I don't know what it is elsewhere, but there's no doubt that if you live and work within reach of the NYC subway system, $81 a month for transportation everywhere is way cheaper than it would be driving.
Of course, since a lot of public transport systems are taxpayer-funded, you could easily argue that real price is much higher.
That is because the modern economists have made it less scientific (or, they believe they've made it more scientific, but in reality they've made it a whole lot of garbled up bullshit where, like you said, it's impossible to draw meaningful conclusions). If you are interested, read that book I linked to. Definitely not every economist would tell you more spending would help - Misesians (or followers of the "Austrian" School of economics) will tell you that we need to spend less and save more, and definitely not spend more. Real investment must be fueled by savings, not paper.
Further, economics should deal with "people and their behaviors" as such, not just with "rational" economic behavior. One huge problem with modern, mainstream economics is that it doesn't deal with human action as such, but rather with "economic" behavior which doesn't actually exist. Real economics should deal with how humans actually act, and employ ends to obtain desired means. It shouldn't have anything to do with what the specific means aimed at are, since those vary between people and over time.
Economics is a social science and should be treated as such.
Maybe mainstream economic thinking is not good science in the sense that it wasn't tested enough and economists are more confident in their conclusions than they actually should be.
No, the problem with mainstream economic thinking is that they want to treat it like a natural science, e.g. where experiments are run and conclusions derived, when it should be treated as a deductive, logical social science. They want to come up with relationships by positivist experimentation, which is ridiculous in a system where there are trillions of inputs and trillions of outputs.
I feel that those supporting doing nothing and ignoring any potential problem related to global warming and increased pollution are sticking their heads in the sand.
By "doing nothing," what do you mean? There is a huge difference between (1) global warming "believers" encouraging people to use resources more efficiently and to invest in finding the "cure" for the global warming problem, and (2) arguing for the State (whereever it may be) to violently oppress the people and organizations they feel "cause" this problem. I'm no client scientist, but from what I can gather it's far from certain that human production of greenhouse gases even causes global warming. In fact, it seems far from certain that the Earth will even continue to warm (considering 2008 was the coldest year of the decade, among other things). To argue for vast increases in State power to regulate and tax CO2 producers is to argue against the entire concept of "innocent until proven guilty."
Basically my point is that investing and researching more energy efficient ways is a good thing. Cutting down on consumption, and perhaps thinking a bit more about the stability and continuity of our ecosystem is a good thing.
I agree. But I'd disagree with someone who says the State should violently suppress consumption of resources or greenhouse gas production.
OK, not NEVER. But, as various planned economy experiments throughout history have demonstrated, the free market is, on the whole, a much better allocator of resources than the state (for example, East vs. West Germany...).
I should have said "...on average, the government is not as efficient at allocating capital..."
My underlying point is that unless the government is, on average, more efficient at capital allocation than the free market, the return on $1T borrowed (even though a large portion of it will be "borrowed" from the Fed, or created out of thin air) and spent by the government today will not offset the price of the loaned capital (interest rate), resulting in a net loss to the economy, over time.
CTalkobt, while your argument is accepted as basically the gospel of "modern economists," it's just not that simple. Taking your argument to its logical extreme, the bigger the deficit, the better. The government should just borrow as much as possible, since any wealth generated from government borrowing and spending now will always be easier to pay back in the future...(we may as well pay people to dig holes and fill them up again, since this "multiplier" will bring prosperity to us all regardless of the usefulness of the initial projects).
What you and all the Keynesian "Who's Henry Hazlitt?" economists forget is that the $100 is still just $100 (+ any return earned on it). The government pays Paul $100, he buys $100 in groceries, and the grocer pays $100 to the mob boss, etc...there is still only $100 floating around there. So, ignoring returns on the $100, someone in the future is going to be violently deprived of $100, meaning the net addition to and from the economy is, at most (assuming that the government is as efficient in allocating capital as the free market) nothing.
Further, considering that the government is NEVER as efficient at allocating capital as the private market is, we have shown there to be a net LOSS of jobs, over time. And we haven't even discussed the moral implications of violently stealing from future C and D in order to give present A and B "jobs."
I must be crazy. As far as I knew, Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, into law around 1980, and Reagan tried to destroy it as soon as he got into office.
First: Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution and then Federalist papers 41-44 are very clear that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it in that section. And that the "general welfare" clause (the first clause of the section) does NOT mean that the feds can do anything they want.
Second: The Department of Education wasn't around for the first 200 years of this country. To think that states and local communities are incapable of running their own educational systems is ridiculous considering you only need to look back 30 years to see a United States without a Department of Education.
Third: These aren't "handouts." They are more "hand-backs," if you will. Perhaps if the federal government wasn't (again, blatantly unconstitutionally) so hellbent on stealing nearly half of my income year in and year out, states, communities, and people would have plenty of money to fund their own educational systems and schools.
And in response to those who think local schools shouldn't be allowed to set their own educational agendas because they are "inbred, God-fearing fools" (I paraphrase), why the hell not? What makes you so certain you are right? In a system where states and local communities were responsible for their own education, those states and communities producing the "smartest" people would naturally rise to the top (be the most desirable places to live, have the strongest economies, etc) while those with crappy systems would be forced to either change or fall behind (it would be their choice - if people in that community were happy falling behind, good for them. If they weren't, individuals and families could freely move to another community or state or the community/state could collectively change its policy...). The entire idea of the federal government mandating nationwide curricula is absurd, and only partly due to this lack of competition (as others have already stated, the federal government is SLOW...). It hasn't worked for the last 30 years and 4 presidents - I find it hard to believe it will work for Obama (then again, maybe he'll prove me wrong - I sure as hell hope so...).
Thank you, thank you, thank you for tossing some common sense on this. The Department of Education is not only unconstitutional (and thus, illegal), it DOESN'T WORK. Schools should be accountable to local communities and parents, NOT federal government bureaucrats.
Even better than state governments, the ACM should be petitioning city and county Boards of Education to possibly include a greater emphasis on computer science in K-12 education.
I disagree. College is about learning how to learn - it's not trade school. You suffer through an intense, largely-theoretical (but definitely not entirely) curriculum and come out confident that you've "learned how to learn" and can quickly pick up the latest programming language at your next job. The top software companies (or any tech company, really) hire tons of people from top schools not because they want to go around bragging to other companies that they hire exclusively from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Cornell, but because they've consistently found that students from schools like that are (1) smart and (2) get things done. That doesn't mean people from state school X aren't smart, or don't get things done, but it definitely also doesn't mean that employers somehow knock big-name schools for heavily emphasizing theoretical instruction.
Thank you for a post that actually looks at the reality of it all. Microsoft just can't win with the Slashdot crowd.
They are typically 100% "closed" source (whatever you want to call it). For this, they are the devil incarnate.
So, they come up with a few new licenses where people can see the source code but can't modify it or rerelease it or whatever. Surely, they didn't do this simply to please the/. crowd, but shit, they did it. And for this, they are trying to "hijack" open source. The title of this discussion says it all.
At the end of the day, Microsoft is a publicly-held company. They are, BY LAW, obligated to serve their shareholders, first and foremost. Not RMS and his loyal followers. Not other software developers wishing they could port Office or Visual Studio to GNU/Linux, or kernel hackers wishing they could go ahead and rip (however few) good features from Windows. Not Slashdotters simply looking for a free copy of Windows. Nope, their obligation is solely to their shareholders - those people that collectively have $280 billion dollars invested in Microsoft.
Well said. Sun is not doing anything to try and keep OpenSolaris alive by locking up ZFS. Quite the contrary, BSD is picking up ZFS. Too many people want to sit around and cry about Sun "not allowing" ZFS to make its way into Linux, but at the end of the day its Linux that wants to force its terms upon everyone else.
Clauset, Newman, and Moore are three of the most respected and well-known networks researchers. I'm not sure what you mean by being poorly presented or researched; care to elaborate?
But how this blog post makes the front page of/. is beyond me. It tells you absolutely NOTHING about the actual paper.
MUNICH (AS) - University of Munich physics professor Dr. Phillip von Jolly has advised aspiring physics student Max Planck to steer clear of physics.
"In this field, almost everything is discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes," says the professor. "The future of physics is very much predictable at this point."
The practice of encouraging young and aspiring physicists to look to different fields is becoming more and more widely practiced, as experts around the world agree: Physics is just about dead.
Planck, however, has decided against von Jolly's advice, and will continue to pursue his dream of entering the once exciting but quickly dying world of physics.
One more thing - how the hell does this make the front page of/.? So what, a school doesn't need a bunch of kids running around shooting nerf guns at eachother. Imagine if you were visiting as a high school student and saw a bunch of kids in green bandanas running wildly from someone just launching nerf bullets (or whatever you'd call them) at them. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd think twice about attending (playing tag with green bandanas doesn't come off as quite as strange)...
They are also banned where I go to school - they play that game by tagging eachother now. Can't say I'm too disappointed not to have seen kids shooting nerf guns at eachother all around campus (instead they just run around like fools trying to tag eachother). Actually, not allowing nerf guns allows the rest of us to have some fun by straight charging at any group of people wearing the zombie headbands. Haha, they will disperse faster than any group you've ever seen.
While I agree that people in real majors (sciences and engineering) need to be passionate, we shouldn't be happy with lower enrollment simply because during the bubble kids were flocking to CS programs just as kids have always flocked to finance (and for the same reasons).
Like you've said, the real problem exists in making people passionate about these subjects. Despite that quote, computer science (and related subjects) are hardly "sexy." You will work 100x harder than your business and artsy-fartsy major cohorts and probably never make much more money than them. Much more ought to be done from the outset of one's education (this is a 15-20 year process) to make science and engineering more attractive to kids of all ages.
That type of thinking is foolish. I used to think the same way, but my eyes have only recently been opened. Eliminating humanities courses from an engineering curriculum basically eliminates creativity (in the broader sense). In order to develop a new product (or service or whatever), you have to understand people. Understand their needs, wants, desires - the way they interact socially, the way they spend money, why they spend money. You need to understand the general socio-economic trends that fuel these needs, wants, and desires. You aren't going to get any of that taking courses in microcontrollers or analog IC design. Kirchhoff's laws mean jackshit for that stuff.
So sure, if you want to always be just a meaningless pawn, fuck liberal arts courses. Take 4 EE courses every semester (also fuck your social life) and avoid being a burden your first year at work. Hell, you'll never be a burden to your managers and those above them (which you'll always have).
Not that I agree with exactly the methodology used by Olin (in fact, this hardly seems revolutionary), but it's a hell of a lot better than having a curriculum with no breadth outside of engineering.
First off, companies like Wipro and Infosys have been recruiting at top U.S. engineering and computer science schools for a long time now.
Secondly, isn't it obvious what will eventually happen? Everyone is so hung up about outsourcing, especially in information technology, but who cares, seriously? The standard of living in India is rapidly rising, prices are rising, the rupee is getting stronger, etc...there is actually a shortage of labor in India at this point (relative to its incredible level of economic growth over the past 5 or so years). These Indian firms have been creating jobs in the U.S. for a long, long time. It's the same deal with the auto industry - everyone is so hung on up the "big three" auto companies just because they are headquartered in America. When they cut jobs it gets more coverage than Paris Hilton gets when a paparazzi snaps a photo of her pantiless cooch after a night of hard partying at some glorious Hollywood club, but when Subaru builds a new plant in Indiana or Toyota adds jobs stateside no one cares. We live in a global economy - as long as we (as in the United States) can provide qualified, quality laborers (which is another story altogether, but at least the ball is in our court), we have the ability to stay on top throughout this age of globalization. Who cares if you work for an Indian IT firm from an office in Boston? It doesn't make any different to me if I'm working for Accenture or Infosys as long as I have a job.
You can't rule AMD out but Intel sure has done just about EVERYTHING right since Conroe. They've been more open with the press (both financial and enthusiast) and have (for lack of a better expression) engineered the shit out of AMD.
That said, it looked like Intel would never catch up during the prime of Athlon 64...of course Intel's resources and size give it an astronomical advantage. AMD will again have to be innovative in some way if it ever wants to catch up...Fusion maybe?
That's 250% more expensive than this machine. This isn't targeted at seasoned computer users - it's targeted at people that honestly could not afford your $650 Dell laptop (and, believe it or now, many of them exist in the U.S.). Even in more developed countries/areas, with city-wide WiFi becoming more and more popular, lower-income folks could jump all over this. Even without city-wide WiFi there is practically a Starbucks on every street corner and (sadly) plenty of private-yet-unprotected wireless connections these people will gladly leech off of (unknowingly) in any major city. All you need is a place to plug it in and you've got your own computer for $199.
Yeah, I've always wondered about this - when they "catch" people downloading something illegal, do they get the police to storm your house and confiscate your hard drive and all related belongings? Even if they confiscate my hard drive, why couldn't I just go out and buy all the movies I illegally downloaded (hypothetically speaking) and then say I owned all them and therefore have them on my hard drive legally? What can they ask you to do - provide them with receipts proving you owned them before your hard drive was confiscated? What if you paid cash and threw the receipt out as soon as you opened the movie and it worked? Or is it illegal to download a movie (or a song) no matter what? (as in, is there a difference between ripping a movie yourself and downloading a copy of it?).
...this made the front page? The course is called "Operating Systems," and it's taught at major universities, as someone previously mentioned. In many of these courses, the semester-long project is to develop your own distribution of Linux (as a class or group).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what it is elsewhere, but there's no doubt that if you live and work within reach of the NYC subway system, $81 a month for transportation everywhere is way cheaper than it would be driving.
Of course, since a lot of public transport systems are taxpayer-funded, you could easily argue that real price is much higher.
That is because the modern economists have made it less scientific (or, they believe they've made it more scientific, but in reality they've made it a whole lot of garbled up bullshit where, like you said, it's impossible to draw meaningful conclusions). If you are interested, read that book I linked to. Definitely not every economist would tell you more spending would help - Misesians (or followers of the "Austrian" School of economics) will tell you that we need to spend less and save more, and definitely not spend more. Real investment must be fueled by savings, not paper.
Further, economics should deal with "people and their behaviors" as such, not just with "rational" economic behavior. One huge problem with modern, mainstream economics is that it doesn't deal with human action as such, but rather with "economic" behavior which doesn't actually exist. Real economics should deal with how humans actually act, and employ ends to obtain desired means. It shouldn't have anything to do with what the specific means aimed at are, since those vary between people and over time.
Economics is a social science and should be treated as such.
Maybe mainstream economic thinking is not good science in the sense that it wasn't tested enough and economists are more confident in their conclusions than they actually should be.
No, the problem with mainstream economic thinking is that they want to treat it like a natural science, e.g. where experiments are run and conclusions derived, when it should be treated as a deductive, logical social science. They want to come up with relationships by positivist experimentation, which is ridiculous in a system where there are trillions of inputs and trillions of outputs.
See Ludwig von Mises, Epistemlogical Problems of Economics, if you want to read further.
I feel that those supporting doing nothing and ignoring any potential problem related to global warming and increased pollution are sticking their heads in the sand.
By "doing nothing," what do you mean? There is a huge difference between (1) global warming "believers" encouraging people to use resources more efficiently and to invest in finding the "cure" for the global warming problem, and (2) arguing for the State (whereever it may be) to violently oppress the people and organizations they feel "cause" this problem. I'm no client scientist, but from what I can gather it's far from certain that human production of greenhouse gases even causes global warming. In fact, it seems far from certain that the Earth will even continue to warm (considering 2008 was the coldest year of the decade, among other things). To argue for vast increases in State power to regulate and tax CO2 producers is to argue against the entire concept of "innocent until proven guilty."
Basically my point is that investing and researching more energy efficient ways is a good thing. Cutting down on consumption, and perhaps thinking a bit more about the stability and continuity of our ecosystem is a good thing.
I agree. But I'd disagree with someone who says the State should violently suppress consumption of resources or greenhouse gas production.
OK, not NEVER. But, as various planned economy experiments throughout history have demonstrated, the free market is, on the whole, a much better allocator of resources than the state (for example, East vs. West Germany...).
I should have said "...on average, the government is not as efficient at allocating capital..."
My underlying point is that unless the government is, on average, more efficient at capital allocation than the free market, the return on $1T borrowed (even though a large portion of it will be "borrowed" from the Fed, or created out of thin air) and spent by the government today will not offset the price of the loaned capital (interest rate), resulting in a net loss to the economy, over time.
This should NOT have been labeled flame bait.
CTalkobt, while your argument is accepted as basically the gospel of "modern economists," it's just not that simple. Taking your argument to its logical extreme, the bigger the deficit, the better. The government should just borrow as much as possible, since any wealth generated from government borrowing and spending now will always be easier to pay back in the future...(we may as well pay people to dig holes and fill them up again, since this "multiplier" will bring prosperity to us all regardless of the usefulness of the initial projects).
What you and all the Keynesian "Who's Henry Hazlitt?" economists forget is that the $100 is still just $100 (+ any return earned on it). The government pays Paul $100, he buys $100 in groceries, and the grocer pays $100 to the mob boss, etc...there is still only $100 floating around there. So, ignoring returns on the $100, someone in the future is going to be violently deprived of $100, meaning the net addition to and from the economy is, at most (assuming that the government is as efficient in allocating capital as the free market) nothing.
Further, considering that the government is NEVER as efficient at allocating capital as the private market is, we have shown there to be a net LOSS of jobs, over time. And we haven't even discussed the moral implications of violently stealing from future C and D in order to give present A and B "jobs."
I must be crazy. As far as I knew, Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act, into law around 1980, and Reagan tried to destroy it as soon as he got into office.
First: Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution and then Federalist papers 41-44 are very clear that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it in that section. And that the "general welfare" clause (the first clause of the section) does NOT mean that the feds can do anything they want.
Second: The Department of Education wasn't around for the first 200 years of this country. To think that states and local communities are incapable of running their own educational systems is ridiculous considering you only need to look back 30 years to see a United States without a Department of Education.
Third: These aren't "handouts." They are more "hand-backs," if you will. Perhaps if the federal government wasn't (again, blatantly unconstitutionally) so hellbent on stealing nearly half of my income year in and year out, states, communities, and people would have plenty of money to fund their own educational systems and schools.
And in response to those who think local schools shouldn't be allowed to set their own educational agendas because they are "inbred, God-fearing fools" (I paraphrase), why the hell not? What makes you so certain you are right? In a system where states and local communities were responsible for their own education, those states and communities producing the "smartest" people would naturally rise to the top (be the most desirable places to live, have the strongest economies, etc) while those with crappy systems would be forced to either change or fall behind (it would be their choice - if people in that community were happy falling behind, good for them. If they weren't, individuals and families could freely move to another community or state or the community/state could collectively change its policy...). The entire idea of the federal government mandating nationwide curricula is absurd, and only partly due to this lack of competition (as others have already stated, the federal government is SLOW...). It hasn't worked for the last 30 years and 4 presidents - I find it hard to believe it will work for Obama (then again, maybe he'll prove me wrong - I sure as hell hope so...).
Thank you, thank you, thank you for tossing some common sense on this. The Department of Education is not only unconstitutional (and thus, illegal), it DOESN'T WORK. Schools should be accountable to local communities and parents, NOT federal government bureaucrats. Even better than state governments, the ACM should be petitioning city and county Boards of Education to possibly include a greater emphasis on computer science in K-12 education.
Um, the Bill of Rights are amendments (read: updates) to the Constitution...
I disagree. College is about learning how to learn - it's not trade school. You suffer through an intense, largely-theoretical (but definitely not entirely) curriculum and come out confident that you've "learned how to learn" and can quickly pick up the latest programming language at your next job. The top software companies (or any tech company, really) hire tons of people from top schools not because they want to go around bragging to other companies that they hire exclusively from Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Cornell, but because they've consistently found that students from schools like that are (1) smart and (2) get things done. That doesn't mean people from state school X aren't smart, or don't get things done, but it definitely also doesn't mean that employers somehow knock big-name schools for heavily emphasizing theoretical instruction.
They are typically 100% "closed" source (whatever you want to call it). For this, they are the devil incarnate.
So, they come up with a few new licenses where people can see the source code but can't modify it or rerelease it or whatever. Surely, they didn't do this simply to please the /. crowd, but shit, they did it. And for this, they are trying to "hijack" open source. The title of this discussion says it all.
At the end of the day, Microsoft is a publicly-held company. They are, BY LAW, obligated to serve their shareholders, first and foremost. Not RMS and his loyal followers. Not other software developers wishing they could port Office or Visual Studio to GNU/Linux, or kernel hackers wishing they could go ahead and rip (however few) good features from Windows. Not Slashdotters simply looking for a free copy of Windows. Nope, their obligation is solely to their shareholders - those people that collectively have $280 billion dollars invested in Microsoft.
Well said. Sun is not doing anything to try and keep OpenSolaris alive by locking up ZFS. Quite the contrary, BSD is picking up ZFS. Too many people want to sit around and cry about Sun "not allowing" ZFS to make its way into Linux, but at the end of the day its Linux that wants to force its terms upon everyone else.
Clauset, Newman, and Moore are three of the most respected and well-known networks researchers. I'm not sure what you mean by being poorly presented or researched; care to elaborate? But how this blog post makes the front page of /. is beyond me. It tells you absolutely NOTHING about the actual paper.
"In this field, almost everything is discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes," says the professor. "The future of physics is very much predictable at this point."
The practice of encouraging young and aspiring physicists to look to different fields is becoming more and more widely practiced, as experts around the world agree: Physics is just about dead.
Planck, however, has decided against von Jolly's advice, and will continue to pursue his dream of entering the once exciting but quickly dying world of physics.
(C) Copyright Arrogant Scientists, 1874
One more thing - how the hell does this make the front page of /.? So what, a school doesn't need a bunch of kids running around shooting nerf guns at eachother. Imagine if you were visiting as a high school student and saw a bunch of kids in green bandanas running wildly from someone just launching nerf bullets (or whatever you'd call them) at them. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd think twice about attending (playing tag with green bandanas doesn't come off as quite as strange)...
They are also banned where I go to school - they play that game by tagging eachother now. Can't say I'm too disappointed not to have seen kids shooting nerf guns at eachother all around campus (instead they just run around like fools trying to tag eachother). Actually, not allowing nerf guns allows the rest of us to have some fun by straight charging at any group of people wearing the zombie headbands. Haha, they will disperse faster than any group you've ever seen.
While I agree that people in real majors (sciences and engineering) need to be passionate, we shouldn't be happy with lower enrollment simply because during the bubble kids were flocking to CS programs just as kids have always flocked to finance (and for the same reasons).
Like you've said, the real problem exists in making people passionate about these subjects. Despite that quote, computer science (and related subjects) are hardly "sexy." You will work 100x harder than your business and artsy-fartsy major cohorts and probably never make much more money than them. Much more ought to be done from the outset of one's education (this is a 15-20 year process) to make science and engineering more attractive to kids of all ages.
So sure, if you want to always be just a meaningless pawn, fuck liberal arts courses. Take 4 EE courses every semester (also fuck your social life) and avoid being a burden your first year at work. Hell, you'll never be a burden to your managers and those above them (which you'll always have).
Not that I agree with exactly the methodology used by Olin (in fact, this hardly seems revolutionary), but it's a hell of a lot better than having a curriculum with no breadth outside of engineering.
First off, companies like Wipro and Infosys have been recruiting at top U.S. engineering and computer science schools for a long time now. Secondly, isn't it obvious what will eventually happen? Everyone is so hung up about outsourcing, especially in information technology, but who cares, seriously? The standard of living in India is rapidly rising, prices are rising, the rupee is getting stronger, etc...there is actually a shortage of labor in India at this point (relative to its incredible level of economic growth over the past 5 or so years). These Indian firms have been creating jobs in the U.S. for a long, long time. It's the same deal with the auto industry - everyone is so hung on up the "big three" auto companies just because they are headquartered in America. When they cut jobs it gets more coverage than Paris Hilton gets when a paparazzi snaps a photo of her pantiless cooch after a night of hard partying at some glorious Hollywood club, but when Subaru builds a new plant in Indiana or Toyota adds jobs stateside no one cares. We live in a global economy - as long as we (as in the United States) can provide qualified, quality laborers (which is another story altogether, but at least the ball is in our court), we have the ability to stay on top throughout this age of globalization. Who cares if you work for an Indian IT firm from an office in Boston? It doesn't make any different to me if I'm working for Accenture or Infosys as long as I have a job.
You can't rule AMD out but Intel sure has done just about EVERYTHING right since Conroe. They've been more open with the press (both financial and enthusiast) and have (for lack of a better expression) engineered the shit out of AMD. That said, it looked like Intel would never catch up during the prime of Athlon 64...of course Intel's resources and size give it an astronomical advantage. AMD will again have to be innovative in some way if it ever wants to catch up...Fusion maybe?
That's 250% more expensive than this machine. This isn't targeted at seasoned computer users - it's targeted at people that honestly could not afford your $650 Dell laptop (and, believe it or now, many of them exist in the U.S.). Even in more developed countries/areas, with city-wide WiFi becoming more and more popular, lower-income folks could jump all over this. Even without city-wide WiFi there is practically a Starbucks on every street corner and (sadly) plenty of private-yet-unprotected wireless connections these people will gladly leech off of (unknowingly) in any major city. All you need is a place to plug it in and you've got your own computer for $199.
Haha, and culture will get this country a long way. Economic well-being is driven by culture, not scientific innovation! Who knew?
Yeah, I've always wondered about this - when they "catch" people downloading something illegal, do they get the police to storm your house and confiscate your hard drive and all related belongings? Even if they confiscate my hard drive, why couldn't I just go out and buy all the movies I illegally downloaded (hypothetically speaking) and then say I owned all them and therefore have them on my hard drive legally? What can they ask you to do - provide them with receipts proving you owned them before your hard drive was confiscated? What if you paid cash and threw the receipt out as soon as you opened the movie and it worked? Or is it illegal to download a movie (or a song) no matter what? (as in, is there a difference between ripping a movie yourself and downloading a copy of it?).
...this made the front page? The course is called "Operating Systems," and it's taught at major universities, as someone previously mentioned. In many of these courses, the semester-long project is to develop your own distribution of Linux (as a class or group).