own lifetimes...
I don't see credits indicating that a team of programmers is putting their egos "above" the rest of the company - I see it as being proud of their achievements.
To deny those people primarily responsible for a product recognition smacks of the type of reasoning where people in large organizations seek to obscure the source of information or of a decision in order to prevent responsibility from being attached to any particular individuals.
There were two issues which kind of made sense:
1. Too many people contributed to each product, making it impossible to credit everyone.
I guess this is a possibility, although I suspect that if you don't include the people outside of the main project (such as administration or the people who did tools & toolkits), then the number of people involved in generating an individual product is probably not too big. Certainly not any larger than a large Hollywood movie production - and they have people up the wazoo listed on the ending credits.
2. Competitors using the credits to target the developers for recruitment.
This is probably a valid concern - although it could probably be argued that if a competitor is able to entice a developer away from a company, then that company either didn't compensate the developer enough or the morale was too poor to instill any loyalty for company. By "hiding" the names of their developers from the public, the company is trying to keep their labor costs lower by keeping their developers from temptation.
I'm wonder if a company could use a clever marketing ploy and actually play UP the reputations of the developers involved with popular products, so that people would feel that products associated with that developer are "higher quality" than something which is generic. (I guess this kind of fits what Transmeta is doing w/Torvalds reputation.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
Perhaps they were saying something like: "Well, since we've defined cryptography as a munition, if you give cryptography to foreigners, you're giving them munitions. This qualifies as providing them the means to wage war against the United States (since it's a munition), therefore we're going to investigate you for treason!
I always thought it would be kind of cool (although dangerous) to use virus-like distribution mechanisms to distribute small binary bug patches:)
Re:"Those who refuse to see are the true blind..."
on
Perverts and Consumers
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· Score: 2
Look at the Federal government -- if it were "controlled by corporate interest" it'd be tearing down regulations left and right, going towards flat taxes, not trying to legislate *any* benefits, and increasing the DoD at the expense of social spending instead of the exact reverse.
You've got a bizarre view of what corporations & rich individuals want in the way of laws. They don't want a lack of laws - they want laws that benefit THEM & hurt their competitors. That's why we have such a nightmare of regulations - every company that can make a congressional puppet dance keeps trying to push through THEIR view of what's best for them, and worst for their competitors.
Actually, I can see setting up a regularly delivery of staples (I assume that a service with plenty of advance notice will be able to fulfil orders completely!) - and reserving the trips to the grocery store/deli when the "I've gotta have something different!" urge strikes...
Since it seems that goverments & corporations have the resources & inclination to collect any and all information they can about the general populace, regardless of whether the populace likes it or not, it seems like the only real alternative to defend our own rights is to fight fire with fire - collect, organize & share information on those who would attempt to be our "overlords", continually audit their behavior & organize "corrective" behavior where warranted.
The media somewhat fulfills this role, but the mainstream media seems to have been greatly corrupted by the influence of their sponsors (i.e., business) and the resultant coverage tends to be biased to avoid offending those sponsors. (It defies common sense that a media outlet will REGULARLY defy their sponsors - they might occasionally run something to show their independence, but in general they will not risk the revenue stream which allows them to exist.)
There are lots of little advocacy & watchdog groups which are attempting this function - but they aren't working together & the general populace is not taking an active part in supporting their activities, therefore their overall effect is somewhat insignificant.
I guess an effective system would provide a way a way to organize & tie together the efforts of these groups, including generating reports for & accepting input from the general populace. It would be decentralized & have some kind of builtin self-checking feedbacks to resist corruption of the information. Anonymous whistleblowing would be a necessity, along with validation through cross-reference & investigation, to try and dig out the dirty "secrets" that students of Machievelli (sp?) are so adamant about hiding.
Finally, they recently figured out how to make vertical transistors (unlike the horizontal ones used today) which can be stacked in 3 dimensions. So I think we'll see logic and memory chips using these principles in a relatively short time - 5 or 10 years is my guess.
Cool - do you have a reference with a general description of the technique they used to make these vertical transistors?
Concerning how long you want to live, go ahead and live 500, 1,000, 5,000 years..you'll literally have to live with it..I just know I won't and don't want to be around to see it.I don't see what the problem is - you live until you don't want to, then you shut down the nanotech & start dying. You get a choice - unlike today.Just ponder the implications of being able to directly modify/"implant" memories..it's bad enough when propoganda and rewriting history causes events to be "forgotten", imagine actually forgetting the event, did it even happen, then?Potentially quite a big issue. If someone WAS going around using nanotech to modify/erase people's memories, would it be possible to create nanotech to protect yourself from such a malicious act? ("backup & restore your brain!")And as for death..I don't see a natural death as horrible (of course, what constitutes a "natural" death is a debate considerably out of the scope of this thread)..I think it'd be more horrible to watch your friends and lovers age and die while you stay perfectly healthy..and how long could a body last until it became totally dependent on nanotech for survival, to the point where death would be instant should the nanobots be partially or totally removed?I don't see "personal" nano technology evolving this way, it sounds too much like one of those corny occult movies where the villian is sustaining himself beyond "natural" means by existing on the life force of other creatures, and dies instantaneously when he can't get his fix.First, if nanotech is widely available, then your friends/lovers/family/etc will have just as much chance to live long as you do.Second, if nanotech is just being used to continually maintain & repair an existing body, then it won't kill you if they were removed (given that the removal process doesn't kill you) - your body would just keep doing what it was doing BEFORE it had the nanotech. If the nanotech has combined with your body to the point where your body no longer does the things it did before - well, then the nanotech has become part of your body, and removing it is just the same is murdering you. I don't see any real ethical difference between murdering you with or w/o nanotech.
Ye Gods (& Goddesses:) - imagine what the synthesis system is going to look like to be able to create a circuit using nano-sized logic gates.
I don't think today's tools are up to it - at the very least, for modeling purposes, there will have to be a quantum-model-simulator like [H]SPICE (QSPICE anyone?:).
Place & route will be on a massive scale for random logic. Not only will the interconnect dwarf the effects of the nano-gates, but you'll have to model effects like quantum-tunneling & other bizarre features.
Tools will have to automatically provide circuitry with fault tolerance, since a cosmic ray blasting through a molecule-sized switch is going to be a catastrophic event...
I suspect that for large arrays of nano-components, there will be a lot of borrowing from the computations that crystallographers do, since they are used to deriving the gross characteristics of substances by mathematically extending "unit cells" ad infinitum.
A lot of the work of the tools will be to just figure out the "self-assembly" steps - do this to make THIS layer self-assemble, then do this to make THAT layer self-assemble, etc., w/o them interfering with each other.
If all the self-assembly steps are low-power, I wonder if it will be possible to finally make these logic circuits in a cube form? (Building up the cube layer-by-layer, instead of starting w/raw silicon wafer & eating layers away like we currently do).
There are so many things that become possible when this technology reaches some threshholds, that I suspect a lot of people "overload" and start tuning out the potential issues because their brains don't want to deal w/all the possible changes which might occur:)
Unlike the distributed.net people, the client is running on real data of which there is a limited supply. They don't want it to be any faster, because they'd start to run out of data blocks.
Now THIS brings up the possibility of issuing the same data blocks to multiple clients & cross-checking the results to improve the confidence of the results!
3. A computer program, even one that implements genetic programming, is a mechanical process. It is entirely deterministic, and can be simulated by anyone, assuming they have the CPU resources (especially if the program's open source!). Thus, anything this program thinks up cannot possibly be "nonobvious"; a nonintelligent computer just came up with it.
This doesn't really hold up under the "common sense" approach of going around to a number of experts in the field & asking "Does this seem non-obvious to you?", although you could probably make a good legal case for it.
Actually, in a world where technology can make a totalitarian-leaning government (or any other large organization/company with control-freak tendencies) nearly omniscient when keeping tabs on its own populace, the only hope that the populace has to preserve its own rights is to cooperate with each other & use technology to keep tabs on the "surveiller".
The many various little consumer advocacy/corporate/government watchdog groups are a beginning to this kind of self-defensive reaction, but they will have to cooperate with each other in the same way that the government agencies & the big corporate lobbies do in order to be truly effective.
While it's true that those agencies & lobbies have a LOT more money than any of the advocacy groups, almost by definition there are a LOT more of us "non-rich" people than otherwise, and if there was more cooperation going on, we could provide enough balance to their power to keep them from running amuck.
Actually, aside from the MP3 angle, the concept seems to be a very interesting, crude start at a "cooperative", distributed archive - the Napster "site" servers (the servers used to find sites) are the equivalent of DNS servesr (except by MP3 names instead of site names).
If you could broaden this idea beyond MP3s, and have "site" servers performing categorization (and perhaps specializing in certain categories of information), you'd have a very decentralized, distributed archive & retrieval system.
Actually, the peer review board doesn't have to "leak" information to the competition - just like today's patents, when they've been granted, they get published for EVERYONE to look at. By law, though, if you use the idea described in the patent for non-personal reasons, you have to cut a license with the patent holder.
Besides, there's nothing stopping somebody from publishing their idea w/o peer review - it just means that they won't get the patent & be able to monopolize the idea. You could probably argue that if there was SUCH a good idea, it probably shouldn't be patented anyway.
If that person refuses to publish the idea because they can't get a patent, then we're no worse off than we were before (since we don't even know what the idea was) - and they don't get any benefit from their idea.
The problem with peer review is that you'd need a huge number of experts. You're not just looking at prior art, you're looking at practicality. It's a nice idea, and it'd be seriously cool if it worked, but I can't see it happening any time soon.
How is this handled under scientific review? I think that the decision making is distributed over a large number of journals & panels of "peers", plus each discovery is further categorized by the various "specialties" of the scientific disciplines. This doesn't seem too unreasonable for a engineering "peer" review system - I'm sure that the various engineering societies for the different industries/disciplines could be instrumental in kickstarting a process like this.
The major hump I could see in implementation would be those members of society who have a vested interest in maintaining the current system (companies with large portfolios & patent lawyers, since a peer-review system would invalidate large sections of the law which they use to declare tiny little changes in wording "innovative").
On the flip side, small companies & individuals will be that more hesitant to defend their patents because they won't be able to afford the upfront cost of the legal battle.
I think that any solution has to treat the large & small equally when judging the "innovativeness" of an invention.
I think there should be a huge fine for dumb patents that have prior art regardless of whether the applicant knew about it. (They never will have known.) That would encourage some real research. Or at the very least have a protected pre-patentperiod so someone can show evidence of prior art.
I think this punitive technique will have the effect of preventing small companies & individuals w/o the resources to do this kind of research from filing patents - the only companies with the resources to do this will be large companies, or large "patent research" firms which will cost a lot of money. This would be bad, considering that much of the original motivation for patents was to protect the little guys from the big guys (although it doesn't seem to have worked out that way recently).
I mentioned this in a previous thread, but now I get a default score of 2 - so I'll mention it again and hope I get some more comments:)
There really ought to be a formalized "peer review" system for patents. It doesn't necessarily have to model the scientific review process (although that's probably a place to start). Preferably, you should be able to take government out of the loop except for maybe the enforcement of the resultant patents.
Anything that can pass the/. "laugh" or "scorn" test (using/. as a typical set of "peers" for software) would probably qualify as innovative - and anything that got a majority "COOL!" reaction would probably be REALLY innovative to the jaded eyes on this forum...
I agree with this mostly, except that (esp. for DOS & early Windows systems) even decent programmers had to "end-run" around the API occasionally because it wasn't providing the basics necessary for certain kinds of functionality.
This sounds like it could be a very popular MP3 player - the manufacturers already have many different styles of Minidisc hardware available, so their engineering cost should be much smaller & be more refined than if they were starting from scratch.
How many minutes of MP3 can a Minidisc hold, anyway?
I'd agree with this - and take it a little farther. The market will hit that "leveling"-off curve when your eyes can't tell the difference between the display & reality (including the "3d-ness" of the images). This will include the processing required to make a 3d-world for each eye, and the display technology.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of the GPL isn't to prevent you from making a profit on the fruits of your own labor - you can do that by writing your own applications and putting your own license on them.
The GPL prevents you from making a profit on the fruits of OTHER people's labors (w/o their permission) - and you are lying if you say otherwise.
If you racked up $25k on your credit card in chocolate & cocoa, you'd be dead of a heart attack from the sugar & caffeine - hardly the condition where you could personally pursue a lawsuit :)
(I guess if you were buying it for OTHER people - but then it would be difficult to claim personal injury...hmmm...AGGH! TOO MUCH ANALYSIS!)
Are you referring to the Synthesis operating system designed by Henry Masselin for a dual-processor 68xxx machine? I read his thesis as part of my graduates studies - VERY cool ideas - so many of them, in fact, I could hardly believe they all came out of the same person. I have a copy of his thesis somewhere on one of my bookshelves...
Last I heard, he was working in R&D somewhere & trading piggy-back rides w/his coworkers (no, I'm not kidding about the piggyback rides). I think there is a small group of researchers collaborating across the world trying to figure out all the ways they can use the ideas that he implemented.
Too bad it wasn't part of the Constitution (all of them) that all laws have to have expiration dates - each law has to be thoroughly audited by the appropriate legislature & repassed to maintain its existence.
That situation might be a good incentive for the Congressional Critters(tm?) to keep the laws simple, so they can review them w/in their own lifetimes...
I don't see credits indicating that a team of programmers is putting their egos "above" the rest of the company - I see it as being proud of their achievements.
To deny those people primarily responsible for a product recognition smacks of the type of reasoning where people in large organizations seek to obscure the source of information or of a decision in order to prevent responsibility from being attached to any particular individuals.
There were two issues which kind of made sense:
1. Too many people contributed to each product, making it impossible to credit everyone.
I guess this is a possibility, although I suspect that if you don't include the people outside of the main project (such as administration or the people who did tools & toolkits), then the number of people involved in generating an individual product is probably not too big. Certainly not any larger than a large Hollywood movie production - and they have people up the wazoo listed on the ending credits.
2. Competitors using the credits to target the developers for recruitment.
This is probably a valid concern - although it could probably be argued that if a competitor is able to entice a developer away from a company, then that company either didn't compensate the developer enough or the morale was too poor to instill any loyalty for company. By "hiding" the names of their developers from the public, the company is trying to keep their labor costs lower by keeping their developers from temptation.
I'm wonder if a company could use a clever marketing ploy and actually play UP the reputations of the developers involved with popular products, so that people would feel that products associated with that developer are "higher quality" than something which is generic. (I guess this kind of fits what Transmeta is doing w/Torvalds reputation.
Perhaps they were saying something like: "Well, since we've defined cryptography as a munition, if you give cryptography to foreigners, you're giving them munitions. This qualifies as providing them the means to wage war against the United States (since it's a munition), therefore we're going to investigate you for treason!
I always thought it would be kind of cool (although dangerous) to use virus-like distribution mechanisms to distribute small binary bug patches :)
You've got a bizarre view of what corporations & rich individuals want in the way of laws. They don't want a lack of laws - they want laws that benefit THEM & hurt their competitors. That's why we have such a nightmare of regulations - every company that can make a congressional puppet dance keeps trying to push through THEIR view of what's best for them, and worst for their competitors.
Actually, I can see setting up a regularly delivery of staples (I assume that a service with plenty of advance notice will be able to fulfil orders completely!) - and reserving the trips to the grocery store/deli when the "I've gotta have something different!" urge strikes...
Since it seems that goverments & corporations have the resources & inclination to collect any and all information they can about the general populace, regardless of whether the populace likes it or not, it seems like the only real alternative to defend our own rights is to fight fire with fire - collect, organize & share information on those who would attempt to be our "overlords", continually audit their behavior & organize "corrective" behavior where warranted.
The media somewhat fulfills this role, but the mainstream media seems to have been greatly corrupted by the influence of their sponsors (i.e., business) and the resultant coverage tends to be biased to avoid offending those sponsors. (It defies common sense that a media outlet will REGULARLY defy their sponsors - they might occasionally run something to show their independence, but in general they will not risk the revenue stream which allows them to exist.)
There are lots of little advocacy & watchdog groups which are attempting this function - but they aren't working together & the general populace is not taking an active part in supporting their activities, therefore their overall effect is somewhat insignificant.
I guess an effective system would provide a way a way to organize & tie together the efforts of these groups, including generating reports for & accepting input from the general populace. It would be decentralized & have some kind of builtin self-checking feedbacks to resist corruption of the information. Anonymous whistleblowing would be a necessity, along with validation through cross-reference & investigation, to try and dig out the dirty "secrets" that students of Machievelli (sp?) are so adamant about hiding.
*sigh* nice daydream, eh?
Cool - do you have a reference with a general description of the technique they used to make these vertical transistors?
Concerning how long you want to live, go ahead and live 500, 1,000, 5,000 years..you'll literally have to live with it..I just know I won't and don't want to be around to see it.I don't see what the problem is - you live until you don't want to, then you shut down the nanotech & start dying. You get a choice - unlike today.Just ponder the implications of being able to directly modify/"implant" memories..it's bad enough when propoganda and rewriting history causes events to be "forgotten", imagine actually forgetting the event, did it even happen, then?Potentially quite a big issue. If someone WAS going around using nanotech to modify/erase people's memories, would it be possible to create nanotech to protect yourself from such a malicious act? ("backup & restore your brain!")And as for death..I don't see a natural death as horrible (of course, what constitutes a "natural" death is a debate considerably out of the scope of this thread)..I think it'd be more horrible to watch your friends and lovers age and die while you stay perfectly healthy..and how long could a body last until it became totally dependent on nanotech for survival, to the point where death would be instant should the nanobots be partially or totally removed?I don't see "personal" nano technology evolving this way, it sounds too much like one of those corny occult movies where the villian is sustaining himself beyond "natural" means by existing on the life force of other creatures, and dies instantaneously when he can't get his fix.First, if nanotech is widely available, then your friends/lovers/family/etc will have just as much chance to live long as you do.Second, if nanotech is just being used to continually maintain & repair an existing body, then it won't kill you if they were removed (given that the removal process doesn't kill you) - your body would just keep doing what it was doing BEFORE it had the nanotech. If the nanotech has combined with your body to the point where your body no longer does the things it did before - well, then the nanotech has become part of your body, and removing it is just the same is murdering you. I don't see any real ethical difference between murdering you with or w/o nanotech.
Ye Gods (& Goddesses :) - imagine what the synthesis system is going to look like to be able to create a circuit using nano-sized logic gates.
:).
:)
I don't think today's tools are up to it - at the very least, for modeling purposes, there will have to be a quantum-model-simulator like [H]SPICE (QSPICE anyone?
Place & route will be on a massive scale for random logic. Not only will the interconnect dwarf the effects of the nano-gates, but you'll have to model effects like quantum-tunneling & other bizarre features.
Tools will have to automatically provide circuitry with fault tolerance, since a cosmic ray blasting through a molecule-sized switch is going to be a catastrophic event...
I suspect that for large arrays of nano-components, there will be a lot of borrowing from the computations that crystallographers do, since they are used to deriving the gross characteristics of substances by mathematically extending "unit cells" ad infinitum.
A lot of the work of the tools will be to just figure out the "self-assembly" steps - do this to make THIS layer self-assemble, then do this to make THAT layer self-assemble, etc., w/o them interfering with each other.
If all the self-assembly steps are low-power, I wonder if it will be possible to finally make these logic circuits in a cube form? (Building up the cube layer-by-layer, instead of starting w/raw silicon wafer & eating layers away like we currently do).
There are so many things that become possible when this technology reaches some threshholds, that I suspect a lot of people "overload" and start tuning out the potential issues because their brains don't want to deal w/all the possible changes which might occur
Now THIS brings up the possibility of issuing the same data blocks to multiple clients & cross-checking the results to improve the confidence of the results!
This doesn't really hold up under the "common sense" approach of going around to a number of experts in the field & asking "Does this seem non-obvious to you?", although you could probably make a good legal case for it.
Actually, in a world where technology can make a totalitarian-leaning government (or any other large organization/company with control-freak tendencies) nearly omniscient when keeping tabs on its own populace, the only hope that the populace has to preserve its own rights is to cooperate with each other & use technology to keep tabs on the "surveiller".
The many various little consumer advocacy/corporate/government watchdog groups are a beginning to this kind of self-defensive reaction, but they will have to cooperate with each other in the same way that the government agencies & the big corporate lobbies do in order to be truly effective.
While it's true that those agencies & lobbies have a LOT more money than any of the advocacy groups, almost by definition there are a LOT more of us "non-rich" people than otherwise, and if there was more cooperation going on, we could provide enough balance to their power to keep them from running amuck.
Actually, aside from the MP3 angle, the concept seems to be a very interesting, crude start at a "cooperative", distributed archive - the Napster "site" servers (the servers used to find sites) are the equivalent of DNS servesr (except by MP3 names instead of site names).
If you could broaden this idea beyond MP3s, and have "site" servers performing categorization (and perhaps specializing in certain categories of information), you'd have a very decentralized, distributed archive & retrieval system.
Actually, the peer review board doesn't have to "leak" information to the competition - just like today's patents, when they've been granted, they get published for EVERYONE to look at. By law, though, if you use the idea described in the patent for non-personal reasons, you have to cut a license with the patent holder.
Besides, there's nothing stopping somebody from publishing their idea w/o peer review - it just means that they won't get the patent & be able to monopolize the idea. You could probably argue that if there was SUCH a good idea, it probably shouldn't be patented anyway.
If that person refuses to publish the idea because they can't get a patent, then we're no worse off than we were before (since we don't even know what the idea was) - and they don't get any benefit from their idea.
How is this handled under scientific review? I think that the decision making is distributed over a large number of journals & panels of "peers", plus each discovery is further categorized by the various "specialties" of the scientific disciplines. This doesn't seem too unreasonable for a engineering "peer" review system - I'm sure that the various engineering societies for the different industries/disciplines could be instrumental in kickstarting a process like this.
The major hump I could see in implementation would be those members of society who have a vested interest in maintaining the current system (companies with large portfolios & patent lawyers, since a peer-review system would invalidate large sections of the law which they use to declare tiny little changes in wording "innovative").
On the flip side, small companies & individuals will be that more hesitant to defend their patents because they won't be able to afford the upfront cost of the legal battle.
I think that any solution has to treat the large & small equally when judging the "innovativeness" of an invention.
I think this punitive technique will have the effect of preventing small companies & individuals w/o the resources to do this kind of research from filing patents - the only companies with the resources to do this will be large companies, or large "patent research" firms which will cost a lot of money. This would be bad, considering that much of the original motivation for patents was to protect the little guys from the big guys (although it doesn't seem to have worked out that way recently).
I mentioned this in a previous thread, but now I get a default score of 2 - so I'll mention it again and hope I get some more comments :)
/. "laugh" or "scorn" test (using /. as a typical set of "peers" for software) would probably qualify as innovative - and anything that got a majority "COOL!" reaction would probably be REALLY innovative to the jaded eyes on this forum...
There really ought to be a formalized "peer review" system for patents. It doesn't necessarily have to model the scientific review process (although that's probably a place to start). Preferably, you should be able to take government out of the loop except for maybe the enforcement of the resultant patents.
Anything that can pass the
I agree with this mostly, except that (esp. for DOS & early Windows systems) even decent programmers had to "end-run" around the API occasionally because it wasn't providing the basics necessary for certain kinds of functionality.
This sounds like it could be a very popular MP3 player - the manufacturers already have many different styles of Minidisc hardware available, so their engineering cost should be much smaller & be more refined than if they were starting from scratch.
How many minutes of MP3 can a Minidisc hold, anyway?
I'd agree with this - and take it a little farther. The market will hit that "leveling"-off curve when your eyes can't tell the difference between the display & reality (including the "3d-ness" of the images). This will include the processing required to make a 3d-world for each eye, and the display technology.