Improving motion tracking, and stereoscopy: those are technical problems that we can deal with.

Improve the substance of modern games and movies: that's a more complicated problem.

The idea of VR is still iffy for me personally. I play mostly FPS games right now. For me I can see VR being used as a monitor (which might give privacy, but not much else). I would still need a mouse to "look around". I can't use my head to look around because I'd loose the keyboard if I turned around. And I'd choke out if I turned right a few times (if you follow where I'm going with that).

So I think it might be alright for a rollercoaster sim, where looking at it on a monitor vs looking at it with VR goggles isn't totally different. Though I do understand that you can have each eye independent so it might actually "feel" different - and that's where "it needs to be applied correctly" comes into play.

I think virtual desk kind of applications are interesting.

Driving games are where head tracking might be awesome. Because the keyboard and mouse are gas/break and steering, so you are totally free to look around and give the evil eye to that guy passing you.

You're a scary individual, but I like the way you think.

I would link a picture of a castle with a moat but I'm too lazy.

Air is so passe.

Your post clearly states that if money is required to view the video then it's commercial use.

So if you are required to be a member of the non-profit group (ergo you paid) then it's commercial use, but if the non-profit makes a video and slaps it up on its site or youtube for everyone to view then they're OK.

This.

How often do you hear about a government personal info data breach? The DMV, IRS, VA? Part of the problem is that the insurance companies are only interested in fleecing their customers for as much as possible. They're not interested in protecting your data, so it slips through their fingers. "Oopsie, sorry about that." is all we get.

The government, OTOH, is interested in data security. If there were a breach on that side the government also has the power to track you down and throw you in Gitmo claiming you threatened national security. Random corp doesn't have that kind of power.

And that's the thing. If it's a well known well understood thing then medicine / doctors work great.

If it's something rare or not well understood then doctors are very hit and miss.

Chiropractic and Acupuncture have worked much better than doctors in my case, but I certainly know that doctors have their place.

You mention running simulations, compiling, etc. You have some Dell and generic "mac" suggestions.

Sager is a company a lot of people have never heard of, and they market more to gamers, but the systems are very solid, have great performance, and cost less than comparable mainstream systems. I have run different Linux distros on 2 of them (4+ years old, and new).

I'm going to say around $1500 will get you 16GB RAM, 1920x1080 display, i7 CPU, 120GB SSD, 1 TB hd, backlit keyboard, DVD burner, etc

Because they are performance based you may need to tweak settings if you want more battery life, but you didn't mention an interest in that. I've never cared, I wanted a portable workhorse and that's what I got.
Check sagernotebook.com or powernotebooks.com

Holy crap! I need to check that out. (pun intended)

Will Darnell: "Ya know Pepper, ya can't polish a turd."
Christine (1983)

+1 indeed.

If you're using a Kindle Fire or the PC Kindle App you do get color covers, but I can't say that I've ever paid a lot of attention to them.

It's more about the opinion that if you fuck up the moon you could very well destroy life on the planet. That said we're not likely to mine enough of the moon to mess things up that bad. But I don't trust a billionaire to care about performing that process in a non-damaging responsible way. Cutting corners and squeezing people may be how he made his billions (I didn't check). And if he did fuck thing up he wouldn't pay the price, "we" would.

Of course, using the moon as a base to build and launch things deeper into space makes perfect sense. If he helps get that process figured out it could do a lot of good for humanity.

Then we can spread like a disease across the solar system. For all the good we do this planet it's probably better for the universe if we die here.

You left out Valve. If (and that may be a big IF, but one can hope), if they are able to get enough game developers supporting Linux as a real option then I think a double digit shift in market share is certainly possible. The biggest problem then is the legacy games. My main system has been running Linux for a while now (though I had dual boot there to play some games). Now I have a secondary system that runs windows for those games (with a dual boot to Linux, just because), but they generally stay in their primary OS in suspend mode.

Ideally I always wanted to have something like a hypervisor that runs on the bare metal where I could install both OS to run at the same time and some key combination to switch between the two. I don't care about dedicating a core to an OS I'm not looking at right now - I've got 8 after hyperthreading. I'd happily give 1/2 the cores and 1/2 the ram to each. But I want the full video performance for gaming in whichever I'm looking at. I don't know if anything (vmware, etc) does that..and they probably wouldn't be at a price point I'm willing to pay. Hell, having two systems is probably cheaper.

I also appreciate the "We'll go build out our service where better service already exists" logic when it would be better to improve service where Google fiber doesn't exist, making it economically difficult for Google to justify the investment.

Right now I pay TWC $65 a month for 50Mbps. I have the option to pay AT&T about the same (and enter a contract). I would gladly take Google fiber here. Luckily I live in Charlotte, where Google fiber is in the works, sadly I live far enough from the center that I may not be able to get it.

Chrome has ScriptSafe. I don't like it as much as NoScript, but it's the closest I've found. AdBlock, Ghostery, and LastPass are on Chrome as well. I'm not sure which ones work with the mobile browser though.

There's also one called ScriptBlock, but I haven't tried it.