Intelligent people never make mistakes? Intelligent people have lost far more than $250 on foolish endeavors, even with information available to them that would counsel them otherwise. Your suggestion that intelligence is infallible is.. not very intelligent.

Spot on in both cases. :)

My wife bought home a $250 bottle of some homeopathic health remedy she'd bought for herself, that warned on the outside not to take more than 1 or 2 drops at a time due to its extreme potency. Downed it in one. Most expensive bottle of water I've ever had. She was pissed, until I made her go read up on what homeopathy was. What's scary is that she, an intelligent, 35 year old woman, simply didn't know. The fact it's allowed to be sold in pharmacies (at least, in my country) is a scary thing.

"Yes it does. You either see the screen, or you start seeing less of the screen."
No, it doesn't, unless you're talking about an autostereoscopic display such as the 3DS. A 3d image rendered on a '3d enabled" TV or computer monitor is static. Take the glasses off and move your head left and right - they're just polarized pixels. The 3d effect is an illusion.

"Anyone that's played the standup VR head/shoulder mounted mech game you could find in arcades can tell you that's bullshit, too."
"Then maybe Oculus should use technology that's been KNOWN to work and is already tested - like the arcade mech game mentioned above."
Riight.. because the requirements for 6-degrees-of-freedom HD gaming with spatial tracking and 9ms lag should somehow compare to a 276x372 8-bit render with 50 ms lag? And the former has to be less than a tenth the price? Guess where that's made up - in the requirements of the hardware you're plugging it into.

"That sure as fuck was NOT the case when Crysis was first released and I'm pretty sure that holds true still to this day with whatever iteration of the latest 3D engine and the game code some random dev spews out."
You're not even having the same conversation anymore. A fixed viewpoint 3D render is much cheaper than a non-fixed non-predictive one. It was when Crysis came out too. Are you simply pointing out that the graphics requirements were high for Crysis when it came out? Sure, nobodys questioning that. But now imagine if there'd also been a VR version at the same time, at the same resolution and graphical quality - guess what? The hardware requirements would be ... even higher!

I get you're angry about something, but I can't tell what. There's not much coherence in what you're saying other than an underlying belief that "they should be able to render modern upcoming games, in 3D VR, with much lighter hardware requirements than they're insisting on.". Of course.. that's why all the other companies out there competing with them have done so.. oh wait.

3D and VR are two different beasts. Moving your head while playing a 3D game (or watching a movie) doesn't affect the scene. There's no motion sickness to be had (besides a very small percentage of the population which actually do manage to be affected). When it comes to VR with head-tracking, you need another level of speed and fluid motion entirely. I've used the DK1 and own the DK2, and I can assure you there's a world of difference between playing a game that's been properly optimized to play fluidly on it (eg, Elite Dangerous) and playing one that hasn't been (eg, Portal 2). Within 30 seconds of playing Portal 2 with the DK2, and I had to turn off the PC and lie down from the motion sickness. (No, not from going through portals - hadn't even made any - the engine just wasn't "right" for it).

You're right, you can do stereoscopic 3D on an onboard VIA chipset with a mobile processor. You don't suffer if there's any frame lag. put, but it into a headset where the scene moves where you look, and you'd suffer. Their original goal was to get frame lag down to under 19ms for head movement updates, but I believe the goal is now something like 9ms. That is, in less than 9ms after a head movement change, it now needs to have rendered the first frames it wasn't predicting and have calculated the speed and direction of your movement so it knows which frame to render next. It's not like a mouse where you've moved it to a precise location and the engine knows already exactly what frames are to be rendered next. You're organic, and it's using accelerometers and infrared head tracking to measure as carefully as possible (without the pinpoint precision that, say, a cursor or controller button has) exactly how you've moved your head, and correctly predict (it already needs to be rendering the frame before it flips it, because by then your head's moved again) what the next one's going to be.

This all has to come together to give you a fast, seamless, fluid natural motion. And to pull this off with modern games at HD resolutions (neither DK1 or DK2 are "high definition" by any stretch of the imagination, which is the only reason they get away with fairly reasonable feeling - even though sometimes jerky - motion for games that are specifically optimized for them) will require a good video card and a good processor, because the average consumer wouldn't (and shouldn't) accept the image resolution of the development kits.

A fixed viewpoint 3D render like you're discussing is much "cheaper" processor-wise, and even when it stutters, doesn't make people sick, hence not needing a powerful videocard.

Not really. When Steam first started, it had their Half-Life branch of games on it. It's disingenuous to say that because Half-Life was an existing offline game, so naturally remained DRM-free even once you activated your serial number on Steam, that Steam was trying to be a DRM-free platform. Steam always was, and still is, incidentally DRM-free in many cases, where publishers don't choose to implement Valve's (or their own) DRM. There's many games you can just copy the folder out and keep playing without firing up Steam. Comparing it to GoG who's entire selling point from day-1 has been the fact that all their titles are, and always will remain, DRM-free, is a miss.

And besides, half those games which were available did actually have DRM, Let me qualify that - there were a slew of multiplayer-only GoldSrc mods (eg, Counterstrike, Ricochet, Deathmatch Classic, etc) which while you could play on local LAN, still required your active WON ID (or now, Steam ID) in order to play even on private online servers. Steam was needed to play CS 1.6 beta as it didn't support WON.

Steam never tried to be specifically DRM-free. Both had DRM-Free games when they started. Both still do. GoG however, unlike Steam, only has and will only ever sell DRM-free games.

"It's my mouth, I can say what I want to."

Maybe Matt and his brigade should write a letter to Miley and tell her that, no, she can't, and it's offensive to suggest otherwise.

*shouldn't..

Damn, that typo always sucks.

If you have a negative opinion about a person, which OP finds offensive, your opinion should be allowed to be voiced. Riiight..

By all means, physical threats should not be tolerated, but everything else is freedom of expression, even if we dislike it or find it in bad taste.

By the way, it's a little sexist to suggest that only women need to be worried about death threats and harrassment. I've received more than a few myself in my time. What - because I'm a guy I should just ignore it? It's not a problem? I think you'll find this is something which can be an issue for 100% of the population, not just your favorite gender. GG bigotry.

The law. In fact, even if your first child dies, you're still not allowed a second child. Doesn't stop people doing it, but those couples who lose a child early on to a medical condition, or being run over by a drunk driver, etc, and try to follow the law, aren't allowed a second child.

Their security record is generally pretty good. In most cases where a celebrity claims their account was "hacked" after a ridiculously stupid or insensitive tweet is posted is just PR covering their ass.

>>You loons haven't even built an upper atmosphere elevator
Right, because an "upper atmosphere elevator" is completely infeasible. A space elevator would have to be taken into space in pieces, constructed there, and the cables rolled "down" to earth from an anchor point a hundred thousand miles out. The science behind it is perfectly sound - unfortunately we lack the material necessary for the "cables", at least in any manufacturable form.

But an "upper atmosphere elevator"? The science behind that is not sound. Besides making a pyramid with a base of 10,000 square miles, there's no way to stabilize a structure at that height without something anchoring it in place from the space end.. you'd need... a space elevator to do that. :p

I just re-read The Forever War this past week. As the quote on the cover says -

"To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise."

But can it clean my HOSTS file?

Posting to undo accidental de-moderation. :(