It doesn't *officially* get support from Nvidia. That isn't the same as not getting support at all.

The problem with basing figures for raytracing on current hardware is that none of it is designed for rays. GPUs are designed to be good at rasterization, and ray tracing has different hardware requirements. CPUs aren't particularly good at it either. The 7-hour scene might render many times quicker if it uses hardware designed for the job it is doing, rather than shoehorning it in to an inefficient architecture.

You mean like the Gamecube was called "dolphin" before it was released? Or the Kinect was called "Project Natal"?

I see this argument again and again, and quite frankly I have to agree with Zuckerberg. People are dumbasses! Not the people you refer to though, but rather the people constantly making said argument.

How much do you think it costs to host a site like Facebook? Servers, storage, electricity, bandwidth.. Facebook is massive, and the simple fact of the matter is they have to generate income to sustain their existence, regardless of your blind ideologies.

That being said, I'm not a huge fan of ads or information gathering, but I'd rather have a small text-based Google ad informing me about online electronics stores, robotics and other somewhat interesting stuff than the huge Flash obscenities of old!

Far more interesting (and relevant) is the effects of hormonal prevention on women's libidos. I don't recall which studies I'm thinking about exactly, but it is a well established fact that women ovulating find high levels of testosterone (e.g. muscles, dominant behavior, general manlyness) attractive while women on the other side of the hormonal scale (pregnant, menstruating, etc.) find typical "female" features more attractive. If a female body is in "get baby!"-mode, she prefers manly men who can protect her offspring as well as contribute good genes. If it's in "has baby!"-mode, she prefers the emotionally available, "soft" man. Hormonal prevention works by tricking the female body into thinking it's pregnant all the time. The result? Tokyo Hotel is hot, burly, hairy men have fallen out of fashion. Seriously.. look at teens these days. The guys generally considered attractive are the semi-anorexic ones with no hair except the neatly styled stuff on their heads. Ask your mother and grandmothers about their taste in men and the answer is likely to be "Butch and if possibly, hairy!". True story!

And how's that working out for ya? (Not saying the other suggestion seems all that much better..)

I would have you check out Sensory Substitution. I feel I'm ranting on about this every time something like this comes up and no one cares. Why is that? The TVSS (Tactile Visual Substitution System by WiCab) provides its users with a 20x20 grayscale image and the Forehead Retina System provides 512 taxel (tactile pixel) vision, all with no surgery. In addition, the BrainPort (also by WiCab) can be hooked up to an accelerometer to provide a sense of balance to people who's inner ears have been damaged. Hell, one can even add new sensory information through some existing channel (f.ex. FeelSpace), and the brain will integrate it thanks to sensomotoric correlations. The blind can already see. We've had the needed technology since Dr. Bach-y-Rita started experimenting with cameras, solenoids and sensory substitution in the 60's.

All that stuff seems perfectly buildable for an enthusiastic DIY'er. Chances are you are just like me though, knowing full-well that it could be created but leaving the actual work and invention/innovation to someone with more skills. =P

There FTFY