dogmatix

Would a dongle be that bad? Back in the Walkman days there was a dongle that acted as a remote control. It made it very easy to skip songs, change volume, etc. Another improvement to this functionality would be a likely movement away from the current situation with non-standard signalling sent across the analogue connection. Right now you can get headphones with integrated remotes to pause/resume and control the volume, but the signals are not shared between android/iphone let alone desktop operating systems.

Significant - it matters. Substantial - of large magnitude.

Winter is coming?

The jagged edges on straight lines is interesting, it looks to me like this could get closer to the input image with a little bit of intelligent anti-aliasing.

Spheres would cause a major issue - the laser would need to strike the centre of the circular visible surface.

Otherwise you'd end up with the light bouncing of at angles other than pi, which would direct the probe to the side.

A flat mirror coupled with crazy fast gyros (also powered by the laser) might be stable enough that the mirror holds directed toward the earth.

As well as hitting the edge of the circle at right angles.

Exhausting - it can be, you wake up in the dream and eventually get tired and fall asleep again (I once fell asleep in a puddle, in which I proceeded to drown).

He's not wrong, he's just an arsehole.

Mantle's is a graphics, not a compute API. For compute AMD uses OpenCL and HSAIL.