You can buy LED strips (and fancier kits) to stick behind your TV/monitor to create a coloured glow on the wall around your screen which extends the edges of the images to create a greater immersion.

Given that screen-size is the limiting factor in these VR headsets, are any of the manufacturers including this kind of ultra-simple peripheral lighting within the headset? To reduce the blinker effect from the limited FOV.

TV/monitor kits can only use the regular image and extrapolate the edge effects. But with a VR kit, the content developers themselves would be able to program peripheral lighting in addition to the monitor image. So an object could appear in your peripheral vision before it reaches the edge of the actual screen. Similarly, small and large objects would show differences in the peripheral lighting even though both have the same size on the screen. Both effects increasing the immersion. (And, of course, in horror games, the devs would use it to just fuck with you.)

IMO, with a peripheral lighting system, a screen with a mere 90 FOV would be plenty for full immersion. It's rare that you pivot your eyes beyond 45 without turning your head. You flick your eyes across, then turn your head to re-centre your vision. And when you do that, your eyes don't have long enough to focus on the object (to extract detail) before your head movement has caught up, so under normal circumstances you still shouldn't notice the extremely low resolution of the peripheral lighting.

[Disclaimer: I ain't even got a Nintendo Virtual Boy, so maybe modern VR devices all do this, but I can't find any reference to it online except a single 5 year old forum post.]

Directly in front of each display, so it's in line with the eyes. Bring up any image of the front of the device and they're right fucking there.

Such as the linked article.

Someone certainly is.

It's the Cowboy Neal option.

You haven't seen my diet.

ads != doubleclick.

There are ways for sites to include advertising without surrendering their site to third-party-hosted malware. Many ways which aren't even blocked by adblockers by default. It's a bit more work for them than just using doubleclick/etc, but it's worth it.

So you're really saying that all the stupid/lazy sites will die off or retire behind paywalls. Surely that's "mission fucking accomplished."

(I'm constantly amazed that newspaper and TV-network sites mindless use doubleclick/etc for their websites, even though they have large advertising/marketing departments for their non-web products. You are already paying for an ad department! You already have a network of advertisers! You already have their actual ad-content on file! Why are you giving money to another company to do what you already do yourself and have done for over half a century?)

But the stuff that is needed one day is worth all the pain of keeping the rest. The problem is not knowing.

The videos are so you have something to cut together for their funeral video.

The newspapers are so the great grandkids have something for their 3rd grade social studies project.

Neither did video tape.

No. Digital content needs to be worked. Digital archives are a certain path to unreadable formats, corrupted files, failed electronics, etc. It's different with archiving paper/film/etc, where constant handling reduces lifespan and data decays in a "human friendly" way. USBs, harddrives, DVDs, all shitty archive material unless they are being constantly used (and thus checked) and copied and themselves backed up.

Even with a archive folder(s) on an active drive, every few years you need to check that the formats are still readable, and that the player/editor software still works on your current system and/or that newer player/editors play the older files. And periodically convert the data to newer formats (by all means keep the old to avoid lossy conversion to short lifespan formats.) And it all gets backed up with your normal backup regime, which itself is a system that gets periodically updated because it's in regular use.

Ionisation of the upper atmosphere creates a cloud of relativistically accelerated electrons which the Earth's magnetic field causes to flow (or rather, to slam) back into the ground. That creates a RF pulse so sharp that it creates a voltage potential across any electronics or electrical devices, no matter how well protected against surges. It is sharp enough to create a voltage potential across a Faraday cage, removing the cage's protective effect. (And if you've seen Faraday cages resist lightning, you'll get an idea how fast this pulse is. It makes lightning look slow.)

The second component is slower, and apparently more like lightning. So at distance, a simple surge protector is enough. Closer, a Faraday cage will do the job. The third component is more like a geomagnetic storm, long wave RF that overloads long antennas (such as power lines). Pulling the plug is enough to protect you. Hell, your normal breakers or fuses should also suffice. The risk there is the destruction of the power grid over a large area.

Rad-hardened electronics will shorten the distance that you are vulnerable. But mostly it's just about putting bulk mass between you and the EMP. And your basement isn't enough, due to the metal lines running from above (power/plumbing/strapping/etc). So basically that means the answer is bunkers.

It's always bunkers.

There are three components to a nuclear EMP. One affects electronics and can punch though a Faraday cage, one affects electronics but can be stopped by a Faraday cage, and one which affects power lines and a Faraday cage for individual devices is overkill. The range of each component is an order of magnitude greater than the previous.

A geomagnetic storm (from a Carrington Event scale CME) only produces the third component. It won't affect your harddrive unless it's plugged into a wall-socket and you're really, really unlucky.

I'm not saying "It should be", or "I expect", I'm saying it's already been decided: unless the law gets changed, the FAA will be the regulator of private manned spaceflight.

NASA hasn't incrementally developed spacecraft for decades. Their obsession with one-off throw-away designs is a major annoyance of mine.

So the topic was human vs robotic. And it's clear that removing the human element has done nothing to reduce the cost of programs like JWST. On the contrary, it's blown the cost out by over 300%.

Step-wise, incremental development would lower costs no matter what program you are talking about, manned or unmanned.

Can you explain the logic behind that?

If the launches are fixed price, it costs NASA a fixed price per-launch whether they have one vendor or ten. If one vendor (say, Boeing) can't compete, they'll drop out and their launches will go to other vendors who can.

Dropping back to a single vendor on a cost-plus contract is the most expensive option.

OTOH, the cost of JWST has blown out even further than Hubble (approx $9b, from an initial budget below $2b) precisely because there's no human servicing, which means everything in the overly-complex design must deploy perfectly or the entire mission is a bust. Eliminating the added cost of making the spacecraft serviceable is more than made up for by making the need to ensure the spacecraft can't fail.

So "the science guys" aren't a guarantee of savings, once a robotic mission becomes the flagship program and everyone tries to latch on to the teat to fund their idiotic ideas.

The problem with HSF at NASA is the legacy of Apollo, the hundred thousand employees and contractors, the scattered NASA centres and even more scattered contractor networks, which all make HSF unaffordable. (For example, the annual cost of the Shuttle program was the same regardless of how many missions they flew that year, 6, 4, 2 or none. The annual budget for operating the completed ISS is, by amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the construction, which was by yet another amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the last four years of development.)

By developing private human space-flight, we can reduce the cost of doing on-orbit repairs until it's cheaper to send humans to fix something than to write off the spacecraft and send up a new one.