Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Out of date (Score 1) 42

this has far more potential

If immersive efefct i what you'tre going for, the potential for this technique is in fact severly limited.
First let's strip away some marketing mumbo jumbo:

The "projecting directly onto the retina" pitch is bull.
Unless you want to venture into eye surgery, you can't bypass the optics of the cornea etc ("lazers" or no "lazers"), so any light looking like it comes from a particular direction has to actually arrive from roughly that direction. It follows that and some part of the chain has to physically cover at least as much of the field of view as it looks like to the viewer. If you're close enough to the cornea that doesn't have to be very big, but unless you're willing to fix your gaze in a single direction and shave your eyelashes, there are practical limits to how far this goes.

The "no screen" pitch is also bull:
The DLP-chip is a screen just fine, just a really small, really bright, reflective one. Optics can make it look bigger, but this approach doesn't really scale to anything beyond a binocular-like FOV as long as the screen/chip remains stationary.

Either you need a bigger screen, or you need the small screen to follow your pupil around as your eyes move (really fast).
The latter is likely to take longer to become practical than the surgical option, so for the next few decades, it's going to be external screens of some sort for most of us.

That said, doubly curved displays, more advanced optics and futher miniaturisation can greatly improve FOV, size and quality compared to the cluncky rigs we see todaty, but don't expect anything beyond "really clunky ski goggles", even in the long term.

Comment Re:Human Relatives (Score 4, Insightful) 238

Nope, survival is just one means among several.
What evolution is really all about is propagation of DNA.

Traits can rise to prominence or dwindle into nothingness without affecting survival at all, if they affect reproductive success in some other way.

A gene doesn't even have to be reproduced via the same individual to support its own propagation:
In multicellular organisms like ourselves, millions of cells self-sacrifice every day, having offloaded the task of propagating their genes to the other clones in in the same colony (i.e. body). Insect colonies display similar constructs at the level of complex individuals, to the point of the majority of individuals being intrinsically sterile.

Humans and other social animals display social contracts that are much weaker, but which still strongly affect behaviour, and probably for much the same reasons.
If humans were truly as asocial as lone-hunter-type animals, you and I would be out feeding or sleeping, not hanging out here on slashdot trying to impress each other with our insights.

Comment Re:Before assuming "they didn't control for" (Score 1) 152

Granted, repvik goes a bit too far. The claim of controlling for all factors remains irrevocably bunk, but that does not in itself mean the study is not good enough - it merely reflects poorly on the source of that claim. Which brings us to the crux: who is that source? Does the actual publication make this extraordinary claim, or is it merely a perversion introduced by someone else along the chain from there and to this comment?

Comment Re:Before commenting, please remember... (Score 1) 389

There are not millions of muslim terrorists.
The terrorists I mentioned all pretend (and probably claim in honesty) to be on the side of the greater good, like they all do.

As for small and unimportant, how are you counting? If you include all use of guerilla tactics ion hot conflicts, you have to do som on the other sides too. All of them, all over the world.
If you don't, there is not a clear difference in numbers, although one specific attack had an admittedly spectalular bodycount.

Comment Re:Before commenting, please remember... (Score 5, Insightful) 389

most Terrorists are Muslims.

Troll.

This moves in waves.
Let's not forget about IRA, ETA, RAF, various other left-wing bombers in Europe, untold guerilla movements in Africa and South America.
With some exceptions it mostly follows where there are active separatist movements at any given time
Do your homework.

Comment Re:Nature has prior art (Score 2) 134

They don't build machines to do it.
You could build stuff that way yourself too, manually using a hot glue gun or an icing bag or whatever (I won't get into the more literal or imaginative emulations) and it would probably not be patentable, and certainly not covered by current 3D printing patents.

Comment Re:How have patents helped the world lately? (Score 1, Troll) 134

Wrong.
There is no such thing as a natural ownership of any kind of knowledge.

Patents and other intellectual rights are articifical limitations on personal freedom, devised and enforced by societies in order to acheive specififc aims. From the start of patents and until this day, "to promote progress" is the rhetoric used in order to justify the otherwise draconian measure of punishing people for using what they know.

It is not obvious that this tradeoff is a good one for all times and all societies. Similarly, a society is not bound by the self-imposed limitations of any another, unless it agrees to be.

Slashdot Top Deals

"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_

Working...