10 Trillion dollars invested [nanotechnews.com]
read for yourself
LOL! Hoping nobody clicks the link, are we?
To quote the first paragraph of the article:
President Kim Dae-jung pledged yesterday that the government would spend 10 trillion won (about $7.8 billion) by 2005 to develop Korea's knowledge-based industries into a new export engine.
I would have been willing to chalk it up to misunderstanding between nationalities, if you hadn't blatantly posted the link as "Ten Trillion dollars". While 7.8 Billion dollars isn't exactly something to sneeze at, it's not all that out of line with what other first world countries put into research, particularly over a 5 year period. And it's one hell of a lot less than 10 Trillion Dollars.:)
I didnt say a trillion in one year. but over the next 5.
Hmmm...5 years, eh? Since I'm pretty sure the investment was by Korea, we'll use their GNP. $764b * 5 = $2.5 trillion. Assuming they're investing 1 trillion, that means that they'll be investing 40% of every dollar produced in South Kora in Nanotechnology. Riiight.
Acceleration requires energy. Due to the engery mass equivalence, which you pointed out, you have to be getting energy, and therefore mass from somewhere. The point is, you're not creating it from nothing.
Re:We have technology to build teleported right no
on
A Timeline of the Future
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
People should at least be realistic.
Yes...
Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,
Hate to break it to you, but theres a slight difference between "Well, we think we've sorta got this theory quantum entanglement figured out" to "Beam me up, Mr. Scott". Even assuming we come up with some incredible new way of using quantum entangled particles to transmit information (Something thats far, far beyond our current technology), you then have to be able to use that information to recreate the object you're "teleporting", which is hardly a hurdle unworthy of consideration.
With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.
70%? I think not. The current number is more like 23-24% and that is only if you don't count Social Security and Medicare as part of the total. If you do, it's more like 16%.
The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies. Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.
Hmmm...Korea and Taiwan throwing "Trillions" into nano tech? Korea's GNP for 2000 was approximately $515 billion dollars, Taiwan's was $363 billion. Somehow, I don't think either of these countries has "trillions" to throw at nanotech. Yes, they're investing, but not on that scale.
The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.
Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.
Untrue. Companies generally bring out technology as soon as it becomes profitable. Granted there is a bit of inertia to overcome, but thats always true of humanity. If they delay, somebody else is just going to come along and introduce it. It's not like the government had to sue for the creation of the integrated circuit - computing technology advanced at an incredible rate because it's extremely profitable for it to do so. Genetics? I seem to remember there were private interests racing the Human Genome Project to complete sequencing the Human Genome. Companies introduce technologies that are profitable - those which create greater resources than they consume. Granted, they must occasionally be "enouraged" to do the correct thing for the greater good of society, but we're not exactly having to beat them with crowbars to introduce the newest greatest thing.
So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.
Again with the claim that we can teleport stuff, which we are no where near having any proof is possible, let alone practical. Cars that run on air and water. I assume you mean hydrogen here, which really isn't ready for the big time. Solar panels are expensive and not particularly efficient yet, not to mention very dirty to make. Fusion reactors? Yeah, they're in the lab and have had quite a lot of research funds poured into them. And thus far they've stayed in the lab because they don't work. They'll fuse hydrogen, but thus far they all consume more power than they produce. Really useful.
In short, I agree with the basic premise that we should spend more money on research than we do, both in the public and private arenas. But numbers off by orders of magnitude and claims that things of things that aren't strictly true don't really help convince others.
Granted, this needs improvement, but x86 is hardly a prize either. The architecture of the Pentium Pro and up screams kludge. Huge amounts of circuitry that do nothing but break up CISC instructions into something resembling RISC so that they can be executed at reasonable speed. x86 didn't beat CISC because it avoided code bloat, (Does anyone eve notice code bloat anymore? I mean most of the world is running Word processor that consumes 32+ megs of RAM, who are we kidding?) it won for the same reason Windows wins, which is because it runs all your stuff. Installed user base. It was compatible with what had come before, and no one wanted to buy new programs, so we've stuck with it. It's like an AMC Gremlin with V12 engine welded onto the roof because you didn't want to have to move your stuff out of the trunk when you move your stuff. And to steal somebody eles's analogy, that V12 has uses side-injection to remain compatible with your old Model-T. I mean, segmented memory architecture? Please.
So what if you can't write assembly to make your code faster. Aside from the "Real Programmers don't eat quiche" mystique, this is a problem why? You probably can't beat a good C compiler on a P3 or P4 either. With very few very specialized exceptions, the compiler is smarter than you are. Granted, it's slow now, but this is the first generation of the chip. With some architectural improvements(please, for the love of god do something different with the cache!) this could be a pretty decent chip, and one that will still run your old apps.
Your example is false. You can't use all the bandwidth; the internet congestion protocols stop you using it all.
I have 256Kb DSL through USWEST (ugh). I'm more than capable of running it at capacity for days on end. Fansubs, anyone?
ISPs use a contention ratio of between 20 and 50. Therefore there would be a T3 for between 2000 and 5000 people
This is kinda the point. The pricing is done according to this sort of ratio. 2000 to 5000 users to a T1. However, when you have a Cable modem user allowed to burst to 1Mb/sec, and he runs at that speed all the time it only takes 45 like him to suck down that entire T1. Hence, they need to charge more.
Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.
On the contrary - I rip my CD's for the same reason I used to dub them to tape. Why? Cause if I only really like 3 or 4 songs on a CD, I have to change the damn CD every 15 minutes, which sucks. With MP3, I rip, I have my WinAmp play lists, and not only can I listen to them here in my room(I don't own a CD player that isn't attached to a computer BTW. I used to have one, but it broke) I can take them with me on a (small) Mp3 player or my laptop instead of dragging a book of CD's with me. If I can't get around copy protection, I don't listen to the CD. I'm not about to buy a walkman CD player just so I can actually listen to something I just paid for thats been intentionally munged.
Once it's up though, we could increase the amount of stuff we could put in orbit by orders of magnitude. As one poster pointed out, we could heft Nuclear Waste up this thing and chuck it towards the sun - not something we realy want to lift out of conventional orbit on a rocket. Dirt cheap sattellites. Family vacations to orbit. Assembling something like the one-shot Mars mission would suddenly become fairly easy and considerably cheaper. Ditto for space stations. The Benefits for humanity would be immense. It would really finally open space to us in a big way.
A carbon nano-tube cable shouldn't develop any electrical potential moving through a magnetic field. This might be a problem with any metallic cabling run along the support cable for data transmission purposes, but I really doubt they'd want to do that. Added weight and all. On the other hand, it's free power.
Wind would probably be a very minor issue - compared to supporting it's own weight, wind would provide a fairly minor amount of stress. Static electricity - Maybe just run a ground up and down to deal with that a lightning.
What crime am I referring to? Hmmm, yeah, I think it was the one where he hacked other peoples web sites, defaced the, and then left behind CGI scripts to DDoS systems belonging to the US Government. Thats a crime, the kid is being investigated for it. End of story. Yeah, they took his web site. Heres a clue - don't do stupid, juvenile things that you know are illegal if you don't want the feds to take your stuff. If you're gonna use your computers to commit crimes, THEY"RE EVIDENCE AND WILL BE SEIZED IN A RAID. I WANT the feds to sieze equipment from stupid little script kiddies - Idiots running DDoS attacks ruin things for everyone, chewing through peoples bandwidth and depriving others of their freedom of speech by driving them off the network.
Yeah, they did go in with a lots of firepower. Heres a clue for you - Cops always bring more firepower than they need. Is it done for intimidation value? Yes. The idea is to keep people from getting the idea that they can win a firefight. If they get that idea, people die. So, such incredible danger. They took his stuff, questioned him for and few hours, and let him go. Ooh, my, what a horrible repressive government. I bet they didn't even hurt so much as a hair on his stupid little punk head - if they had, IndyMedia would undoubtably have reported it as the beating of the century.
I'm not the one whos delusional here - Everything they did, from questioning, to taking his equipment, to the number of guys they brought along was perfectly justified by the situation. There are thousands of these web sites around. One of them gets shut down because the owner is a stupid script kiddy so automatically the Federal government is this horrible repressive monster. When you start getting shut down for what you're saying, you've got a legitimate case. In the mean time try and behave like adults and maybe people will take you a little more seriously.
Dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What freaking danger are you talking about? The kid had his equipment seized as evidence(which it is) and was questioned for six hours. The stupid little punk isn't even in jail, they didn't beat the crap out of him. Yeah, they had a lot of people with guns. If I were raiding the house of someone who had a web site full of bomb making instructions exhorting people to kill people like me, I might want a gun and some body armour too, ya know? If they'd gone in with a couple of guys and he'd answered the door with an M-16 and a Fragmentation grenade, the conversation would be about how stupid the cops were. The show of force was warranted for somebody who committed a crime. Theres no story here, move along.
Yeah, wasn't it great to spend hours working on RIP graphics only to figure out that there was exactly 1 person on your board willing to go through the hassle to use them? Not to mention that ASCII graphics were a much. much faster way to get around the board. Can't waste those precious connect minutes!
It's just incredibly unbelivably unlikely. Somebody French(I've forgotten the name.) shortly after the laws of Thermodynaics were first created published an analysis showing that if you wait long enough, you should see things like all of the gas molecules returning to the box, all of the air molecules on one side of the room, etc. However, statistically for this to happen for 100 molecules is probably going to require a length of time several orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe. It's a lot like tunnelling. Theres a nonzero chance that if I run into that wall I might just pass through it, but if I decide to keep trying until it happens I'm going to die a bitter man with a broken nose.
It wasn't the (Troll | Stupidity) that I found so amusing. It was the moderation as insightful. Whether he just didn't get it or it was a troll, modding it up as insightful is still pretty bizarre.
Because if you have a thousand users who each transmit a meg a day and say, a couple of gigs a day every so often, you need a lot less infrastructure than if you have a thousand users who all transmit a gig a day every day. You need bigger pipes and better routers at pretty much every step of the way.
Corporate status only sheilds you from civil liabilities. An individual in this situation would end up paying fines, the same as a corporation would. If you commit fraud as part of a corporation and you still go to jail just as easily as Bill Gates would if he hired Uncle Vinnie to go whack Larry Ellison on behalf of the Microsoft corporation. Besides, the penalty for breaking SEC regulations is almost never jail time, regardless of who you are, unless you actually commit Fraud.
Amazon had a solid business plan, yes. It said "We're going to sell books, cheaper, and offer a wider selection". And they got caught up in the dot com craze, and decided to go with a lot of business plans that were a lot less sound, like selling garden tools and hibachi grills where they had no conceivable advantage over a brick and mortar. And as a result, hemoraged cash like every other dot-com on the planet. Really, most of their uppermanagement from a year or two ago needs to be prevented from breeding.
Well, there is the fact that they should never have been losing money at the first place and in fact were only losing money because instead of being happy selling books and movies where they could turn profits their idiot management decided that they should sell everything on the planet, from lawnmowers to barbeques, to furry handcuffs or whatever the hell else they were selling at the height of their product line expansion. Their business model(like the web business model) works very well when selling things like books and movies where you can provide a huge selection and a brick and mortar cannot. However, it doesn't work when you can pick up the same item at the same price at a local store - cause thats what most people will do every time.
2.4.x, for a stable kernel really hasn't been. It's not something you want to put onto a server whos major selling point is "throw it in a corner and forget about it". 2.2.x is quite a bit more appropriate for this use.
I can't think of a distribution less likely to share any sort of vision with AOL than Slackware. AOL is organized around coddling the user and spoon feeding the user while Slackwares attitude is "Rm * -r? Powerful command there. Gives you what you want. You did it to/? Why would you want to do that? You didn't? Then why the hell'd you type it?". This is why there are two slackware boxes running on either side of me right now...
True. It was exaggeration to make a point, but the point was that if they wanted to pick up a distro to use as a desktop, there are certainly far better choices.
Slashdot Mirror
read for yourself
LOL! Hoping nobody clicks the link, are we?
To quote the first paragraph of the article:
President Kim Dae-jung pledged yesterday that the government would spend 10 trillion won (about $7.8 billion) by 2005 to develop Korea's knowledge-based industries into a new export engine.
I would have been willing to chalk it up to misunderstanding between nationalities, if you hadn't blatantly posted the link as "Ten Trillion dollars". While 7.8 Billion dollars isn't exactly something to sneeze at, it's not all that out of line with what other first world countries put into research, particularly over a 5 year period. And it's one hell of a lot less than 10 Trillion Dollars. :)
I didnt say a trillion in one year. but over the next 5.
Hmmm...5 years, eh? Since I'm pretty sure the investment was by Korea, we'll use their GNP. $764b * 5 = $2.5 trillion. Assuming they're investing 1 trillion, that means that they'll be investing 40% of every dollar produced in South Kora in Nanotechnology. Riiight.
* increase mass
Travel near the speed of light.
Acceleration requires energy. Due to the engery mass equivalence, which you pointed out, you have to be getting energy, and therefore mass from somewhere. The point is, you're not creating it from nothing.
Yes...
Flying Cars? We can teleport stuff. Ever heard of quantum entanglement? Just because we can do something doesnt mean we will,
Hate to break it to you, but theres a slight difference between "Well, we think we've sorta got this theory quantum entanglement figured out" to "Beam me up, Mr. Scott". Even assuming we come up with some incredible new way of using quantum entangled particles to transmit information (Something thats far, far beyond our current technology), you then have to be able to use that information to recreate the object you're "teleporting", which is hardly a hurdle unworthy of consideration.
With tax cuts going on right now, and about 70 percent of all our tax dollars maybe 80 percent now that Bush is president and 911 happened, all going to the Military, and very little going to science, its not that technology doesnt exsist today, its just too expensive to bring out of the lab.
70%? I think not. The current number is more like 23-24% and that is only if you don't count Social Security and Medicare as part of the total. If you do, it's more like 16%.
The hope is, other countries and governments will invest trillions of dollars in these technologies. Korea or was it Taiwan, i cannot remember, is investing Trillions in nano technology, this is how you do it, you need the government to start the industries off by giving companies funding. You also need the government funding scientists.
Hmmm...Korea and Taiwan throwing "Trillions" into nano tech? Korea's GNP for 2000 was approximately $515 billion dollars, Taiwan's was $363 billion. Somehow, I don't think either of these countries has "trillions" to throw at nanotech. Yes, they're investing, but not on that scale.
The trend in the US is so anti tax that its also anti technology.
Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
Companies wont bring technology until they have no choice.
Untrue. Companies generally bring out technology as soon as it becomes profitable. Granted there is a bit of inertia to overcome, but thats always true of humanity. If they delay, somebody else is just going to come along and introduce it. It's not like the government had to sue for the creation of the integrated circuit - computing technology advanced at an incredible rate because it's extremely profitable for it to do so. Genetics? I seem to remember there were private interests racing the Human Genome Project to complete sequencing the Human Genome. Companies introduce technologies that are profitable - those which create greater resources than they consume. Granted, they must occasionally be "enouraged" to do the correct thing for the greater good of society, but we're not exactly having to beat them with crowbars to introduce the newest greatest thing.
So while we can teleport stuff, use cars which run on air and water, and get energy from the sun or even build fusion reactors, this stuff is still in the lab and will be for 20 years because people want tax cuts.
Again with the claim that we can teleport stuff, which we are no where near having any proof is possible, let alone practical. Cars that run on air and water. I assume you mean hydrogen here, which really isn't ready for the big time. Solar panels are expensive and not particularly efficient yet, not to mention very dirty to make. Fusion reactors? Yeah, they're in the lab and have had quite a lot of research funds poured into them. And thus far they've stayed in the lab because they don't work. They'll fuse hydrogen, but thus far they all consume more power than they produce. Really useful.
In short, I agree with the basic premise that we should spend more money on research than we do, both in the public and private arenas. But numbers off by orders of magnitude and claims that things of things that aren't strictly true don't really help convince others.
Funny, I asked my parents for a calculator watch when I was in the 3rd grade. Later, I had one that stored phone numbers.
Granted, this needs improvement, but x86 is hardly a prize either. The architecture of the Pentium Pro and up screams kludge. Huge amounts of circuitry that do nothing but break up CISC instructions into something resembling RISC so that they can be executed at reasonable speed. x86 didn't beat CISC because it avoided code bloat, (Does anyone eve notice code bloat anymore? I mean most of the world is running Word processor that consumes 32+ megs of RAM, who are we kidding?) it won for the same reason Windows wins, which is because it runs all your stuff. Installed user base. It was compatible with what had come before, and no one wanted to buy new programs, so we've stuck with it. It's like an AMC Gremlin with V12 engine welded onto the roof because you didn't want to have to move your stuff out of the trunk when you move your stuff. And to steal somebody eles's analogy, that V12 has uses side-injection to remain compatible with your old Model-T. I mean, segmented memory architecture? Please.
So what if you can't write assembly to make your code faster. Aside from the "Real Programmers don't eat quiche" mystique, this is a problem why? You probably can't beat a good C compiler on a P3 or P4 either. With very few very specialized exceptions, the compiler is smarter than you are. Granted, it's slow now, but this is the first generation of the chip. With some architectural improvements(please, for the love of god do something different with the cache!) this could be a pretty decent chip, and one that will still run your old apps.
Your example is false. You can't use all the bandwidth; the internet congestion protocols stop you using it all.
I have 256Kb DSL through USWEST (ugh). I'm more than capable of running it at capacity for days on end. Fansubs, anyone?
ISPs use a contention ratio of between 20 and 50. Therefore there would be a T3 for between 2000 and 5000 people
This is kinda the point. The pricing is done according to this sort of ratio. 2000 to 5000 users to a T1. However, when you have a Cable modem user allowed to burst to 1Mb/sec, and he runs at that speed all the time it only takes 45 like him to suck down that entire T1. Hence, they need to charge more.
Does anyone really believe that music consumers "backup" thier discs to mp3 for purely "personal" use? Let's at least be adult enough not to sugar coat this: we want to get around Cactus Data Shield because we want to "share" [or steal] music.
On the contrary - I rip my CD's for the same reason I used to dub them to tape. Why? Cause if I only really like 3 or 4 songs on a CD, I have to change the damn CD every 15 minutes, which sucks. With MP3, I rip, I have my WinAmp play lists, and not only can I listen to them here in my room(I don't own a CD player that isn't attached to a computer BTW. I used to have one, but it broke) I can take them with me on a (small) Mp3 player or my laptop instead of dragging a book of CD's with me. If I can't get around copy protection, I don't listen to the CD. I'm not about to buy a walkman CD player just so I can actually listen to something I just paid for thats been intentionally munged.
Once it's up though, we could increase the amount of stuff we could put in orbit by orders of magnitude. As one poster pointed out, we could heft Nuclear Waste up this thing and chuck it towards the sun - not something we realy want to lift out of conventional orbit on a rocket. Dirt cheap sattellites. Family vacations to orbit. Assembling something like the one-shot Mars mission would suddenly become fairly easy and considerably cheaper. Ditto for space stations. The Benefits for humanity would be immense. It would really finally open space to us in a big way.
A carbon nano-tube cable shouldn't develop any electrical potential moving through a magnetic field. This might be a problem with any metallic cabling run along the support cable for data transmission purposes, but I really doubt they'd want to do that. Added weight and all. On the other hand, it's free power.
Wind would probably be a very minor issue - compared to supporting it's own weight, wind would provide a fairly minor amount of stress. Static electricity - Maybe just run a ground up and down to deal with that a lightning.
What crime am I referring to? Hmmm, yeah, I think it was the one where he hacked other peoples web sites, defaced the, and then left behind CGI scripts to DDoS systems belonging to the US Government. Thats a crime, the kid is being investigated for it. End of story. Yeah, they took his web site. Heres a clue - don't do stupid, juvenile things that you know are illegal if you don't want the feds to take your stuff. If you're gonna use your computers to commit crimes, THEY"RE EVIDENCE AND WILL BE SEIZED IN A RAID. I WANT the feds to sieze equipment from stupid little script kiddies - Idiots running DDoS attacks ruin things for everyone, chewing through peoples bandwidth and depriving others of their freedom of speech by driving them off the network.
Yeah, they did go in with a lots of firepower. Heres a clue for you - Cops always bring more firepower than they need. Is it done for intimidation value? Yes. The idea is to keep people from getting the idea that they can win a firefight. If they get that idea, people die. So, such incredible danger. They took his stuff, questioned him for and few hours, and let him go. Ooh, my, what a horrible repressive government. I bet they didn't even hurt so much as a hair on his stupid little punk head - if they had, IndyMedia would undoubtably have reported it as the beating of the century.
I'm not the one whos delusional here - Everything they did, from questioning, to taking his equipment, to the number of guys they brought along was perfectly justified by the situation. There are thousands of these web sites around. One of them gets shut down because the owner is a stupid script kiddy so automatically the Federal government is this horrible repressive monster. When you start getting shut down for what you're saying, you've got a legitimate case. In the mean time try and behave like adults and maybe people will take you a little more seriously.
You mean aside from just how bad hacker movies could get?
Dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What freaking danger are you talking about? The kid had his equipment seized as evidence(which it is) and was questioned for six hours. The stupid little punk isn't even in jail, they didn't beat the crap out of him. Yeah, they had a lot of people with guns. If I were raiding the house of someone who had a web site full of bomb making instructions exhorting people to kill people like me, I might want a gun and some body armour too, ya know? If they'd gone in with a couple of guys and he'd answered the door with an M-16 and a Fragmentation grenade, the conversation would be about how stupid the cops were. The show of force was warranted for somebody who committed a crime. Theres no story here, move along.
Yeah, wasn't it great to spend hours working on RIP graphics only to figure out that there was exactly 1 person on your board willing to go through the hassle to use them? Not to mention that ASCII graphics were a much. much faster way to get around the board. Can't waste those precious connect minutes!
It's just incredibly unbelivably unlikely. Somebody French(I've forgotten the name.) shortly after the laws of Thermodynaics were first created published an analysis showing that if you wait long enough, you should see things like all of the gas molecules returning to the box, all of the air molecules on one side of the room, etc. However, statistically for this to happen for 100 molecules is probably going to require a length of time several orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe. It's a lot like tunnelling. Theres a nonzero chance that if I run into that wall I might just pass through it, but if I decide to keep trying until it happens I'm going to die a bitter man with a broken nose.
It wasn't the (Troll | Stupidity) that I found so amusing. It was the moderation as insightful. Whether he just didn't get it or it was a troll, modding it up as insightful is still pretty bizarre.
Only on slashdot...first, some replys seriously to obvious satire, and the gets modded up for being insightful. Sheesh.
Because if you have a thousand users who each transmit a meg a day and say, a couple of gigs a day every so often, you need a lot less infrastructure than if you have a thousand users who all transmit a gig a day every day. You need bigger pipes and better routers at pretty much every step of the way.
Funny, I've never heard of anyone getting shut down under such a law. I'd love to see a reference for this...
Anyway, last time I checked the company was actually ditching many of its non core product lines because they weren't profitable.
Corporate status only sheilds you from civil liabilities. An individual in this situation would end up paying fines, the same as a corporation would. If you commit fraud as part of a corporation and you still go to jail just as easily as Bill Gates would if he hired Uncle Vinnie to go whack Larry Ellison on behalf of the Microsoft corporation. Besides, the penalty for breaking SEC regulations is almost never jail time, regardless of who you are, unless you actually commit Fraud.
Amazon had a solid business plan, yes. It said "We're going to sell books, cheaper, and offer a wider selection". And they got caught up in the dot com craze, and decided to go with a lot of business plans that were a lot less sound, like selling garden tools and hibachi grills where they had no conceivable advantage over a brick and mortar. And as a result, hemoraged cash like every other dot-com on the planet. Really, most of their uppermanagement from a year or two ago needs to be prevented from breeding.
Well, there is the fact that they should never have been losing money at the first place and in fact were only losing money because instead of being happy selling books and movies where they could turn profits their idiot management decided that they should sell everything on the planet, from lawnmowers to barbeques, to furry handcuffs or whatever the hell else they were selling at the height of their product line expansion. Their business model(like the web business model) works very well when selling things like books and movies where you can provide a huge selection and a brick and mortar cannot. However, it doesn't work when you can pick up the same item at the same price at a local store - cause thats what most people will do every time.
2.4.x, for a stable kernel really hasn't been. It's not something you want to put onto a server whos major selling point is "throw it in a corner and forget about it". 2.2.x is quite a bit more appropriate for this use.
I can't think of a distribution less likely to share any sort of vision with AOL than Slackware. AOL is organized around coddling the user and spoon feeding the user while Slackwares attitude is "Rm * -r? Powerful command there. Gives you what you want. You did it to /? Why would you want to do that? You didn't? Then why the hell'd you type it?". This is why there are two slackware boxes running on either side of me right now...
True. It was exaggeration to make a point, but the point was that if they wanted to pick up a distro to use as a desktop, there are certainly far better choices.