It never is, and never will be if all goes well. Wouldn't you rather be honest about what you (don't) know than work on stupid old data, like "cloved hooves are bad to eat"??

We continuously learn more, and the "flip flops" are the result of continuously better understandings. Your life expectancy has increased as a result, and this continues to improve each and every year.

There is a tremendous amount of ignorance and stupidity the world over. People get ideas from random sources, make their choices, and are very prone to making the mistake of believing everything they think. So we have people who *still* swear by Laetrile as a cure for cancer, or Scientology as a cure for arthritis caused by grumpy souls stuck in their elbows.

However, science offers a way out of the maze: the idea that ideas are only as valuable as they can be *validated* by peer review and experimentation. Validating ideas is painful, costly, and time consuming, so it takes *time* to find all the stupids and work them out, one by one. Combine that with the often significant economic interests in the ideas being cross-checked, and you can see it often takes even more time and expense to get the word out.

The change of tune that you point out is perhaps the single biggest strength of science, not some evidence of *ahem* irrational design.

Simply put, VR headsets (displays mounted in such a way as to be placed in front of a person's eyes) have been visualized and built for decades.

Sure, but that's not what's being patented here. What's being patented here is a frame that you can slot an existing mobile device into to be used as a headset, where the headset detects the insertion and notifies the phone to switch to VR mode. That's not something that has been built for decades.

Lawnmower Man anyone?

Lawnmower Man didn't include a device like this. This is not a patent on any and all VR displays, it's a patent on a specific type of frame for mobile devices.

Yep. At that time Microsoft were still running Hotmail on FreeBSD because they were struggling to migrate it to Windows.

Or a can of beans?

I mean, it's a header to tell you what's inside the packet. How is a label on a can not telling you what's inside the can?

There's lots that you are missing.

The issue isn't the input data, it's the processing method. The processing method mentioned here as "revolutionary" is just about exactly the method that Raymond Kurzweil posited: a hierarchy of "nodules" that pattern match on a cascading network of pattern matches....

We're living with a modern-day Turing. Do we give him ample credit?

If anything, the digital revolution obviates the need for tedious, drudgerous work. In the 1960s that was George Jetson speak! Poor George had to work an entire hour per day! But now that we've adopted far-right, archaic ideology and let the super-wealthy get all the spoils of the digital revolution, suddenly "eliminating drudgery" means "eliminating jobs".

The digital revoluion is set to disemploy up to 50% of Americans over the next 2 decades. It's going to get lots worse before it gets better. That is, unless you are a software engineer.

I'm a lifelong business owner, and this guy is calling it exactly, giving good advice, and all you can do is complain about autoplay? Just be decent and don't complain about cubicle life, OK?

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, on Slashdot of all places. How many times have you seen a shitty submission here and comments correcting it? It's practically Slashdot's unofficial slogan: "yeah, the stories are awful, but I come for the comments".

Apparently, there is a C-64 emulator written in Javascript? (I don't know enough to try it)

On the other hand, I've recently been playing Sim City 2000, an ancient DOS game in a DOS Box, provided for free by EA....

Everyone knows that the military airplane became obsolete once radar was invented. (Sarcasm?)

The SR-71 was shot at too many times to count. Never once shot out of the sky. RADAR? Sure, they may have known she was there, and wasn't nothing to be done about it, as nothing could catch it.

The only reason why we parked the SR-71 is that satellites could do the same thing, cheaper, 24x7.

I would like to know about how smoking pot compares to smoking tobacco.

I don't *want* fancy electronics my car that doesn't adhere to some standard interface.

I want music to adhere to a standard interface, EG: RCA connectors. I don't expect navigation in the dash - I'm perfectly happy using my phone. I'd be good with it playing through the soundsystem via a standard interface, EG: bluetooth.

If you take care of them, cars last a long time. I'm *still* driving a 2001 Chrysler convertible, and it not only has a CD player, but also a cassette tape! I can't imagine using CDs or tapes - all my music is in my phone. The car only has 120k miles, I'll probably get another half decade out of it, at least. (And yes, I'm aware that the Chrysler convertibles have a bad reputation; emphasis on take care of them )

I want my car to be a car, and not try to include technology with a life cycle of 3-5 years. I don't *want* my car to have a built in cellular wifi, because the cellular network will likely be upgraded well before the car dies, making the feature worthless at best, but more likely a security or reliability concern. I don't *want* my car to have built-in navigation, as whatever system it has will be hopelessly obsolete long before I'm ready to turn in the drivetrain.

Instead, I propose that cars can have an in-dash screen that may (or may not) have it's own "smarts" but is also usable as a simple screen via something like HDMI with touch feedback so that later, I can use some new whiz bang thingie that hasn't been invented yet.

I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal.

In theory, yes. In practice, the DMCA can be used to squash interoperable implementations. Look at bnetd, for example. Despite it being a completely separate implementation of the protocol, Blizzard used the DMCA to successfully sue the project maintainers.

It's somewhat true that there's a bell curve in taxation, peaking with the middle class.

1) The poor have nothing to tax. They are generally on welfare or just off it, and struggling. The "freebies" a la "welfare" is not so much about the welfare receiving parents as giving their kids a chance to break out of the poverty trap, which they can't do if undernourished or uneducated.

2) The middle class has something to tax, but don't have the resources to defend themselves adequately. This is where the peak begins.

3) The upper middle class has a lot to tax, and is just starting to have enough resources to start to defend themselves, This is where the taxation peak starts to drop. (pretty much: between the 2% and the 0.5%)

3) The super wealthy hold all the cards. They can hire legions of lawyers and bankrupt countries if need be. This category controls or directly owns 50% of the world's wealth. Taxation doesn't even make sense to this class.