I trust Israel more than China. Israel is a modern democracy and has proven itself capable of handling these weapons. It's had a nuclear deterrent since at least the 1970s and has only ever threatened to use it once, when it had no choice but to threaten its use to protect itself from destruction (against unprovoked Syrian aggression). China is a dictatorship in an arms race with no one in particular and will likely seek to build a nuclear capability able to destroy the entire Western world which it sees as a potential threat to its way of life.

I have one. It's fine for development work which is what it's intended for. Frankly, in practice the resolution isn't all that bad either.

The cheapest and simplest thing for Samsung to do for a relatively small run of only 45k devices is to literally lift existing pre-built screens directly off the Note 3 assembly line and hand them over to Oculus. Virtually any kind of customization, like removing the Gorilla glass or touchscreen controller would require an assembly line change and could result in a much larger production slow down. I know it's hard to believe that 'wasting' unnecessary materials is actually cheaper than removing them, but if you know anything about manufacturing you understand the enormous impact that an assembly line change can have.

$12.5M in 1981 would only be worth $32.6M today (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=12500&year1=1981&year2=2014). While that's certainly nothing to scoff at, back in 1981, it seems that an NBA franchise was well within the range of many 1%ers, whereas today it seems that a franchise is really only in the domain of the 0.01%. What I can't figure out is, what happened to NBA (and sports franchises in general) over the last 33 years to have out-paced inflation by so much? Even if you think Ballmer paid 3-4x what it's really worth, the rate of growth is still an order of magnitude greater than inflation over that period.

Still more useful than building yet another FPS in this day and age...

No, but the original knew what it was. This one apparently wants to fool you into thinking it's something that it's not: realistic.

I watched the trailer. It looks like it's designed for 13 year old boys who wouldn't know a believable premise or nuance if it struck them in the head. It seems to be edited by the same Hollywood effects people that do action movies. I sense that this cacophony of fast moving images is supposed to quickly overload your brain and make you feel like what you're watching is more exciting than it is, but reality is it's just a crutch to fall back on when there's little to scrutinize beyond the special effects.

Beyond that, it appears to be the same old regurgitated storyline (stolen from Rambo and used on practically every FPS since 1992): It's you versus an army of cliched enemies (i.e. aliens, robots, robots created by aliens, nazis or some other 'evil' country that the US fought in the 20th century). The voice acting is full of nondescript caricature-like accents. The up-close textures look like they're from some generic game circa 2005, but other effects/shadows mask it fairly well.

Maybe there are some unique elements to the gameplay, but I'm having trouble getting excited about it. Hasn't this run-and-gun FPS genre been played out enough already? I mean, even Carmack went to go do something more useful with his time...

You don't seem to understand something. 3D sucks because after you play in 3D for a while, the effect wears off and your brain can barely tell the difference between it and a simple 2D image. Then you wonder why you're wearing the dumb glasses.

VR is a completely different experience. It doesn't wear off in the same way, though the brain does get somewhat accustomed to aspects of it. The problem is you can't just move back to a 2D screen and get a similar experience. Games developed specifically for VR are very compelling and can't really be experienced any other way.

> These things cost way too fucking much and have way too little use for the mass market to buy in. The amount of people that do buy in is way too fucking small for developers to support, and thus those use cases are never created.

Welcome to the smartphone market circa 2005...

Have you worn an Oculus? No, you haven't. Which is why you think it is an 'abortion'. I have spent the better part of a year with an early development kit and I can tell you it's already a highly entertaining experience that will only get better over time.

> People don't want to wear headgear for their media consumption.

People don't want to watch a wall-mounted rectangle for their media consumption. Both are asinine statements. Anyway, VR isn't so much about consuming media. It's about being part of an interactive experience that can't be replicated any other way.

> 2 decades passed since the last time they tried this shit and failed.

Yes, it was super expensive back then, there was next to no content and the overall experience was absolutely horrible by anyone's standards.

So what's different this time? Technology has improved immensely. Field of view is much larger, latency is way down, resolution is way up, and weight is a small fraction of the early headsets. Oh, also most households already have the computers necessary to drive a decent VR experience. And content? It's coming. There are thousands of 3d games that can benefit from VR with only a few months of additional development effort and hundreds of new titles already being built. Furthermore, VR headsets will be in the same price range as a typical game console or high end video card. It is now right in the cross-hairs of the mainstream digital consumer.

You: Linux Sucks!
Me: Hmmm... Well I guess it does in some ways, but to be so one sided must mean you have something new or insightful to add to the conversation. 'Click'
You: Well actually Linux sucks and it's great at the same time!
Me: So why did you claim that Linux sucks then?
You: Because people are forking stuff and um, companies are making business decisions that I don't like.
Me: Huh?
You: Well someone forked OpenSSL and that makes Linux suck.
Me: Well that's one out of thousands of components within Linux, but I'm not sure it justifies a headline claiming that Linux sucks in general.
You: Right see, it's also awesome that we have an ecosystem where someone can just come around and fork stuff. Isn't it cool that things suck and are great at the same time?
Me: So you have no sensible opinion about any of this.
You: Well no, but you played the video, so I win.
Me: Fuck you and fuck Slashdot for promoting you.

I honestly don't have too many gripes about the redesign. You can still get to the old menu by hitting alt and the drag and drop UI customization flows are better than before. The tabs? meh, they were fine before, they're fine now. Moving the old orange firefox drop-down to the right side and re-arranging the buttons ala Chrome? Meh. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I still use it because performance is decent, it's reasonably stable and I feel like Mozilla is slightly less interested in spying on everything I do than Google is.

Also, I've noticed that Firefox has lost a lot of market share in the past few years, which probably means it will be less of a target for hackers going forward.

> This exact sort of behavior made Detroit the smoking crater it is today.

Not really.

There may be some parallels, but Detroit was mostly a different situation. The Detroit lower classes did not actively try to push away those with money the way the SF leaches are trying to do. In Detroit, there were decades of major race relation problems that culminated in black riots in the downtown core. This scared the white middle-class who pretty much all picked up and moved to the suburbs willingly.

In SF, the complainers are a small group of mostly young, white folks who are bored, unemployed and looking for handouts to sustain their leach-like lifestyle.

Oh and I'm never traveling outside of a tour group in Central or South America. Just the thought of having to come up with the right incantation and bribe for a dollar-a-day cop on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere gives me anxiety.

What I really want in the new design, is easier access to SlashDataCenter and SlashCareers.... oooooh and SlashBI. I really can't get enough 'Business Intelligence' news formatted as a two paragraph article with a large stock image and zero comments!

"The Premium package gives you access to all your streaming favorites like YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix along with dozens of foreign movie sites you've never heard of.
The Friends & Family package gives you access to the people you want to keep in touch with, when you want to keep in touch with them, over your favorite NSA-sponsored proprietary social networking site: FacePalmSpace.
Our Adults-Only package allows you to stream all your favorite German Scheiße porn tube sites!"

Don't think so? Bookmark me, wait a couple years, then come back and mod me "Insightful".