They are not going to be sending people starting in 2018. The 2018 trip, if it actually happens, will be an unmanned demonstration flight. I'm not sure how realistic the whole idea is but I'll wait to see if they actually do that unmanned trip before getting excited about Mars One.

Maybe this is where they ACTUALLY buried all those cartridges of the Atari ET game.

Haven't tried it myself - but if they actually do nail all the latency, resolution and head tracking issues, then the only unavoidable thing left would be the focal depth issue that all current 3D technologies suffer from (your eyes converge at a different depth than they are focusing on). This will remain a problem until true real-time holography becomes a reality, or at least some kind of advanced eye tracking to dynamically adjust focal depth to the point you're looking directly at, which is probably super-hard to do. I suppose that the headache issue will likely vary by person.

Usually reliable emulators don't come out until about two generations after a console. So by the end of the XBone/PS4 era we should start seeing good 360/PS3 emulators coming out.

I think at that point you turn into Wolverine.

I remember the first VR fad in the 90s... it seemed like such a neat idea. However, the graphics were horrible, frame rates sucked, head tracking was laggy, headsets were bulky, screens were blurry, FOV was too small, and people were still trying to figure out 3D movement control schemes. I've felt that ever since around 2004 we've been ready to give VR another shot, now that we've fixed or have the technology to fix every single one of those problems. And it seems like a lot of different companies are going to be going head-to-head in an attempt to be the ones that bring VR back. Obviously Oculus Rift has the biggest head-start, but there's some promise in the other ones too. The Infiniteye seems to have the FOV advantage. The CastAR seems like it could be an awesome thing of its own (although it's meant more for AR than VR, so it's not in direct competition). I know Sony has a head-mounted display and Valve are planning to bring one out as well. In fact, I think this is what the true next generation of video games is going to be known for, rather than the consoles (though they will likely add support Oculus Rift or make their own headsets if VR turns out to be a thing) If they can get the head-tracking and motion-tracking down without any noticeable lag, then the only real problem remaining is the issue of focus depth for stereo 3D. And that's something that basically CAN'T be resolved without actual real-time holographic technology, which is still probably a few decades away.

For our safety, we should teach robots what types of actions would cause the most amount of bodily harm to a human, and where all our vital organs are located, so they'll have a better idea how to behave safely around us and prevent injury. I see no possible way this could backfire.

This certainly sounds like an attempt to go "Hey! You! Undecided people! Snowden is totally the bad guy because of this! Ignore the other stuff!" Of course, nothing in the real world is ever as simple as (person X) is the bad guy and (person Y) is the hero, but we need a narrative. We need to stick people into archetypal categories with heroes and villains, and episodes/chapters with clear resolutions and unambiguous morals.

I suppose the streaming from your PC to the Steambox would be through your local network. Is the bandwidth of a network connection sufficient for a full HD video stream? Would there need to be some lossy compression to allow streaming at a good frame rate?

Gee, I wonder who gets to decide which rumors are true or false?

Aside from the issues of racial profiling, invasion of privacy, etc... this seems like a huge waste of time, resources, and money. Imagine the hourly rates of everyone from all the agencies involved, and how their hours-long interrogation of a harmless, innocent man diverted all of those resources AWAY from actually preventing terrorism.

It's interesting how well self-driving cars are working early, and it's certainly promising. But I'm wondering if liability issues will put the whole thing on hold for decades? Right now, if you crash, the blame can be assigned to an individual most of the time (aside from rare crashes caused by brake failures or other technical problems). If a self-driving car crashes, the liability would then be with the car company or the company which programmed the self-driving code. There may be a lower risk of crashing in a well-made self-driving car, and the total number of crashes may be reduced greatly, but it could only take a handful of crash incidents to bring down a company.