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... or the one who is run over, or no one at all.
Right now, when a car runs someone over, it is usually assumed to be the fault of the driver, even if he did nothing wrong. Blaming an individual is easy, but this could change if a large manufacturer is behind it. The manufacturer will have the data from the car sensors, skilled engineers to interpret them and a whole team of lawyers to defend them in court. If they can get away by proving that the victim was reckless, they will

Don't assume too soon, as many people don't know what DirectX really is.
DirectX is a collection of libraries for sound, input, 2D and 3D graphics, video, etc... 3D graphics and GPU computation is only part of it, and the only part that OpenGL/Vulkan compete against. There are other libraries that reproduce other parts of DirectX such as SDL, OpenAL, mplayer, ....

Probably. But at least, in a VR environment, skin color is a choice.

The hard part of quantum physics is not the maths, it is the interpretation.
We have formulas that work, you can apply them and predict the results of experiments, they can be used to design microprocessors, etc... But it is just manipulating numbers. Having a gut feeling of what it means in human terms is so much harder that even the best scientists cannot agree on an interpretation.

There are areas like fluid dynamics where the maths are not easier, however it is easy to visualize things like air swirling around.

It is not the best language for game programming, at least not when performance may be a concern.
Minecraft is a memory hog and Java is at least partly to blame.

I didn't read the paper but I think that big debatable facts ("global warming is caused by humans", "vaccines cause autism") won't count as much as small unquestionable facts ("Barrack Obama is the president of the USA", "A marathon is 42.195 km").

For example :
site 1 : cell phone radiations are bad for your health because ... plenty of true facts
site 2 : cell phone radiations are not a problem because ... plenty of true facts
Because both sites are full of unquestionably true facts (such as frequencies, laws, city populations, etc...) yet they disagree on some point, the point will be probably marked as "debatable" and will be of a lesser importance.

I also don't think "truth" will be reduced to academic truth. The goal here is to evaluate the quality of a website, not promote some kind of universal truth. For example, religious sites opposing well established scientific principles but correctly citing sacred texts and correctly identifying church leaders will be marked as high quality, whereas a site more inline with mainstream science but full of small mistakes (ex: "the earth diameter is 6371 km") will go down.

USB power bricks are about 50% less efficient than replaceable batteries due to conversion losses.
Battery charging cases exist but they are not remotely as convenient and efficient as, say, zerolemon extended batteries.

There will probably be some pain where the head is cut off, and not having a functional body is not fun, however how will the body feels pain is a much more complex question. Perhaps the pain will be unbearable, perhaps the new body will be incapable of feeling pain at all. Weird sensation are to be expected but will it be painful ?
A lot of research is being done about pain, and maybe one day, this research will also benefit animals. Genetically modifying lab animals so that don't feel pain maybe. Some people don't feel pain at all, and others are literally fearless, these are dangerous medical conditions but these are clearly useful traits in some situations.
But for now, "cruel" animal testing is a necessity if we want medicine to advance and make further testing less painful... Unless we bring back Josef Mengele.

Every time there is the slightest hint of the NSA doing something bad, especially if it is somehow related to Snowden, everyone here seem to believe it without question. However, every time there is a response saying that it may not be as bad as it seems, there are cries of LIES.

I'm not saying that intelligence agencies don't lie and that big corporations don't try to downplay serious problems but critical thinking goes both ways. For example, why focus on the keys, even in the office network, there are plenty of interesting stuff from accounting and employee data to network architecture and source code.

E-readers are very specialized devices. They are usually e-ink based and the only thing they do is display pages from a book. No web browsing, no apps.
When you start adding things like connectivity (except maybe syncing of books and annotations), web searching, or anything that isn't about reading books, you have a computer, not an e-reader.

I believe it means diagnosis through talking with the patient ("medical history" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...).
And it is indeed a case for alternative medicine, as doctors commonly do not take the time to talk to their patients.

Alternative medicine practitioners typically spend a lot of time listening to their patients, making them feel at ease, while at the same time encouraging them to improve their lifestyle (eat healthier food, exercise, better sleep habits, etc...). And guess what, most of the times, it works. The ritual they use (sugar pills, planting needles, calling spirits, trinkets, ...) doesn't really matter.

It matter a lot to the NSA, FBI, GCHQ, ...

Maybe because there is more to porn than poorly filmed videos of people having sex. Like properly filmed videos of people having sex.

I like my porn with proper lighting, interesting camera angles, decent acting, quality sound and even plot. Like a real movie. I don't expect IMDB top 10 material but I prefer not to be distracted by the incompetence of the filmmakers. I've seen some of these actual amateur material, it sucks, and not in a good way. In fact many so-called amateur video are in fact professionally made.
And while is is easy get pictures of naked people for free, getting your actors on time in your studio while making sure they don't just waste time for everyone else is much more difficult.

Generic APIs are cool but one needs to watch out for abstraction layers.
One of the biggest challenge with VR is latency, and when it comes to latency, the less layers there is between the input and the output, the better. It means that genericity may need to be sacrificed at some point, at least until things stabilize.

VR is hard, and I believe it is too soon to think about standardization. First, do something that works really well, then draw the standards based on this.

The funny part is that his first intention wasn't to make fertilizers. He did this so that Germany could make explosives in preparation for war.
He did however work for the food industry and produced a very effective pesticide called "Zyklon A", which was later improved... (yes, it is that Zyklon).