If you believe yourself to be an eternal being, then this life is but one small step in a much longer journey. It's always puzzled me why so many Christians fear death, when they claim to know they are going to a place vastly superior to this one.

Well, you've got to stretch the definition of Religion pretty far to encompass Buddhism. It offers no God, nor any Commandments (though lots of guidelines for monks and others seeking enlightenment). Hardly a religion by most definitions.

It's probably a safe bet that, generally speaking, the sorts of monks who lock themselves in isolation for months or years at a time don't consider "communicating with the world" to be very high on their priority list. Enlightenment is after all a very personal thing, not something you can really discuss directly even with fellow attainees.

I suspect that the various VR implementations will be relatively compatible at the API level - really there's only two core components:
The first, 6-axis head tracking, should be trivial to maintain compatibility so long as nobody tries to lock down the technology with DRM, like TackIR attempted to do with their non-VR head tracking.

The second, renderer-based collaboration with the optics, could potentially be more problematic. But so long as the optics are similar and/or it's simply a post-processing distortion filter applied to what is basically a pair of traditional rendering frustums, maintaining compatibility should be a relatively simple endeavor. Again assuming the producers *want* to maintain compatibility.

So I guess it all comes down to willingness to be compatible, and frankly what we've seen so far seems promising: There seem to really be only three major contenders (not counting AR, which is a completely different technology that only shares much of the hardware):

Oculus/Facebook - where Oculus has repeatedly voiced their hope and commitment to avoiding artificial market segmentation, and have collaborated heavily with both Valve and Sony in the past. Belonging to Facebook may change things, but I really don't see Facebook wanting to get heavy into the hardware side: they're a software/advertising platform company - I can see why they would really want decent VR to catch on, but I doubt they have much interest in being a hardware company themselves, the profit margins are unlikely to be appealing.

Valve: Again, they're primarily a software delivery platform, plus game engines, and oh yeah, a couple games too. They have shown very little interest in producing hardware, even their SteamBox initiative has focused on partnering with hardware vendors while they provide an alternative OS to Windows, which has been neglected by MS on the gaming front, and faces the risk of a "Microsoft Store" eating Steam's lunch, especially if they decide to pull an iOS and lock out competing storefronts.

Sony: Well, okay, they're Sony. I could totally see them doing everything they can to try to lock down their own proprietary VR solution, especially since they already have a potentially viable first-gen motion-control system worked out with the PS Move. They're also a console company with a long history of selling hardware at a loss and making their profit on licensing software compatibility, which could give them a distinct price advantage over more open competition. I suppose the question there will be whether they see more profit potential in going their own way, or in attracting PC VR enthusiasts who don't want to have to buy a second VR helmet for their PS5. Personally, if they're going up against two popular open platforms, I suspect they'll see more profit potential in compatibility.

Well, silicon is reaching its limits - much like with aircraft maneuverability, stability tends to come at a price: modern highly maneuverable fighter planes are so unstable that a human pilot couldn't hope to keep them in the air without constant computer assistance. Modern CPU manufacturing, self-monitoring, and thermal self-regulation are all far more advanced than when GaAS "failed" - I'd say its got a fair chance at a comeback, though doped diamond may prove more viable once synthetic diamond yields grow to sufficient scale. Barring revolutionary production techniques though, I think that's still at least a decade or two in the future.

Haven't you heard? Photonic computing is the new positronic brain.

Got something on your mind there? Silicone is far more commonly used in caulks, oils, resins, and "rubber" oven/freezer dishes than in implants. And I would go so far as to say that silicone is by far the most common use of silicon in the world, not counting sand and glass, which most people don't realize are silicon-based.

But I would certainly like to get my hands on the fellow that decided this crazy new siloxane-based rubber should be named almost the same thing as the crystaline mineral from which it was produced. Talk about an invitation to confusion.

And to look around the GHz barrier *was* pretty damned insurmountable. Sure, it wasn't at exactly 1000MHz, but that particular number was always a "magical thinking" artifact of how the human brain regards numbers. We hit 1GHz back in 2000, and here we are, 15 years later and we haven't managed even managed a single order of magnitude increase in clock speed. Lets put that in proper context: 15 years earlier, in 1985, Intel had just released the 12MHz 386 with optional floating point module.

So, from '85 to '00 we got roughly 100x faster clock speeds, plus vectored floating-point instruction sets and radically improved pipelining. Then over the next 15 years we managed to push the clock-speed boundary up another, what 3-4x? That looks an awful lot like hitting a brick wall to me.

>You cant seriously compare a neural network operating at 100Hz or less to modern CPU-s.

You can when that network involves roughly 100 billion idependent processing units, each equipped with local memory and ~7000 dedicated network connections. Make no mistake - an actual neuron is a far more sophisticated thing than the glorified switches in so-called "neural network" software. Assuming an average firing rate of 100hz, and an average processing unit of 1 flop (a gross oversimplification I'm sure), that's 10 trillion flops - I don't think any modern CPU is even remotely close to the Teraflops range.

Ah, the good old days. I miss having real competition in the CPU market.

What on Earth makes you think "has massive market share" is in any way related to "good quality"? And "gets the job done"? That's a pretty low bar there, I've heard it used far more often to describe bailing-wire repair jobs than as an actual recommendation of any sort.

I'll offer you up the old betamax versus VHS, 8-track versus cassette, or bluray versus hd-rom comparisons as counterexamples. Or how about mp3s? A nasty, artifact-laden music format despised by anyone with good ears or who can hear outside the "normal" frequency range, and yet if you want your music to be compatible with whatever random hardware you come across it's really your only option.

It all comes down to network effects - who was first to market, or perhaps who as cheaper in the early days. Once there's a clear market winner nobody want to use or produce the "fringe" technology and deal with a constant stream of incompatibilities with the majority. The actual quality of the technology doesn't even factor into the decision - unless you're dealing with niche products or can deliver an order of magnitude improvement, compatibility carries the day.

>people who, make no mistake, want to destroy our way of life.

Don't be melodramatic - for the most part they don't even know what our way of life is, except for the part that involves spending the better part of a century manipulating their domestic politics for our own ends - overthrowing legitimate democracies, installing sadistic dictators, selling them powerful weapons, etc. And honestly I'd rather like to destroy that part of our way of life myself, I just don't think it can be done via militant action.

For the most part they just want to drive out the foreign devils that are slaughtering civilians and raining death from above, whereas the warlords calling the shots probably secretly love having the foreign devils around giving them legitimacy and bolstering recruitment numbers to leverage in their domestic power struggles. Anything they know about our "way of life" is going to be the same sort of racist caricatures that pervaded US media during WWI and II - propaganda designed to dehumanize the enemy to bolster support for the domestic warmongers.

There is no doubt the occasional extremist who actually would like to destroy our way of life, but without a vast support structure they're just another random terrorist - maybe they manage to take out a few hundred people, maybe even a few thousand - tragic, but statistically insignificant - you chances of dieing in a car crash are much better. And if they do have the vast support structure, then it becomes a business, and like any institution its primary goal becomes self-perpetuation - not something usually furthered by picking fights with opponents that have you vastly outmatched. Though admittedly occasionally you get an Al Qaeda situation, where a crumbling institution deliberately provokes a dragon in order to give themselves a new patina of relevancy rather than fade gracefully into obscurity.

Meanwhile, virtually every "terrorist plot" interrupted in the last decade plus has been initiated by agent provocateurs working for the FBI, etc. *Maybe* you could argue that they're trying to "weed out the bad apples", but the available evidence looks a lot more like they're creating the very threat they're using to justify their ever-expanding authority.

It won't solve the problem, no, but it's a start. And we *really* need to get people starting on a large scale. Short of someone pulling a cold-fusion reactor out of their nethers there won't be any magic bullets to this problem, and white roofs are cheap step we could take today, one that's absolutely cost effective anywhere that employs significant air conditioning: return on investment of *you* painting *your* roof white is probably a few years, tops. And done on a large scale in cities it would also reduce the heat island effect by at least several degrees, lowering cooling costs even further.

And all that lowered cost translates directly to lowered CO2 emissions. Not by much, but it's one of the few things that can be done without massive government intervention. And as people actually start taking a measure of personal responsibility for climate change, even if largely symbolic, then we can start to hope to gather the sort of popular momentum necessary for more sweeping changes. Or would you rather wait for the puppet masters to decide that business as usual is causing things to get bad enough even their obscene profits won't protect them? Because personally I don't think they're far-sighted enough to recognize that point, and even if they are, the rest of us will still be screwed.

If there are clouds then the sunlight mostly wouldn't make it to ground level to begin with - on sunny days the reflected sunlight will mostly make it back out of the atmosphere, especially on roofs and other fairly horizontal surfaces. Whitewashing vertical surfaces is more relevant to cooling the individual structure, but a cooler structure is also one that likely runs less air conditioning, which until we get off fossil fuels will make an even bigger difference than whitewashing on solar thermal retention.

The problem is that at present we have lots of dark surfaces absorbing that sunlight and re-emitting it as thermal infrared - most of which gets reflected even by clear skies.

I have never heard such a claim before - which symmetries are you referring to, and how do they change things? Better yet, is there a good easily-comprehensible discussion of the topic you can point me at?