Actually, no. What you're forgetting is that the planet is *huge*, even the massive consumption of the entire human race is only a tiny fraction of it's total capacity biomass.

We are currently consuming biological resources at somewhere between 1.5x and 2x the rate at which the planet can produce them. Remember it's a living, *growing* system - so long as we consume things no faster than it grows, the system is sustainable. As it is though we're "spending the capital" - not only are we consuming the new growth, but we're also reducing the "base" biomass so that, on average, next year things will grow more slowly than they did this year, and that trend will continue until we reduce consumption sufficiently.

Fishing is probably the most obvious example of this - go find some photos of the docks with fishermen showing their prizes from the 1800s: huge 4-8 foot fish all over the place, while today you rarely see anything over a couple feet. We've been "strip-mining" the ocean for centuries, and as a result the total yields have been falling for almost as long.

Fair point on the factor of ten.

As for being single bit units - they may only have a single-bit output, but they have thousands of analog-weighted inputs, plus a memory of past states, all being used to determine exactly when it fires. And the brain being an un-clocked chaotic system, the exact timing of that firing may have dramatic effects downstream. So really, even though the firing potential offers only a single-bit transition, there's an analog range of timing-encoded output.

Actual neurons are radically more sophisticated than the glorified adders used in a programmers "neural net".

Thoughts are nice, but unless there's actual evidence, a thought is all it is. Personally I suspect that the woman who is struggling to keep two kids fed knows damned well that a third kid is going to mean someone is going to go hungry, and it tears at her heart to realize that sooner or later that is going to become reality.

It's not calculus, every parent knows that children are expensive. "All" you need is a social outreach program to let people know that the world has changed, and every child can be a *choice*, one that can be cheaply and easily declined, or delayed until you can afford it better. The difficult part is swaying social expectations, not explaining the premise.

Well, that got him some serious seed money, but the country is full of people who proceed to piss such money away.

Another important benefit of solar is that the lack of necessary infrastructure gives it *incredible* potential in the developing world, whose power consumption is growing rapidly, and for whom coal is currently the only realistic alternative. But for it to really take off the price needs to be driven down even further, and subsidies in the developed world help us reach the economies of scale necessary to make that happen.

That's an incredibly powerful force for accelerating economic development, but I haven't heard much credible evidence that it has a dramatic effect on population growth directly, and it's not like an uneducated woman isn't going to contribute to her families wellbeing.

It's important to choose your battles - you're going to tend to run in to a lot more opposition to your population-control programs if you're trying to upset the current power hierarchy at the same time. *Everybody* wins from family planning, and the next generation of women will be much better positioned to fight for equality if the culture has already shifted so that they're not expected to be constantly pregnant and struggling to keep their children alive.

Education may be a win for all in the long term, but the impoverished men whose only power is over their wives aren't going to see it that way at first. (And it's mostly the deeply impoverished whose populations are growing fastest)

Not even technology in general, population growth drops off precipitously in the presence of three factors:
1) Cheap, effective birth control - because not many people are ever going to give up sex.
2) Family planning education - because the benefits of planning the size and timing of your family is a lot more obvious in retrospect, especially in cultures where (1) is a new phenomena.
3) Affordable, quality childhood medical care - children are the retirement plan, if you can't rely on your kids surviving to adulthood, you have more kids.

If only it were that simple. Vaccines aren't a magic bullet, they only give your immune system a chance to practice fighting a disease without your life being on the line. The process is fairly random though - your body throws random shit at the infection until something sticks well enough to wipe it out, and then keeps a record of what worked. As a result many people find really effective solutions and become effectively immune, but others just get a boost in their resistance - hopefully enough to keep them alive until their immune systems can find a better solution, but there are no guarantees.

Nah, that part I can understand: funerals are for the living, who have undeniably suffered a loss. You might weep when a good friend moves far away, and you can still visit and talk to them on the phone. Death is considerably less malleable - even if you decide to follow, doing so means giving up contact with all your living loved ones until their time comes.

And incidentally I've actually been to a few funeral parties - no strippers or blow, but lots of drinking and carrying on, with plenty of laughter to ease the tears. I'd certainly hope my own would be so pleasant. That I will die is the only guarantee I got in life - don't mourn that I met the inevitable, rejoice that I lived well while I was here.

I don't see that there's much to abstract, at least not in the helmet itself.

Head tracking provides a six-axis position relative to some reference position.
Render post-processing that complements optics to provide a artificially wide FOV.

There's lots of other tricks you can play to improve performance, but I get the impression they're mostly at the engine level, and thus unlikely to be particularly relevant to API-level compatibility

Read TFA - it's a 2000-day diet designed to severely emaciate the body, followed by drinking varnish tea to purge remaining fluids and possibly render the body poisonous, followed by live entombment in a space too small to move in, and meditation until death. 1000 days after death the tomb is then opened to see if the body was mummified or not - presumably some time after that the scrolls were inserted - they're not normally part of the process. Depending on construction the statue may have been the tomb, or it may have been constructed around his body at some later date - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if both the scrolls and the statue were added to the mummy at the same time.

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.