But how would a traditional relational database scale to the 1 billion, or 1,000 billion users, huh? Did you think about the need to future-proof the application?

Too bad Microsoft just burned all that money, and not paid some poor, $100k+ engineers to develop the controller!

The difference between your hack, the many existing head-mounted displays and the Rift is how serious they're taking a) the FOV and b) latency. These two factors are critical to making the VR feel like something more than a display strapped to your head. This is also why I don't see this working with the PS4 very well either, unfortunately. For the Rift and, really, any VR, to work well you need high resolution, high framerate, and low latency which is not something the consoles are very good at.

As for content, I think this type of VR proposition is way better off than 3D TV/video stuff, as most 3D games can easily be adjusted to render the scene twice with a slightly different camera position. You don't really even need the official dev support for this, as this is something that can be done on the driver level for any DX/OpenGL game.

I'm not really sure about the Oculus API policy but Valve hasn't been particularly "open" about anything either so far. In any case, although the Rift might start off with a single model, that doesn't have to be always the case, it just makes sense to start with one unified offering rather than immediately confusing the market with a bunch of versions.

Anyway, what makes it difficult for me to predict how this goes is a fundamental part of the experience - you have to strap something to your head and isolate yourself completely from the real environment, which is a rather dorky proposition that not everyone would accept. Anyway, even if none of the mainstream games support the Rift/Valve VR, a high resolution and low latency HMD is something I'd definitely want anyway.

Have you tried the Rift? While you're correct that just having a perfect picture won't get you the full experience of jacking into the Matrix, it actually does go a long, long way toward making the experience extremely immersive.

A lot of our sense actually depend on our vision to work properly - for instance, you'd think that an airplane pilot would be able to tell which way is up based on what their body feels, but actually losing visibility of the outside world is a good way to completely mess up the perception of position and direction. With the inner ear not providing data one way or another, having realistic, lag free video works pretty well for making you feel like you're experiencing whatever is being shown.

Well, as long as they make taking photos with a tablet an offense punishable by death, carried out on the spot, I don't have a problem with the rule.

Could be a gearing issue, or rather the lack of gearing to be more specific. It seems to get up to the top speed reasonably quickly, but if the motor hits its speed limiter, well, that's it, because you can't upshift even if the motor is still making sufficient power to overcome wind/rolling resistance.

Sure, but for now AMD and Nvidia seem to be happy rebadging previous-gen chips with new names and calling it a day. 2014 is almost here and still nobody knows anything about Maxwell, which was already supposed to be shipping by this point. With huge per generation improvements and a significant process advantage, Intel could really put the hurt on them in the lower end of the market, which is the majority of it.

What about all potential electricity users who won't get anything because everything except perhaps natural gas power plants are more expensive and the poor countries won't be able to afford as many of them?

They do work very well at improving efficiency and cutting down on unnecessary travel. Do you think everyone in Europe loves driving gutless 3-cylinder shitboxes and agricultural diesels? Of course not, but for people who aren't rich and aren't car enthusiasts, the taxes make fuel efficiency one of the top priorities, and the manufacturers pay attention to this.

Average fuel efficiency is significantly higher in the EU, while theres no CAFE-like bullshit - which is why you can still easily get a bi-turbo V12 AMGs, V8 Land Cruiser, or whatever you want, and the manufacturers don't have to game the system by pushing useless trucks to people who don't need them just to take advantage of different economy standards.

As a car nut I'd prefer not to have the fuel tax so I could afford to run a muscle car and not cry when filling up my Miata, but as it stands, that's by far the easiest and also effective way to raise revenue and slowly nudge consumer preference towers better fuel efficiency.

If you think this is bad, check out the recent story about this on Arstechnica. Like 2/3s of the comments are trying to prove that the hyperloop won't work because of... terrorists! Sure, you can screen anyone at the entrance like in the airport, but what if the terrorist drives to the middle of the route and blows it up with an RPG? How do you counter that, Musk?

Why not just look at Elon's PDF, which already has a map with all the radius circles drawn on it?

Shit, I hoped they'd go with pacem lacerta or something.

You still haven't crashed your helicopter, so why would this be any different?

I'm just hoping they'll try to make a database this time...