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.

[citation needed]

With how obsessed the media is with anything terrorism related, you think we would have actually heard of some of these supposed "one a day" IED attacks in the US. Or maybe IED attacks are far, far more rare than "suspicious items".

It's difficult to blame the police officers and bomb squad for doing their job, but this is pretty good example of how broken the system is. I don't have a great solution to suggest other than STOP FREAKING OUT ABOUT TERRORISM! It's not a significant threat to your life if you live in the continental US. Yes, I know 9/11 and the Boston bombings are scary, but more people died in car accidents in the last two years on Texas roads than have died in the full history of the US due to terrorist acts in the continental US.

There have been some gut transplant studies in mice that demonstrate causation. It's pretty far out of my specialty, so I can't comment on their scientific merit, but there it is nonetheless.

...wouldn't trust...

Neither would I. Then again, I would trust my data to any single point of failure. That's why I have copies scattered around.

Last I read, they are targeting a price point of $20k for those robots. Considering they could probably replace 2 workers each, the payback time would be less than a year.