A simpler explanation is that waves oscillating perpendicular to one another cannot interfere with each other at all. The x axis oscillates at full magnitude, and the y axis does too, regardless of the relative phases. The only thing that's weird here is that the third filter at 45 degrees can "remove" the 90 degree difference in polarization, but it's not that hard to understand, and can be demonstrated with a much simpler experiment by just inserting the 45 degree polarizer between the ones at 0 and 90 degrees. Bonus nitpick: current polarized 3d glasses filter circular polarized light, not linear. If you add two of those together, you'll get linearly polarized light, the angle of which depends on the relative phases. I think (I haven't tried this so I'm not sure) if you put your RealD lenses on the two slits, you would not see interference patterns with the naked eye, but you would if you looked at the screen through a linear polarizing filter.

• If we're not coming up with something new and innovative we're stuck making outlook clones. People don't like writing software like that.

What are you talking about?? Writing clones of commercial software is the prime directive of open source! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that actually there are quite a lot of people who like nothing more than doing exactly that.

Software will stop being buggy as soon as people stop putting up with it.

If people actually stopped buying Windows because it sucks, you can bet your sweet darned bippie Microsoft would stop making it suck. As it is, honestly, why should they care? People keep using Windows. It makes no business sense for them to focus on quality if quality doesn't sell.

<flamebait>There is already a company that caters to the niche market that actually gives a rat's ass about consumer software quality. It's Apple -- and oh, look at how they just dominate the desktop computer market....</flamebait>

You'd like this subsystem to be something other than .dll files?