I certainly am. I got my DK1 on schedule at a great price, AND I'm getting to see VR succeed in the marketplace. And as a bonus, I'm watching Oculus and Palmer do quite nicely out of it.

I don't remember "stick it to the Big Guys" being a campaign goal on the Kick starter pitch.

Contradiction detected. You want developers to stop building in high levels of detail, but then say their audience won't settle for anything less?

This is exactly what the detail slider is for. You can't really fault developers for making their game look even more awesome on future hardware while still being playable today.

Just turn the detail down if you need smoother play (in VR or not), and have a closer look at your apparent need to max all the sliders. Don't force the developers to artificially limit detail for everyone.

Back to only two possibilities again, status quo or mud huts? The world really isn't that black & white.

The great majority of which can be substituted with alternate elements that have a similar effect. For example, the gold on edge connectors could be replaced with any of the corrosion-resistant noble metals - silver, iridium, platinum, rhodium, titanium etc.

The infographic ignores undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, as I've said, so is no real guide at all. Extrapolating its claims to include data it does not show is pure speculation.

The linked study was informative, thanks. Interesting to see that many substitutions are indeed possible while for some, no practical alternative has been found yet. But bear in mind, for many of these critical materials, we simply haven't looked for an alternative yet, and some will likely be found when supply gets expensive enough to justify it.

For the remaining materials, as the study itself says, we can instead develop "new and transformative technologies, many of which are under active investigation: advanced composite materials, bulk metallic glasses, and structural biological materials, to name a few."

It's not unreasonable to expect that, given all the above alternatives and coupled with the future sources of improved recycling and asteroid mining, materials supply will likely be little more than speedbumps along the road of progress - as it has been through cycles of supply and demand for all history. I see little reason to give in to pessimism at this early stage.

I'd take any claims China makes about its rare earth quantities with a few tonnes of NaCl. They've been restricting their output to boost prices, and using "limited reserves" as an excuse - but they're certainly not the only source. There's plenty more reserves which are being opened up now that China's prices aren't so cheap.

The Visual Capitalist infographic is pretty, but is apparently based solely on current mines & sources, as far as I can tell. It mentions the existence of undeveloped and undiscovered reserves, but doesn't try to estimate depletion rates of those. While of course I wouldn't claim we'll "never run out", we can clearly go a lot further than the infographic shows before the price per unit extracted gets excessive - in most cases long enough to find alternate sources as I mentioned above (we've already started eyeing the asteroid belt).

Plus of course, few individual minerals are absolutely essential anyway. Most have alternatives that can be substituted, and demand for more than one mineral has waxed and waned as technology developed a use for it, then replaced it with something more effective. I looked up the USGS report on Antimony, for example, and it makes interesting reading.

Unsustainable over what term, though? There's plenty of most minerals around. Rare earths aren't particularly rare, and there's a lot more sources of most things if we spend a little more to develop them. And recycling pushes "peak minerals" out further. We're set for most things for the next few decades at least, centuries mostly, and millennia for a lot of common stuff.

In the longer term, we can greatly improve our recycling (nanotech molecular disassemblers combing our landfill, maybe), and our sources (there's literally astronomical amounts of useful minerals in the asteroids). I don't think we're in too much trouble there.

Read up on opportunity costs. Money isn't lost completely, but it could certainly be spent more productively.

Exactly. It's definitely true that e.g. renewable energy development would have many other knock-on benefits, but it's better not to have to adapt to dramatic climate change while we're doing it, any more than needing a World War to prompt us to invent radar.

Yep, the Thwaite Glacier vulcanism is definitely a factor in this - it's certainly not all due to climate change.

The accelerating sea level rise from this is still a problem regardless of cause. From your link:

Are those really the only two possibilities that occur to you?

No scientist claims the world is ending; that's a straw man from the denialist camp. What the scientists ARE telling us is that the coming climate changes (which can't now be prevented completely but CAN certainly be mitigated) will have significant costs - economic and humanitarian.

Even if you ignore the human costs (relocations, famine, refugees, conflict over dwindling local resources - mostly in poor countries), there's still the economic costs (increased storm damage, droughts, flooding, sea level rise) which been shown by numerous economic studies to far outweigh the costs of mitigation.

Yes, it will cost money to move our energy infrastructure away from fossil fuels. No, it won't derail the economy (the average estimate from the World Bank and many others is about 0.5-1% of GDP). But it will slow the onset of climate change, reduce the impact of changes in decades to come, and SAVE us hundreds of billions we'd otherwise need to spend adapting to the negative effects of dramatic climate change, not to mention other indirect benefits (like the surprisingly large health costs from fossil fuel pollution). Many studies show the investment in a clean, efficient energy infrastructure will actually save us money in its own right, independent of climate change effects.

Replacing lightbulbs is easy, low-hanging fruit, and there are numerous other efficiency gains we can make, but it's ultimately not enough. We don't have to cut our energy usage to the bone, we just have to invest in carbon-neutral energy generation - then we can easily support our lavish lifestyles with zero carbon cost, and save money in the process.

There are certainly other solar irradiance fluctuations greater than that, of course. GP was only referring to the long-scale growth in solar output.

The sunspot cycle varies output by about 0.1%, and of course there are Milankovitch cycles (orbital variations) which also affect the solar irradiance we get (though not the star's output). The Maunder minimum appears to have been due to an anti-phase correlation between the sunspot cycle and heliospheric current
sheet inclination variations (interesting paper here).

If you think the current climate research is "silly", have you considered that you may be simply misinterpreting it? Perhaps due to an incomplete picture, not having kept up with the vast amount of research in the field, or even by just taking out-of-context statements as meaning more than intended. And as for lack of supporting evidence, I don't think posts on slashdot should be taken as indicative of actual climate research. There's a lot of evidence out there if you look.

Because it's a feedback loop. Other factors (e.g. orbital variations) can initially trigger warming in the oceans, which then release CO2, which results in further warming. See this article for details.

Also accepted:
*slowingly
*plowingly
*flowingly
*loweringly
*gloatingly
*glaringly
*Cowboy Neal

From the description in the article, they built a fairly basic (by today's standards) camera-driven lane following system. It's an impressive achievement, given the highly limited hardware and early state of the research, but it sounds like a far cry from what we would call autonomous driving today,

Colour me entirely unsurprised. This investigative article has details of many more billions of the Pentagon's wasted taxpayer money - and the real number could be dramatically higher. We'll never know, because the Pentagon has failed to perform the required audits of its accounting ever, despite tens of billions still being sunk into modernising its infosystems.

A few random details of what we do know:
- $5.8B of inventory "lost" between 2003-2011.
- $9B of ledger adjustments simply made up to get the books to balance in 2012, up from $7.4B the previous year.
- "Probably half" of its $7B general inventory is in excess of needs, but they're still spending $700+M buying more of the same.
- Hundreds of thousands of contracts that have not been audited for completion. Solution: raise the threshold to contracts worth $250+M.

There's much worse, but you wouldn't believe it coming from a random Slashdot post. Read the article.

I went to a library the other day, and all the kids stared at their books the entire time, never looking at or talking to anyone around them.

At least the kids on phones were constantly chatting with friends elsewhere via texts & IM. Sounds much healthier than hiding from the world with your nose in a book..

Or maybe I should just learn to stop judging them by my own preconceived notions.

And it achieved a milestone of human-scale lookup and response that we'd never seen before. It's still an impressive feat, even as a powered-up refinement of existing techniques and just another step on the road.

As for the brain, while the complexity gets huger the deeper we look, there's an excellent chance we simply don't need to build that level of detail ourselves to get useful results. We already have useful AI with much less, and it's getting more impressive every day.

I'm guessing we'll have non-sentient AI that can do human-level tasks and interaction long before we emulate the whole brain completely, just like we have useful and cheap flight without needing to build a whole bird.