You're eyes are focused at infinity with this gen. of VR, so no eye strain. It's unclear if there will be any long-term physiological affects, though. Eventually, retinal displays will have shifting focus based on the in-world content.

“Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”
- Voltaire, Candide (1759)

One of the worst things you can do to a man is to take away his purpose.

No, the antivirus just became self aware, and then immediately committed suicide out of disgust.

I think you mean thermal steady state. A body at 140-300 K being illuminated by a ~6000 K blackbody radiation source is far from equilibrium.

Also, shipping dry ice around is probably overkill. The difference between night-time and day-time surface temperatures on Mars can be as high as ~150 K, and the low night-time surface temperatures means high Carnot efficiencies are possible (eta = 1 - T_C/T_H ~= 1 - 150/300 ~= 50%). The possibility of cheaply exploiting that difference in large heat engines could make it economical compared to photovoltaics. It might even be possible to combine the two in the same system, with waste heat from the photovoltaic cells going in to the heat engine.

I get about 5x lower bandwidth streaming movies from Amazon than from Netflix. I've stopped renting HD movies from Amazon because the buffering kills it. Netflix happens to have paid to AT&T (my ISP) to get preferred service [1].

Hmm... That sounds an awful lot like a "fast lane" to me.

[1] http://time.com/3059431/netfli...

Which is why the current crop of displays won't last long, if VR really catches on. Magic Leap is already well on the way to developing consumer-level retinal displays. I'm pretty sure Oculus and Apple are working on their own; other companies likely are, as well. There are some significant challenges, particularly with making it economical, but nothing insurmountable. Advances in MEMS and fiber-coupled diode lasers will play a critical role. I expect to see consumer-ready, variable-focus retinal displays in ten years at the latest. The question in my mind, is whether the other peripherals will be able to match the level of immersion provided by the displays. Convincing haptics may end up being more difficult than direct neural interfaces; I hope that's not the case, though, because the latter seems to be quite far off.

Of course then there's the question of how much society will be able to adapt to immersive VR. If the second or third generation consumes all the brightest minds, there will be no one left to develop the subsequent generation.

Your analogy has an issue: traditional drilling can only extract a small fraction ( 5%) of the oil from a field, and only from a specific, relatively rare type of field. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing makes extracting oil from shale (a porous but low permeability rock) both economical and extremely effective. I'm not a petroleum engineer, but my understanding is that the perfection of these techniques has started a revolution in oil and gas production, and that traditional oil reserve figures are now nearly meaningless.

Nuclear carriers are great for asymmetric warfare, but useless in a nuclear war. Nuclear subs are critical for mutually assured destruction.

Disclaimer: I am not a military strategist.

You're conflating macro stability with micro stability. The former describes entire economies as a whole. The latter describes single entities or sectors. Maintaining macro stability in no way requires maintaining micro stability or the elimination of risk.

Correction: break can't break out of two loops in many popular languages.

I think this demonstrates that the disadvantages likely outweigh the advantages, on average. If launches require optimal weather in two distant locations, it's going to be a lot harder to get rockets off the pad. Once stage recovery is working, I suspect it will be a lot cheaper to increase the fuel by 15-30% than to scrap a sizable fraction of launches.

Of course they don't necessarily have to pick one. They could default to using an ocean landing when weather in the atlantic is optimal (and thus load less fuel), or a land landing when weather in the atlantic is less ideal. Whether or not such a last-minute decision could realistic work is beyond my knowledge.

Uhh, no... it hasn't... The redshift is determined by the shift of spectral signatures such as the double sodium line. Only relativistic effects can cause such a shift.

There is such a thing as a non-distributed denial of service attack. They're just not very effective.

If he's drinking multiple non-diet sodas a day, he's practically guaranteed to be above a 2000 cal diet.

This article is not science. A single uncontrolled data point is far from convincing. There appears to be some legitimate evidence from studies in mice that gut bacteria transplants can have an significant effect on weight (on phone so no ref), but it's not definitively proven.

This particular case could be explained in a thousand other ways.

In not an anthropologist, but my understanding is that almost everyone was either a farmer/rancher living on their farm/ranch, or a factory worker living in a slum.