Well, when they make an affordable TV that can do decent 3D without nauseating shutter-glasses, I'll consider it. Though in fairness a lot of the problem is content that tries to make stuff float in front of the screen, which generates horribly unsettling artifacts whenever line-of-sight from one eye extends beyond the edges of the TV. It's an awesome effect when my FOV is filled by a huge movie screen, but it just gets nauseating in my living room. I'd much rather have the TV act as a window to a seperate 3D world than have them try to comingle, badly.

"All that junk"? I'd imagine a "dedicated VR room" would mostly be an empty room free of junk you could bang in to while flailing around blindly. Maybe featuring an undersized rug/mat that gives your feet some warning when you're wandering too far from the "sweet spot" and risk punching the wall. The sort of room which would double nicely as a meditation/yoga/aerobics/etc space. (and yes, I'm sure there's a "padded room" joke in there somewhere...)

Unless you're going the omnidirectional treadmill route, but in that case you're kind of locked in place anyway, so you really only need one corner of a room that could otherwise be dedicated to less virtual pursuits (maybe a use for some of that horribly wasteful "master bedroom" space?)

Really? Cool. I missed that one.

That would admittedly be truly great for some things, but if you want to swing a sword, aim a rifle left while looking over your right shoulder, or reach over the cover you're crouching behind to fire toward the approaching baddies, you're probably going to need a much larger FOV than such hardware is likely to offer cost effectively. At least for now. And it seems unlikely that you'd be able to aim a pistol precisely based on hand position (plus, it probably wouldn't feel right)

Not to mention the cumulative error issue: total error = error in hand tracking + error in head tracking. Further complicated by the fact that head position will be constantly moving, so to get any sort of precision at all your hand and head tracking would have to be perfectly synced. Doable in theory, but probably more challenging than it sounds. Still, should have afar fewer issues as an integrated component than as a 3rd-party addon.

Hmm, you know, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Facebook will probably be primarily targetting the casual gamer/VR social experience crowd, for which simple (for the user) hand tracking will be ideal. While the hard-core gaming crowd is going to want their precision controllers with some measure of tactile presence. Not that I wouldn't like both - give me "naked" hand tracking with holsterable controllers please!

And I suppose with a bit of cleverness that hand-tracker could portray physical environment information as well - which could be very nice for cockpit games - if I take my hand off the throttle to interact with the HUD in my space fighter, it would be nice to be able to see "it" when I reach for it again, instead of having to fumble around blind.

I believe one of the reasons liquid nitrogen is a preferred cooling liquid is that it's chemically inert. Do they even sell liquid air? I've never heard of it. I would suspect liquid oxygen might be nastily corrosive, and quite possibly explosive since it will likely boil out of solution before most the rest.

Ah yes, quite. From Wikipedia:

I was making no comment on what actually happened, I too suspect it was just a malfunction. I was simply responding to TechnoGirl's apparently baseless attack on the word "maser".

As for your question:
>then why the hell would they tell people about it in the first place?
Well, people all over the world are going to notice that something has happened almost immediately - satellites are really obvious things tracked not only by governments but by armies of space enthusiasts. To the point that military stealth satellites, which are only "invisible" from certain angles, have to individually target every satellite tracking hobbyist on the planet if they want their current orbit to remain secret. Any satellite that suddenly appears or disappears is going to attract a lot of attention among certain circles, so if you were doing something covert, you'd pretty much have to throw up a media smokescreen immediately to deflect suspicion.

Simply commenting on the fact that the number of facts supporting the truth of most religions hovers around zero. Certainly there's few facts directly undermining them (other than their own inconsistency and the ridiculousness of taking their creation myths literally), but then there's no facts at all disproving the existence of unicorns or Russell's invisible teapot.

Basically, if this ranking system actually worked, only those sites merely claiming that "the bible states X" would have a chance at being anywhere near the top, anything actually claiming "X is true" would down-rank it radically. In fact, judging by my own experiences I'd venture a guess that even most "the bible states X" claims are verifiably false. It would probably mostly be scholarly analysis of religions that populated the top several pages.

Quite so, obviously the First Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is true. But I think that's widely enough known that it would rise to the top.

Or are you being insufficiently cynical? We might want a new cold war as well - cold wars are wonderful excuses to tighten the screws on your populace, and ours is starting to slowly wake up to the fact that all the "anti-terrorist" policies we've implemented in the last decade+ are fairly ineffective against terrorists, but *extremely* useful for suppressing legitimate dissent and undermining democracy. Start a nice theatrical cold war though and they could probably get away with putting all those empty FEMA internment camps to "proper" use.

Not that I believe we did it, Putin would be much higher on my list for starters, but I do love a good conspiracy theory.

Perhaps you could be more informative as to the problem? Why wouldn't a coherent microwave beam be every bit as effective as a laser? Or perhaps you simply didn't realize that masers are a real thing, and even predate lasers sufficiently that lasers were originally called "optical masers".

The only potential issue that I can think of is that, due to the longer wavelength, it would be difficult to focus a maser beam as tightly. Of course if you're happy to cook the whole satellite instead of burn a hole in it, then that's less of an issue.

Out of curiosity, are those saunas dry or steam? I would think a steam sauna at those temperatures would make it rather difficult for your body to cool itself adequately.

Easy. The standard deviation is substantially larger than the effect being measured. Doesn't mean the effect isn't real, or even that it can't be measured fairly accurately. Just that it will be completely lost in the noise of anecdotal evidence without a proper statistical analysis.

I think you may have misread a bit - cheap liquid nitrogen boils at 77K, making it ideal for pre-cooling/outer jacket cooling. Most superconductors on the other hand only work their magic at substantially colder temperatures, which require much more expensive liquid helium cooling (liquid He is 100s of times more expensive, as I recall).

High temperature superconductors are those which operate at temperatures above 30K, with the highest I could find reference to operating at 138K - a range which could easily operate with only liquid nitrogen cooling. Such materials start to open the door to realistic superconducting power distribution, etc, but only in a few very specific cases - it's still radically more expensive than normal conductive wire after all. If we manage another 100K or so jump in superconducting temperature we'd start to get into the range of more traditional cooling systems, even if it's still well below freezing (273.15K). At that point the costs for cooling drop enough that superconductors would start to be attractive for a much wider range of applications.

The problem, unfortunately, is that to get such trials you must first overthrow the power-structure issuing the orders. Now, that might happen if we could get enough people of their ass to vote out the fascists controlling this country - but thus far I haven't seen any real viable opposition, mostly just a bunch of disorganized wingnuts. So what are you going to do - follow orders and risk facing persecution if your overlords are overthrown, or refuse to comply and definitely face persecution now?

As others have pointed out - so long as you're downloading your firmware from their website instead of a third party, anyone who compromised the firmware could compromise the hash just as easily. It's become a common thing in the OSS community because volunteer mirrors are common, any of which might be compromised.

The only exception I can think of is internet malware that modifies your download while in transit, though if it can appropriately identify and modify your firmware download, it can probably also modify the web page listing the hash.

Depends on the checksum - I understand the better ones like SHA and maybe even MD5 are relatively irreversible, making them extremely difficult to spoof. Yes, you could do it if you had enough resources to throw at the problem, but I'm betting even the NSA probably has better things to do with their computation centers that week (month? year?). Sure, SHA-1 is only 160 bits, but that's still 10^48 possibilities, and you'll have to recompute the hash with a sizable fraction of that many different fillers to get a false-match.