Nothing but light!

We're cooking with green energy!

Note to self: sell industries connected with mercury for CFLs, but LED makers

Ah, thanks.

[cryptic response]

Hooray! Congrats!

"More to the point, now that Occulus is highly capitalized via its facebook deal, its quite capable of ramping up production to meet demand at its price, BUT, it seems to me occulus dont seem to want its products in wide use yet , probably to protect their reputation whilst its still in development. If they just wanted cash, they could simply produce more."

this is exactly my point. if they wanted to they would take a page from sony http://store.sony.com/wearable-hdtv-2d-3d-virtual-7.1-surround-sound-zid27-HMZT3W/cat-27-catid-3D-Personal-Viewer and sell a vitual 750" screen as seen at 65' away. but they want real games that look nice and are meant for gaming. and sony is going to release a version that can be motion compensated for, as it's tv model is designed to be sit down and do your best to not move, because if you move the image doesn't change and sensitive folks get vertigo. whereas the gaming model is to track and move the image as smoothly as possible with as few vertigo as possible.

the occulus rift is a devkit, people have been asking for 3-d headset displays since digital tech made it possible. those people are not ready to own a rift yet, because it has one major game engine, and decent games take time to mature. i bought planetary annihilation when it was early in development and it was awesome but it is so much harder than a normal rts and the interface is so different that i stopped playing it, i might have enjoyed it better had they had weaker ais or no nukes allowed modes, which maybe it has by now, but playing it from beta was not a plesant experience. saying that the occulus rift should 'let the market decide the price' when games are all crappy and in early alpha development would be almost suicide. i bought the original playstation 1 just for final fantasy and the few rpgs they had all got me mad at buying a ps, cause i had no games i liked. sony almost died to me, but eventually good games came along and made it worth the money. so there is a litlle chicken and egg dillema because in order for people to 'eat the chicken' at a bbq no one can eat the mutant egg of the chicken for breakfast. if you do what philips did with the CDI (computer disc interactive) and release the system to everyone without securing launch titles it will fail. if you launch a system like sony, but promise on paper lots of games, maybe it will work for some, but others will be pissed at the lack of quality of the games that were rushed to fill the void. however what the rift is trying to do is they somehow knew the first chicken would come from that egg, and decided to hatch feed and grow it until it could lay eggs for chickens and once that was successful then they had bbq, and some people could still eat the eggs, of the other chickens.

i think that for as long as i have waited for VR in the home that the occulus and the ps4 both getting head tracking VR is very cool, and i will use whichever one works better. so if occulus or sony delays their head tracking vr units i might even get impatient and get the one that is released, rather than wait on reviews. but only if that model can do 3-d bluray movies (i have 3 3d bluray capable computers if you count my ps3) either with a standard pc or with a ps4. if it doesn't do movies it is dead to me, and games are less important. support for google earth streetview would be very, very interesting.

I've never had a CFL fail. I've been replacing incandescents with CFLs whenever a bulb burns out. My oldest CFL is 7 years old and my newest is a little under 1 year old.

Many of us are still living! Just a bit dispersed here and there.

You do realize that if they are tracking you when you make a mistake and are in an accident they will hang you out to dry, wont pay your claim, and will be sitting at the other table in the court room if they can make a credible case that you breeched the terms of your insurance contract.

The parent wasn't quite right, in reality software flies your airplane 100% of your journey right now.

Modern Boeing and Airbus designs are pure fly by wire. 100% of the time you fly it though software. The engines are FADEC (full authority digital engine controls).

Autoland has been a thing since the early 70s. The first aircraft to have it, the Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 (an aircraft similar to the Boeing 727 in layout - three engines at the back of the aircraft and T-tailed) was flying autolandings in pretty much zero visibility decades ago.

Since all modern large airliners are fly by wire, you're screwed anyway.

Airliners have multiple redundant power buses. Each engine has a generator, and there is also an APU (auxilliary power unit) which has a generator. If all three fail (for example, because the plane ran out of fuel, it's happened, or flies through a flock of Canada geese and loses all engines and for some reason the APU won't start) there is a ram air turbine that sticks out into the airflow and powers a generator. There is also a mandated amount of reserve battery power. Talking of losing all engine power, the Airbus A320 that went in the Hudson has purely electronic controls, and remained controllable after a double engine failure.

They glide much better than a brick. I think a typical airliner has something like a 16:1 glide ratio so from a cruise heigh of 11km could glide 176km (over 100 miles).

That's not how it works at all.

Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.

However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.

Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.

correction dk1 units sel for $470 dk2 are not even on ebay yet. and dk1 weren't hd capable... they were more to just test game engines.