HMD's have been around since LONG before there were 3D graphics on the PC at all. They'd been used (for example) on military flight simulator back when you'd need a million dollars of mainframe hardware to generate a 3D image. I very much doubt that any of this tech is actually new. Probably someone like Evans & Sutherland were the first to do it - and they had 3D graphics back in the late 1970's. I doubt that much of the general concept is still patentable - so this argument is probably over some kind of small feature.

Consider this...suppose you are just over a mile from the SOUTH pole. You walk a mile south - and now you're maybe a hundred feet from the South pole. Then you turn west and start walking...around and around in a tiny 100 foot radius circle centered on the pole. When you've finally clocked up a mile - you turn and head North again...where do you end up?

Well, the answer depends on the exact circumference of the circle that you walked around. Generally, you'll end up someplace very different from your starting point...BUT if that circle is an EXACT sub-multiple of a mile - then you'll end up precisely where you started.

So...the North pole is clearly NOT a unique answer.

Furthermore - the north pole is only ONE answer. My approach reveals an infinite number of possible answers:

1) You could have started ANYWHERE that's at the exact right distance from the pole - so anywhere on that circle will do...an infinite number of starting points will work.

2) Note that ANY exact sub-multiple of a mile will do - so with mathematical precision, there are an infinite number of sub-multiples of a mile - and hence an infinite number of distances from the pole where you could have started.

Truly - the "North Pole" example exhibits very little lateral thinking... if that was your answer then you **FAILED** the Musk test...which (I'm pretty sure) is the whole point here.

The original version of the story is that a hunter walk a mile south, a mile west, shoots a bear, then walks a mile north to return to his starting point. What color was the bear?

Since there are no bears at the south pole - and only polar bears live anywhere near the north pole - then the north pole is the right place and the correct answer is "WHITE!"....but Musk isn't asking *that* question...he's trying to trick people into jumping to a false conclusion without stopping to think about it.

    -- Steve Baker

Post to undo a misclicked mod. :(

50 million? You are not even close! Billions of billions of babies die each year due to masturbation! Even more than the population of earth!

Seriously... read up on some biology, there is a big difference between the various stages of a fetus

120 years, 200 years does it matter? Nothing is going to come out from under copyright until we're all dead.

I am a strong advocate of 20 year automatic copyright, then allowing the purchase of 20 year extensions for escalating renewal fees. Years 20-40 could be $1000 and then 10x for each successive renewal. This simple change would completely fix the orphan work problem and put millions of less popular works into the public domain. But the copyright industry doesn't want that to happen - they don't want these less popular works flooding the market for free.

I'm still trying to figure out how collecting royalties on songs where everyone is dead is going to incentivize them to make more music. Maybe we should reconsider these rules giving copyright to corporations for 200 years.

I don't know about you - but there are two parts to my job...thinking and doing.

The doing part is easy enough to segregate...If I'm sitting at my desk at work "doing"...typing in code, debugging, documenting, etc - then clearly that belongs to my employer and I have no right to be "doing" anything that I'm going to have control over outside of work.

But thinking is near impossible to segregate. I may well be thinking about solutions to my employer's problems as I commute, or as I'm fritzing around with something else at home...and it's impossible not to have an idea for an outside-work project pop into your head while you're trying to come up with a solution to something that's work-related.

In my opinion, the inability to segregate work-thinking from home-thinking means that I shouldn't try. In my mind, I'm paid for the 'doing' part during office hours - and whatever 'thinking' is required in order to get the 'doing' done. 'Doing' that gets done on my own time is mine - as is whatever thinking went into making it happen. When I think of something that relates to my job - it belongs to them, even if I come up with it at 4am in a flash of dream-inspired wakefulness. And if I come up with something that would make a great off-time project while I'm waiting for my code to compile at work - then that's my idea and it's nobody's business when and where I came up with it.

The only requirement to make that work is a clean separation between the kinds of things I'm paid to do and the kinds of things I do for myself - but since "a change is as good as a rest", there is a natural tendency for me to do very different things in my off-time anyway. If you find that you have a fuzzy grey area in there - then you'd better lawyer-up and make sure everyone has a crystal clear idea of where the "doing" boundaries lie an that the "thinking" boundaries don't exist.

Microsoft and IBM ended up in a spat over OS|2 and parted ways. That left IBM very angry at Microsoft and without an x86 operating system. IBM spent $1B on Linux in the early 1990's and made a major marketing campaign out of doing it. They even ported Linux onto their sacred mainframe - the Z-series. This IBM support legitimized Linux and propelled it into becoming what it is today.

The real question is how long the reboot time is relative to the glide duration from 30,000 feet?

There are a significant number of 'missing features' in the free version of Unity3d...for example, render-to-texture. That's a pretty serious omission for any kind of serious software development - so the $1500 (or $75/month with a 2 year commitment) is necessary if you are really serious about game development. In a typical game company, $1,500 is roughly the salary of one programmer for a week. So over the life of any reasonable commercial game, the cost of buying a full license for each worker is essentially negligible.

What the free versions do is to enable indie studios to grow to the point where they can afford to pay for a game engine - and to get amateur game developers to grow interest, loyalty and expertise in a particular free engine that will hopefully translate into sales of the professional version when they become paid game developers in the future. But there are enough annoying road blocks that even an amateur developer may be tempted into buying (or renting!) the full version after running into a few of them.

It's a good model, and I hope it grows and continues.

    -- Steve

I don't know how many panels you need, but your price sounds ridiculous.
I spend less then a tenth of that and have enough panels for about 2/3 of my electriciy consumption. They are also well on their way to pay for themselves in about 6 years. (currently in year 2).

duckduckgo ?

Unless your build environment is really broken (or you have a seriously a-typicall code base) compile time should not matter nearly as much as the resulting code. Don't forget that the resulting code has a big impact on the test phase of your cycle.

Normally during the edit phase you only touch part of a codebase, and proper dependency tracking should result in only a small part of it being rebuild and linked.
Proper dependency handling is not a job of the compiler.
LInking is also not the job of the compiler. (And untill lld is mature enough llvm and gcc use the same one anyway, and even then it still has to prove itself)