I've had people ask me which planet is the closest one to Earth. I now stand corrected. I will now tell them that the order of the is Venus, Mercury, Earth, Mars, etc. and be properly geocentric about it.

A long time.

There's some info on the Wikipedia page regarding this. Seems feasible.

It's traveling fast, but I don't think so fast that a probe couldn't catch up with it if launched in the not too distant future. Could this object be strange enough to be worth pursuing? Even if the object is "natural", it could be an amazing target to investigate for all kinds of other reasons.

I think the reasons why VR is not more successful is simply because the expectations are too high for what is basically a specialized niche peripheral for geeks, not a popular and sweeping social movement. That kind of thinking is just silly. I'm one of those "rounding error" enthusiasts, but even I only pull out the VR gear for very specific reasons. I do most of my gaming on the ordinary platforms, but pull out the VR when I want something different. There are no equivalents to titles like Beat Saber, Space Pirate Trainer, Apollo 11, or Tilt Brush in flat land. For me its worth every penny, but then I also spent thousands on an arcade machine that I think was worth every penny too, but don't think for a second that everyone who vistis my house and finds the arcade machine to be really cool will want to get one themselves. Personally, I'd like VR to stay niche since my favorite reason to pull it out is to show it to people who have never experienced roomscale VR and watch them have a blast. Can't do that if everyone is already pre-jaded.

I had just gotten a new computer and picked up Myst along with it. I was a videogamer, but this was a new sort of experience. Actually, as a gamer, i'm not sure that I ever would have finished the game if it wasn't for my mother. She had absolutely no interest in video games, but I called her over to show off the new computer and used Myst for my demo. I started clicking here and there, and she immediately "got it", and was able to easily determine the solution to one of the early puzzles before I could. That was it. From then on, she was hooked. Mind you, I was doing all the steering--she didn't want to use the mouse, but was content to sit by my side and play along. I too got into it, and after a few weeks we finally solved it. Far more than the graphics or gameplay, it was the team play with my mom (who died in 2002) that make me recall the game with fondness.

Yup. That's where I've semi-officially ended Star Trek. I continue to watch everything up to that movie, but have abandoned everything post.

It's funny. I've had my Vive for 3 months and heard that you could play Oculus games on it using Revive. So last night, after some reluctance, I went ahead and tried installing the Oculus software and found that it didn't work. i spent two hours downloading/uninstalling/trying again thinking I was doing something stupid when I stumbled across a post about this blunder. Well, Oculus is back off my system. Maybe I'll try again in another 3 months.

"Killer apps" (or "killer games") are matters of opinion, but there is no question in my mind that games like "Talos Principle" are simply in another category when played in VR. I have my arcade machine, my Nintendo Switch, and my PC pancake games that I continue to play, but for certain specific games, VR has no equal. The ones that come immediately to mind (beyond TP) are VTOL (a military flight sim), Iron Wolf (submarine sim), and Eleven Table Tennis. And, of course, there is Space Pirate Trainer (no experience like it in the flatscreen world), the Invisible Hours (a virtual who done it play), the new Sprint Vector, etc., etc. To me these are all "killer".

Should have just rated these titles as MA.

Adobe's decision to go subscription only has saved me a lot of money as it caused me to stop my habit of buying PS upgrades every year. I'm on CS4 and perfectly fine with that. Lightroom will be a different story since I'm going to finallyneed to purchase Capture One (which I've long preferred anyway), but at least I can keep my current perpetually licensed copy of Lightroom 6 for as long as I want without monthly cost while I migrate over.

As a GLOWARM doubter (GLobal Warming by Opportunistic Anthopomorphic Reason of the Moment), I prefer to think it was the cold and wet summer we had in the NE.

Cool. Looks like the number of rational folks out there is up to 2 out of 10 now.

Is the criteria for gaining a verified status published somewhere?

Glad you said this because I was otherwise not going to bother reading the story. The first sentence of the summary had me intrigued about a potentially new scientific discovery, but the second made me think that the story was probably just bait to make me read yet another global warming parable.

"Once upon a time there was a nice planet called Venus. Billions of years ago Venus may have been similar to the Earth in some respects, having oceans, etc.. However, its closeness to the sun and slow rotation caused it to be both hotter than Earth and subject to more ultraviolet radiation. It is hypothesized that this may have accelerated the evaporation of water and created an excess of carbon dioxide leading to a naturally-caused runaway greenhouse effect."

-scratch-

"Once upon a time there was a nice planet called Venus. Venus was just like Earth. The planet began producing carbon dioxide, just like big-business run factories do. This eventually led to a runaway greenhouse effect. This will happen on Earth soon unless we do something about it because Venus is just like the Earth."

-ah, much better-