Meh, it never even really went away on the desktop either. I'm killing time browsing version tracker or whatever, see something that looks like it could potentially be useful/interesting/entertaining, and I download it. Most of the time it's not really what I had hoped, and it goes to the trash. Occasionally it seems useful, and I tuck it away in my applications folder. And sometimes I'll even end up using it again.
Like you said, it's all about price. For free or maybe even a buck, you might as well try it to see if you like it. It's not like spending $50 on a retail game, in which case you should hopefully do some research (demos!) before you put down the money.
The best idea that I've heard about is the "laser broom". Basically big ground based lasers that shine up into space and hit orbiting junk with enough energy that they start to ablate. As the material ablates from the pieces, a small amount of thrust would be created, which would alter the pieces' orbits and eventually cause them to reenter the atmosphere and burn up.
It doesn't require putting any new material up into orbit, so you're not potentially creating even more matter up there to deal with. I think the biggest issue (besides economics) would be making sure that the laser doesn't damage any functional satellites, but that's not a hard problem to solve, as satellites are very closely tracked.
That's not a logically attitude, it's a negative and defeatist attitude. The scripting language I used to to code a website last week will likely be obsolete in a decade or so, so I don't know why I even bothered writing it in the first place. I should probably have just saved myself the trouble and watched TV all day instead of spending a couple of hours writing in a doomed computer language.
A building can't realistically be expected to last forever, so why do we bother with structural engineering, or safety codes, or any of that. Living in any structure that requires more effort than just pushing together and crawling under a pile of sticks isn't worth the effort.
Well you're personally going to die in a geologically insignificant amount of time, so why would I even bother feeding myself or taking medicine when you I get sick? All I'm doing is delaying the inevitable.
One of the fundamentals of life is that tries to continue to exist, either through not dying or reproducing. You should not be surprised that humans generally have the same inclination. The fact that the world/universe is a dangerous place makes surviving rather difficult, especially over the long term. Your response to this challenge is apparently to declare it hopeless and ridicule anyone for even trying. There's no logic in that, you're just being lazy.
Particularly for a public figure like a politician, an accusation doesn't necessarily have to be proven or even be true in order to have serious repercussions on one's career. Public opinion has much less rigorous standards than a court room, and opponents will generally be absolutely shameless in peddling negative stories about you, even if they know it's not true.
Jailbreaking an iPhone isn't really much different than removing the DRM from a game that you own. But neither one is ethically problematic (although it might be illegal due to silly laws). With the game, it becomes wrong when you then start distributing the cracked version to people who haven't purchased it and who don't rightfully own it.
Jailbreaking on the iPhones historically (a long 15 month history) has been about running software without Apple's approval. The jailbreaking scene came into being well before Apple started selling applications on the iTMS. For about a year, there wasn't really any other way of putting new software onto your phone. Now that there is an online store for buying apps, it is possible to use a jailbroken phone to pirate them, but that wasn't the original reason for the development of the jailbreaking processes, and it's not the only reason that that development continues.
If the Guild wants to advocate about this, it should make commercials or something explaining to consumers why a professionally recorded audiobook read by voice actors is a superior product to some computer generated text-to-speech.
Ranting about how it this should be illegal and how it's not fair to authors is just silly.
I love playing video games, but I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to make a living doing it, so I went out and got a different job and I play those games as a hobby. If you can't pay your bills writing books full time, then suck it up and go find another way to put food on the table. Write on the weekends and in the evenings and stop complaining.
A lot of these objects are really far away, and over the billions of years since the light was emitted, the actual space that its had to travel has grown as the universe expands. All of that adds up and the light is significantly red-shifted.
Well, we can try to pull some lessons from an experiment done in the past, when for a period Apple licensed their OS to other manufacturers. Conditions weren't exactly the same, of course, but it's still informative.
Apple did lose sales to the clone manufacturers, that much was fairly obvious. The clone manufacturers not only undercut Apple's prices, but they also would sometimes produce machines with better specs (on paper at least). Their build quality was often not up to Apple's standards, but quality doesn't always win out.
Today Apple is financially in a far stronger position and more product diversified than they were back in the clone era, so losing a percentage of their hardware sales wouldn't be as damaging to them as it was back then, at least in the short term. But I do think that in the long term it could have a negative effect on public perception of OS X, particularly if lower quality machines caused problems for people migrating from Windows.
It's an interesting side effect of the drive towards efficiency that our economy has leaned heavily on. We're seeing the results now that things are getting rough. You've got a ton of companies that were just barely profitable, and once things started going even a bad, it was only a matter of a couple months before many of companies started collapsing or having to cut big portions of their workforce and we end up in that downward spiral of economic tanking.
In theory, it's good for the consumer to have competing companies cut their margins and prices down to the last nickle, and it holds true in practice while times are good. But those companies that are existing right on that edge of profitability have no safety cushion, and are completely at the mercy of the outside economy.
When things start to collapse, they'll all crumble much faster than expected, because there's no wiggle room anymore. It was all driven out in the name of efficiency and productivity.
As someone who really enjoyed BF1942, and still occasionally plays it these days, I think this is awesome news.
Take one of my favorite games, bring the graphics up to speed, add a couple extra bells and whistles, and charge a non-ridiculous price for it? Hell yeah I'm game.
Mittani is pretty good at what he does, but to be fair, this more than anything was just a lucky opportunity that fell into his lap. It wasn't the culmination of a master plan or targeted persuasion. From what he's said, they didn't choose a guy and target him and convince him to switch sides, the guy made the decision on his own. But once that had happened, Mittani did a good job of quickly realizing the extent of the opportunities that were presenting themselves, and organizing quickly to make it happen.
In the larger sense, it was a victory that Goonfleet to some degree earned, by creating a situation where a veteran player was having more fun as a rank-and-file member of the GoonSwarm alliance than he had been having as a high-level director in EvE's long-standing "top-dog" alliance. Mittani referred to it as being like a "cultural victory" in the game Civilization.
Also, there are ways within the game's mechanics that BoB could have structured their alliance set up that would have made this action much harder to do. As a group of players that prides itself on being able to adapt and squeeze the most benefit possible out of the way the game works, they really dropped the ball on this one.
Goons take some pride in the fact that they prosper in spite of the fact that they're just a bunch of morons being led by giant video game nerds. But they fully realize that they're all huge nerds, and that greater success in EvE is just greater proof of what dorks they all are.
BoB liked to pretend that they prospered because they were badasses. They act like their accomplishments in EvE made them better than all the EvE rabble. That somehow they transcended the nerdiness and became cool.
True, and some successful bands have done just that. But the equation is different for an established and popular band. They've got some leverage to negotiate with the record labels. The labels aren't taking as big of a risk backing a guy who's already had three platinum albums as they are with a guy nobody has heard of. The plus hopefully the ability and wisdom to hire a decent lawyer to protect them, and said famous band should walk away with a much better deal than your average no-name group could ever hope to get.
Sure, Aerosmith could print their own CD's and make deals with walmart and amazon and iTunes to carry their music. But if they can negotiate a good deal with Sony and let someone else do all that busywork instead, then maybe it's worth it for them.
Meh, they only realized that they couldn't deal with themselves after they repeatedly shot themselves in the foot trying to make the issue go away. Napster was the big thing years before iTMS came on the scene. And even before that people were writing about how things were changing. The music industry should've seen this coming a million miles away, and should have had a better strategy from the beginning. They should have expected a napster to appear one day and had a plan to compete with it.
Instead they were taken completely by surprise, and reacted with denial followed by lawsuits. It wasn't until the reality had stared them in the face and then run them over that they accepted what was happening. I guess better late than never, but it's hard to congratulate the supposed experts for noticing what everyone else noticed years earlier.
Maybe, except that the minimal cost of digital distribution has started to allow bands to make their music available without the help of a major label. Both no-name and big famous bands are experimenting and starting to be successful doing it all on their own. While there will still be some space for larger labels to operate, their monopoly on the mass-production of music has been cracked by technology, and will continue to erode away.
If Apple loses leverage and the major labels try to jack up prices two or three times, Three basic groups of music consumers will emerge. One group will shrug their shoulders and just pay extra (but not as many as the labels would like). The second group will look to smaller/indie labels for cheaper music, and thanks to the internet they'll be able to find them with increasing ease. And the third group will go back to downloading off of whatever kazaa/limewire type software is popular at that time.
Especially with the economy cratering the way it is right now, raising prices is a really good way to get your customers to look elsewhere. The only reason the music companies could get away with it in the past is that recorded music was nowhere else to be found. Now it's digital and it's everywhere. Yay.
First off, creating a good online music store is hard. Lots of people have tried already, and very few have been successful. Just because the labels have access to lots of songs doesn't mean that they know how to create an online storefront and run the backend system that it would require. Sure, they can try to hire someone else to do it, but there aren't too many people out there with an established track record for this sort of thing for them to pick from.
Second, Apple's got the iPod, it's got the cool factor, and the labels have none of that. Nobody cares which label a song comes from. The star power comes from the artist, not from the distributor. A store run by the labels would get little attention, and would have to prove itself useful in every way from the very beginning, because nobody would give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
Which countries in particular are you thinking of? I don't really buy the idea that there are some governments out there just itching for mass destruction. Despite any rhetoric otherwise, just about every government's main goal is to maintain their power. This is even more so in dictatorial governments, where the rulers don't have to worry about pesky little things like term limits and elections.
The idea that Saddam Hussein, if he acquired nuclear weapons, was planning on attacking the US is just silly. Sure, he may have hated us, but you don't have to be a genius to understand that an attack like that would lead to complete destruction of Iraq, and an end to his life of power and privilege.
The same thing goes for Iran. The government there isn't going to try to nuke the USA or even Israel, because they know that the response would destroy their whole country. Whatever hatred they might have for the west or for Israel doesn't overshadow their desire to maintain their power/lifestyle, and not die. Their talk is just talk, aimed more at the attitude of their own population than at any of us.
Does it really mean that our chances of interstellar travel are actually low? What if we're already past the bottleneck? What if the hard part is the evolution of intelligence in the first place? Since we were lucky enough to get past that hurdle, maybe interstellar space flight is pretty likely.
It's sort of frustrating to say, well 40 years ago we went to the moon, but we haven't done anything since. But in the grand scheme of things, 40 years is a blink of an eye, and whether it takes us another 4 decades or another 4 centuries, I think it will happen.
Well, if that were the case, and there's already that many black holes hanging out inside the planet, I don't think the LHC could create enough new holes to make a difference even if it were dedicated strictly to that task.
Technically, all of the data in a computer is really just a bunch of ones and zeros, so assuming a fairly even mix of those two possibilities, writing over everything with zeros would only change half of their data.
Except that even if the LHC did create a black hole, the effects on the earth or any people are basically nil. The amount of mass/energy that's going to be involved in the LHC is practically nothing compared to the black holes that astronomers are looking for out in space. If a black hole happened to be created in an LHC particle collision, it would be incredibly tiny. Smaller than an atom tiny.
A newer but reasonably well respected theory about black holes has them emitting "Hawking radiation", and one of the ways that this stuff works is that the smaller a black hole, the more quickly it radiates away its energy/mass, and a minuscule black hole like we're potentially talking about here would evaporate almost instantly. For more information about Hawking radiation, ask the internet.
Even if we assume that hawking radiation doesn't exist, and that black holes last forever, a minuscule black hole created by the LHC would not be particularly dangerous. First off, when you smash things together in an particle accelerator, the resulting particles usually end up moving very quickly. A black hole that happened to be created would likely be moving in a random direction at a speed well above escape velocity, and would quickly fly off into space and we'd never hear from it again.
But let's assume again that it just so works out that a black hole is created, doesn't evaporate, and it ends up with very little momentum, and just starts slowly drifting around inside the earth. The black hole would have very little mass, and it's gravity would be negligible, it wouldn't "suck" in matter. For it to absorb another particle, it would have to actually bump into it. It's important to understand how very tiny this black hole would be. The event horizon would be many times smaller than even the diameter of an atom. And although we generally consider matter to be reasonably solid and dense stuff, an atom is almost entirely empty space. The black hole could pass through billions and billions of atoms without actually hitting and absorbing a nucleus.
So worst case, we end up with an extremely tiny black hole hanging out around the center of the earth, and on rare occasions, happening to absorb a particle and increasing its mass a tiny bit. Perhaps many billions of years from now it will grow large enough that we might be able to detect it somehow, but it's more likely that the earth will have been destroyed by an expanding sun before then.
There's still plenty of room for new products from Intel. They just need to continue to find areas of improvement beyond just cranking up the speed. And they seem to be doing that, with a new emphasis on better power efficiency. The constant need/desire for more processing power hasn't gone away, it's just shifted to mobile electronics. The technology that pushed desktop computers cpu's to 3GHz is not the same technology that's going to be required to get the processors in phones up to 3Ghz.
And that's not taking into account the ability to shove tiny computers into all sorts of other things. Networking and wireless are starting to get developed enough where it might actually be useful to start putting more capable computing parts into appliances and stuff like that. There's tons of room for the microprocessor industry to grow.
Also, there's always going to be some demand for flat-out faster processors. There's still plenty of places out there building supercomputers and clusters and pushing for more performance. I wouldn't worry too much about intel.
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Meh, it never even really went away on the desktop either. I'm killing time browsing version tracker or whatever, see something that looks like it could potentially be useful/interesting/entertaining, and I download it. Most of the time it's not really what I had hoped, and it goes to the trash. Occasionally it seems useful, and I tuck it away in my applications folder. And sometimes I'll even end up using it again.
Like you said, it's all about price. For free or maybe even a buck, you might as well try it to see if you like it. It's not like spending $50 on a retail game, in which case you should hopefully do some research (demos!) before you put down the money.
The best idea that I've heard about is the "laser broom". Basically big ground based lasers that shine up into space and hit orbiting junk with enough energy that they start to ablate. As the material ablates from the pieces, a small amount of thrust would be created, which would alter the pieces' orbits and eventually cause them to reenter the atmosphere and burn up.
It doesn't require putting any new material up into orbit, so you're not potentially creating even more matter up there to deal with. I think the biggest issue (besides economics) would be making sure that the laser doesn't damage any functional satellites, but that's not a hard problem to solve, as satellites are very closely tracked.
That's not a logically attitude, it's a negative and defeatist attitude.
The scripting language I used to to code a website last week will likely be obsolete in a decade or so, so I don't know why I even bothered writing it in the first place. I should probably have just saved myself the trouble and watched TV all day instead of spending a couple of hours writing in a doomed computer language.
A building can't realistically be expected to last forever, so why do we bother with structural engineering, or safety codes, or any of that. Living in any structure that requires more effort than just pushing together and crawling under a pile of sticks isn't worth the effort.
Well you're personally going to die in a geologically insignificant amount of time, so why would I even bother feeding myself or taking medicine when you I get sick? All I'm doing is delaying the inevitable.
One of the fundamentals of life is that tries to continue to exist, either through not dying or reproducing. You should not be surprised that humans generally have the same inclination. The fact that the world/universe is a dangerous place makes surviving rather difficult, especially over the long term. Your response to this challenge is apparently to declare it hopeless and ridicule anyone for even trying. There's no logic in that, you're just being lazy.
We wanted change that maybe made some sense and at least pretended to try to solve problems.
Libertarian ideology might be a little bit more internally coherent than Republican ideology, but that's all that its got going for it.
Design a cool screensaver that the monitor will display while my computer is running this, and I'll sign up.
Particularly for a public figure like a politician, an accusation doesn't necessarily have to be proven or even be true in order to have serious repercussions on one's career. Public opinion has much less rigorous standards than a court room, and opponents will generally be absolutely shameless in peddling negative stories about you, even if they know it's not true.
Jailbreaking an iPhone isn't really much different than removing the DRM from a game that you own. But neither one is ethically problematic (although it might be illegal due to silly laws). With the game, it becomes wrong when you then start distributing the cracked version to people who haven't purchased it and who don't rightfully own it.
Jailbreaking on the iPhones historically (a long 15 month history) has been about running software without Apple's approval. The jailbreaking scene came into being well before Apple started selling applications on the iTMS. For about a year, there wasn't really any other way of putting new software onto your phone. Now that there is an online store for buying apps, it is possible to use a jailbroken phone to pirate them, but that wasn't the original reason for the development of the jailbreaking processes, and it's not the only reason that that development continues.
If the Guild wants to advocate about this, it should make commercials or something explaining to consumers why a professionally recorded audiobook read by voice actors is a superior product to some computer generated text-to-speech.
Ranting about how it this should be illegal and how it's not fair to authors is just silly.
I love playing video games, but I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to make a living doing it, so I went out and got a different job and I play those games as a hobby. If you can't pay your bills writing books full time, then suck it up and go find another way to put food on the table. Write on the weekends and in the evenings and stop complaining.
A lot of these objects are really far away, and over the billions of years since the light was emitted, the actual space that its had to travel has grown as the universe expands. All of that adds up and the light is significantly red-shifted.
Well, we can try to pull some lessons from an experiment done in the past, when for a period Apple licensed their OS to other manufacturers. Conditions weren't exactly the same, of course, but it's still informative.
Apple did lose sales to the clone manufacturers, that much was fairly obvious. The clone manufacturers not only undercut Apple's prices, but they also would sometimes produce machines with better specs (on paper at least). Their build quality was often not up to Apple's standards, but quality doesn't always win out.
Today Apple is financially in a far stronger position and more product diversified than they were back in the clone era, so losing a percentage of their hardware sales wouldn't be as damaging to them as it was back then, at least in the short term. But I do think that in the long term it could have a negative effect on public perception of OS X, particularly if lower quality machines caused problems for people migrating from Windows.
It's an interesting side effect of the drive towards efficiency that our economy has leaned heavily on. We're seeing the results now that things are getting rough. You've got a ton of companies that were just barely profitable, and once things started going even a bad, it was only a matter of a couple months before many of companies started collapsing or having to cut big portions of their workforce and we end up in that downward spiral of economic tanking.
In theory, it's good for the consumer to have competing companies cut their margins and prices down to the last nickle, and it holds true in practice while times are good. But those companies that are existing right on that edge of profitability have no safety cushion, and are completely at the mercy of the outside economy.
When things start to collapse, they'll all crumble much faster than expected, because there's no wiggle room anymore. It was all driven out in the name of efficiency and productivity.
As someone who really enjoyed BF1942, and still occasionally plays it these days, I think this is awesome news.
Take one of my favorite games, bring the graphics up to speed, add a couple extra bells and whistles, and charge a non-ridiculous price for it? Hell yeah I'm game.
Mittani is pretty good at what he does, but to be fair, this more than anything was just a lucky opportunity that fell into his lap. It wasn't the culmination of a master plan or targeted persuasion. From what he's said, they didn't choose a guy and target him and convince him to switch sides, the guy made the decision on his own. But once that had happened, Mittani did a good job of quickly realizing the extent of the opportunities that were presenting themselves, and organizing quickly to make it happen.
In the larger sense, it was a victory that Goonfleet to some degree earned, by creating a situation where a veteran player was having more fun as a rank-and-file member of the GoonSwarm alliance than he had been having as a high-level director in EvE's long-standing "top-dog" alliance. Mittani referred to it as being like a "cultural victory" in the game Civilization.
Also, there are ways within the game's mechanics that BoB could have structured their alliance set up that would have made this action much harder to do. As a group of players that prides itself on being able to adapt and squeeze the most benefit possible out of the way the game works, they really dropped the ball on this one.
There is definitely a cultural difference
Goons take some pride in the fact that they prosper in spite of the fact that they're just a bunch of morons being led by giant video game nerds. But they fully realize that they're all huge nerds, and that greater success in EvE is just greater proof of what dorks they all are.
BoB liked to pretend that they prospered because they were badasses. They act like their accomplishments in EvE made them better than all the EvE rabble. That somehow they transcended the nerdiness and became cool.
True, and some successful bands have done just that. But the equation is different for an established and popular band. They've got some leverage to negotiate with the record labels. The labels aren't taking as big of a risk backing a guy who's already had three platinum albums as they are with a guy nobody has heard of. The plus hopefully the ability and wisdom to hire a decent lawyer to protect them, and said famous band should walk away with a much better deal than your average no-name group could ever hope to get.
Sure, Aerosmith could print their own CD's and make deals with walmart and amazon and iTunes to carry their music. But if they can negotiate a good deal with Sony and let someone else do all that busywork instead, then maybe it's worth it for them.
Meh, they only realized that they couldn't deal with themselves after they repeatedly shot themselves in the foot trying to make the issue go away. Napster was the big thing years before iTMS came on the scene. And even before that people were writing about how things were changing. The music industry should've seen this coming a million miles away, and should have had a better strategy from the beginning. They should have expected a napster to appear one day and had a plan to compete with it.
Instead they were taken completely by surprise, and reacted with denial followed by lawsuits. It wasn't until the reality had stared them in the face and then run them over that they accepted what was happening. I guess better late than never, but it's hard to congratulate the supposed experts for noticing what everyone else noticed years earlier.
Maybe, except that the minimal cost of digital distribution has started to allow bands to make their music available without the help of a major label. Both no-name and big famous bands are experimenting and starting to be successful doing it all on their own. While there will still be some space for larger labels to operate, their monopoly on the mass-production of music has been cracked by technology, and will continue to erode away.
If Apple loses leverage and the major labels try to jack up prices two or three times, Three basic groups of music consumers will emerge. One group will shrug their shoulders and just pay extra (but not as many as the labels would like). The second group will look to smaller/indie labels for cheaper music, and thanks to the internet they'll be able to find them with increasing ease. And the third group will go back to downloading off of whatever kazaa/limewire type software is popular at that time.
Especially with the economy cratering the way it is right now, raising prices is a really good way to get your customers to look elsewhere. The only reason the music companies could get away with it in the past is that recorded music was nowhere else to be found. Now it's digital and it's everywhere. Yay.
There's two big reasons why.
First off, creating a good online music store is hard. Lots of people have tried already, and very few have been successful. Just because the labels have access to lots of songs doesn't mean that they know how to create an online storefront and run the backend system that it would require. Sure, they can try to hire someone else to do it, but there aren't too many people out there with an established track record for this sort of thing for them to pick from.
Second, Apple's got the iPod, it's got the cool factor, and the labels have none of that. Nobody cares which label a song comes from. The star power comes from the artist, not from the distributor. A store run by the labels would get little attention, and would have to prove itself useful in every way from the very beginning, because nobody would give them the benefit of the doubt on anything.
Which countries in particular are you thinking of? I don't really buy the idea that there are some governments out there just itching for mass destruction. Despite any rhetoric otherwise, just about every government's main goal is to maintain their power. This is even more so in dictatorial governments, where the rulers don't have to worry about pesky little things like term limits and elections.
The idea that Saddam Hussein, if he acquired nuclear weapons, was planning on attacking the US is just silly. Sure, he may have hated us, but you don't have to be a genius to understand that an attack like that would lead to complete destruction of Iraq, and an end to his life of power and privilege.
The same thing goes for Iran. The government there isn't going to try to nuke the USA or even Israel, because they know that the response would destroy their whole country. Whatever hatred they might have for the west or for Israel doesn't overshadow their desire to maintain their power/lifestyle, and not die. Their talk is just talk, aimed more at the attitude of their own population than at any of us.
Does it really mean that our chances of interstellar travel are actually low? What if we're already past the bottleneck? What if the hard part is the evolution of intelligence in the first place? Since we were lucky enough to get past that hurdle, maybe interstellar space flight is pretty likely.
It's sort of frustrating to say, well 40 years ago we went to the moon, but we haven't done anything since. But in the grand scheme of things, 40 years is a blink of an eye, and whether it takes us another 4 decades or another 4 centuries, I think it will happen.
Well, if that were the case, and there's already that many black holes hanging out inside the planet, I don't think the LHC could create enough new holes to make a difference even if it were dedicated strictly to that task.
Thanks.
Technically, all of the data in a computer is really just a bunch of ones and zeros, so assuming a fairly even mix of those two possibilities, writing over everything with zeros would only change half of their data.
Except that even if the LHC did create a black hole, the effects on the earth or any people are basically nil. The amount of mass/energy that's going to be involved in the LHC is practically nothing compared to the black holes that astronomers are looking for out in space. If a black hole happened to be created in an LHC particle collision, it would be incredibly tiny. Smaller than an atom tiny.
A newer but reasonably well respected theory about black holes has them emitting "Hawking radiation", and one of the ways that this stuff works is that the smaller a black hole, the more quickly it radiates away its energy/mass, and a minuscule black hole like we're potentially talking about here would evaporate almost instantly. For more information about Hawking radiation, ask the internet.
Even if we assume that hawking radiation doesn't exist, and that black holes last forever, a minuscule black hole created by the LHC would not be particularly dangerous. First off, when you smash things together in an particle accelerator, the resulting particles usually end up moving very quickly. A black hole that happened to be created would likely be moving in a random direction at a speed well above escape velocity, and would quickly fly off into space and we'd never hear from it again.
But let's assume again that it just so works out that a black hole is created, doesn't evaporate, and it ends up with very little momentum, and just starts slowly drifting around inside the earth. The black hole would have very little mass, and it's gravity would be negligible, it wouldn't "suck" in matter. For it to absorb another particle, it would have to actually bump into it. It's important to understand how very tiny this black hole would be. The event horizon would be many times smaller than even the diameter of an atom. And although we generally consider matter to be reasonably solid and dense stuff, an atom is almost entirely empty space. The black hole could pass through billions and billions of atoms without actually hitting and absorbing a nucleus.
So worst case, we end up with an extremely tiny black hole hanging out around the center of the earth, and on rare occasions, happening to absorb a particle and increasing its mass a tiny bit. Perhaps many billions of years from now it will grow large enough that we might be able to detect it somehow, but it's more likely that the earth will have been destroyed by an expanding sun before then.
There's still plenty of room for new products from Intel. They just need to continue to find areas of improvement beyond just cranking up the speed. And they seem to be doing that, with a new emphasis on better power efficiency. The constant need/desire for more processing power hasn't gone away, it's just shifted to mobile electronics. The technology that pushed desktop computers cpu's to 3GHz is not the same technology that's going to be required to get the processors in phones up to 3Ghz.
And that's not taking into account the ability to shove tiny computers into all sorts of other things. Networking and wireless are starting to get developed enough where it might actually be useful to start putting more capable computing parts into appliances and stuff like that. There's tons of room for the microprocessor industry to grow.
Also, there's always going to be some demand for flat-out faster processors. There's still plenty of places out there building supercomputers and clusters and pushing for more performance. I wouldn't worry too much about intel.