Very much this.

The problem I have with this article is that it's basically pointing out a tautology. The kind of fusion created by slamming atoms together at high speed (in other words, high temperature fusion) can't be done at low temperatures. OK, but we have empirical evidence of other mechanisms for causing fusion.

Other forms of catalyzed fusion, if they exist, probably also require some pretty exotic physics, or we'd see lots of evidence of unusually high energy output in nature.

I understand this point of view, but on the other hand, I think that the VR killer app hasn't been found yet. The 'mainstream' equation works both ways. Sure there's a bigger potential customer base for VR apps running on Windows and OSX, but I think there's a bigger 'idea base' for new VR apps with hackers running Linux.

The Oculus SDK license specifically forbids using it to connect to non-Oculus hardware. On the other hand, they've recently released the full specs of the DK1 as open source, so it's now possible to legally build a piece of hardware that the SDK itself can't distinguish from the real thing. Hypothetically speaking, since the most recent version of the SDK relies on a runtime to communicate with the hardware, if you could spoof the runtime communication (which happens over a socket) then you could use any IMU you want to at all, as long as you replicated the mechanism that the runtime uses to send tracking data to a Rift enabled application. This is probably a violation of SDK / Runtime the license, but if you do a clean-room reverse engineering of the runtime you might be ok? IANAL.

Thank Captain Hindsight. Sure, technically anybody could have done it. But no one else actually did it, despite the numerous Linux developers complaining about the total lack of positional support for them. It's pretty easy to look at someone else's work and say "Oh, yeah, that's obvious" once they've actually done it. I don't really see why you've bothered commenting since you seem to be of the opinion that the entire exercise was pointless. If you don't buy into the entire premise of the article how can you be bothered to have an opinion of whether one of the participants in the work received proper credit?

Never mind. They've corrected the article.

Anyone with the SDK can get these codes. Oh, and you made a thread on Reddit.

Really? Oliver explicitly said he'd had no luck in getting the codes. The SDK doesn't contain them, btw. Only the Oculus runtime, which is closed source, now communicates with the hardware. So, anyone who had the SDK and could also figure out how to write a DLL to intercept the HID calls made by the runtime (not the SDK, which doesn't contain the codes anywhere) could get the codes.

I think that the article kind of unfairly glosses over my contribution. I posted the original reddit thread, and I'm the one who discovered the codes required to actually enable the LEDs on the device. I appreciate that Oliver is an actual VR researcher, but I did this in part to get some visibility for the book I'm writing on Oculus Rift development.

There are a bunch of comedies and a bunch of kids shows because Amazon is probably going to start of producing a comedy and a kid's show, because they're both proven genres. Having decided to do so, they produced a bunch of pilots in each genre with the intent of picking one or two of the best results. People keep reacting to these pilots as if they're the first episodes of a set of series Amazon will make, but they're not.

Also, while the networks are overloaded on comedies, they're sadly lacking in stuff that includes the way real human beings talk (i.e. saying fuck) or stuff that can include drug humor, so there's plenty of room for doing stuff that hasn't been seen before.

You can't compare the budget with House of Cards with the budget spent on these episodes. Amazon didn't make these pilots as an alternative to spending a lot of money on a single show. They did it as a prelude to spending a bunch of money on one or two shows.

I'm pretty certain Netflix produced a bunch of pilots which were equally as shaky as the Amazon work. The only difference is that those weren't shown to the general public, just focus groups and Netflix execs, and they picked the ones that they thought had the most promise. Many, if not most shows start out with a pilot that isn't nearly as good quality as the finished product, and not all series air a pilot as the first episode.

Your reaction to the pilots is pretty much why pilots don't get shown to the general audience: because most people go in with an expectation built up over years of watching final products.

This depends on the size of the black hole. The larger the black hole, the smaller the tidal forces at the actual event horizon, in which case you're correct, he just seems to slow down and redshift from an outside observer. However, for a small enough black hole he'll be ripped apart and quite dead long before he reaches the event horizon. If it's small enough to have a hot accretion disk (whether the disk is there or not).

Read it again. It says the nickel becomes copper, which means that the proton isn't ejected from the nucleus. The energy of it and the electron will end up getting distributed as thermal energy. I suppose you might get some beta radiation at the edges if electron escape the nucleus with enough energy, but that's nowhere nearly as dangerous as something like a fast neutron.

He got a threatening letter from a law firm, not a summons. If they brought an actual case against him you would be correct that ignoring it would be stupid, but ignoring asshat extortion lawyergrams is a perfectly legitimate tactic.

Defining and using the regex inline is a bug, not a feature. It typically means you're putting regex literals into the code, which is just as bad as peppering your code with hard-coded constants.

I hope Kurzweil succeeds simply so that we can assign the resulting AI the task of arguing with these critics about whether it's experience of consciousness is any more or less valid than theirs. It probably won't shut them up, but it might allow the rest of us to get some real work done.

Whoops.... that should have included this link: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/12/safe_personal_c.html