...but we still have seatbelts and crumple zones in cars.

Any new vaccine should not be accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects until it is proven.

I don't know of anything - not just any vaccine, any thing that's ever existed in the universe - that is "accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects". That seems to be a high enough bar to be, er, perhaps obstructionist. To be honest, I wonder what your objection might be once this technique gets commercialized.

My wife and are teaching our children about how things work and what contraceptive options are available, emphasizing the effectiveness of each method, and the potential risks and benefits of sex, before and within marriage. And they either have received or will receive Gardasil, too. For much the same reason we have them wear seatbelts.

In the linux driver you have a steaming pile of crap that barely works at all.

Not true - in fact, Nvidia's Linux driver is quite good. The issue is that 'important' games get special attention from the graphics companies, who special-case things in their drivers - replacing whole shaders, etc. That doesn't happen in Linux. It winds up being necessary because OpenGL has grown so complex that it's incredibly hard to write fast code for it.

Vuikan is liable to change that considerably - a much lower-level API, that engines can interface with more directly and consistently. The drivers won't have be huge tangles of special-case code, and will be much simpler to implement on multiple operating systems because they are called upon to do far less.

One of my primary suspects for the difference is the video card - how well optimized are the Linux drivers?

On an absolute scale, probably not as well-optimized as the Windows one. But Nvidia's Linux drivers have consistently been better-performing than AMD's versions. Intel's Linux drivers have had problems, too, and their dependence on Mesa has meant that a lot of recent OpenGL features haven't been exposed. Plus Intel's hardware is significantly slower than AMD or Nvidia's offerings.

Sequencing such a large volume of samples is not - currently - technically or financially practical. In Michigan, if you jump through special hoops, you can get them to cough up the samples to you personally. That's what I'm doing, before they decide to start building a big sequence database (with 'appropriate protections', of course).

I actually am in the process of having the samples destroyed for all of my children - now that I'm actually aware of them. Michigan recently switched to an opt-in research consent, but my kids were born before the cutoff - for them it's opt-out. And we were not informed of this warehousing at any point when any of them were born.

Either way, you have to specifically request destruction. No response so far to either phone or email...

You can also refuse vaccines. But why the hell would you do either of these things ? You can have your sample destroyed so any real objection is pretty flimsy.

There's two separate things going on here. The screening for obscure diseases is one thing - and sure, that's a good thing. The warehousing of samples indefinitely to be used in research - and whatever else might one day be permitted legally - without explicit consent? That's quite a different issue, and there are reasonable objections to that.

But it cannot be used beyond a reasonable doubt for forensics.

Presently, at the current state of the art.

If it's specific demos that produce nausea, but not the general case, I'd bet that the demos themselves have problems keeping up. Especially for some people, even if the average frame right is high, a few inconsistent dips would be enough to disturb equilibrium.

That said... every single trait of humans is on some kind of bell curve. There may well be people who need 120fps to avoid 'vr sickness', but they'll be a few standard deviations from the mean.

No wonder you're posting anonymously.

First off, games that are optimized for pure eye candy strain current cards, yes. But you don't have to have teh bezt pozzible grafix for everything. Take Alien: Isolation - looked really good, but ran at excellent framerates even on older cards. And even has some vr support. Tradeoffs can be made to crank framerate, and not horrible tradeoffs. I can handle 2010 graphics on VR, it's not like those games looked bad.

And no, a $4000 PC isn't necessary. The official specs are more like $1K these days. In fact, definitely $1K.

And no, 120fps/eye isn't necessary. You need low latency, definitely, but not that low. The DK2 peaks at 76fps, and yet few people report sickness at that rate.

Got "Shadow of Mordor" fro Linux (bought directly from Feral, to reward behavior I approve of, like porting). 42GB, and on the connection we had (allegedly 10Mbps, in practice ~7.5Mbps) it took over two days to download. And Netflix/Youtube/etc. got slow when a big download was happening. So we just this weekend bumped up to 35Mbit (seems to get around 40Mbit in practice). It's already better when two people are trying to watch different streams.

John Carmack is still with Oculus, and he knows graphics tech. If he thinks they can get it right, I'm inclined to believe him. So I'm paying attention to Oculus, still.

Mind you, Valve's stuff is supposed to be out by the time the Rift comes out, so it'll be possible to directly compare them before I'll be in a position to buy. I'm not ruling them out. But overall I like the Rift's odds, based on what I've been reading.

That sounds like something that could be applied to a lot of existing hardware quickly, and should logically have its own heading, but I didn't see it in a very quick skim of the PDF. What kind of settings are they talking about?

I've never actually been able to get Linux to run properly on arbitrary hardware that I happened to own.

I, on the other hand, have run into one thing that Linux didn't work with. I have a collection of accumulated 'stuff' and just last night Frankensteined a PC together. I don't even know the model number of most of the parts. It's an Nvidia 8600 (something) video card, and a Soundblaster Live, I know that much. Worked just fine, no issues. (Streams PC games from Steam pretty well to the TV upstairs, too.)

I purchased a mid-high prebuilt 'gaming rig' a couple years back, and everything 'just worked', except the "SoundBlaster® X-Fi XtremeAudio" card. That was the 'one thing'. There was a config fix but I just pulled the card and used the onboard MB audio. Whatever that is worked fine.

Just installed Linux for my cousin this weekend. Some HP laptop, I honestly didn't even check the model. Everything just worked, including the 'scroll region' on the trackpad, and the weird 'slide-touch' volume control above the keyboard.

If you're working on the equipment, and it shouldn't move, you put a padlock, with a nametag, on the switch and physically lock the power out. You take the key with you into the workcell, and only you are allowed to remove that lock.

If the robot must be moving (typically, when you're teaching the robot the path it should follow), then every single person in the workcell must have an active deadman switch (anyone lets go, the robot emergency-stops). And you run the program at 10% speed so that you have time to trip the deadman or get out of the way. The workcell itself is fenced off, usually with either a tripwire or electric-eye switch that will e-stop the robot if triggered.

I used to work for a robot company, and we enforced these rules religiously. When I went to visit plants and work on the robots, they issued me my own padlock and tags for lockout/tagout. Someone had to have skipped some safety procedures in this case.

Indeed, in most places, a bug where the system crashes is the most severe possible bug. When dealing with robots, that's only the second most severe. The most severe were "unexpected motion" bugs, where the robot didn't follow the path in the correct way or otherwise didn't behave predictably. Those got everybody's attention.