Members of the same sex don't have a slot B, only a slot C, and sticking tab A into slot C is a damn good way to die young, now that we know about germs and stuff.
Members of the same sex as the welder in question, described as a "he", have slots C and D, as well as hands etc.. And people have been known to die young as a result of germs and stuff picked up from sticking tab A into slot B. (And those with tab A and those with slot B have been known to use the latter's slots C and D and to use hands on tab A and in slot B, but I digress....)
you forgot to include the u.s.a in the list of countries who conducted unethical medical experiments on its own unwitting citizens, as well as criminals, and citizens of sovereign foreign states, but I'm sure that was just an accident.
You forgot to note the "U.S." in "Medical experiments by Germany, Japan & U.S. during WW2", but I'm sure that was just an accident. (And, yes, there were such experiments in the US before and after WW2 as well.)
we already have 'approval voting' for president except it's the approval board that actually elects him. the popular vote does nothing but tell the electoral college what the people want. it's a bit archaic and easily gamed by those with money.
The phrase "approval voting" doesn't mean what you think it means. With approval voting you get to vote for multiple candidates (presumably as in "these are the candidates who, in my opinion, don't suck or, at least, don't suck so badly I wouldn't want them in that office"), and the one who gets the most votes wins.
The voting system in US presidential elections is good old-fashioned first-past-the-post for your local elector, followed by good-old-fashioned first-past-the-post in the Electoral College, but given that electors are pretty much always pledged to a particular candidate, the two in-theory separate elections are tied together to make a somewhat odd combination in which the population selects the president but not all votes count equally.
You could have an Electoral College-based system with approval voting for electors and/or approval voting in the Electoral College, or you could have a first-past-the-post system with direct election of the president, or you could have an approval-voting system with direct election of the president (and there are other systems that could be substituted for first-past-the-post or approval-voting). The Electoral College stuff is orthogonal to first-past-the-post vs. approval voting vs.....
And the FDA routinely allows drugs onto the market that have nasty side effects. What's your point?
The point is probably that neither government regulation nor private third-party ratings magically avoid Bad Things Happening, at which point the best thing to do is probably to investigate which of the two appears to have a better record of avoiding Bad Things in practice and the costs of both. (No, I'm not saying which of the two such an investigation would find better.)
Note the every economy that has ever industrialized did so under a libertarian economic policy.
Indeed? Presumably you mean either that Russia never industrialized or did the bulk of its industrialization pre-1917 (assuming Tsarist polic was economically libertarian) or post-1980's (or that Vlad Ulyanov and Joe Dzhugashvili were libertarian in their economic policies, but I doubt you mean that).
On the less extreme side, I'm a bit skeptical that, say, Germany and France industrialized under such a policy.
Except the managing partner(s) do not have limited liability.
But the other investors do. That's one thing that the "L" in "LLC" and the "limited" in "limited partnership" indicates. That's the "where the investor is protected" bit you mentioned earlier; as the person to whom you're replying says, "Anyone whose business is growing and needs outside financial resources (ie, debt, venture capital, additional stock) to grow, has the business in some form of legal entity." - I'm not going to be particularly eager to invest in a company if doing so renders me potentially liable for all the debts of the company.
I suspect that you didnt even consider it a possibility that the real problem with corporations is that their members are not generally treated on a legal level as individuals responsible for their corporate actions.
Federal and state courts are using the "responsible corporate officer" doctrine to impose civil liability on corporate officers for their acts performed on behalf of the corporation that lead to the violation of certain environmental laws. Recently, the Supreme Court of the State of Indiana judicially imposed greater corporate responsibility by holding an individual associated with a corporation personally liable under the "responsible corporate officer" doctrine for the corporation's violations of the Indiana Environmental Management Act. Although the Court interpreted the language in the Indiana Environmental Management Act, there is language in the opinion that may be used to support the argument that the Court's reasoning may be applied to other types of civil or criminal violations.
Not really. Such a move is naturally accompanied by a drastic reduction in regulation, with red tape being the largest impediment to most new businesses.
"Limited liability" covers more than just liability to suits by regulatory bodies or plaintiffs citing regulations in their suits. I might be less likely to want to invest in a small start-up if it means that if the startup goes bankrupt, and the creditors can't satisfy their claims from the assets of the startup, I might lose not only my investment but part of whatever else gets awarded to the creditors.
Further, most companies in the US are not incorporated, but are sole proprietorships. Something like 90%, as I recall.
Is a sole proprietorship a "company" or just a "business"? The entry in Black's Law Dictionary for "company" says a "company" is "A society or association of persons, in considerable number, interested in a common object, and uniting themselves for the prosecution of some’commercial or industrial undertaking, or other legitimate business.", so a sole proprietorship wouldn't be a "company".
As for the number, Table 744, "Number of Tax Returns, Receipts, and Net Income by Type of Business: 1990 to 2008" of the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States (I guess that's "2012" as in "put out in 2012", as it's a bit hard to get useful statistics about 2012 as a whole by January 4, 2012) has, for 2008, 22,614,000 tax receipts from non-farm proprietorships, 3,146,000 receipts from partnerships, and 5,847,000 receipts from corporations (the numbers are given in thousands of returns, and are "estimates based on sample of unaudited tax returns", so no silly-ass comments about the ",000" in the numbers, please), so it's more like 72%
In any case, I suspect your local dry-cleaner shop didn't buy its dry-cleaning equipment from a sole proprietorship, so, whilst most businesses might be sole proprietorships, most businesses any of us either deal with directly or are dealt with by other businesses with which we deal (ad whatever the translation for "transitive closure" to Latin is) might well be limited-liability entities of some sort.
Perhaps in a world with no limited-liability entities there would still be the equivalents of Apple and Google and of all the other entities that built the equipment that they use and the infrastructure that they use and so on, but I would not be tempted to assume that.
I LOVE meat. Steak, hamburgers, brats, chicken wings - you name it.
My wife, on the other hand, has shifted to a pescetarian diet (like vegetarian + fish and dairy products). Which means *my* diet has shifted as well, in a much healthier direction.
I.e., you're now eating more meat from fish and less meat from cows, pigs, and chickens?
The Neolithic life expectancy at birth was 20. Granted that had a lot to do with the fact that living past 5 was extremely difficult.
Yup - if half the population dies by age 3 and the other half live to 70, the life expectancy is 36.5, right? (Remember, the average human being has one mammary gland and one testicle.)
So the point? Your health gains from eating nuts, berries and wild rabbit while roaming the plains...
"Eating nuts, berries and wild rabbit while roaming the plains" sounds more Paleolithic than Neolithic.
The study revealed a correlation between high blood vitamin levels and higher mental abilities. That gives three possible causative relationships: 1) high vitamin levels cause high mental abilities; 2) high mental abilities cause high vitamin levels; or 3) a third factor causes both.
Exactly. That is what "correlation is not causation" means - "A is correlated with B" does not solely imply "A causes B".
Re:This is what's wrong with private healthcare.
on
How Doctors Die
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· Score: 1
In the US, healthcare isn't about getting people better, it's about maximising profits. So, on that basis, it's perfectly okay to keep people alive and suffering terribly as long as there's still a few dollars to be squeezed out of them. Patient dignity and welfare doesn't come into it - the hospital administrator needs a new Jaguar!
Do you mean "private healthcare" as in "healthcare from non-government-owned institutions" or do you mean "private healthcare" as in "healthcare from for-profit institutions"? If the former, that's not, in the developed world, unique to the US. (I'm not sure the latter is, either, although other countries might have a higher percentage of government-run and private-but-nonprofit hospitals than the US.)
not to mention environmental issues. They are known as the lease green company
I don't think Apple leases hardware. IBM used to, but that was a while ago.
And if you meant "least green company", well, if you ask Greenpeace, it's more like fourth greenest company. (Then again, a lot of what Greenpeace rates highly is openness about policies and advocacy; Apple was, for a long time, not very open about its environmental policies and not much for advocating particular policies - the lowest-rated company on that list, RIM, was dinged for, among other things, not having explicit policies - "New to the Guide, RIM needs to improve reporting and disclosure of its environmental performance compared to other mobile phone makers.")
I am not sure which boycotts of BoA you have in mind, because I don't recall a major boycott, and my searches on CNN, BBC and Reuters don't turn up any relevant news. I'll say that if there was such a boycott, it was pretty much a failure.
You Google fanboys obviously enjoy circle-jerking each other into a frenzy but the rest of us find it disgusting.
Replace "Google" from the previous statement with a wildcard and you end up with an accurate description of most if not all of the sides in many Slashdot debates.
Funny, I thought both of those were fairly popular.
Was GoDaddy a "loved and popular" brand? Heck, did a lot of non-nerds even know who they were? I suspect most of the people who would buy Apple equipment wouldn't know a DNS registrar if one came up and bit them in the ass.
And the objections to BofA (debit card fees) are probably easier to explain to the general public than the objections to Apple.
(No, the merits of the objects really don't matter in the grand scheme of things; what matters is whether you can get enough people to care. I suspect that, sad though it may be to many concerned geeks, the parent poster's claim that "With a brand as loved and popular as Apple's, a boycott by a few concerned geeks isn't going to even register as a rounding error on their profits." may well be factual.)
Once C became popular, however, this changed. A few of the reasons were
Some of the instructions, which used multiple clock cycles, could also be replicated by simpler instructions in the assembly code, which compilers could use
And which clueful assembler-language programmers could use as well, especially with a slightly higher-level assembler or lower-level language than C that let you write a single "instruction"/statement that expanded into the instruction sequence in question.
On the silicon side, once designers figured out that a CPU could be a lot faster if it didn't need microcode to determine the length of each subsequent instruction,
You don't need microcode to determine the lengths of instructions - the implemented-entirely-in-hardware System/360 Model 75 didn't, for example.
This was just the basic underpinnings of the 'RISC is better' school of thought. Over time, RISC itself developed several techniques, and schools of its own. You had super-scalar processors, that increased the number of registers,
I'm assuming you're talking about register renaming here; superscalar processors don't in and of themselves increase the number of registers.
pipelines and other hardware in the CPU as a result of saving on the microcode - examples of this were the SPARC and POWER CPUs. You also had super-pipelined processors, that diced the various stages of a pipeline even finer, to enable the CPU to run @ higher frequencies - examples being the initial MIPS I & II processors (up to the R4x00 series) and the Alpha 21064s. Over time, superpipelined processors became more superscalar - like the Alpha 21164, while the MIPS switched to superscalar from MIPS III (R5000 onwards), while superscalar processors became more superpipelined in the quest to bump up their frequencies.
While Intel didn't eliminate microcode itself, it adapted a lot of concepts from the RISC camp, such as multiple registers,
OK, so you almost certainly mean "register renaming"; they went up to 8 registers in the 80386, and AMD (not Intel) went up to 16 registers in x86-64 (Intel followed them there).
pipelines
Well, yes, the 80486 was pipelined, but so was the CISC System/360 Model 91 (admittedly, a rather high-end S/360).
Some companies, like NexGen created RISC processors which had x86 instructions fed in and decoded into internal RISC instructions that got executed. AMD's Athlon - made by the same DEC team that did Alpha after they left DEC for AMD - was their first CPU that didn't have any Intel underpinnings to it, but was a RISC CPU internally, and x86 outside. That was the first time that AMD got an independent CPU design team that weren't just copycats of the x86.
...which they got from, err, umm, NexGen.
The concept here was to have several independent instructions in a program running in parallel, so that you essentially had a multiprocessor within a CPU,
That's also what you have in a superscalar processor, such as many RISC processors and x86 processors starting with the original Pentium (and, arguably, the somewhat RISCy CDC 6600 and definitely CISC System/360 Model 91).
and in addition to the usual things that a RISC compiler did - like register renaming, branch prediction and speculative execution.
Presumably you mean "RISC processor" rather than "RISC compiler" (and branch prediction, at least, didn't originate on RISC processors).
No, Transmeta designed two VLIW architectures that were, I think, incompatible with each other, and implemented x86 emulators atop them (simulated x86 and translated frequently-run code from x86 to the native architecture). Developers didn't {write code for, compile code into code for} the internal architectures; the chips were just used as alternative implementations of x86.
I scoured your post for one actual reason why you think x86 is an inferior ISA, but I couldn't find any. I'll give you a couple reasons why it is superior, or at least on par with, any given RISC ISA, on its own merits, not taking into account any backwards compatibility issues:
Variable length instruction encoding makes more efficient use of the instruction cache. It is basically code compression...
x86 has load-op instructions. Load-op is a very, very common programming idiom both for hand written assembly and for compiler generated code. ARM and other RISC ISAs require two instructions to accomplish the same thing.
The latter pretty much amounts to "code compression"; maybe assembler-language programmers would also find it convenient, but compilers probably don't really care much, except for a little extra register pressure.
Dedicated stack pointer register allows for push/pop/call/return optimizations to unlink dependence chains from unrelated functions. With a GPR-based stack, RISC has false dependence problems for similar code sequences that they can't really optimize,
x86 has some instructions that use one of the GPRs - ESP/RSP - specially. RISC processors have calling conventions that use one of the GPRs specially. What exactly are the differences here?
Perhaps create an instruction set that lets you get more out of your MFG process; Maybe one that's cross platform (like ARM is).
What do you mean when you say the ARM instruction set is "cross platform"?
Let's look at THAT problem and solve it with perhaps a new type of linker that turns object code into the proper machine code for the system during installation (sort of like how Android does).
Or how the IBM System/38 and successors do it (compilers generate a very CISCy high-level virtual instruction set; core OS code translates it to machine code when it's first run). ("How Android does" is, I think, pretty much "how Java does".)
The downsides of RISC has always been the increased size of the program code and reduced freedom to access data efficiently (ie with unaligned accesses,
Which, as far as I know, at least one RISCs supports in recent implementations (Power Architecture). SPARC doesn't have it, and I think ARM didn't have it at least at one point.
byte addressing
If you mean "as opposed to word addressing", as far as I know, all the major RISCs used in general-purpose computing are byte-addressed. Alpha was a little weird, at least until the BWX (Byte/Word eXtension) instructions were added, but the others had/have byte and 2-byte loads and stores.
and powerful address offset instructions
Do you mean "more complex addressing modes" here? (Presumably you aren't referring to auto-increment and auto-decrement and so on, as they're pretty much dead; I seem to remember Andy Glew in comp.arch saying that they made pipelining harder, so Intel was in a better position to speed x86's up than Motorola were in to speed up 68k's.)
How long before Apple reproduces the iPhone market model on the Mac ?
This might happen rather sooner than later.
My bet's on Mac OS X 10.8 "Common House Cat"
(or whatever the Code Name will be, the "Big Cat" series finally being done...)
And my bet is that 10.8 will be just as fine with arbitrary third-party apps, including "I just downloaded the JCL interpreter from a comp.sources.unix archive and compiled it".
(My other bet is that they'll manage to find some big cat name, even if it's another name for an already-used cat, but I digress.)
How long before Apple reproduces the iPhone market model on the Mac ?
Two, three years, tops. They stated their intent when the iPhone came out, and everything they've done since supports their intent.
When the iPhone first came out, there was no App Store, and you didn't get to write UIKit apps unless you were in a group at Apple that wrote them. Then the OS was jailbroken, and a bunch of people wrote them anyway. I'd have to dig up the Jobs bio, or wherever it was that I heard that the original intent was truly not to allow third-party apps, to see whether the jailbreak convinced Apple to do otherwise.
Nothing was stated about the Mac in that regard when the iPhone came out, unless by "they stated their intent" you mean "I inferred their intent based on my judgement about what they did".
Its not free any more. Why? Because if your software becomes useful to the point of competing with Apple then they will sue your pants off with dubious, trivial, and obvious software-patents.
Have Apple ever sued a developer of software for Mac OS X to stop them from competing? Developing for Mac OS X is what I'm talking about
Slashdot Mirror
Members of the same sex don't have a slot B, only a slot C, and sticking tab A into slot C is a damn good way to die young, now that we know about germs and stuff.
Members of the same sex as the welder in question, described as a "he", have slots C and D, as well as hands etc.. And people have been known to die young as a result of germs and stuff picked up from sticking tab A into slot B. (And those with tab A and those with slot B have been known to use the latter's slots C and D and to use hands on tab A and in slot B, but I digress....)
you forgot to include the u.s.a in the list of countries who conducted unethical medical experiments on its own unwitting citizens, as well as criminals, and citizens of sovereign foreign states, but I'm sure that was just an accident.
You forgot to note the "U.S." in "Medical experiments by Germany, Japan & U.S. during WW2", but I'm sure that was just an accident. (And, yes, there were such experiments in the US before and after WW2 as well.)
we already have 'approval voting' for president except it's the approval board that actually elects him. the popular vote does nothing but tell the electoral college what the people want. it's a bit archaic and easily gamed by those with money.
The phrase "approval voting" doesn't mean what you think it means. With approval voting you get to vote for multiple candidates (presumably as in "these are the candidates who, in my opinion, don't suck or, at least, don't suck so badly I wouldn't want them in that office"), and the one who gets the most votes wins.
The voting system in US presidential elections is good old-fashioned first-past-the-post for your local elector, followed by good-old-fashioned first-past-the-post in the Electoral College, but given that electors are pretty much always pledged to a particular candidate, the two in-theory separate elections are tied together to make a somewhat odd combination in which the population selects the president but not all votes count equally.
You could have an Electoral College-based system with approval voting for electors and/or approval voting in the Electoral College, or you could have a first-past-the-post system with direct election of the president, or you could have an approval-voting system with direct election of the president (and there are other systems that could be substituted for first-past-the-post or approval-voting). The Electoral College stuff is orthogonal to first-past-the-post vs. approval voting vs. ....
And the FDA routinely allows drugs onto the market that have nasty side effects. What's your point?
The point is probably that neither government regulation nor private third-party ratings magically avoid Bad Things Happening, at which point the best thing to do is probably to investigate which of the two appears to have a better record of avoiding Bad Things in practice and the costs of both. (No, I'm not saying which of the two such an investigation would find better.)
Note the every economy that has ever industrialized did so under a libertarian economic policy.
Indeed? Presumably you mean either that Russia never industrialized or did the bulk of its industrialization pre-1917 (assuming Tsarist polic was economically libertarian) or post-1980's (or that Vlad Ulyanov and Joe Dzhugashvili were libertarian in their economic policies, but I doubt you mean that).
On the less extreme side, I'm a bit skeptical that, say, Germany and France industrialized under such a policy.
Except the managing partner(s) do not have limited liability.
But the other investors do. That's one thing that the "L" in "LLC" and the "limited" in "limited partnership" indicates. That's the "where the investor is protected" bit you mentioned earlier; as the person to whom you're replying says, "Anyone whose business is growing and needs outside financial resources (ie, debt, venture capital, additional stock) to grow, has the business in some form of legal entity." - I'm not going to be particularly eager to invest in a company if doing so renders me potentially liable for all the debts of the company.
I suspect that you didnt even consider it a possibility that the real problem with corporations is that their members are not generally treated on a legal level as individuals responsible for their corporate actions.
Is that, in fact, the case? For example, this article from Ice Miller LLP says
Not really. Such a move is naturally accompanied by a drastic reduction in regulation, with red tape being the largest impediment to most new businesses.
"Limited liability" covers more than just liability to suits by regulatory bodies or plaintiffs citing regulations in their suits. I might be less likely to want to invest in a small start-up if it means that if the startup goes bankrupt, and the creditors can't satisfy their claims from the assets of the startup, I might lose not only my investment but part of whatever else gets awarded to the creditors.
Further, most companies in the US are not incorporated, but are sole proprietorships. Something like 90%, as I recall.
Is a sole proprietorship a "company" or just a "business"? The entry in Black's Law Dictionary for "company" says a "company" is "A society or association of persons, in considerable number, interested in a common object, and uniting themselves for the prosecution of some’commercial or industrial undertaking, or other legitimate business.", so a sole proprietorship wouldn't be a "company".
As for the number, Table 744, "Number of Tax Returns, Receipts, and Net Income by Type of Business: 1990 to 2008" of the 2012 Statistical Abstract of the United States (I guess that's "2012" as in "put out in 2012", as it's a bit hard to get useful statistics about 2012 as a whole by January 4, 2012) has, for 2008, 22,614,000 tax receipts from non-farm proprietorships, 3,146,000 receipts from partnerships, and 5,847,000 receipts from corporations (the numbers are given in thousands of returns, and are "estimates based on sample of unaudited tax returns", so no silly-ass comments about the ",000" in the numbers, please), so it's more like 72%
In any case, I suspect your local dry-cleaner shop didn't buy its dry-cleaning equipment from a sole proprietorship, so, whilst most businesses might be sole proprietorships, most businesses any of us either deal with directly or are dealt with by other businesses with which we deal (ad whatever the translation for "transitive closure" to Latin is) might well be limited-liability entities of some sort.
Perhaps in a world with no limited-liability entities there would still be the equivalents of Apple and Google and of all the other entities that built the equipment that they use and the infrastructure that they use and so on, but I would not be tempted to assume that.
I LOVE meat. Steak, hamburgers, brats, chicken wings - you name it.
My wife, on the other hand, has shifted to a pescetarian diet (like vegetarian + fish and dairy products). Which means *my* diet has shifted as well, in a much healthier direction.
I.e., you're now eating more meat from fish and less meat from cows, pigs, and chickens?
The Neolithic life expectancy at birth was 20. Granted that had a lot to do with the fact that living past 5 was extremely difficult.
Yup - if half the population dies by age 3 and the other half live to 70, the life expectancy is 36.5, right? (Remember, the average human being has one mammary gland and one testicle.)
So the point? Your health gains from eating nuts, berries and wild rabbit while roaming the plains...
"Eating nuts, berries and wild rabbit while roaming the plains" sounds more Paleolithic than Neolithic.
The study revealed a correlation between high blood vitamin levels and higher mental abilities. That gives three possible causative relationships: 1) high vitamin levels cause high mental abilities; 2) high mental abilities cause high vitamin levels; or 3) a third factor causes both.
Exactly. That is what "correlation is not causation" means - "A is correlated with B" does not solely imply "A causes B".
In the US, healthcare isn't about getting people better, it's about maximising profits. So, on that basis, it's perfectly okay to keep people alive and suffering terribly as long as there's still a few dollars to be squeezed out of them. Patient dignity and welfare doesn't come into it - the hospital administrator needs a new Jaguar!
Do you mean "private healthcare" as in "healthcare from non-government-owned institutions" or do you mean "private healthcare" as in "healthcare from for-profit institutions"? If the former, that's not, in the developed world, unique to the US. (I'm not sure the latter is, either, although other countries might have a higher percentage of government-run and private-but-nonprofit hospitals than the US.)
not to mention environmental issues. They are known as the lease green company
I don't think Apple leases hardware. IBM used to, but that was a while ago.
And if you meant "least green company", well, if you ask Greenpeace, it's more like fourth greenest company. (Then again, a lot of what Greenpeace rates highly is openness about policies and advocacy; Apple was, for a long time, not very open about its environmental policies and not much for advocating particular policies - the lowest-rated company on that list, RIM, was dinged for, among other things, not having explicit policies - "New to the Guide, RIM needs to improve reporting and disclosure of its environmental performance compared to other mobile phone makers.")
I am not sure which boycotts of BoA you have in mind, because I don't recall a major boycott, and my searches on CNN, BBC and Reuters don't turn up any relevant news. I'll say that if there was such a boycott, it was pretty much a failure.
For what it's worth, there was a call for a boycott, and they did rescind their debit-card fee. Whether you can credit the call for the boycott for that is another matter.
You Google fanboys obviously enjoy circle-jerking each other into a frenzy but the rest of us find it disgusting.
Replace "Google" from the previous statement with a wildcard and you end up with an accurate description of most if not all of the sides in many Slashdot debates.
How about BofA boycott?
Funny, I thought both of those were fairly popular.
Was GoDaddy a "loved and popular" brand? Heck, did a lot of non-nerds even know who they were? I suspect most of the people who would buy Apple equipment wouldn't know a DNS registrar if one came up and bit them in the ass.
And the objections to BofA (debit card fees) are probably easier to explain to the general public than the objections to Apple.
(No, the merits of the objects really don't matter in the grand scheme of things; what matters is whether you can get enough people to care. I suspect that, sad though it may be to many concerned geeks, the parent poster's claim that "With a brand as loved and popular as Apple's, a boycott by a few concerned geeks isn't going to even register as a rounding error on their profits." may well be factual.)
Once C became popular, however, this changed. A few of the reasons were
And which clueful assembler-language programmers could use as well, especially with a slightly higher-level assembler or lower-level language than C that let you write a single "instruction"/statement that expanded into the instruction sequence in question.
You don't need microcode to determine the lengths of instructions - the implemented-entirely-in-hardware System/360 Model 75 didn't, for example.
This was just the basic underpinnings of the 'RISC is better' school of thought. Over time, RISC itself developed several techniques, and schools of its own. You had super-scalar processors, that increased the number of registers,
I'm assuming you're talking about register renaming here; superscalar processors don't in and of themselves increase the number of registers. pipelines and other hardware in the CPU as a result of saving on the microcode - examples of this were the SPARC and POWER CPUs. You also had super-pipelined processors, that diced the various stages of a pipeline even finer, to enable the CPU to run @ higher frequencies - examples being the initial MIPS I & II processors (up to the R4x00 series) and the Alpha 21064s. Over time, superpipelined processors became more superscalar - like the Alpha 21164, while the MIPS switched to superscalar from MIPS III (R5000 onwards), while superscalar processors became more superpipelined in the quest to bump up their frequencies.
While Intel didn't eliminate microcode itself, it adapted a lot of concepts from the RISC camp, such as multiple registers,
OK, so you almost certainly mean "register renaming"; they went up to 8 registers in the 80386, and AMD (not Intel) went up to 16 registers in x86-64 (Intel followed them there).
pipelines
Well, yes, the 80486 was pipelined, but so was the CISC System/360 Model 91 (admittedly, a rather high-end S/360).
Some companies, like NexGen created RISC processors which had x86 instructions fed in and decoded into internal RISC instructions that got executed. AMD's Athlon - made by the same DEC team that did Alpha after they left DEC for AMD - was their first CPU that didn't have any Intel underpinnings to it, but was a RISC CPU internally, and x86 outside. That was the first time that AMD got an independent CPU design team that weren't just copycats of the x86.
...which they got from, err, umm, NexGen.
The concept here was to have several independent instructions in a program running in parallel, so that you essentially had a multiprocessor within a CPU,
That's also what you have in a superscalar processor, such as many RISC processors and x86 processors starting with the original Pentium (and, arguably, the somewhat RISCy CDC 6600 and definitely CISC System/360 Model 91).
and in addition to the usual things that a RISC compiler did - like register renaming, branch prediction and speculative execution.
Presumably you mean "RISC processor" rather than "RISC compiler" (and branch prediction, at least, didn't originate on RISC processors).
Didn't Transmeta design a xWBT86 architecture?
No, Transmeta designed two VLIW architectures that were, I think, incompatible with each other, and implemented x86 emulators atop them (simulated x86 and translated frequently-run code from x86 to the native architecture). Developers didn't {write code for, compile code into code for} the internal architectures; the chips were just used as alternative implementations of x86.
There is IBM Mainframe System 360 code from the '60s still running on current zEnterprise systems today.
...and the latest implementations of it use the same "translate some multi-step instructions into internal micro-ops" technique that a lot of x86 processors, dating back to the Pentium Pro, do. (They also use Alpha's "trap some instructions to processor-dependent code running in a special mode with access to some special internal registers" technique, only they call it "millicode" rather than "PALcode" - and they have some more instructions to trap.)
I scoured your post for one actual reason why you think x86 is an inferior ISA, but I couldn't find any. I'll give you a couple reasons why it is superior, or at least on par with, any given RISC ISA, on its own merits, not taking into account any backwards compatibility issues:
The latter pretty much amounts to "code compression"; maybe assembler-language programmers would also find it convenient, but compilers probably don't really care much, except for a little extra register pressure.
x86 has some instructions that use one of the GPRs - ESP/RSP - specially. RISC processors have calling conventions that use one of the GPRs specially. What exactly are the differences here?
Perhaps create an instruction set that lets you get more out of your MFG process; Maybe one that's cross platform (like ARM is).
What do you mean when you say the ARM instruction set is "cross platform"?
Let's look at THAT problem and solve it with perhaps a new type of linker that turns object code into the proper machine code for the system during installation (sort of like how Android does).
Or how the IBM System/38 and successors do it (compilers generate a very CISCy high-level virtual instruction set; core OS code translates it to machine code when it's first run). ("How Android does" is, I think, pretty much "how Java does".)
The downsides of RISC has always been the increased size of the program code and reduced freedom to access data efficiently (ie with unaligned accesses,
Which, as far as I know, at least one RISCs supports in recent implementations (Power Architecture). SPARC doesn't have it, and I think ARM didn't have it at least at one point.
byte addressing
If you mean "as opposed to word addressing", as far as I know, all the major RISCs used in general-purpose computing are byte-addressed. Alpha was a little weird, at least until the BWX (Byte/Word eXtension) instructions were added, but the others had/have byte and 2-byte loads and stores.
and powerful address offset instructions
Do you mean "more complex addressing modes" here? (Presumably you aren't referring to auto-increment and auto-decrement and so on, as they're pretty much dead; I seem to remember Andy Glew in comp.arch saying that they made pipelining harder, so Intel was in a better position to speed x86's up than Motorola were in to speed up 68k's.)
How long before Apple reproduces the iPhone market model on the Mac ?
This might happen rather sooner than later.
My bet's on Mac OS X 10.8 "Common House Cat" (or whatever the Code Name will be, the "Big Cat" series finally being done...)
And my bet is that 10.8 will be just as fine with arbitrary third-party apps, including "I just downloaded the JCL interpreter from a comp.sources.unix archive and compiled it".
(My other bet is that they'll manage to find some big cat name, even if it's another name for an already-used cat, but I digress.)
How long before Apple reproduces the iPhone market model on the Mac ?
Two, three years, tops. They stated their intent when the iPhone came out, and everything they've done since supports their intent.
When the iPhone first came out, there was no App Store, and you didn't get to write UIKit apps unless you were in a group at Apple that wrote them. Then the OS was jailbroken, and a bunch of people wrote them anyway. I'd have to dig up the Jobs bio, or wherever it was that I heard that the original intent was truly not to allow third-party apps, to see whether the jailbreak convinced Apple to do otherwise.
Nothing was stated about the Mac in that regard when the iPhone came out, unless by "they stated their intent" you mean "I inferred their intent based on my judgement about what they did".
Its not free any more. Why? Because if your software becomes useful to the point of competing with Apple then they will sue your pants off with dubious, trivial, and obvious software-patents.
Have Apple ever sued a developer of software for Mac OS X to stop them from competing? Developing for Mac OS X is what I'm talking about