"Until that's resolved, the safest solution is to compute with the lights on. "
Or just close the window shades.
It seems like you can read the contents of a monitor under optimal conditions, but how often do you get optimal conditions? More often that not, a person sits in front of a monitor as he or she works. At best, then, you'd only be able to get bits and pieces of what's on the screen. You also have to contend with different grades of wall paint and/or wallpaper (not to mention furniture behind you) which might make this endeavor fruitless in most cases.
It's a nice trick in a lab, and probably worth publishing. But I think there are too many uncontrollable variables to make this practical.
There is no law saying that a corporation must pay out dividends. Some corporations pay out dividends as a matter of policy, some don't. The difference is that the extra cash held onto by the corporation enables it to reinvest that cash into additional internal projects in order to increase the company's value (and therefore share price). The idea behind this is that the company feels that the cash can be put to better use by the company than by the shareholder. Besides Microsoft, Berkshire-Hathaway comes to mind. This model DOES work and value added to shareholders is reflected in increased stock price.
Of course, the shareholders don't have to accept this and can choose to take the cash now instead of later, either by holding a vote among present shareholders or by choosing to invest elsewhere.
One of the factors an investor considers is if a company pays out dividends. Ultimately, it comes down to a personal choice based upon the investor's expectations.
There have been papers written on this subject, usually asking the question: "Do dividends matter?"
Dividends are taxed as ordinary income, while capital gains are taxed as, well, the capital gains rate(usually at a lower, flat rate than ordinary income).
As for a shelter shielding Microsoft from taxes, their own financials reported a total income tax expense (2001) of $1,288,000,000 US Dollars. If they have a tax dodge in place, it AIN'T working.
Regarding that $40 Billion in cash holdings. Holdings are not taxed. How would YOU like it if you were taxed based on what your bank account held? You may be taxed in interest received, but NOT on the principle amount.
Back in the days before the PC architecture became king, Radio Shack used to sell computers with SILVER CASES. I distinctly remember people taking sandpaper to the cases to get to the BLACK primer underneath.
There was also a number of WHITE cases sold by the various clone manufacturers during the mid 1990's.
The picture in the NY Times article shoes a person painting a PC case. Perhaps that's the way to go. Someone should offer HANDPAINTED PC cases to people. You could have themes endorsed by various celebrities and artists.
... and you learn to deal with motion issues later in life.
This would be especially true with astronauts. A lot of them learned to deal with motion issues as adults during pilot/aviation training in previous careers. For the rest, you learn to deal with motion issues when learning to drive a car or ride a bike.
Contrast this with learning about gravity and trajectory. One learns to catch and throw at a relatively young age (say 1 1/2 to 3 years old). Such learning is deeply embedded and may well take longer to "unlearn."
I can see where this would be true on a large scale (ie a human), but what about animals that function mostly on instinct (insects, fish, etc)?
I'll bet it's possible to create a cybernetic "animal" that functions on 95% instinct and 5% learning. The recursion problem could therefore be contained and studied.
Such a thing won't be "HAL" or "C3PO" by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll be a start.
I would imagine it's because that meat is higher in energy, pound for pound. With spacecraft, weight/storage considerations are of paramount importance.
When you talk about sending people to live in space (either in the ISS or on a trip to Mars), you want to be able to pack as much nutrition into as small a space as possible. With launch costs somewhere around $10000 per pound, taking several extra pounds in vegetables means NOT taking several extra pounds in fuel, air or equipment more so than it means spending more money.
When you're in as hostile an environment as space, survival dictates what you do. Tastiness takes a back seat to that.
As for the ethical considerations of killing animals, you could just as easily take tissue samples. As for the nutritional downsides of eating meat, that's where genetic engineering (still in the future) comes in.
Aren't there limits to how many times an animal cell can divide, before it just stops dividing, lives out it's life and dies?
IANAB (I am not a biochemist), but there have been different articles on this subject over the years. Wouldn't that be an impediment to large scale implementation of this?
From the article: "and if they [senior and junior executives] tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system.
This is BAD THING??????? This "feature" should be used as a management training tool.
But those modules are US$300.00 a piece. Contract that with the PCMCIA wireless card that sells for US$80 (from the same Xircom website). At work, we have an 802.11b network. At HOME I have the same thing connected to my cable modem (firewalled and encrypted, of course). Dual capability would make me consider the palm.
It would seem that there is no value in using or abusing a system that doesn't work. The consequences of a false positive are great: Lawsuit, criminal charges (against police).
As for straight surveillence, the fact that abuses can and are documented shows that the system CAN be monitored and the watchers CAN be watched.
Good auditing practices conducted by 3rd parties WILL keep the system (fairly) honest.
"[Summary: In response to the Ukraine government's "failure to enact an
optical media licensing regime that would preclude the piracy of such
products," the U.S. government has levied 100 percent tariffs on
Ukraine exports such as fuel oil, sneakers, paper, and diamonds. --Declan]"
Do we actually BUY that much stuff from them? It seems most of these exports can find ready markets elsewhere. It seems the loss in trade is greater than any piracy could be. Any comments?
But the REAL questions are....
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 1, Troll
1. How much RAM? CPU speed?
Let me listen to MP3's and store documents temporarily. Since I'm constantly travelling, my PDA has become my Laptop.
2. Wireless connectivity (802.11x)?
None of this pay as you stuff or Apple proprietary crap. I want to ba able to connect it to my networks at home and work - seamlessly.
And finally...
3. What's the cost?
If it costs substantially more than an IPAQ without offering any compelling features, I'm not buying it.
I didn't include battery life because that's really out of Apple's hands. Sure they can engineer the product to conserve power, but most rechargable PDA devices need AC power every 4-5 hours after constant use.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the P rating was started by NexGen, the company that AMD eventually bought that created the architecture that was incorporated into the K5/K6 lines.
Their chips used slower clock speeds, but rivaled Pentium performance. For example, a chip clocked at 81Mhz yielded a performance equal to a Pentium 90, hence a P90 designation. This also happens to be the designation of my NexGen motherboard that still serves as my home web development platform under Linux.:)
Now WHY they didn't just run their chips at comparible speeds and blow away the Pentium performance-wise, I have no idea.
I always thought it was a stupid marketing ploy to begin with. Casual consumers always rate things by simple measurements (speed, horsepower - as in cars).
... the problem seems to be high prices and an overly consevative corporate culture.
When I was a kid, legos were always more pricy than the "cheap knockoffs" that the toy stores also carried. Although I loved them, any money I earned was more likely to put into other building activities (ie model rockets, erector sets, etc).
Mindstorms was probably the most innovative toy product to come around during the last 10 years, but it's always remained one of the most expensive. The problems the article detailed about getting the cost down seemed more like management problems than anything else.
I know the company has a good thing going, but you always have to exercise foresight, research your customer base and be ready to take chances - especially in the toy industry.
Traditionally, one has always had to make the "trip across town" to the local town/city hall or state/federal building. This has limited access only to those who were somewhat determined to get the information (ie for lawsuits and other conflicts).
Easier access to this information can be used by spammers, telemarketers, etc. to create mailing lists that bombard us with all kinds of garbage.
I propose that online access to public information be limited such that it doesn't allow a person to retrieve dozens or hundreds of records continuously. If a person wants to access such information, he or she would be allowed a fixed amount of usage (determined by a browser cookie, a scan of the persons IP address, etc.) per day or week. If that person needs to access or download hundreds of records at once for legitimate reasons such as lawsuits, tax research, title research, then such access can be applied for and granted on a case by case basis.
This won't stop unscrupulous people from abusing legitimate access for their own needs, but it will provide some tracability and accountability for their actions.
Public records should remain public. However, the cybernetic tools to search and gather hundreds of records don't have to be. A human brain has always been an excellent, and free, tool to use. It still is.
This has happened before....
on
RIAA To Target CD-R
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
.... with cassette tapes during the late '70s and early '80s and with video tapes, too. In the end a small tax was levied, they collected their money and people still recorded music and video.
Let's face it, people are going to do a small amount of copying for their own personal use. You do it, I do it - I'll bet even the children of the RIAA demons do it. The RIAA is sweating the small stuff.
The greatest threat of piracy comes from people that will copy in huge volumns for sale on the black market. A lot of this will happen overseas, where RIAA has the least influence.
If they want to sweat the small stuff, I say fine. It hasn't gotten them anywhere in the past - and it won't get them anywhere in the future.
Phillips, Sony and others have invested far too much money in CD-R technology and make far too much off of it to roll over dead for the RIAA.
I've said it once and I'll say it again. The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying. In it's place, artists (those backed by record companies) will make money from personal appearances and product endorsements, just like professional sports figures do. Sports figures may make a few million a year, but they pull in much more from product endorsements. That's where the money is and that's where the industry will finally go. The true value in a recording contract for an artist will lie not in the sale of music, but in the sale of his/her image.
A persons's memory erodes and is clouded by bias and emotion. A computer's memory is not clouded by bias nor emotion.
As for eroding, a properly designed and backed up database can be trusted to hold accurate information. It's in the best interests of the police to hold accurate information. A poorly designed system would be of no use to them and generate lots of lawsuits.
WHY do we have to use Microsoft's file server software at all? Why not just write a secure, open source NT/2000 service that can share directories? This can be accessed by a secure, open source client that sits on a NT/2000/9x/Linux/UNIX machine. This (sort of) was done with SSH. There are 3rd party solutions for NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP, etc. Why not file sharing?
Moore's law (actually it is more of a prediction) dealt with semiconductor densities doubling every 18 months. This implies a drop of cost and an increase in performance. Of course you have to wait for it to happen.
For those who have an IMMEDIATE need for high performance computing, parallel systems are the answer. Simply put, you can have access to high performance computing now rather than wait for a single machine to become cheap enough.
But don't forget that Moore's law made this all possible. Smaller components also made cheap, high-speed communications commonplace. This can only mean that the cost of setting up such a grid will become cheaper over time, not more expensive.
Look at AOL, for example. They provide a distributed service to millions of people. This is made possible because communications and computing power is cheaper more than it has ever been. The longer it is in existance, the more services they offer. This happens without an appreciable increase in price.
The same thing will happen with grid computing. It may be a specialty item NOW, but in the future, it will become a CHEAP commodity, not an expensive one.
If I remember correctly, my Estes Enterprise model rocket mounted the solid fuel engine about an inch below where the impulse engine ports were. That took care of the center of gravity issue. That was a number of years back when they sold the model.
Elephants probably could have been used, but probably were not for reasons just as valid as today:
1. Elephants take a long time to raise. In India, wild elephant are captured because it just takes too much time and money to raise one for labor. It's just not cost effective. The ancient Egyptians would have had to have spent a lot of time hunting and capturing them (not a safe occupation).
2. African elephants aren't as trainable as their Asian counterparts. True Hannibal used them, but they don't have the temperament for labor.
Hippos are just too aggressive to train.
Local horses (zebra) don't adapt well. Their social structure prevents that. The Egyptians did use horses for war, commerce and such, so that might have made them more valuable in those areas.
Camels seem to function better as individuals, not as group workers.
It may be that that type of animal labor just wasn't available. Think about it. Of all the potential species that can work, only a handful lend themselves to humans integrating themselves into their group instincts. Dogs(wolves) are a good example. Out of the 1/2 dozen or so horse species, only two have ever been domesticated. Only a few types of cows have ever been domesticated for labor.
Lots of candidate animal species just don't allow humans within their social circle, or they are too aggressive with each other to be kept in close quarters.
If you read the article carefully, Borland clearly states that if you use the FREE tool, then you can ONLY distribute FREE software. If you wish to charge money for your software, then you have to purchase the non-open version.
I think it makes perfect sense and is perfectly fair for a company to ask for payment for a development tool that others will use to earn money with. They are a company duly bound to earn a profit for shareholders. They have graciously decided to allow open source developers a chance to use their rather powerful tool.
They can't give everything away - their employees have to eat, too. If you want an open source development tool that you can use any way you want, you have GCC, KDevelop, Glade and probably a few more.
While Borland believes in offering a free development tool, they apparently DON'T believe in offering a free lunch.
Sure they're expensive, but Borland does offer deep discounts to students - at least they did when I was a student. My C++ compilers, Delphi and JBuilder packages came from the university bookstore. If you aren't a student, surely you know one (unethical, though).
From the article, it seems that they need to develop a reliable method of laying down these devices atom by atom.
If this can be done, then the implications for non-quantum devices are awesome. You could manufacture nano-machines, specialized conventional electronic devices, etc. If these techniques could be applied to the macroscopic world, you could create specialized materials with purities unmatched by conventional techniques.
Your magic words there were "Government Rebates". All that means is that someone else pays the cost of your upgrade. If everyone does it, then everyone pays the difference in the form of higher taxes. There IS no free lunch.
For Solar to truely be successful, it must stand on it own merits.
Slashdot Mirror
"Until that's resolved, the safest solution is to compute with the lights on. "
Or just close the window shades.
It seems like you can read the contents of a monitor under optimal conditions, but how often do you get optimal conditions? More often that not, a person sits in front of a monitor as he or she works. At best, then, you'd only be able to get bits and pieces of what's on the screen. You also have to contend with different grades of wall paint and/or wallpaper (not to mention furniture behind you) which might make this endeavor fruitless in most cases.
It's a nice trick in a lab, and probably worth publishing. But I think there are too many uncontrollable variables to make this practical.
There is no law saying that a corporation must pay out dividends. Some corporations pay out dividends as a matter of policy, some don't. The difference is that the extra cash held onto by the corporation enables it to reinvest that cash into additional internal projects in order to increase the company's value (and therefore share price). The idea behind this is that the company feels that the cash can be put to better use by the company than by the shareholder. Besides Microsoft, Berkshire-Hathaway comes to mind. This model DOES work and value added to shareholders is reflected in increased stock price.
Of course, the shareholders don't have to accept this and can choose to take the cash now instead of later, either by holding a vote among present shareholders or by choosing to invest elsewhere.
One of the factors an investor considers is if a company pays out dividends. Ultimately, it comes down to a personal choice based upon the investor's expectations.
There have been papers written on this subject, usually asking the question: "Do dividends matter?"
Dividends are taxed as ordinary income, while capital gains are taxed as, well, the capital gains rate(usually at a lower, flat rate than ordinary income).
As for a shelter shielding Microsoft from taxes, their own financials reported a total income tax expense (2001) of $1,288,000,000 US Dollars. If they have a tax dodge in place, it AIN'T working.
Regarding that $40 Billion in cash holdings. Holdings are not taxed. How would YOU like it if you were taxed based on what your bank account held? You may be taxed in interest received, but NOT on the principle amount.
Back in the days before the PC architecture became king, Radio Shack used to sell computers with SILVER CASES. I distinctly remember people taking sandpaper to the cases to get to the BLACK primer underneath.
There was also a number of WHITE cases sold by the various clone manufacturers during the mid 1990's.
The picture in the NY Times article shoes a person painting a PC case. Perhaps that's the way to go. Someone should offer HANDPAINTED PC cases to people. You could have themes endorsed by various celebrities and artists.
... and you learn to deal with motion issues later in life.
This would be especially true with astronauts. A lot of them learned to deal with motion issues as adults during pilot/aviation training in previous careers. For the rest, you learn to deal with motion issues when learning to drive a car or ride a bike.
Contrast this with learning about gravity and trajectory. One learns to catch and throw at a relatively young age (say 1 1/2 to 3 years old). Such learning is deeply embedded and may well take longer to "unlearn."
I can see where this would be true on a large scale (ie a human), but what about animals that function mostly on instinct (insects, fish, etc)?
I'll bet it's possible to create a cybernetic "animal" that functions on 95% instinct and 5% learning. The recursion problem could therefore be contained and studied.
Such a thing won't be "HAL" or "C3PO" by any stretch of the imagination, but it'll be a start.
I would imagine it's because that meat is higher in energy, pound for pound. With spacecraft, weight/storage considerations are of paramount importance.
When you talk about sending people to live in space (either in the ISS or on a trip to Mars), you want to be able to pack as much nutrition into as small a space as possible. With launch costs somewhere around $10000 per pound, taking several extra pounds in vegetables means NOT taking several extra pounds in fuel, air or equipment more so than it means spending more money.
When you're in as hostile an environment as space, survival dictates what you do. Tastiness takes a back seat to that.
As for the ethical considerations of killing animals, you could just as easily take tissue samples. As for the nutritional downsides of eating meat, that's where genetic engineering (still in the future) comes in.
Aren't there limits to how many times an animal cell can divide, before it just stops dividing, lives out it's life and dies?
IANAB (I am not a biochemist), but there have been different articles on this subject over the years. Wouldn't that be an impediment to large scale implementation of this?
Just asking....
From the article: "and if they [senior and junior executives] tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system.
This is BAD THING??????? This "feature" should be used as a management training tool.
But those modules are US$300.00 a piece. Contract that with the PCMCIA wireless card that sells for US$80 (from the same Xircom website). At work, we have an 802.11b network. At HOME I have the same thing connected to my cable modem (firewalled and encrypted, of course). Dual capability would make me consider the palm.
Until then, I'll stick with my IPAQ.
It it possible that she's sensitive to the flickering of a CRT? I actually know some people that are bothered by a 60 Hz scan rate.
It would seem that there is no value in using or abusing a system that doesn't work. The consequences of a false positive are great: Lawsuit, criminal charges (against police).
As for straight surveillence, the fact that abuses can and are documented shows that the system CAN be monitored and the watchers CAN be watched.
Good auditing practices conducted by 3rd parties WILL keep the system (fairly) honest.
"[Summary: In response to the Ukraine government's "failure to enact an
optical media licensing regime that would preclude the piracy of such
products," the U.S. government has levied 100 percent tariffs on
Ukraine exports such as fuel oil, sneakers, paper, and diamonds. --Declan]"
Do we actually BUY that much stuff from them? It seems most of these exports can find ready markets elsewhere. It seems the loss in trade is greater than any piracy could be. Any comments?
1. How much RAM? CPU speed?
Let me listen to MP3's and store documents temporarily. Since I'm constantly travelling, my PDA has become my Laptop.
2. Wireless connectivity (802.11x)?
None of this pay as you stuff or Apple proprietary crap. I want to ba able to connect it to my networks at home and work - seamlessly.
And finally...
3. What's the cost?
If it costs substantially more than an IPAQ without offering any compelling features, I'm not buying it.
I didn't include battery life because that's really out of Apple's hands. Sure they can engineer the product to conserve power, but most rechargable PDA devices need AC power every 4-5 hours after constant use.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the P rating was started by NexGen, the company that AMD eventually bought that created the architecture that was incorporated into the K5/K6 lines.
:)
Their chips used slower clock speeds, but rivaled Pentium performance. For example, a chip clocked at 81Mhz yielded a performance equal to a Pentium 90, hence a P90 designation. This also happens to be the designation of my NexGen motherboard that still serves as my home web development platform under Linux.
Now WHY they didn't just run their chips at comparible speeds and blow away the Pentium performance-wise, I have no idea.
I always thought it was a stupid marketing ploy to begin with. Casual consumers always rate things by simple measurements (speed, horsepower - as in cars).
... the problem seems to be high prices and an overly consevative corporate culture.
When I was a kid, legos were always more pricy than the "cheap knockoffs" that the toy stores also carried. Although I loved them, any money I earned was more likely to put into other building activities (ie model rockets, erector sets, etc).
Mindstorms was probably the most innovative toy product to come around during the last 10 years, but it's always remained one of the most expensive. The problems the article detailed about getting the cost down seemed more like management problems than anything else.
I know the company has a good thing going, but you always have to exercise foresight, research your customer base and be ready to take chances - especially in the toy industry.
Traditionally, one has always had to make the "trip across town" to the local town/city hall or state/federal building. This has limited access only to those who were somewhat determined to get the information (ie for lawsuits and other conflicts).
Easier access to this information can be used by spammers, telemarketers, etc. to create mailing lists that bombard us with all kinds of garbage.
I propose that online access to public information be limited such that it doesn't allow a person to retrieve dozens or hundreds of records continuously. If a person wants to access such information, he or she would be allowed a fixed amount of usage (determined by a browser cookie, a scan of the persons IP address, etc.) per day or week. If that person needs to access or download hundreds of records at once for legitimate reasons such as lawsuits, tax research, title research, then such access can be applied for and granted on a case by case basis.
This won't stop unscrupulous people from abusing legitimate access for their own needs, but it will provide some tracability and accountability for their actions.
Public records should remain public. However, the cybernetic tools to search and gather hundreds of records don't have to be. A human brain has always been an excellent, and free, tool to use. It still is.
.... with cassette tapes during the late '70s and early '80s and with video tapes, too. In the end a small tax was levied, they collected their money and people still recorded music and video.
Let's face it, people are going to do a small amount of copying for their own personal use. You do it, I do it - I'll bet even the children of the RIAA demons do it. The RIAA is sweating the small stuff.
The greatest threat of piracy comes from people that will copy in huge volumns for sale on the black market. A lot of this will happen overseas, where RIAA has the least influence.
If they want to sweat the small stuff, I say fine. It hasn't gotten them anywhere in the past - and it won't get them anywhere in the future.
Phillips, Sony and others have invested far too much money in CD-R technology and make far too much off of it to roll over dead for the RIAA.
I've said it once and I'll say it again. The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying. In it's place, artists (those backed by record companies) will make money from personal appearances and product endorsements, just like professional sports figures do. Sports figures may make a few million a year, but they pull in much more from product endorsements. That's where the money is and that's where the industry will finally go. The true value in a recording contract for an artist will lie not in the sale of music, but in the sale of his/her image.
A persons's memory erodes and is clouded by bias and emotion. A computer's memory is not clouded by bias nor emotion.
As for eroding, a properly designed and backed up database can be trusted to hold accurate information. It's in the best interests of the police to hold accurate information. A poorly designed system would be of no use to them and generate lots of lawsuits.
WHY do we have to use Microsoft's file server software at all? Why not just write a secure, open source NT/2000 service that can share directories? This can be accessed by a secure, open source client that sits on a NT/2000/9x/Linux/UNIX machine. This (sort of) was done with SSH. There are 3rd party solutions for NNTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, HTTP, etc. Why not file sharing?
Moore's law (actually it is more of a prediction) dealt with semiconductor densities doubling every 18 months. This implies a drop of cost and an increase in performance. Of course you have to wait for it to happen.
For those who have an IMMEDIATE need for high performance computing, parallel systems are the answer. Simply put, you can have access to high performance computing now rather than wait for a single machine to become cheap enough.
But don't forget that Moore's law made this all possible. Smaller components also made cheap, high-speed communications commonplace. This can only mean that the cost of setting up such a grid will become cheaper over time, not more expensive.
Look at AOL, for example. They provide a distributed service to millions of people. This is made possible because communications and computing power is cheaper more than it has ever been. The longer it is in existance, the more services they offer. This happens without an appreciable increase in price.
The same thing will happen with grid computing. It may be a specialty item NOW, but in the future, it will become a CHEAP commodity, not an expensive one.
If I remember correctly, my Estes Enterprise model rocket mounted the solid fuel engine about an inch below where the impulse engine ports were. That took care of the center of gravity issue. That was a number of years back when they sold the model.
Elephants probably could have been used, but probably were not for reasons just as valid as today:
1. Elephants take a long time to raise. In India, wild elephant are captured because it just takes too much time and money to raise one for labor. It's just not cost effective. The ancient Egyptians would have had to have spent a lot of time hunting and capturing them (not a safe occupation).
2. African elephants aren't as trainable as their Asian counterparts. True Hannibal used them, but they don't have the temperament for labor.
Hippos are just too aggressive to train.
Local horses (zebra) don't adapt well. Their social structure prevents that. The Egyptians did use horses for war, commerce and such, so that might have made them more valuable in those areas.
Camels seem to function better as individuals, not as group workers.
It may be that that type of animal labor just wasn't available. Think about it. Of all the potential species that can work, only a handful lend themselves to humans integrating themselves into their group instincts. Dogs(wolves) are a good example. Out of the 1/2 dozen or so horse species, only two have ever been domesticated. Only a few types of cows have ever been domesticated for labor.
Lots of candidate animal species just don't allow humans within their social circle, or they are too aggressive with each other to be kept in close quarters.
If you read the article carefully, Borland clearly states that if you use the FREE tool, then you can ONLY distribute FREE software. If you wish to charge money for your software, then you have to purchase the non-open version.
I think it makes perfect sense and is perfectly fair for a company to ask for payment for a development tool that others will use to earn money with. They are a company duly bound to earn a profit for shareholders. They have graciously decided to allow open source developers a chance to use their rather powerful tool.
They can't give everything away - their employees have to eat, too. If you want an open source development tool that you can use any way you want, you have GCC, KDevelop, Glade and probably a few more.
While Borland believes in offering a free development tool, they apparently DON'T believe in offering a free lunch.
Sure they're expensive, but Borland does offer deep discounts to students - at least they did when I was a student. My C++ compilers, Delphi and JBuilder packages came from the university bookstore. If you aren't a student, surely you know one (unethical, though).
From the article, it seems that they need to develop a reliable method of laying down these devices atom by atom.
If this can be done, then the implications for non-quantum devices are awesome. You could manufacture nano-machines, specialized conventional electronic devices, etc. If these techniques could be applied to the macroscopic world, you could create specialized materials with purities unmatched by conventional techniques.
This technology bears close watching....
Your magic words there were "Government Rebates". All that means is that someone else pays the cost of your upgrade. If everyone does it, then everyone pays the difference in the form of higher taxes. There IS no free lunch.
For Solar to truely be successful, it must stand on it own merits.