That's the easy and fun part.
If you find that to be the hardest part, then what do you consider the fun part?

Compared to figuring out a design, everything else is tedious and boring. Things like debugging, documentation, and testing are hard because they are boring.

The terminology in the summary is confusing and wrong.

First of all, software rendering vs. hardware rendering isn't the same as scanline rendering vs. "rendering from the underlying math", which I assume is a bad attempt at a layman's description of raytracing. You can have a scanline triangle renderer in software, and you can have a raytracer in hardware. It is true that most GPUs are built for scanline rendering and not raytracing, but plenty of raytracers have been written that run on GPUs.

Second, if your renderer runs on the GPU using OpenCL, then it is not a software renderer, it is a hardware renderer, perhaps with a little more of the work done in programmable shaders and a little less done on the fixed function hardware.
What they meant to say was that you can program your own hardware renderer using CL kernels, rather than rely on the ever-decreasing fixed-function hardware that the triangle pipeline normally uses.

The only fixed-function capabilities in a modern GPU are texture filtering and rasterization. The vertex processing, lighting, and shading are all programmable.

There is something interesting and new here, which is that maybe sometime in the future the programmable hardware will be good enough that the fixed-function stuff can be done away with completely.

The concept behind augmented reality is that you are looking at your real environment with virtual objects inserted into it.
Ideally this would be done with a head mounted display that contains a camera with a possibly transparent display.
Since we don't have such HMDs sitting around, phones are the next best thing. If you hold up your phone, point it at your living room and turn on the camera, it is like you are viewing your room through a window. Add some augmented reality software to insert furniture, and you have a decent augmented reality system.
Sure you could plug a webcam into your PC and run the same software, but it wouldn't really feel like augmented reality, it would be more like taking a picture and having someone use photoshop to insert furniture.

And who cares what is best if you can't use it?

Except for the fact that CUDA only works on nvidia devices, and OpenCL works on everything...

I don't understand your post...

"The dearth of devices out there with hundreds of variations..."

A dearth means "lack of", but the problem here is more the opposite!

I think the point about "getting the money back" was misinterpreted.
Obviously when you pay into insurance and then you leave the insurance plan for whatever reason, you don't get your premiums returned to you.
If that were the case, then there would be no money to pay the claims for other people.

No, the point is, if you have been paying premiums into your health insurance for 30 years, then one day you go a two month stretch of unemployment, and you get hit by a serious random illness in that interim, then you are not insured and those 30 years of payments won't do a thing to help you. The idea is that you shouldn't lose your insurance just because you lose your job, and paying in for 30 years should have invested you into the insurance system enough that you still have coverage even if you have to go a month or two where your premiums don't get paid.

> To summarize: cut free the freeloaders. Those with serious ailments need to learn to live better (stop smoking and eating lard). And those who have legitimate > psychological problems shouldn't be out with the general public anyways. Reopen the asylums. This will give motivation to the 'depressed' to go get a job.

What about the "Freeloaders" with serious ailments are not caused by smoking and lard, but actually struck them at random? What if YOU developed MS? Are you prepared to just lay down and die because the cost of treatment is more than your annual income?

What about the "freeloaders" with genuine psychiatric problems that are FULLY TREATABLE with medication and therapy. Some of these people will go on to hold important jobs and create critical innovations in science and technology that will improve the world for everyone. You think the world would be a better place if they were just thrown in an asylum?

But an MRI costs $8000. A lot of honest hardworking people don't have that money RIGHT NOW. So they should just be left to die?

The thing about health insurance is that it isn't really insurance in the traditional sense.
Traditional insurance is something like "just in case something bad happens while you are covered, we will pay for it."

But that's not how our healthcare system works. People get sick while they are unemployed, they get sick while they are employed, they may stay sick after losing their job. Healthcare costs are exceptionally expensive, so it is unrealistic to expect ANYBODY short of multi-millionaires to be able to afford to cover their own healthcare costs in the event of a serious illness. Therefore the only solution is socialism, and our socialist system is referred to as "health insurance". Health insurance MUST be structured such that everybody, healthy and sick, pays into the system to one extent or another through premiums, so that there are enough cash reserves in the system to pay for the care of people who get seriously ill.

The alternative would be that everybody who isn't EXTREMELY rich has to lead their life in fear that if they ever get cancer they will have to guaranteed to die through lack of care, but not until they first go bankrupt exhausting all of their financial resources. Even if they do have a few million in the bank due to hard work and careful savings, it might not be enough.

Society at large has decided that socialism or health insurance (which is rather socialist in nature) is vastly preferable to the alternative.

Now the fact that the medical industry is corrupt and dramatically overcharges for things that could be cheap, just because the insurance company is paying and can afford it... that's a serious matter that should be dealt with somehow.

My point is, denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions is ludicrous in a world where insurance is necessary for survival, but not everyone who is capable and hardworking can always have insurance, all it takes is a few months of unemployment in a tough economy. But then when they get a job with good coverage... sorry, you got sick in between jobs, we'll just let you die!

My point is just that this talk about simulating a human brain is meaningless until we first have proved that we can simulate a flea brain.
Hell, can we even exactly simulate a single neuron that precisely matches the behavior of a neuron in a petri dish?
Solve the easy stuff first.

Can you explain to me how USING a website constitutes SIGNING a contract?
How can a contract be valid when I never even lifted a pen?
Where's the signature?

Maybe because we want google to win because we like what they do, but we want microsoft to lose because we don't like what they do?
In wartime you don't "fight fair", why would you want to grant your enemies the same benefits as your friends?

It is evil for office to use a secret windows API because it gives microsoft an unfair advantage against the competing office suites for windows.
It is not evil for google to use a secret youtube api because... why would it be? Google has a youtube server, and they make a youtube client app. They generously provide a public API so anybody can write a youtube app. There is no reason in law or common sense why they are obligated to provide any API at all, or why they should allow anybody else to make youtube apps that compete with their own. They are going above and beyond by ever allowing anybody to make such an app.

This would be a fair comparison to the microsoft office scenario if windows was JUST a server for running office. If microsoft had an office server, would they really be out of line for wanting to restrict what clients connect to it? Go make your own open source office server if you want to own it and set the rules.

Evil depends on your point of view. If you side with google, then google is doing good. If you side with microsoft, google is doing evil. If you side with the consumer, the question is more complicated and I don't know the answer. Probably it is good for the consumer to have access to youtube from whatever and whichever device they own, but if microsoft is evil then doing anything and everything to put them out of business might be good, even if it temporarily pisses off people who own windows phones (temporary until they get a phone from a non-evil company).

You fall into the common trap of thinking that treating everyone equal is somehow the definition of good, but in reality good means treating good people/companies well and treating evil people/companies with the evil they deserve. The trick is in judging who is good and who is evil so that we know who to punish and who to praise.