Coming from someone that's been regularly using VR since 2016, I think the problem is that VR really isn't good enough--well, depending on the kind of market and application you're trying to target. When most get one of these first gen VR headsets, it is certainly incredible. Most go through a period that's come to be known as the "VR Honeymoon". E.g. that's what many PSVR2 users are experiencing right now.

But over time you realize that there are a ton of problems with the way VR displays currently work. For example, the "virtual image" they create for each eye is basically a fixed focus screen set at a depth of ~2 meters. Moreover, even as a virtual screen the image is incorrect when you look away from the optical axis (see ocular parallax rendering). Essentially, the visuals of first generation VR still use the same general operating principle as stereoscopes going back many decades (but with clearer optics, higher pixel density, higher FOV, etc etc) and it's at best a bastardized simulation of the way light works--it is one tiny slice of the light field one experiences in real life. They are "stereo flat" displays. As a result, you experience significant visual fatigue after a mere 20 minutes (e.g. also see the "vergence accommodation conflict") and they are not useful for many contexts.

I would say that for most contexts they introduce more problems than they solve and that (in terms of looking "weird") they actually look much weirder than flat displays due to this bastardized simulation of a lightfield. And there are many other visual problems on top of this related to optics and displays.

Of course most people aren't aware of such problems in the technical sense. Rather, they just feel fatigued or discouraged and stop using the headsets, and this is why retention/engagement for VR headsets is so incredibly poor. And depending on your use case, there are also many issues motion controllers, energy exertion, simulator sickness, and fundamental frictions associated with actually clearing a space and gearing up to use such a device.

They are good enough for things like sparse gaming and social VR (what I'm interested in), and maybe exercise for some people that don't mind getting sweaty in a hot headset. But it is hard to see the current technology taking off outside of this, and the technical challenges in the way of advancing beyond this are formidable. I am not sure what Apple intends to do with the technology (and from the leaks, they aren't really that confident either...) but for their ambitions it sounds more like early developer hardware (and perhaps not even for VR but simulated AR).

More on ALEC http://billmoyers.com/segment/...

Now I can watch "VIDEO FILE" and "EDUCATION FILE" in 4K!

Some slashdot editors have failed to notice that incomplete sentences, which are less and less common in the first sentence of slashdot summaries.

In at least one way or another, the vast majority of private companies pushing ground-breaking technologies have relied on a higher than typical level of government support because, sorry, the free market just can't solve these sorts of hard problems on its own. This is how things are *supposed* to work--let both government and private enterprise play their role. Musk is always really transparent about this.

However perhaps one good thing about articles like this is that they should quiet down the libertarian types that are trying to co-opt Musk's successes as some sort of shining example of their ideology.

http://video.pbs.org/video/236... The recent Frontline documentary "American Terrorist" (which investigates American-born David Coleman Headley and his involvement in the Mumbai assault and the thwarted attack on a Danish newspaper) seemed to reach a similar conclusion. It was originally touted as an NSA bulk data collection success story by high level officials, but they had to backpedal as the truth emerged.

The conclusion seems to be that while they are able to collect a vast amount of information, they are unable to process and analyze all of the information gathered and connect it to individuals that warrant investigation. And Headley was extremely messy in many situations (e.g. directly contacting wanted terrorist leaders) where others certainly are not--so messy that my confidence in the NSA's abilities has diminished (this is assuming bulk data collection is a good thing to begin with, and I don't think it is). The data collected mainly became useful *after* an incident rather than being used to thwart an attack.

Perhaps things have changed by now as this is an investigation of something that happened several years ago, but I highly recommend the documentary.

How will we know that we know everything?

Finally no longer being tracked. So it can take a week or two.

From http://phys.org/news/2015-04-t...

Good to hear. Still being tracked on my end. If it doesn't change soon, I might give them a call.

I opted out of all of their advertising programs (including "Relevant Mobile Advertising", which is supposedly the "supercookie") a day or so ago, restarted my 4G hotspot, and the above http://www.amibeingtracked.com... link says I'm still being tracked.

I agree that it is the first step but if the FCC did not plan to simultaneously remove the requirement of local loop unbundling (and other things, such as rate regulation), we would've been much better off. It shows that despite the public's concern over net neutrality, the FCC is ultimately still in the pocket of the telecoms.

I also agree that competition is the solution, but we may not agree on how it should come about. There are very few Googles out there that can afford these sort of high capital infrastructure projects and even google is limiting their rollout to only those places where it is very profitable. In other words, it is a natural monopoly. Thus we need local loop unbundling, and a separation of service providers from content providers and highly regulated infrastructure providers. Simply doing away with territorial exclusivity will not solve the problem.

And since we can't all be superstars at X, only the people that are superstars at X should bother trying?

I don't think this is true. Most importantly, just because one's performance at something is not among the best doesn't mean one cannot find enjoyment in it (not to mention the people that are just good, good enough for employment in it, or even especially bad at it compared to others). And in life finding the things that are most enjoyable is probably the one of the most worthwhile things you can do (at least if you attribute any value to happiness). With programming and mathematics in particular, it is not always obvious that you enjoy them from the outset: how the subjects are presented can dramatically affect one's enjoyment of them, and there is often a hurdle you need to get over in order to discover the pleasure of participating.

This was especially true for myself: up until my first year of college, I hated mathematics and most intellectual pursuits. Then I had an enthusiastic instructor in college that (among other things) approached mathematics from the "pure" perspective rather than the "applied" and to say the least it was life changing. And from mathematics I learned the joy of learning for its own sake rather than simply for its "utility", and this blossomed into a passion for many other subjects I would have never dreamed I would enjoy. Now I spend the majority of my time on them (to many's confusion and sometimes frustration), but just imagine how much better my life could have been had I experienced such a teacher when I was, say, 8 years of age. On the other hand, perhaps another "authority figure" of my youth would have come along and shattered such a passion anyway with a statement like "a genius will accomplish more than you ever will, common man, so don't waste our time"

And, not that this was being argued, but I don't buy the argument that "All people that are interested in X naturally gravitate toward X regardless of all other external factors." In the case of programming or mathematics, such an external factor might be an anti-intellectual culture (such as in the U.S., Brazil, etc etc) or ignorant backwaters stuck in their own miniature "Dark Ages"--where e.g. deep-set insecurities or prejudices are cultivated.

Maybe they should fix Steam Chat so people actually use it first? The only way that chat channels will stay populated and thus see any use is if there's a simple autojoin mechanism. It is silly that users have to manually join each individual chat room every time they start up Steam (they end result of course being that ... they don't). Right now you have groups with tens of thousands of members but no one joins the chat channel.

People have been asking for this since fucking 2008 ( http://forums.steampowered.com... ). And yes there are workarounds to make autojoin work but they don't apply here since the point is to give the average user a chance to join.

Until they get autojoin to work, Steam Chat will be practically useless, so the idea that considering its use for pirating games is quite silly.

Just to be clear, the problem was purely on the Air Force's end, right? It didn't sound like Musk was saying that something malfunctioned with the launch vehicle itself.