If you do not have a passion for low-level graphics programming, I would strongly recommend using a higher level library like OpenSceneGraph or Ogre rather than programming directly at the nuts and bolts level of OpenGL. You get more done that way and leverage other people's experience instead of reinventing so many wheels yourself.
...which is exactly the same as the second edition. Almost. But not quite as painfully obvious a reprint as the OpenGL book that usually accompanies it (the Red Book). It just had some warnings that OpenGL 3 is, like, totally different, and saying that we are not going to bother with any of that, despite announcing that prominently on the cover of the book. Nothing on, for example, how to do transforms without all the old pipeline commands. Lots on, say, display lists, instead. Display lists that have been unofficially deprecated now for about a decade. Oh, well.
And for those not in the know, the Orange Book and the Red Book together form the unofficially official documentation for OpenGL.
Someone really needs to step up to produce quality documentation for the new lean and mean non-backward-compatible profile of OpenGL 3 if that is to make any headway. Or maybe that lets-make-the-API-even-more-low-level approach was wrong to begin with, and people are just afraid to say that out aloud like Mark Kilgard of NVIDIA recently did (see slide 35).
Anyway, if you are going to work with OpenGL, you need to read those two books. But you can just as well buy the previous edition.
Once the big game engines and physics libraries get generic support for GPU programming through OpenCL, this will all be pretty moot anyway. From what I can tell, the bullet physics library is already developing this, and I am sure closed source competitors are doing that as well. Relying on anything that will only run on a single vendor's hardware is just a losing business proposition (unless that vendor pays you for it, which I guess is how PhysX got going).
No, you need gravity to hold an atmosphere, much more than the Moon currently has. A strong magnetic field helps, but is not necessary, as in the case of Venus.
That number for drug R&D costs is described by some commentators as "9-digit fairy tale" (source article http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/180/3/279). It is true that you cannot market directly to consumers in many countries, the industry can and do market to doctors. Although the doctors are relatively few in numbers, the pandering they receive is far more expensive.
"If you own something then you can sell it."
There are lots of things you can own, but not sell. Some things you can only sell under certain very limited circumstances, other things not at all. There is an infinite variety of property arrangements, and trying to define property to be just one, simple (ideologically loaded I guess) concept is meaningless. Try reading a book about the philosophy of law and property one day. You might learn something.
China does not want the existing regime to collapse, which would most likely lead to a mass exodus of millions of poor people across the border to China. But North Korea does not really have any friends in the international arena anymore. It is so bat shit crazy that it would be a liability to anyone associated with it.
Every computer program can be interpreted to "improve the way a system runs", and therefore be patentable under this theory, which is exactly the point. They have been doing this slimy workaround the "mere program" rule for a long time, arguing that the invention is a combination of software and hardware components (because software has to run on hardware, duh), and it forms the very basis for software patents in the EU.
What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee.
