They have shipped well over 20'000 developer kits so far. That's a device only sold through their website, known to be low-resolution, lacking position tracking and to become obsolete within a year due to release of the much improved consumer version. I have little doubt that they will sell a lot more units once the consumer versions hits the retail shelves. They also have something like $90 million venture capital, so they certainly can do some volume ordering.

Total immersion is a problem and people have wanted to solve for a long long time. At the moment it's still a little niche due to lack of hardware, but there is no shortage on people with tipple monitor setups, TrackIR and other gadgets to get as close to the real thing as possible. Rift can provide a better experience for much cheaper.

Look at some reaction videos on Youtube, everybody from 6 year old kids to 90 year old grandmas seems to enjoy the experience, a lot. Disney also did some research back in the 90's with they Aladdin Virtual Reality Carpet Ride and concluded that it's basically fun for all ages, no need to be some hardcore sci-fi geek to enjoy a bit of virtual reality. All the gaming aside, who would say no to an IMAX cinema in his living room? Virtual reality can provide that.

The Segway cost as much as a small car, so it's not that surprising that it didn't take of. If the Segway would have cost as much as a bike it would have had a much better time with mass market adoption. The Rift by contrast is pretty cheap, well within the realm of other gaming peripherals, cheaper then a big TV.

The Rift is already extremely cheap, devkits sell for just $300 which is about as much as a good monitor will cost you and given that the thing is little more then a mobile phone screen and motion tracking that price can easily go down to $200, $100 or even less in the coming years when they ramp up the volume.

The reason why VR failed in the past is that it was to expensive and just not good enough. Tracking was slow, resolution was low, the things were heavy, FOV was tiny and game support was extremely limited. All that meant you would go back to a monitor sooner or later. The Rift however fixes basically all of that thanks to use of cheap components from mobile phones and in terms of performance it beats every previous consumer headset by a mile. The FOV goes from the usual 50 degree to 110 degree and the tracking is fast enough to have basically no perceivable lag. Weight is also pretty low and cost is as mentioned is a third of the inferior competition (aka Sony HMZ). Game support also seems to be much better this time around, thanks to a lot of developers either already offering native support or third party driver injection into exiting games (which was impossible in the first round of consumer VR, as games back then still run under DOS without a standard 3D API and most people didn't have the Internet yet).

The Rift still has a bit of an uphill battle, as mainstream game development focuses mainly on consoles not PC, but given the never ending hype that this device has gotten over the last one and a half year I have little doubt that virtual reality will stick around this time.

Copy-protection ain't exactly a new invention, games in the days of the original Prince of Persia where full of them, be it checks that made you look up something in the games manual or checks for faulty sectors on the floppy that you couldn't copy easily. But just as with modern copy protection almost all of that stuff has been cracked.

What you have to worry about isn't really DRM, but just plain old archival. I tried to toy around with some Grand Prix Legends old mods a few weeks ago and a huge amounts of that stuff is already lost due to plain old link-rot, dead servers or Megaupload going down. Steam and Origin are actually a good thing in that aspect, as they (hopefully) keep around a well maintained archive of all their games and mods, something that can't be said about random Indie studio that likely won't exist any more in five years time or a random modder.

The problem is that an erasable Internet can only ever work with locked down hardware, incompetent users or a government censored Internet. And even with locked down hardware stuff like Snapchat would quickly lose it's point once Google Glass becomes more popular and you can just snap photos of your phone with your Glass. If anything, I see the future heading in the complete opposite direction. Record everything, all the time. A $100 3TB drive will already record a year or two of non-stop video in 360p@30. Right now it's impractical as head mounted cameras are clunky and battery life is short (two hours for most models), but that's slowly changing.

Come on, he installed four alarm system and didn't bother with a single surveillance camera? I am not saying that there wasn't somebody in his apartment, but it's hard not to think this might have just been a case of a malfunctioning alarm system and a whole bunch of paranoia on top. If the government is after you, at least make sure you get some pretty pictures of them, cams are cheap these days.

Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.

It won't give you a headache like the 3DS, as the 3D is done via a display strapped to your head instead of lenticular lenses, shutter glasses, so the image that hits your eyes is always the proper one and there is no cross talk. The current devkit will however give you motion sickness as there is both latency between your head movement and the display updates as well as a lack of positional tracking, meaning there will be a small offset between where the image is and where it should be.

However people who have tried the latest prototype of what Oculus is currently developing behind closed doors have commented that they have basically solved those issues and can generate a motion sickness free experience even for people for which motion sickness was a big problem with the released devkits.

This seems like a great underhanded way to make it illegal to run Tor exit nodes, free VPNs, proxies or similar services that give anonymous people ways to interact with the net.

That assumes that there was a point where he said "screw this". I have plenty of projects that I just stopped working on, but with none of them I had a clear point were I knew I would stop working on them, it was mostly just getting busy with other stuff and then just never finding the time or motivation to come back to them. The projects just fizzled out, there was never a point were I gave up on them and in theory I might pick them up again one day.

They may have changed it in one of their redesigns, but for a long time your subscription list was public. You could disable it from your profile, but even then that info was still available in the channels list of subscribers. Does the owner still get a mail when you subscribe to his channel? Either way, that's basically the point, it's quite unclear what gets shared and with whom.

It's not the data that affects my freedom, it's the laws and regulations of the government that do that.

Misinterpreting the data is what I would consider a minor annoyance. Sure it will happen, but it's not like not collecting the data would magically stop the SWAT team from knocking on the wrong door. Mistakes happen and if anything, data provides a way to reduce them.

The government snooping around doesn't bother me all that much, as while it might be a waste of money, it really doesn't affect me. It's just dead data sitting around on some NSA server. There is more interesting stuff to read then my email. What I am bothered by is the leaking of private data that happens all over the place, things like the people you follow on Twitter or Youtube being publicly visible information. Why exactly does every modern social webpage treat what are essentially bookmarks as public information and publishes it to the world? Why is everybody just accepting that and not complaining about? You can't even switch it off most of the time. I find that incredible annoying and avoid any service that does that when I can. I don't have much of a problem with my information being out there, but at the very least a service should make it very clear what kind of information is public and what is private and modern services don't really do that.

Another thing I have a real issue with is the starting pervasiveness of requiring real life authentication to log into a webpages. Mobile phone numbers started as just a way to get your password back, but now quite a few webpages are requiring them and Google+ and Facebook have their real name requirements. Furthermore there are more and more webpages that only allow you to access them via your Facebook or Twitter login, not via a webpage specific account. So once Facebook or Google switching on the requirement for a mobile phone number or real name and enforce that, that means your real life identity is linked to a ton of a webpages and you can't stop that from happening unless you completely avoid that webpage, as even Tor doesn't give you a free anonymous mobile phone number.

AR is coming, but it's still years away from being practical, so Valve focuses on VR instead which is right around the corner. Also CastAR isn't really suited for general purpose AR, as it needs a special surface to project on. So it's probably an evolutionary dead end in the long run. Finally CastAR seems overall more focused on the toy/boardgame market then on the gamer market and Valve is mainly interested in gamers.

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The gimping is a feature, it means parents don't have to worry about the kid gaining access to the Internet, buying stuff on their credit card or all the other things that can go wrong with an Internet enabled console. This thing plays the games grandma buys them for Christmas and nothing else. For everybody else the Wii Mini might not be a good buy, but they are not the target audience, this thing is made as Christmas present for 6 year olds.