Is it? If they have to use legacy applications, then they have to use IE (usu. 6) to run those. However, these days, luckily lots of companies also allow other browsers to be installed, usually Firefox and/or Chrome, because IE sucks so bad for browsing regular (non-intranet) websites. Also, IE doesn't allow multiple versions of itself to be installed, so if your crappy internal time-reporting app or whatever only works in IE6 (or 8 or whatever), then you can't install a later version for viewing other websites, so either you suffer with IE6's horrible rendering and incompatibilities, or you install Firefox/Chrome.
So what happens in the end is that corporate users like myself have two browsers open at all times: Firefox for regular web browsing, and IE for intranet sites. I never bother using Firefox with intranet sites because I assume they're all designed with IE in mind, which is the case with many of them, and I don't feel like figuring out the hard way which ones will and won't work with Firefox.
As for admin rights, I don't know the details there, but at my current megacorp, there's some kind of tool called "Software Center" (it appears to be supplied by Microsoft) which allows users to install certain selected software made available to them by IT. Here, Firefox is on our approved list, so I didn't need any admin rights, as the IT department explicitly allowed it. Of course, the version available from IT isn't necessarily the latest version (this one is 26).
The current IE version isn't really relevant, because lots of people don't use that. For instance, here on my work computer, I'm using IE8 on Win7. It's not like I have any choice in the matter. Luckily, for browsing non-intranet sites, the company lets me install Firefox (version 26 currently). There's still lots of companies chugging along with IE6. And there's pretty much zero companies that have moved to Win8, so if the latest IE version only works on that (I don't know if it's available on Win7 or not), then it's even more irrelevant how good it is.
Umm, ever use a DVD player? I'd bet that it was region encoded, so it won't play DVDs from outside of your part of the world. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a piracy prevention scheme.
Ok, that's true, DVD and BD players do have some DRM measures like this. However, this is because the content is controlled by companies in an organization that devised these schemes, and required the player mfgrs to follow these DRM schemes in order to be licensed to make and sell these players.
With 3D printing, the only way this would happen is if the content, the "plans" basically, were controlled by a similar cartel. I don't see how that would happen. There's no such cartel in existence (the MPAA and RIAA both long pre-date the advent of digital media used to distribute their wares, and had a LOT of power by the time digital media useful for distributing music and movies came around).
Not only that, but even with CDs and DVDs, anyone can make their own music or movies on these media (or just plain digital files to be distributed online). Nothing's stopping you from making your own MP3 or AAC or MP4 or DVD which can play anywhere. The MPAA/RIAA don't control ALL media, they only try to control their own product.
In other words, there's little evidence that DRM gets in the way of sales for a new product or technology as long as it's cool or novel enough.
Again, DRM is only used on movies because the MPAA demands it, and they have a lot of political power to push it through. Besides that, as I said before, there's nothing stopping you from making your own DRM-free movie and distributing it via BitTorrent (just ask the guys who make Pioneer One). There's nothing in media players that I'm aware of that looks for unauthorized copies of DRMed movies; just look at all the ones available on various places online. There's no powerful organization pushing for DRM on 3D printers; it's a brand-new industry.
What do you mean? What's going on with media players? Or computers? I haven't heard of any of them looking for "unauthorized" files; in fact, consumer pressure forced Apple to abandon DRM in the iTunes store.
I remember reading about one DRM system where a 3D printer will not print any files it gets unless they are signed and approved by an IP consortium. I am amazed this hasn't been put out yet
Why would 3D printer manufacturers want such a thing? Their business relies on selling as many printers as possible, and this would only hurt that effort. The only way this would happen is if governments mandate it, the way they did with copiers detecting counterfeiting. However, governments are notorious for being glacially slow to respond to technological change. They're even worse about working across national boundaries, as your IP consortium idea would require. I can see them trying to do such a thing in 5-10 years, but by then the cat will be out of the bag.
How are IP attorneys like John Hornick supposed to earn a living when you can print anything you want in the future? This will have a devastating effect on our economy, because IP lawyers are among the most productive people in our entire society. Won't someone think of the lawyers???!!
Tape drives are a lot cheaper than $6k, and 2TB tapes aren't any more expensive than that $50 300GB disc. If the prices come down, then great, but if they're just targeting high-end customers, I don't see prices changing at all. Regular consumers don't have a need for any of this stuff. The only reason CD-ROMs and DVD-Rs made sense for a little while was that those formats were used by consumers for music and movies. Nowadays, everyone just uses MP3s/AACs on their hard drives and mobile phones for music, and streams video for movies from Netflix and Amazon.
What's really stupid is that there's resources in space: mineral-laden asteroids, He3 on the Moon, etc., and none of them have any angry natives sitting on them that you have to displace or placate or fool somehow. Yes, it'll take a while before we can really successfully exploit these things, but probably only a couple of decades, which isn't very long in the grand scheme of things (considering we've been in Afghanistan for well over a decade now).
Huh? How would a 5-10 Blu-Ray autochanger be userul for backups? 10 BDs equals a paltry 360GB of data storage; that's only enough for 1/3 of a typical 1TB hard drive. BDs are nearly useless because they simply don't store much data; why FB is bothering with them, I have no idea. Optical discs have always been found to be pretty awful in terms of storage capacity and data integrity over time compared to tapes. The only problem tapes have is the drives are expensive, but large companies don't have a problem with spending $2k on a drive. On a per-GB basis, they're easily the cheapest thing out there.
According to someone else's comment just above, the absolute minimum size required for most humans to be comfortable is 100m radius and rotation rate of 3 rpm. Going up to 500m radius and 1rpm would make the habitat comfortable for almost everyone.
Sounds like a lot, but we build much larger structures that this all the time here on Earth which are capable of withstanding the forces of storms at sea, battering waves, etc.; they're called "ships". The biggest ones are about 400m long. Something built for space doesn't need to be remotely as rugged as an aircraft carrier, since there's no gravity or other forces to deal with besides those caused by rotation and propulsion, so it really shouldn't be that hard to build something that size if we put our minds to it and actually dedicated serious resources to the task instead of sitting around and debating Creationism.
Gasoline has a very, very low freezing point. The only way you can have gas lines freeze at -10 (any temp) is if you have a bunch of water in your gas.
If you're still getting 25 miles before the gas engine comes on, how the heck is it more expensive than any regular gas car on a per-mile basis? The only way that makes any sense is if you're factoring in depreciation, and comparing it to a subcompact economy car that you bought used.
Howso, please? They're brilliantly marketed, but I fail to see how they're technically awesome. What do you consider impressive about them? Be specific.
Are you really that stupid? Please point to any cars which actually compete with them technically, in terms of available horsepower and all-electric driving range.
So, these industries, that enforce non-comps across the board... do they even open up shop in CA?
Yes, they even demand tech workers to sign them at some companies in CA. They're hoping for ignorance, that the workers won't know their rights. No court will ever enforce such a contract clause in the state; it's come up before and been thrown out. It'd be nice if they just passed a law banning such contract language, but I guess unenforceability is better than nothing.
Now granted, I've only worked in a couple of states, and never signed a non-comp, but as far as I'm aware it's pretty much "at-will" employment most places, in that employment can be terminated by either party, at any time, for any reason. But again, that's based purely on my own experience.
That's mostly orthogonal. Most states are indeed at-will employment, but lots of jobs involve employment contracts of some type. If they employer puts a non-compete in there and you sign it, you're legally bound by it in most states. Usually, if the company terminates you, the clause doesn't apply (or else you could fight it in court as that clause doesn't provide "consideration"), but if you leave of your own accord, it does.
It actually hit me at my first job out of college (in VA); I worked at a small company near my university. They paid peanuts and I had other issues with them, so I tried to go to the other big employer in that town, which happened to be their competitor. They were very interested until I informed them of my non-compete contract. These contracts aren't universal by any means (I don't remember seeing any at jobs I worked at in AZ), but some companies do push them.
Eventually it'll leave the solar system and the automated quarantine enforcer robots will blast it to bits. Back here on Earth, we'll just think it finally died. They'll do this to all our extra-solar-system probes; let them survive for a good long time (since it's so far to the next star system anyway), then vaporize them when the Earthers won't suspect it's anything more than normal old-age failure of the equipment. At our current rate of progress, we'll probably never actually send any manned ships or anything more substantial than Voyager out of the solar system (we'll destroy ourselves first).
Uh, you do know that slavery and indentured servitude are illegal, right? Going to a different company because you got a better offer has nothing to do with the state you live in.
Bullshit. If you sign a non-compete agreement in most states, companies can and will hold you to that. Since so many companies in certain areas do it, it becomes effectively impossible to work in that industry without signing one. Not a problem in California, because these clauses aren't enforceable there. It has everything to do with the state you live in.
But wait; wasn't it just last week that a bunch of Silicon Valley companies got their asses handed to them by the courts for colluding on non-hiring agreements?
That's different. Those companies (illegally) colluded to not poach each other's employees, or to hire them away from each other. That's different from the employees having non-compete agreements; basically it was an end-run around the fact that they couldn't hold their employees to non-compete contracts. And yes, they got their asses handed to them, rightfully. Something like that would not have happened in most other states, since in most other places employees are forced to sign those contracts as a condition for employment.
Isn't that pretty much the complete opposite of the picture you're trying to paint here?
No, how so? It's very simple: if you live in, say, Virginia, and work for company A, you're not allowed to work for company B because you signed a non-compete contract. So you have to leave the state to get a job at a competitor in the industry. If you live in California, you don't have that problem. You may have had a problem getting hired at a competitor if you worked at a select small group of very large companies and wanted to work for another large company that was part of this collusion, but this didn't affect the vast majority of companies in the state. Now that the deal's been busted, it doesn't apply any more, so everyone is free to work at competitors, unlike in other states.
Like how the fracking companies had to give up on digging for oil in the Dakotas, because there weren't any qualified workers there, right?
Oil workers are not like software engineers. There's lots of software engineering jobs out there in places much more desirable than Detroit, and there's a high barrier to entry in the profession (namely, a college degree, and relevant experience). Oil workers can only get jobs where the oil is, due to geology, and there's a low barrier to entry. Any moron can be an oil worker. Because the work is usually located in remote areas, the companies offer relatively high pay for oil workers to go there, just like the pay offered to people to work in Afghanistan or Alaska.
I've wondered the exact same thing. The ETs probably have a quarantine set up around our solar system to make sure we don't get out and none of them wander in. Notice how we had lots of alleged UFO encounters in years past? When was the last time you heard of one? Maybe some of those were real, and they hung out and observed us for a while before deciding we're all a bunch of idiotic assholes, and have now left.
There's a lot of agricultural jobs in the south that are done by Mexican immigrants and guest workers. Why not move the Detroit residents down there to do them instead? Also, there's lots of other minimum-wage jobs in cities around the country that have been taken over by immigrants (frequently illegal immigrants); why not put these citizens to work at these jobs instead? Why are our politicians and various liberal groups on the "comprehensive immigration reform" (amnesty) bandwagon, and giving out all kinds of free government benefits to these immigrants, while our own people are suffering and unemployed?
It seems to me that instead of trying to revitalize a dying city no one wants to live in and that doesn't have much decent industry left, what we need to do is bring these people to the jobs. There's lots of agricultural jobs in the southern states, for instance, which we have Mexican immigrants working at. Why not ship unemployed Americans down there and let them have those jobs instead?
I'm not sure I understand your argument. What about small cars makes them unsuitable for traveling long distances?
I can answer that. If you weigh 300 pounds, a small car is going to get uncomfortable really really fast. You might be able to put up with it for very short trips around town (like if you have a really short commute with no rush-hour traffic), but no longer.
Small cars work for people in other countries because they have BMIs well under 25. In America, it's highly unusual to have a BMI of less than 30 unless you're under 20 years old.
It still blows my mind that today, in an age where we can communicate instantly with people all over the planet, industries still tend to centralize geographically. Silicon Valley had a purpose at first, but I can't figure out for the life of me why anyone would want to invest, today, in companies that are based in one of the most business-and-individual-unfriendly regions of the nation.
Because you can't run a company without workers, and there's no qualified workers in Detroit. You're not going to be able to attract talent for your software firm to Detroit, or some other bumblefuck town in flyover country, because the workers don't want to live there. Even if don't have anything against living in Bumblefuck, many professional workers (esp. engineers) don't want to pack up and move to a place where there's only one employer, because then you have no alternatives if you get laid off, or you're not getting appropriate raises. In Silicon Valley, there's tons of jobs and high salaries. If your employer sucks or isn't paying enough or lays you off, you just go get a job across the street the next Monday. You can't do that in Fargo.
Also, your contention about being "individual-unfriendly" is bogus. California stands apart from most other states in that non-compete clauses in employment contracts are unenforceable. If you work at some company in a town that's dominated by a particular industry (in a non-CA state), you may find yourself unable to get another job if you want to or need to leave your job for some reason, because all those companies are competitors. In California, this isn't the case; if you work company A and their competitor company B offers you a better deal, you can go to work there. I'd say that's extremely employee-friendly. It's all the other states that are individual-unfriendly, and excessively business-friendly.
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Is it? If they have to use legacy applications, then they have to use IE (usu. 6) to run those. However, these days, luckily lots of companies also allow other browsers to be installed, usually Firefox and/or Chrome, because IE sucks so bad for browsing regular (non-intranet) websites. Also, IE doesn't allow multiple versions of itself to be installed, so if your crappy internal time-reporting app or whatever only works in IE6 (or 8 or whatever), then you can't install a later version for viewing other websites, so either you suffer with IE6's horrible rendering and incompatibilities, or you install Firefox/Chrome.
So what happens in the end is that corporate users like myself have two browsers open at all times: Firefox for regular web browsing, and IE for intranet sites. I never bother using Firefox with intranet sites because I assume they're all designed with IE in mind, which is the case with many of them, and I don't feel like figuring out the hard way which ones will and won't work with Firefox.
As for admin rights, I don't know the details there, but at my current megacorp, there's some kind of tool called "Software Center" (it appears to be supplied by Microsoft) which allows users to install certain selected software made available to them by IT. Here, Firefox is on our approved list, so I didn't need any admin rights, as the IT department explicitly allowed it. Of course, the version available from IT isn't necessarily the latest version (this one is 26).
The current IE version isn't really relevant, because lots of people don't use that. For instance, here on my work computer, I'm using IE8 on Win7. It's not like I have any choice in the matter. Luckily, for browsing non-intranet sites, the company lets me install Firefox (version 26 currently). There's still lots of companies chugging along with IE6. And there's pretty much zero companies that have moved to Win8, so if the latest IE version only works on that (I don't know if it's available on Win7 or not), then it's even more irrelevant how good it is.
Yep, I remember frequenting a CompuAdd store back around 1991.
Umm, ever use a DVD player? I'd bet that it was region encoded, so it won't play DVDs from outside of your part of the world. Theoretically, this is supposed to be a piracy prevention scheme.
Ok, that's true, DVD and BD players do have some DRM measures like this. However, this is because the content is controlled by companies in an organization that devised these schemes, and required the player mfgrs to follow these DRM schemes in order to be licensed to make and sell these players.
With 3D printing, the only way this would happen is if the content, the "plans" basically, were controlled by a similar cartel. I don't see how that would happen. There's no such cartel in existence (the MPAA and RIAA both long pre-date the advent of digital media used to distribute their wares, and had a LOT of power by the time digital media useful for distributing music and movies came around).
Not only that, but even with CDs and DVDs, anyone can make their own music or movies on these media (or just plain digital files to be distributed online). Nothing's stopping you from making your own MP3 or AAC or MP4 or DVD which can play anywhere. The MPAA/RIAA don't control ALL media, they only try to control their own product.
In other words, there's little evidence that DRM gets in the way of sales for a new product or technology as long as it's cool or novel enough.
Again, DRM is only used on movies because the MPAA demands it, and they have a lot of political power to push it through. Besides that, as I said before, there's nothing stopping you from making your own DRM-free movie and distributing it via BitTorrent (just ask the guys who make Pioneer One). There's nothing in media players that I'm aware of that looks for unauthorized copies of DRMed movies; just look at all the ones available on various places online. There's no powerful organization pushing for DRM on 3D printers; it's a brand-new industry.
What do you mean? What's going on with media players? Or computers? I haven't heard of any of them looking for "unauthorized" files; in fact, consumer pressure forced Apple to abandon DRM in the iTunes store.
I remember reading about one DRM system where a 3D printer will not print any files it gets unless they are signed and approved by an IP consortium. I am amazed this hasn't been put out yet
Why would 3D printer manufacturers want such a thing? Their business relies on selling as many printers as possible, and this would only hurt that effort. The only way this would happen is if governments mandate it, the way they did with copiers detecting counterfeiting. However, governments are notorious for being glacially slow to respond to technological change. They're even worse about working across national boundaries, as your IP consortium idea would require. I can see them trying to do such a thing in 5-10 years, but by then the cat will be out of the bag.
How are IP attorneys like John Hornick supposed to earn a living when you can print anything you want in the future? This will have a devastating effect on our economy, because IP lawyers are among the most productive people in our entire society. Won't someone think of the lawyers???!!
I don't follow. How is this any better than using LTO6 tapes? If the government needs to access the data, you can send them the tape too.
Tape drives are a lot cheaper than $6k, and 2TB tapes aren't any more expensive than that $50 300GB disc. If the prices come down, then great, but if they're just targeting high-end customers, I don't see prices changing at all. Regular consumers don't have a need for any of this stuff. The only reason CD-ROMs and DVD-Rs made sense for a little while was that those formats were used by consumers for music and movies. Nowadays, everyone just uses MP3s/AACs on their hard drives and mobile phones for music, and streams video for movies from Netflix and Amazon.
What's really stupid is that there's resources in space: mineral-laden asteroids, He3 on the Moon, etc., and none of them have any angry natives sitting on them that you have to displace or placate or fool somehow. Yes, it'll take a while before we can really successfully exploit these things, but probably only a couple of decades, which isn't very long in the grand scheme of things (considering we've been in Afghanistan for well over a decade now).
Huh? How would a 5-10 Blu-Ray autochanger be userul for backups? 10 BDs equals a paltry 360GB of data storage; that's only enough for 1/3 of a typical 1TB hard drive. BDs are nearly useless because they simply don't store much data; why FB is bothering with them, I have no idea. Optical discs have always been found to be pretty awful in terms of storage capacity and data integrity over time compared to tapes. The only problem tapes have is the drives are expensive, but large companies don't have a problem with spending $2k on a drive. On a per-GB basis, they're easily the cheapest thing out there.
No, Mars is about 1/3g.
According to someone else's comment just above, the absolute minimum size required for most humans to be comfortable is 100m radius and rotation rate of 3 rpm. Going up to 500m radius and 1rpm would make the habitat comfortable for almost everyone.
Sounds like a lot, but we build much larger structures that this all the time here on Earth which are capable of withstanding the forces of storms at sea, battering waves, etc.; they're called "ships". The biggest ones are about 400m long. Something built for space doesn't need to be remotely as rugged as an aircraft carrier, since there's no gravity or other forces to deal with besides those caused by rotation and propulsion, so it really shouldn't be that hard to build something that size if we put our minds to it and actually dedicated serious resources to the task instead of sitting around and debating Creationism.
Gasoline has a very, very low freezing point. The only way you can have gas lines freeze at -10 (any temp) is if you have a bunch of water in your gas.
If you're still getting 25 miles before the gas engine comes on, how the heck is it more expensive than any regular gas car on a per-mile basis? The only way that makes any sense is if you're factoring in depreciation, and comparing it to a subcompact economy car that you bought used.
Howso, please? They're brilliantly marketed, but I fail to see how they're technically awesome. What do you consider impressive about them? Be specific.
Are you really that stupid? Please point to any cars which actually compete with them technically, in terms of available horsepower and all-electric driving range.
So, these industries, that enforce non-comps across the board... do they even open up shop in CA?
Yes, they even demand tech workers to sign them at some companies in CA. They're hoping for ignorance, that the workers won't know their rights. No court will ever enforce such a contract clause in the state; it's come up before and been thrown out. It'd be nice if they just passed a law banning such contract language, but I guess unenforceability is better than nothing.
Now granted, I've only worked in a couple of states, and never signed a non-comp, but as far as I'm aware it's pretty much "at-will" employment most places, in that employment can be terminated by either party, at any time, for any reason. But again, that's based purely on my own experience.
That's mostly orthogonal. Most states are indeed at-will employment, but lots of jobs involve employment contracts of some type. If they employer puts a non-compete in there and you sign it, you're legally bound by it in most states. Usually, if the company terminates you, the clause doesn't apply (or else you could fight it in court as that clause doesn't provide "consideration"), but if you leave of your own accord, it does.
It actually hit me at my first job out of college (in VA); I worked at a small company near my university. They paid peanuts and I had other issues with them, so I tried to go to the other big employer in that town, which happened to be their competitor. They were very interested until I informed them of my non-compete contract. These contracts aren't universal by any means (I don't remember seeing any at jobs I worked at in AZ), but some companies do push them.
Eventually it'll leave the solar system and the automated quarantine enforcer robots will blast it to bits. Back here on Earth, we'll just think it finally died. They'll do this to all our extra-solar-system probes; let them survive for a good long time (since it's so far to the next star system anyway), then vaporize them when the Earthers won't suspect it's anything more than normal old-age failure of the equipment. At our current rate of progress, we'll probably never actually send any manned ships or anything more substantial than Voyager out of the solar system (we'll destroy ourselves first).
Uh, you do know that slavery and indentured servitude are illegal, right? Going to a different company because you got a better offer has nothing to do with the state you live in.
Bullshit. If you sign a non-compete agreement in most states, companies can and will hold you to that. Since so many companies in certain areas do it, it becomes effectively impossible to work in that industry without signing one. Not a problem in California, because these clauses aren't enforceable there. It has everything to do with the state you live in.
But wait; wasn't it just last week that a bunch of Silicon Valley companies got their asses handed to them by the courts for colluding on non-hiring agreements?
That's different. Those companies (illegally) colluded to not poach each other's employees, or to hire them away from each other. That's different from the employees having non-compete agreements; basically it was an end-run around the fact that they couldn't hold their employees to non-compete contracts. And yes, they got their asses handed to them, rightfully. Something like that would not have happened in most other states, since in most other places employees are forced to sign those contracts as a condition for employment.
Isn't that pretty much the complete opposite of the picture you're trying to paint here?
No, how so? It's very simple: if you live in, say, Virginia, and work for company A, you're not allowed to work for company B because you signed a non-compete contract. So you have to leave the state to get a job at a competitor in the industry. If you live in California, you don't have that problem. You may have had a problem getting hired at a competitor if you worked at a select small group of very large companies and wanted to work for another large company that was part of this collusion, but this didn't affect the vast majority of companies in the state. Now that the deal's been busted, it doesn't apply any more, so everyone is free to work at competitors, unlike in other states.
Like how the fracking companies had to give up on digging for oil in the Dakotas, because there weren't any qualified workers there, right?
Oil workers are not like software engineers. There's lots of software engineering jobs out there in places much more desirable than Detroit, and there's a high barrier to entry in the profession (namely, a college degree, and relevant experience). Oil workers can only get jobs where the oil is, due to geology, and there's a low barrier to entry. Any moron can be an oil worker. Because the work is usually located in remote areas, the companies offer relatively high pay for oil workers to go there, just like the pay offered to people to work in Afghanistan or Alaska.
I've wondered the exact same thing. The ETs probably have a quarantine set up around our solar system to make sure we don't get out and none of them wander in. Notice how we had lots of alleged UFO encounters in years past? When was the last time you heard of one? Maybe some of those were real, and they hung out and observed us for a while before deciding we're all a bunch of idiotic assholes, and have now left.
There's a lot of agricultural jobs in the south that are done by Mexican immigrants and guest workers. Why not move the Detroit residents down there to do them instead? Also, there's lots of other minimum-wage jobs in cities around the country that have been taken over by immigrants (frequently illegal immigrants); why not put these citizens to work at these jobs instead? Why are our politicians and various liberal groups on the "comprehensive immigration reform" (amnesty) bandwagon, and giving out all kinds of free government benefits to these immigrants, while our own people are suffering and unemployed?
It seems to me that instead of trying to revitalize a dying city no one wants to live in and that doesn't have much decent industry left, what we need to do is bring these people to the jobs. There's lots of agricultural jobs in the southern states, for instance, which we have Mexican immigrants working at. Why not ship unemployed Americans down there and let them have those jobs instead?
Only in America do people think Mustangs are "sports cars".
I'm not sure I understand your argument. What about small cars makes them unsuitable for traveling long distances?
I can answer that. If you weigh 300 pounds, a small car is going to get uncomfortable really really fast. You might be able to put up with it for very short trips around town (like if you have a really short commute with no rush-hour traffic), but no longer.
Small cars work for people in other countries because they have BMIs well under 25. In America, it's highly unusual to have a BMI of less than 30 unless you're under 20 years old.
It still blows my mind that today, in an age where we can communicate instantly with people all over the planet, industries still tend to centralize geographically. Silicon Valley had a purpose at first, but I can't figure out for the life of me why anyone would want to invest, today, in companies that are based in one of the most business-and-individual-unfriendly regions of the nation.
Because you can't run a company without workers, and there's no qualified workers in Detroit. You're not going to be able to attract talent for your software firm to Detroit, or some other bumblefuck town in flyover country, because the workers don't want to live there. Even if don't have anything against living in Bumblefuck, many professional workers (esp. engineers) don't want to pack up and move to a place where there's only one employer, because then you have no alternatives if you get laid off, or you're not getting appropriate raises. In Silicon Valley, there's tons of jobs and high salaries. If your employer sucks or isn't paying enough or lays you off, you just go get a job across the street the next Monday. You can't do that in Fargo.
Also, your contention about being "individual-unfriendly" is bogus. California stands apart from most other states in that non-compete clauses in employment contracts are unenforceable. If you work at some company in a town that's dominated by a particular industry (in a non-CA state), you may find yourself unable to get another job if you want to or need to leave your job for some reason, because all those companies are competitors. In California, this isn't the case; if you work company A and their competitor company B offers you a better deal, you can go to work there. I'd say that's extremely employee-friendly. It's all the other states that are individual-unfriendly, and excessively business-friendly.