Right, and there's a market for people who don't want to ever touch the insides of their computers.
Eventually most end user computers will be come cheap, and mostly disposable, I'm not sure we're there yet, but we've seen hints of that with Xbox, PS3, SNES etc, which are partially repairable, but only partially because most of the time it's cheaper to just replace something than repair it.
Years ago when I worked in an IT shop our rule of thumb was one hour of time is 100 bucks - i.e. if it was going to take more than an hour to fix something less than 100 bucks, just replace it. Where my dad worked (G.E.) they had a 5000 dollar rule for custom computer equipment, if it cost less than 5000, when it doubt just replace it, this was for multi million dollar equipment of course. I tend to think the threshold today is probably about 200 dollars, which is basically a motherboard, CPU or GPU, if any of those is gone, just replace it. I can do a fan or a drive in 5-10 minutes, maybe a bit more for a HDD if I'm trying to move data (but then the data is more valuable than 200 dollars usually), but just about everything else, especially on a laptop, if it's not the keyboard or a removable part that's broken it's probably a multi hour job to try and pick the thing apart, order replacement parts etc. It's not that you can't do it, and if it's a problem you can cope with for a while you can save money waiting on repairs, but I can see where Apple is at the point of figuring it's not worth doing repairs on stuff. Most of the time it's probably under warranty (just replace it), so badly broken you have to replace it, or not worth the labour to repair locally (and therefore not worth waiting weeks for it to be shipped back and forth to some foreign country).
Of course Apple doesn't want to recover the data on your drive, or move it to a new computer, that probably costs them 50 or 60 bucks, they want to sell you a 'time capsule' or an external drive and screw you if you don't want to go that route.
comparing GDP of a country to net worth of a company is a bizarre comparison anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue is sort of what you're talking about, and it ranks apple at 43rd, with 103 billion in revenue last year, whereas exxon, royal dutch shell and Walmart are all up over 400 billion dollars.
(point of interest, samsung is on that list with 247 billion).
The idea of meaningful value is sort of hard to pin down, because in both cases the answer to your question is: Their competitors would just sell more. It's not like there aren't other companies making tablets or phones or oil or jet fuel or the like. If you shut down one, their competitors will simply gobble up market share and assets.
In that sense the state owned companies that have state monopolies are the most 'meaningful' value, think state electricity company of China. If they shut down there's no other company to fix chinas power problems just waiting in the wings, but then it's not really realistic that the entire company could disappear overnight in a scandal either the way say a bank or apple could.
Market capitalization is just the total value of the company, it's not intended to reflect anything, two companies with equal revenue but one making a profit and the other not can have wildly different market capitalizations. Hitachi, IBM, Apple, Tesco, Freddie Mac, Bank of America Honda, Verizon, Nissan, and Nestle all have roughly the same revenue, total employees is meaningless because it doesn't count sub contractors, but apple is worth more than any 3 of them combined because they make a huge profit, and because they kept holding onto that cash rather than paying a dividend like everyone else would have. Which might have been part of the plan/fun of it all, pay out 100 billion dollars in cash, watch the stock drop by 100 billion dollars but get to claim the title for having been the most valuable company ever.
Computer nerds viewed torrents as a way around file sharing rules because you never shared the whole file, only a little piece of it, guess how well that went over?
Changing the technology being used doesn't change what it does, if I post a list of hashes that my browser can interpret as the comments on/. they may as well be the actual links to the comments. Storing a collection of magnets, or links or providing any resource that allows me to access something I'm not supposed to (however you decide that) is going to fall under the umbrella of the law eventually.
Obviously this is a silly game of whack a mole, there are still tax havens and people have been mad about those for centuries, either you block people from leaving your intranet, and then tightly manage what's on it, or you're going to find that people are constantly finding ways to access things you don't want them to, that you can't do much about.
Most military components are indeed manufactured domestically.
sure, by value the US is what, 70% domestic, the problem is a matter of how critical the other 30% are, if you're talking about displays from korea or processors from singapore you have a problem.
That's why it was a big deal when some designs were stolen and shipped to China.
I actually don't think that's as much of a problem as it's made out to be for the reason you said, they don't really see a lot of value in picking fights with other people when economies are so interconnected and Taiwan (or some uninhabited islands) are worth so little to them. The issue is more what I would point to with europe, or slowly china. Anyone can match your capabilities for comparable PPP spending, everyone else is just cheap. But the great strength of the US military has always been in the backdrop of civilian industry that can be converted rapidly to simply out produce anyone else, the current reliance on technology is supposing there's some novel brilliance in the US defence industry that seems to be actually be a matter of money, not brilliance. And the manufacturing edge is slipping away, not compared to Europe so much, but it's slipped away compared to china.
With enough spending the chinese can (and probably will) have the capability to take over all of Taiwan overnight, I would think that's the most sensible goal. The US could probably take over Cuba overnight if it put it's mind to it, and it's basically the same problem. So that's the problem, the US edge has been in having the money to develop the technology and then the manufacturing base to build it, the technology is actually not an advantage against anyone who wants to spend the money, and the manufacturing base has fallen being, so you can't rely on that to back it up.
they would then successfully have figured out how to fabricate 1 of the 30k chips in one of our military devices.
No, they only need to steal/acquire/buy the designs for each component, once.
Good luck to them.
Everyone has been quite successful at either stealing or copying or reinventing US military innovations for some time. That they aren't willing to throw as much leaves them with smaller armies, but don't delude yourself, for the same PPP dollars most anyone can match what the US is up to. And the US is gradually losing the edge of having a massive civilian manufacturing base to fall back on as its real great strategic reserve. Obviously having 300 million people still gives a leg up over any european state though.
So you'll need the trained engineers/technicians/workers at factories as well as trained soldiers/sailors/pilots and support people...
and all of the training is a matter of intellectual property as well essentially. Copy the documents, copy the training plans and you have a fairly good sense of what's going on.
10 years ago people weren't selling 2 year old parts as a great deal, and there existed the possibility for a lot of outfits to switch to something else if they really hated Windows XP.
That barrier to switching, as companies have a lot of both their back and front end on windows is now much higher.
Except that your military advantage is entirely intellectual property driven, the (technical) design off all of your equipment and all of the components of that equipment define the equipment. If someone can copy those, and remember, quite a lot of the parts are made in places not covered by US IP laws, you lose your military advantage.
Games used to have things like pre-order bonuses and so on. That was fine when there were a lot less games, getting a guaranteed pre order was trivial and when you could have reasonable confidence that a developer wouldn't make crap.
But times change. If you're a bit OCD, a bit of a completionist or if you just want everything having all the goodies some people get for 'free' (or bundled with things you don't want like a statue) you still might want that same content, which is DLC, and might be willing to pay for it.
Some of the Bioware DLC then makes sense, in the scope of say an extra character or an extra mission that you want to see when you play the game. And for say 5 dollars it's still cheaper than a 10 dollar special edition with an art book that you don't want. Think of some DLC then as 'a la carte' limited/collectors/special edition parts.
Day-1 DLC was supposed to be in Day-0 product.
That's both subjective on a case by case basis, and really hard to argue in a lot of cases. Charging 5 dollars for day 1 DLC is partly a way of increasing the price by 5 dollars but cutting the various middle men out of the process. If you are a semi indie studio and you sell a game for 50 bucks at Walmart, walmart takes about 15 bucks (steam, gamestop about the same), your publisher takes 17 or so, and you're left with 17. But you get 100% of the DLC. So rather than getting 17 dollars for a copy you just got 22 (without having to push the whole cost through the chain). Usually publishers these days are smart enough to demand a cut of the DLC so it goes from being the publisher getting 35 bucks to split with you to getting 40 to split with you, but either way, the developer still takes home a lot more cash this way.
Most DLC is also not really major, relative to the price. A 5 dollar DLC doesn't have 1/10th the content of the game in it, if you're really lucky it has 1/20th, so you're significantly overpaying for that one piece of content in the hopes that more money goes back to the people who actually made the product than the people who distributed the product or left it in a box in their bathroom waiting for you.
Lets take a non bioware topical example: Guild Wars 2. Every retailer near where I am sold out on pre -orders of the collectors edition day one. Too bad I was away that day on business and missed my pre-order chance. Now with a 'digital deluxe' or similar edition I'm basically buying in a bundled DLC, call it whatever you want, you're paying for day 1 DLC. So I can't get the collectors edition, or at least, I can't be sure I can get the collectors edition, but I can be reasonably sure I can get the important game content one way or another.
In short: your concept of DLC and his aren't necessarily the same thing. You're not wrong, but neither is he. That perspective matters a lot. He's talking to other game developers, and in that sense he's right. Day 1 DLC (including in collectors editions or content that could have been in collectors editions but a player didn't buy that) is hugely popular, and that should be obvious enough to everyone.
Extra less relevant bits: Dragon age origins (the product in question) launched with 3 version. Regular retail. Collectors (physical) and digital deluxe. The digital deluxe had a *code* to download the day 1 DLC for free (so he's counting that in his stats almost certainly since it wasn't technically bundled), but the digital deluxe had a soundtrack and some desktop theme crap too. Why pay for the sound track and desktop wallpapers when you can just buy the actually game content for 7 bucks or whatever, save yourself 3 dollars, (or maybe 13, i can't remember). In his context a significant portion of the launch day had people buying basically the 2 special editions or a la carte versions of the special editions.
You want education to be controlled from the top down, by people you have never even met, right?
From the perspective of a student that is always true no matter who is in charge.
The higher up the control comes from, the more uniform the experience. If you're a kid born in Kansas it's not your fault your education was fundamentally flawed, but you're competing for jobs and university placements with people from 49 other states who didn't necessarily have the same advantage or disadvantage. The reason eduction belongs as a primarily federal responsibility is because being a kid in california right now means spending cuts that the state can't resolve, it means being a kid in Kansas who has to deal with his/her schoolboard having a fit at the presence of evolution etc. At least if every kid in the US got the same basic funding, requirements and curriculum they'd all be equally good or badly off. It means there's a single point of contact for when the system is failing (the federal department of education), there's a buffer for local economic circumstances (so people in poor neighbourhoods aren't screwed) etc.
A centrally planned top down system is the only way you're going to have a functional educational system. I'm canadian, and we get applicants to our university from the US on regular basis. It's actually a real pain in the ass to figure out if this person went to a legitimate school or not, if the courses they covered legitimate material or not etc. We don't have that problem with india, Iran, or France etc. Certainly India and Iran have regular failures in teaching certain material at various schools, and India has a serious bribery problem, but those are easier to cope with than trying to assess US students a lot of times.
MOBO chipsets: no problem on either these days. Going back to when nvidia made motherboards doesn't really count (The linux guys always had a pissing contest with nVIDIA over whether their onboard raid controller counted as raid and so that NEVER behaved nicely, I haven't tried with an intel one). Marvell SATA Controllers, for them to work properly (insofar as that could be considered possible), had to download in both cases. and then they still suck so it was a wasted effort.
USB 3.0 cards: For them to work at all, no special downloads, for them to have full speed usb 3.0 needed to download on both. USB ports on monitors/keyboards etc. it's all over the place, mice with special buttons, same thing.
nVIDIA cards, for full features, needed to download something for both.
Sound drivers (onboard realtek) to get latest drivers, needed to download for both, (both linux and windows support it working out of the box, neither of them seemed to find the latest drivers).
USB printers: Connect and print on both, but Linux by default sometimes gets confused and tries to print 4 pages per page, or with other nonsense problems with margins etc. Windows doesn't have that problem, but I don't get working monitoring or scanning necessarily.
And that's kinda my point. If even for 1 or 2 devices on your machine you have to figure out how to navigate realteks website, then you need that skill, at which point out of the box support for things that are easy to find doesn't get you much. MS's thing with windows 7 seems to be that it will download the drivers from the windows update website (in the same way linux automatically grabs from repositories). That's a good idea in both cases, but it becomes like having a calculator when doing your taxes, sure it makes the easy part easier, but you still need the skills to figure out the hard part.
Less so these days, but I've had a lot of issues with particular video card models on linux and not had the same issue on windows, I think it's a matter of someone being lazy and not pushing up a supported device ID to linux, but whatever it is, it's a nuisance.
Have you used windows 8? This isn't like your comparison. This is like having a joystick in your 767 but if you turn the lights on, or have been flying for an even multiple of 5 minutes it switches to a steering wheel.
Ya likely. I suspect the core technology behind windows 9 will be much the same as windows 8. The technology isn't the problem (other than some of the secure booting stuff and linux but I'm not sure how that will play out in the real world), it's the design. How microsoft manages to have such bad design I don't know. It's not like a video game were you can be off by 10% and have the game feel slow, or a weapon under powered or whatever. This is like they had two completely different design teams design completely different products and then said 'both'.
I don't really understand how the high level process at Microsoft even manages this. Vista I sort of understand, the biggest detractor was the overly obsessed UAC and they had a clear vision with that, a bad vision, but a vision at least. I'm not sure how the senior windows guys load up windows 8 and think 'ya, we should definitely launch this' or 'crap, we need to get this out the door asap, whatever state we can have it in'. How are they going to get 2012 holiday sales with a terrible product?
Now I could be proven wrong in a couple of weeks when they demo windows phone 8, and it's possible the whole plan will suddenly come together and the UI problems in Windows 8 will seem like a understandable if unfortunate compromise so they could get the whole product family out the door. But I doubt it.
That's how 3D engines game engines work, but pixel density has remained in a very narrow range for years, deliberately, the whole GPU/Monitor/Design infrastructure is built up around that density range, Apple making something completely different is out on the fringes precisely because the technology to do so has been around for a while but no one, not hardware or software guys thought it was a good idea. Just supporting 4 regular laptop screens duct taped together in a 'eyefinity' type setup would probably work fine on linux, (if not, it certainly would on windows, since you can do that with every other display) but the increased density... not so much.
In a sense this is an accessibility issue, everything now takes 1/4 the size it was expected to, which is the same problem as someone who has 1/4 the vision of normal so you need to magnify everything 4x. There are companies that make specialized equipment or software to do so, and there are accessibility tools in windows and linux to try and do it, but they have always been sub par for general use.
If this was 10 years ago, then yes, probably suicide. The Windows ecosystem is so big, and so entrenched with 'new' computers being sold with 2 year old parts in them (not used, just parts fabbed 2 years) as great buys that a single iteration of windows being a clusterfuck isn't the end of the world, because people will still buy the old version, with hardware suited to the old version.
That gives them a chance to change direction after people have had windows 8 for a few months and the torrent of negative feedback ends up as a pie in ballmers face. And then they can change direction to: consistent design. It's not that any of the interfaces in Windows 8 are bad, it's that there are more than one, and things inconsistently shift between them. That's a fundamental design problem on microsofts part, and they'll have to pick something and go with it.
It probably is, correctly guessed, the biggest bet MS has taken so far. They know that the feedback has been by and large negative, and that it's horrible to use, microsoft employees must have parents and putting windows 8 on one of their computers risks getting you disowned it's that bad. But they're releasing it anyway, and it's hugely expensive to make an operating system like Windows 8, so that's certainly risky, and it's risky because they're banking on their ability to not fuck up windows 9, whatever that will be, even if (and likely when) windows 8 is a disaster.
It certainly won't be the biggest bet MS ever takes, but to this point I could be reasonably persuaded it is the riskiest bet they made. All of the other major revisions they've made have been into different market conditions or as a much smaller company.
Whatever you may say about apple, you have to concede they make interesting laptops. Not necessarily good, but certainly interesting. The form factor is pretty decent, the retina display is a terrible idea, but it's interesting to try out, the GPU switching etc. are all neat concepts. If you really want the form factor your options are limited, and you can't get anything like the retina display elsewhere.
Eventually we'll all need to support higher density displays, Apple is leading the charge on this one, and no else seems to be stupid enough to follow along after them for the moment, but the sooner we start figuring out how to work with these things the easier it will be when the time comes and desktop users have 3840 x 2400 (or 3840 x 2160) displays, and quadrupole density displays will be common place on regular laptops.
You just don't care that you have to download Windows drivers for hardware because its normal to you
Which kind of takes away the advantage of support out of the box.
This is one of those points where it's only the marginal cases that matter. Whether I need to download drivers to reach the full potential of my video card or they come pre installed is of minimal importance, because there are only basically 3 video card makers and I either can find them easily, or I need someone else to manage my computer for me no matter what, because I can't find www.nvidia.com, click the drivers, GPU drivers, then auto detect buttons, I'm not capable of managing my own computer, windows or linux.
On the other hand, if I have some bizarro SATA controller on my MOBO or a video card from SIS or matrox or one of the other boutique guys or some other random weird crap on my computer I'm still probably going to have to find drivers for something, and it's a pain in the arse because you may have to navigate some taiwanese website looking for some numbers in the hopes that they will point you to the right driver. And that's about equally bad for both linux and windows, assuming you can find drivers at all, and assuming they would do anything on linux if you needed them.
Which takes us to why Linux doesn't work on a retina macbook. The APIC intel mobo thing seems like that's actually a linux bug, whatever they happen, I'm not going to rail on the Linux dev guys about it. But the rest of it seems to be all the marginal case stuff, some custom apple thunderbolt part that you need to get working so you can transfer over files to support some other custom apple part (or at least very new part that is currently only supported by apple). No one ever seriously thought a 2880x 1800 display was going to exist (same ratios at 1440x900 but 4x the pixels), so it works like shit, the wifi is probably some custom part, so it doesn't work, the GPU switching thing is relatively new, so it's hard to say if that's a newness problem or a custom Apple way of GPU switching problem. For windows you're stuck waiting for Apple to release a driver kit (although the retina display thing can be solved through nvidia's website), and everything else is about as bad as linux. In both cases you're waiting on someone else to solve the problem for you as an end user. On linux you're waiting for someone to basically reverse engineer the parts, on Windows you're waiting for Apple to release a boot camp disk or money to change hands and Microsoft to write their own.
So sure, Linux has more support out of the box, but if it doesn't support the marginal case stuff that's hard for me to find fixes for then it's not getting me a whole lot over windows (at least in terms of driver support). As is well exemplified by the macbook retina display, which is basically a series of edge cases linux doesn't support yet, and neither does microsoft. That's probably Apple being assholes more than the fault of the other two, but either way, the linux setup experience isn't winning out over windows.
It's like saying when steel ceases to be the most important industrial commodity the US and the UK will suddenly fade into the history books. Right now it's not viable to do anything but extract oil, or oil related businesses in Saudi as a foundational industry. But now they have cash, and they can use cash to create an industry when something else becomes viable.
Poor countries having nothing with which to create a new industry. Saudi isn't like that. The royal family may squander or steal the money they do have, leaving the rest of the populace with nothing, but just as easily they could use the trillions of dollars they have to buy into whatever industry looks most profitable at the time, they could end up being the bankers of the middle east (abu dhabi kind of does this now) where they end up like London playing host to investment if not manufacturing monies, as this hub of financial transactions going from the developed world to the islamic or developing world for example.
Saudi arabia isn't all that big of a country, it's basically slightly more populous than the netherlands (18 vs 17 million), but has 8 million extra foreigners living there. When the oil dries up they'll turf out the foreigners, and be left with a strategically convenient location, whatever remains of the novel and hard to replace uses for oil (which might end up being very high value remember), they have guaranteed tourism as the home of one of the pillars of islam if they want it, and they have a pile of money with which they could buy up a car company, a semiconductor manufacturer and a stock exchange with a lot left over.
Since the 70's they've realized the oil will run out, and they've been experimenting (with varying success) at various industries since, so it's not like this a problem they are blindly ignoring. It's just really really hard to find something worth doing in Saudi that isn't extracting oil. Which is the same problem places like texas and alberta and norway face but not as badly, where you're competing with oil companies for labour, it's just not worth it.
They know no such thing. They are deadly serious about eliminating things like this from the earth.
I am 100% sure that is not the case. Try flying first class out of saudi arabia sometime and watch rich saudi's ditch the traditional garb for suits and a glass of wine.
yes, the literate crazies (the clerics) actually believe this nonsense, in the same way I'm sure the pope and his various cardinals believe his word as the infallible word of god. But no one in any catholic government is stupid enough to believe that.
If you have a wife and two kids you're basically screwed on trying to do a PhD, sorry. Unless you can live off of your wifes income.
You can get side jobs when you're a PhD student, pretty easily (especially in your case because you have years of being a software developer) but time spent doing contract software work is time spent not doing PhD research, and you can very easily start to drag the whole process out which just makes it worse. As I say, I have a buddy here in his late 40's, with two kids and he had to drop out of the programme because he spent all of his time making money to support the kids (his wife makes a decent wage but two kids gets pricey) and didn't have time left to be with the kids.
A PhD in comp sci is almost never a financial benefit over an MSc, especially if you start late. We have a few faculty who make 200k but they've been at this since they were in their late 20's and they're in their late 50's now.
In terms of time. You don't need to work 80 hours a week to get a PhD. You can do it in 40 or 50 hours a week with some crunch time as you get towards the end, for younger people a lot of their work time is wasted, so they don't have the focus someone with industry experience has. Show up everyday, work 9-5 and don't dick around and you can get it done in 40 hours a week easily enough. It's being able to find 40 hours a week (or more like 30 if you do a Teaching assistant position which forms half your stipend) where you are not making any money directly.
Your best bet might be to start off with a part time masters, do the course work as a part time student and keep your current job (you'll lose 6 or 7 hours a week for lectures/lab time) but then you can do the 'thesis' part full time, which can be done in 5 or 6 months if you actually work at it and have a topic from the get go. If you're doing really well at it you can ease your way from a masters into a PhD (make sure the school you go to offers both).
A few tips, especially since you have kids: Do not work at home. Absolutely do not work at home. You can have a man cave where you get some stuff done in the evenings but during the day go to the school, work at the school. People don't understand 'graduate student' doesn't mean 'unemployed', and they will try and monopolize your time at home for every stupid scheme they have. Your wife will call you and tell you to start making dinner at 3 in the afternoon, your mom will show up and want to chat or see the kids or whatever. The kids will think "daddy's home!" and constantly drain on your time during the summer etc. Make sure everyone in your life understands it's a full time commitment with shitty pay. If you're going to pick your kids from school everyday at 3:30 (my boss does this) well remember that's saving you money on child care, but it's costing you time you could be productively working.
For an MSc especially: convince someone else to pay for it. Your boss can usually be persuaded that a masters is valid professional development, and will let you keep your job.
A part time PhD can be something like 13 years, a part time masters 7. For that, you may as well not bother, and just work the whole time.
A PhD can get you a research career, but the lost years of earning power getting there usually mean it's not a payoff, the later you start the worse off you are, and you have to ask how likely it is that there will be a position available nearby, or will your wife be able to get a job there. I'm in this boat now where as I'm finishing I can get offers of ~90-100k a year (you can get better than that at google and facebook but I haven't talked to either of them), but anywhere I can get a job my spouse can't. If your wife has a job now and you'd need to move to do research in comp sci, well she's going to have to find a new job to support your dream. Guess how well that plan will go over?
Saudi view themselves as the leaders of the Islamic faith (sort of like if Italy took the lead on all things catholic that the pope said, good ideas or not).
To them the notion that some of these concepts could even be considered acceptable, anywhere, is outrageous, and true moral leadership is to object vigorously to all of it. They know they'll probably lose, and they probably want to lose (and I'm sure the US embassy was consulted in advance as to whether or not they had any chance of actually getting their opinions followed). But as the stewards of the islamic faith they must at all times appear to object to things contrary to the brand of islam they are promoting.
The idea that these behaviours (consumption of alcohol, sex for fun, homosexuality etc.) could be exposed to any of the islamic faith, especially their poorer brethren, who rely on the Kingdom for guidance and support on these issues, means they must show their leadership to the world and demand such unislamic activites be discouraged at all time. It would be equally terrible if a member of the Islamic faith outside of a Islamic society were to be corrupted by these ideas, especially as a young, impressionable boy or girl in the US or Europe, and the international community should at all times work to protect them from unislamic influences, everywhere.
It's stupid, they know it's stupid, you know it's stupid, but the poor illiterate bastard in Bangladesh or Afghanistan or Morocco or the like can get outraged over it and they don't know it's theatre for their benefit, the saudi's can claim to be defenders of the islamic faith (which wins them points with the literate crazies) and it's unlikely to go very far anyway, so no harm done.
Claiming a theory that has a working track record is wrong is dishonest at best.
Now sure, Keynesian economics as written initially would be a bit like thinking evolution is exactly as laid out the origin of species, that's silly, the model evolves over time quite a lot as you figure out more and more detail on more and more pieces of the puzzles.
which is destroying our economy.
The fact that people aren't doing it is what has caused your economy be stuck in the doldrums for a 4 years with no great prospects for the future. Things would be about equally bad under obama for another 4 years without a change in direction, and significantly worse under romney assuming you can believe anything he is saying now.
Depends on whether the economy grows faster than the interest a year or slower, and for how long. If you spend a trillion dollars this year, 800 billion next year, 600 billion after that and so on but have growth of 200 billion, then 400 billion then 600 billion in 5 years the net effect would be 3 trillion dollars in debt for an economy that is 3 trillion dollars bigger a year sort of thing.
And yes, interest rates will climb from historical lows. But that's the point, you're at the very bottom of how low interest rates can get, there's a long way from where they are to where they become a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and there's a market for people who don't want to ever touch the insides of their computers.
Eventually most end user computers will be come cheap, and mostly disposable, I'm not sure we're there yet, but we've seen hints of that with Xbox, PS3, SNES etc, which are partially repairable, but only partially because most of the time it's cheaper to just replace something than repair it.
Years ago when I worked in an IT shop our rule of thumb was one hour of time is 100 bucks - i.e. if it was going to take more than an hour to fix something less than 100 bucks, just replace it. Where my dad worked (G.E.) they had a 5000 dollar rule for custom computer equipment, if it cost less than 5000, when it doubt just replace it, this was for multi million dollar equipment of course. I tend to think the threshold today is probably about 200 dollars, which is basically a motherboard, CPU or GPU, if any of those is gone, just replace it. I can do a fan or a drive in 5-10 minutes, maybe a bit more for a HDD if I'm trying to move data (but then the data is more valuable than 200 dollars usually), but just about everything else, especially on a laptop, if it's not the keyboard or a removable part that's broken it's probably a multi hour job to try and pick the thing apart, order replacement parts etc. It's not that you can't do it, and if it's a problem you can cope with for a while you can save money waiting on repairs, but I can see where Apple is at the point of figuring it's not worth doing repairs on stuff. Most of the time it's probably under warranty (just replace it), so badly broken you have to replace it, or not worth the labour to repair locally (and therefore not worth waiting weeks for it to be shipped back and forth to some foreign country).
Of course Apple doesn't want to recover the data on your drive, or move it to a new computer, that probably costs them 50 or 60 bucks, they want to sell you a 'time capsule' or an external drive and screw you if you don't want to go that route.
comparing GDP of a country to net worth of a company is a bizarre comparison anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_revenue is sort of what you're talking about, and it ranks apple at 43rd, with 103 billion in revenue last year, whereas exxon, royal dutch shell and Walmart are all up over 400 billion dollars.
(point of interest, samsung is on that list with 247 billion).
The idea of meaningful value is sort of hard to pin down, because in both cases the answer to your question is: Their competitors would just sell more. It's not like there aren't other companies making tablets or phones or oil or jet fuel or the like. If you shut down one, their competitors will simply gobble up market share and assets.
In that sense the state owned companies that have state monopolies are the most 'meaningful' value, think state electricity company of China. If they shut down there's no other company to fix chinas power problems just waiting in the wings, but then it's not really realistic that the entire company could disappear overnight in a scandal either the way say a bank or apple could.
Market capitalization is just the total value of the company, it's not intended to reflect anything, two companies with equal revenue but one making a profit and the other not can have wildly different market capitalizations. Hitachi, IBM, Apple, Tesco, Freddie Mac, Bank of America Honda, Verizon, Nissan, and Nestle all have roughly the same revenue, total employees is meaningless because it doesn't count sub contractors, but apple is worth more than any 3 of them combined because they make a huge profit, and because they kept holding onto that cash rather than paying a dividend like everyone else would have. Which might have been part of the plan/fun of it all, pay out 100 billion dollars in cash, watch the stock drop by 100 billion dollars but get to claim the title for having been the most valuable company ever.
Conceptually it's the same problem though.
Computer nerds viewed torrents as a way around file sharing rules because you never shared the whole file, only a little piece of it, guess how well that went over?
Changing the technology being used doesn't change what it does, if I post a list of hashes that my browser can interpret as the comments on /. they may as well be the actual links to the comments. Storing a collection of magnets, or links or providing any resource that allows me to access something I'm not supposed to (however you decide that) is going to fall under the umbrella of the law eventually.
Obviously this is a silly game of whack a mole, there are still tax havens and people have been mad about those for centuries, either you block people from leaving your intranet, and then tightly manage what's on it, or you're going to find that people are constantly finding ways to access things you don't want them to, that you can't do much about.
Most military components are indeed manufactured domestically.
sure, by value the US is what, 70% domestic, the problem is a matter of how critical the other 30% are, if you're talking about displays from korea or processors from singapore you have a problem.
That's why it was a big deal when some designs were stolen and shipped to China.
I actually don't think that's as much of a problem as it's made out to be for the reason you said, they don't really see a lot of value in picking fights with other people when economies are so interconnected and Taiwan (or some uninhabited islands) are worth so little to them. The issue is more what I would point to with europe, or slowly china. Anyone can match your capabilities for comparable PPP spending, everyone else is just cheap. But the great strength of the US military has always been in the backdrop of civilian industry that can be converted rapidly to simply out produce anyone else, the current reliance on technology is supposing there's some novel brilliance in the US defence industry that seems to be actually be a matter of money, not brilliance. And the manufacturing edge is slipping away, not compared to Europe so much, but it's slipped away compared to china.
With enough spending the chinese can (and probably will) have the capability to take over all of Taiwan overnight, I would think that's the most sensible goal. The US could probably take over Cuba overnight if it put it's mind to it, and it's basically the same problem. So that's the problem, the US edge has been in having the money to develop the technology and then the manufacturing base to build it, the technology is actually not an advantage against anyone who wants to spend the money, and the manufacturing base has fallen being, so you can't rely on that to back it up.
our blueprints to even know what to do with them.
all of which is just intellectual property.
they would then successfully have figured out how to fabricate 1 of the 30k chips in one of our military devices.
No, they only need to steal/acquire/buy the designs for each component, once.
Good luck to them.
Everyone has been quite successful at either stealing or copying or reinventing US military innovations for some time. That they aren't willing to throw as much leaves them with smaller armies, but don't delude yourself, for the same PPP dollars most anyone can match what the US is up to. And the US is gradually losing the edge of having a massive civilian manufacturing base to fall back on as its real great strategic reserve. Obviously having 300 million people still gives a leg up over any european state though.
So you'll need the trained engineers/technicians/workers at factories as well as trained soldiers/sailors/pilots and support people...
and all of the training is a matter of intellectual property as well essentially. Copy the documents, copy the training plans and you have a fairly good sense of what's going on.
10 years ago people weren't selling 2 year old parts as a great deal, and there existed the possibility for a lot of outfits to switch to something else if they really hated Windows XP.
That barrier to switching, as companies have a lot of both their back and front end on windows is now much higher.
Except that your military advantage is entirely intellectual property driven, the (technical) design off all of your equipment and all of the components of that equipment define the equipment. If someone can copy those, and remember, quite a lot of the parts are made in places not covered by US IP laws, you lose your military advantage.
Kinda....
Games used to have things like pre-order bonuses and so on. That was fine when there were a lot less games, getting a guaranteed pre order was trivial and when you could have reasonable confidence that a developer wouldn't make crap.
But times change. If you're a bit OCD, a bit of a completionist or if you just want everything having all the goodies some people get for 'free' (or bundled with things you don't want like a statue) you still might want that same content, which is DLC, and might be willing to pay for it.
Some of the Bioware DLC then makes sense, in the scope of say an extra character or an extra mission that you want to see when you play the game. And for say 5 dollars it's still cheaper than a 10 dollar special edition with an art book that you don't want. Think of some DLC then as 'a la carte' limited/collectors/special edition parts.
Day-1 DLC was supposed to be in Day-0 product.
That's both subjective on a case by case basis, and really hard to argue in a lot of cases. Charging 5 dollars for day 1 DLC is partly a way of increasing the price by 5 dollars but cutting the various middle men out of the process. If you are a semi indie studio and you sell a game for 50 bucks at Walmart, walmart takes about 15 bucks (steam, gamestop about the same), your publisher takes 17 or so, and you're left with 17. But you get 100% of the DLC. So rather than getting 17 dollars for a copy you just got 22 (without having to push the whole cost through the chain). Usually publishers these days are smart enough to demand a cut of the DLC so it goes from being the publisher getting 35 bucks to split with you to getting 40 to split with you, but either way, the developer still takes home a lot more cash this way.
Most DLC is also not really major, relative to the price. A 5 dollar DLC doesn't have 1/10th the content of the game in it, if you're really lucky it has 1/20th, so you're significantly overpaying for that one piece of content in the hopes that more money goes back to the people who actually made the product than the people who distributed the product or left it in a box in their bathroom waiting for you.
Lets take a non bioware topical example: Guild Wars 2. Every retailer near where I am sold out on pre -orders of the collectors edition day one. Too bad I was away that day on business and missed my pre-order chance. Now with a 'digital deluxe' or similar edition I'm basically buying in a bundled DLC, call it whatever you want, you're paying for day 1 DLC. So I can't get the collectors edition, or at least, I can't be sure I can get the collectors edition, but I can be reasonably sure I can get the important game content one way or another.
In short: your concept of DLC and his aren't necessarily the same thing. You're not wrong, but neither is he. That perspective matters a lot. He's talking to other game developers, and in that sense he's right. Day 1 DLC (including in collectors editions or content that could have been in collectors editions but a player didn't buy that) is hugely popular, and that should be obvious enough to everyone.
Extra less relevant bits:
Dragon age origins (the product in question) launched with 3 version. Regular retail. Collectors (physical) and digital deluxe. The digital deluxe had a *code* to download the day 1 DLC for free (so he's counting that in his stats almost certainly since it wasn't technically bundled), but the digital deluxe had a soundtrack and some desktop theme crap too. Why pay for the sound track and desktop wallpapers when you can just buy the actually game content for 7 bucks or whatever, save yourself 3 dollars, (or maybe 13, i can't remember). In his context a significant portion of the launch day had people buying basically the 2 special editions or a la carte versions of the special editions.
You want education to be controlled from the top down, by people you have never even met, right?
From the perspective of a student that is always true no matter who is in charge.
The higher up the control comes from, the more uniform the experience. If you're a kid born in Kansas it's not your fault your education was fundamentally flawed, but you're competing for jobs and university placements with people from 49 other states who didn't necessarily have the same advantage or disadvantage. The reason eduction belongs as a primarily federal responsibility is because being a kid in california right now means spending cuts that the state can't resolve, it means being a kid in Kansas who has to deal with his/her schoolboard having a fit at the presence of evolution etc. At least if every kid in the US got the same basic funding, requirements and curriculum they'd all be equally good or badly off. It means there's a single point of contact for when the system is failing (the federal department of education), there's a buffer for local economic circumstances (so people in poor neighbourhoods aren't screwed) etc.
A centrally planned top down system is the only way you're going to have a functional educational system. I'm canadian, and we get applicants to our university from the US on regular basis. It's actually a real pain in the ass to figure out if this person went to a legitimate school or not, if the courses they covered legitimate material or not etc. We don't have that problem with india, Iran, or France etc. Certainly India and Iran have regular failures in teaching certain material at various schools, and India has a serious bribery problem, but those are easier to cope with than trying to assess US students a lot of times.
My experience then, for comparison sake.
MOBO chipsets: no problem on either these days. Going back to when nvidia made motherboards doesn't really count (The linux guys always had a pissing contest with nVIDIA over whether their onboard raid controller counted as raid and so that NEVER behaved nicely, I haven't tried with an intel one). Marvell SATA Controllers, for them to work properly (insofar as that could be considered possible), had to download in both cases. and then they still suck so it was a wasted effort.
USB 3.0 cards: For them to work at all, no special downloads, for them to have full speed usb 3.0 needed to download on both. USB ports on monitors/keyboards etc. it's all over the place, mice with special buttons, same thing.
nVIDIA cards, for full features, needed to download something for both.
Sound drivers (onboard realtek) to get latest drivers, needed to download for both, (both linux and windows support it working out of the box, neither of them seemed to find the latest drivers).
USB printers: Connect and print on both, but Linux by default sometimes gets confused and tries to print 4 pages per page, or with other nonsense problems with margins etc. Windows doesn't have that problem, but I don't get working monitoring or scanning necessarily.
And that's kinda my point. If even for 1 or 2 devices on your machine you have to figure out how to navigate realteks website, then you need that skill, at which point out of the box support for things that are easy to find doesn't get you much. MS's thing with windows 7 seems to be that it will download the drivers from the windows update website (in the same way linux automatically grabs from repositories). That's a good idea in both cases, but it becomes like having a calculator when doing your taxes, sure it makes the easy part easier, but you still need the skills to figure out the hard part.
Less so these days, but I've had a lot of issues with particular video card models on linux and not had the same issue on windows, I think it's a matter of someone being lazy and not pushing up a supported device ID to linux, but whatever it is, it's a nuisance.
same interface everywhere" idea is wrong?
Have you used windows 8? This isn't like your comparison. This is like having a joystick in your 767 but if you turn the lights on, or have been flying for an even multiple of 5 minutes it switches to a steering wheel.
Ya likely. I suspect the core technology behind windows 9 will be much the same as windows 8. The technology isn't the problem (other than some of the secure booting stuff and linux but I'm not sure how that will play out in the real world), it's the design. How microsoft manages to have such bad design I don't know. It's not like a video game were you can be off by 10% and have the game feel slow, or a weapon under powered or whatever. This is like they had two completely different design teams design completely different products and then said 'both'.
I don't really understand how the high level process at Microsoft even manages this. Vista I sort of understand, the biggest detractor was the overly obsessed UAC and they had a clear vision with that, a bad vision, but a vision at least. I'm not sure how the senior windows guys load up windows 8 and think 'ya, we should definitely launch this' or 'crap, we need to get this out the door asap, whatever state we can have it in'. How are they going to get 2012 holiday sales with a terrible product?
Now I could be proven wrong in a couple of weeks when they demo windows phone 8, and it's possible the whole plan will suddenly come together and the UI problems in Windows 8 will seem like a understandable if unfortunate compromise so they could get the whole product family out the door. But I doubt it.
That's how 3D engines game engines work, but pixel density has remained in a very narrow range for years, deliberately, the whole GPU/Monitor/Design infrastructure is built up around that density range, Apple making something completely different is out on the fringes precisely because the technology to do so has been around for a while but no one, not hardware or software guys thought it was a good idea. Just supporting 4 regular laptop screens duct taped together in a 'eyefinity' type setup would probably work fine on linux, (if not, it certainly would on windows, since you can do that with every other display) but the increased density... not so much.
In a sense this is an accessibility issue, everything now takes 1/4 the size it was expected to, which is the same problem as someone who has 1/4 the vision of normal so you need to magnify everything 4x. There are companies that make specialized equipment or software to do so, and there are accessibility tools in windows and linux to try and do it, but they have always been sub par for general use.
No, it's not suicide.
If this was 10 years ago, then yes, probably suicide. The Windows ecosystem is so big, and so entrenched with 'new' computers being sold with 2 year old parts in them (not used, just parts fabbed 2 years) as great buys that a single iteration of windows being a clusterfuck isn't the end of the world, because people will still buy the old version, with hardware suited to the old version.
That gives them a chance to change direction after people have had windows 8 for a few months and the torrent of negative feedback ends up as a pie in ballmers face. And then they can change direction to: consistent design. It's not that any of the interfaces in Windows 8 are bad, it's that there are more than one, and things inconsistently shift between them. That's a fundamental design problem on microsofts part, and they'll have to pick something and go with it.
It probably is, correctly guessed, the biggest bet MS has taken so far. They know that the feedback has been by and large negative, and that it's horrible to use, microsoft employees must have parents and putting windows 8 on one of their computers risks getting you disowned it's that bad. But they're releasing it anyway, and it's hugely expensive to make an operating system like Windows 8, so that's certainly risky, and it's risky because they're banking on their ability to not fuck up windows 9, whatever that will be, even if (and likely when) windows 8 is a disaster.
It certainly won't be the biggest bet MS ever takes, but to this point I could be reasonably persuaded it is the riskiest bet they made. All of the other major revisions they've made have been into different market conditions or as a much smaller company.
Whatever you may say about apple, you have to concede they make interesting laptops. Not necessarily good, but certainly interesting. The form factor is pretty decent, the retina display is a terrible idea, but it's interesting to try out, the GPU switching etc. are all neat concepts. If you really want the form factor your options are limited, and you can't get anything like the retina display elsewhere.
Eventually we'll all need to support higher density displays, Apple is leading the charge on this one, and no else seems to be stupid enough to follow along after them for the moment, but the sooner we start figuring out how to work with these things the easier it will be when the time comes and desktop users have 3840 x 2400 (or 3840 x 2160) displays, and quadrupole density displays will be common place on regular laptops.
You just don't care that you have to download Windows drivers for hardware because its normal to you
Which kind of takes away the advantage of support out of the box.
This is one of those points where it's only the marginal cases that matter. Whether I need to download drivers to reach the full potential of my video card or they come pre installed is of minimal importance, because there are only basically 3 video card makers and I either can find them easily, or I need someone else to manage my computer for me no matter what, because I can't find www.nvidia.com, click the drivers, GPU drivers, then auto detect buttons, I'm not capable of managing my own computer, windows or linux.
On the other hand, if I have some bizarro SATA controller on my MOBO or a video card from SIS or matrox or one of the other boutique guys or some other random weird crap on my computer I'm still probably going to have to find drivers for something, and it's a pain in the arse because you may have to navigate some taiwanese website looking for some numbers in the hopes that they will point you to the right driver. And that's about equally bad for both linux and windows, assuming you can find drivers at all, and assuming they would do anything on linux if you needed them.
Which takes us to why Linux doesn't work on a retina macbook. The APIC intel mobo thing seems like that's actually a linux bug, whatever they happen, I'm not going to rail on the Linux dev guys about it. But the rest of it seems to be all the marginal case stuff, some custom apple thunderbolt part that you need to get working so you can transfer over files to support some other custom apple part (or at least very new part that is currently only supported by apple). No one ever seriously thought a 2880x 1800 display was going to exist (same ratios at 1440x900 but 4x the pixels), so it works like shit, the wifi is probably some custom part, so it doesn't work, the GPU switching thing is relatively new, so it's hard to say if that's a newness problem or a custom Apple way of GPU switching problem. For windows you're stuck waiting for Apple to release a driver kit (although the retina display thing can be solved through nvidia's website), and everything else is about as bad as linux. In both cases you're waiting on someone else to solve the problem for you as an end user. On linux you're waiting for someone to basically reverse engineer the parts, on Windows you're waiting for Apple to release a boot camp disk or money to change hands and Microsoft to write their own.
So sure, Linux has more support out of the box, but if it doesn't support the marginal case stuff that's hard for me to find fixes for then it's not getting me a whole lot over windows (at least in terms of driver support). As is well exemplified by the macbook retina display, which is basically a series of edge cases linux doesn't support yet, and neither does microsoft. That's probably Apple being assholes more than the fault of the other two, but either way, the linux setup experience isn't winning out over windows.
yes and 40 odd thousand people in the royal family. but they are not the entirety of the rich class.
When the oil runs out they still have money.
It's like saying when steel ceases to be the most important industrial commodity the US and the UK will suddenly fade into the history books. Right now it's not viable to do anything but extract oil, or oil related businesses in Saudi as a foundational industry. But now they have cash, and they can use cash to create an industry when something else becomes viable.
Poor countries having nothing with which to create a new industry. Saudi isn't like that. The royal family may squander or steal the money they do have, leaving the rest of the populace with nothing, but just as easily they could use the trillions of dollars they have to buy into whatever industry looks most profitable at the time, they could end up being the bankers of the middle east (abu dhabi kind of does this now) where they end up like London playing host to investment if not manufacturing monies, as this hub of financial transactions going from the developed world to the islamic or developing world for example.
Saudi arabia isn't all that big of a country, it's basically slightly more populous than the netherlands (18 vs 17 million), but has 8 million extra foreigners living there. When the oil dries up they'll turf out the foreigners, and be left with a strategically convenient location, whatever remains of the novel and hard to replace uses for oil (which might end up being very high value remember), they have guaranteed tourism as the home of one of the pillars of islam if they want it, and they have a pile of money with which they could buy up a car company, a semiconductor manufacturer and a stock exchange with a lot left over.
Since the 70's they've realized the oil will run out, and they've been experimenting (with varying success) at various industries since, so it's not like this a problem they are blindly ignoring. It's just really really hard to find something worth doing in Saudi that isn't extracting oil. Which is the same problem places like texas and alberta and norway face but not as badly, where you're competing with oil companies for labour, it's just not worth it.
They know no such thing. They are deadly serious about eliminating things like this from the earth.
I am 100% sure that is not the case. Try flying first class out of saudi arabia sometime and watch rich saudi's ditch the traditional garb for suits and a glass of wine.
yes, the literate crazies (the clerics) actually believe this nonsense, in the same way I'm sure the pope and his various cardinals believe his word as the infallible word of god. But no one in any catholic government is stupid enough to believe that.
Yes, but an irrelevant country. The vatican has 800 people. Italy, 70 million.
If you have a wife and two kids you're basically screwed on trying to do a PhD, sorry. Unless you can live off of your wifes income.
You can get side jobs when you're a PhD student, pretty easily (especially in your case because you have years of being a software developer) but time spent doing contract software work is time spent not doing PhD research, and you can very easily start to drag the whole process out which just makes it worse. As I say, I have a buddy here in his late 40's, with two kids and he had to drop out of the programme because he spent all of his time making money to support the kids (his wife makes a decent wage but two kids gets pricey) and didn't have time left to be with the kids.
A PhD in comp sci is almost never a financial benefit over an MSc, especially if you start late. We have a few faculty who make 200k but they've been at this since they were in their late 20's and they're in their late 50's now.
In terms of time. You don't need to work 80 hours a week to get a PhD. You can do it in 40 or 50 hours a week with some crunch time as you get towards the end, for younger people a lot of their work time is wasted, so they don't have the focus someone with industry experience has. Show up everyday, work 9-5 and don't dick around and you can get it done in 40 hours a week easily enough. It's being able to find 40 hours a week (or more like 30 if you do a Teaching assistant position which forms half your stipend) where you are not making any money directly.
Your best bet might be to start off with a part time masters, do the course work as a part time student and keep your current job (you'll lose 6 or 7 hours a week for lectures/lab time) but then you can do the 'thesis' part full time, which can be done in 5 or 6 months if you actually work at it and have a topic from the get go. If you're doing really well at it you can ease your way from a masters into a PhD (make sure the school you go to offers both).
A few tips, especially since you have kids: Do not work at home. Absolutely do not work at home. You can have a man cave where you get some stuff done in the evenings but during the day go to the school, work at the school. People don't understand 'graduate student' doesn't mean 'unemployed', and they will try and monopolize your time at home for every stupid scheme they have. Your wife will call you and tell you to start making dinner at 3 in the afternoon, your mom will show up and want to chat or see the kids or whatever. The kids will think "daddy's home!" and constantly drain on your time during the summer etc. Make sure everyone in your life understands it's a full time commitment with shitty pay. If you're going to pick your kids from school everyday at 3:30 (my boss does this) well remember that's saving you money on child care, but it's costing you time you could be productively working.
For an MSc especially: convince someone else to pay for it. Your boss can usually be persuaded that a masters is valid professional development, and will let you keep your job.
A part time PhD can be something like 13 years, a part time masters 7. For that, you may as well not bother, and just work the whole time.
A PhD can get you a research career, but the lost years of earning power getting there usually mean it's not a payoff, the later you start the worse off you are, and you have to ask how likely it is that there will be a position available nearby, or will your wife be able to get a job there. I'm in this boat now where as I'm finishing I can get offers of ~90-100k a year (you can get better than that at google and facebook but I haven't talked to either of them), but anywhere I can get a job my spouse can't. If your wife has a job now and you'd need to move to do research in comp sci, well she's going to have to find a new job to support your dream. Guess how well that plan will go over?
I might add more later but I have to run now.
Saudi view themselves as the leaders of the Islamic faith (sort of like if Italy took the lead on all things catholic that the pope said, good ideas or not).
To them the notion that some of these concepts could even be considered acceptable, anywhere, is outrageous, and true moral leadership is to object vigorously to all of it. They know they'll probably lose, and they probably want to lose (and I'm sure the US embassy was consulted in advance as to whether or not they had any chance of actually getting their opinions followed). But as the stewards of the islamic faith they must at all times appear to object to things contrary to the brand of islam they are promoting.
The idea that these behaviours (consumption of alcohol, sex for fun, homosexuality etc.) could be exposed to any of the islamic faith, especially their poorer brethren, who rely on the Kingdom for guidance and support on these issues, means they must show their leadership to the world and demand such unislamic activites be discouraged at all time. It would be equally terrible if a member of the Islamic faith outside of a Islamic society were to be corrupted by these ideas, especially as a young, impressionable boy or girl in the US or Europe, and the international community should at all times work to protect them from unislamic influences, everywhere.
It's stupid, they know it's stupid, you know it's stupid, but the poor illiterate bastard in Bangladesh or Afghanistan or Morocco or the like can get outraged over it and they don't know it's theatre for their benefit, the saudi's can claim to be defenders of the islamic faith (which wins them points with the literate crazies) and it's unlikely to go very far anyway, so no harm done.
Except when it's worked in similar circumstances.
Claiming a theory that has a working track record is wrong is dishonest at best.
Now sure, Keynesian economics as written initially would be a bit like thinking evolution is exactly as laid out the origin of species, that's silly, the model evolves over time quite a lot as you figure out more and more detail on more and more pieces of the puzzles.
which is destroying our economy.
The fact that people aren't doing it is what has caused your economy be stuck in the doldrums for a 4 years with no great prospects for the future. Things would be about equally bad under obama for another 4 years without a change in direction, and significantly worse under romney assuming you can believe anything he is saying now.
That implies you cut spending or increase revenue
Depends on whether the economy grows faster than the interest a year or slower, and for how long. If you spend a trillion dollars this year, 800 billion next year, 600 billion after that and so on but have growth of 200 billion, then 400 billion then 600 billion in 5 years the net effect would be 3 trillion dollars in debt for an economy that is 3 trillion dollars bigger a year sort of thing.
And yes, interest rates will climb from historical lows. But that's the point, you're at the very bottom of how low interest rates can get, there's a long way from where they are to where they become a problem.