First off, start at the basics: iOS isn't going to "replace" OS X, because they share the same codebase. I know some people here will balk at this description, but iOS is nothing but OS X optimized for mobile touchscreen devices. They're basically the same operating system. This is why it's so easy to incorporate iPad software into Lion. This isn't a situation like Microsoft had, where their early mobile operating systems... Win CE... were from a completely different codebase than the NT-based PC systems. So a PC-type desktop OS isn't going to disappear from Apple's product line.
Second, while I see the corporate appeal to Apple in forcing customers to their own home-brewed "A" based CPU's (and the friction they've had with Intel lately), even if they do this, it doesn't necessarily mean a "PC" is really disappearing from their product line. If it's got a USB port and a video miniport, then you can essentially make it a PC. I don't see the A processors being powerful enough for real desktop use, but that could change in the near future. I could also see Apple abandoning the truly professional-grade workstation market if they're going to focus completely on consumer devices.
But to sum it up, even as radical as Steve Jobs can be at times (remember, he wanted the first edition of the iMac to ship without a keyboard until wiser heads talked him down from that ledge), I just don't see him completely eliminating all desktop options. Some form of real desktop computer from Apple will continue to be on the market. Reduce consumer choices in that regard, yes... he'll do that in a heartbeat and demand that you love him for it. But eliminate the option itself? No.
I don't know, a picture of Stallman might have been a better shot. One of the biggest names in OSS over the sign for a company well noted for being the most closed in technology.
And no one would have gotten the joke. People would have said "What's up with the dirty hippie on the Apple store"? Everyone knows the Windows logo. Outside of the Slashverse, a few academics, and some industry people, no one knows who Richard Stallman is or what he stands for. And even if they did, it still wouldn't have been as funny as the Windows logo.
The criticism and complaints against these officers is completely justified... they should face charges at a formal hearing for this... but a blanket statement about "we hate cops" makes you look silly and juvenile. Government... federal, state, and local... has become far too powerful. But they're not yet the Nazis you and other perpetually outraged Slashdotters make them out to be.
Usually while doing a Google image search. I was searching for everything from ships to aircraft, so this doesn't appear to be just a porn/warez problem.
Still, there's a major difference between this and Windows malware. The "Install me now" routine pops up, but you have to voluntarily enter your username and password for it to infect you on the Mac. You can become infected on Windows just by surfing the wrong website. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before the scumbag malware makers of the world find a way around that.
The Fox guarding the Henhouse
on
DC Reboots Universe
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The people in charge of this reboot... Dan Didio, Jim Lee, Geoff Johns... are some of the prime people responsible for screwing DC up over the past decade. So now they're going to hand the repair job to the same people that helped muck up the works? Sometimes I think Warner Brothers wants to kill DC off.
And some of the costume redesigns... radically changing Superman's outfight without the red tights and adding a military style collar? His costume has only been popular for 70 years, but hey, what does everyone else know.
Here's my first prediction for the "new" DC universe.... the reboot won't stop DC's habit of pushing a major "event" series every year, with so many tie-ins that you can't keep up (or afford to buy all the $3-plus issues). And the marketing for it will be the same crap we've heard ever since Crisis On Infinite Earths... "THIS is the event that changes EVERYTHING"... until the next event, that is.
Maybe now is a great time to quit collecting and just walk away.
DOS was a pretty good OS for low end hardware. Unlike a Unix clone, it was never meant to be a server, and so it didn't really need multitasking. It was simple, stable, and once you learned the various commands, easy to use. My only gripe about it was the memory limitations.
More to the point, this is a private person doing something privately with their earned fortune, its none of the WSJs business.
Yes it is, because Google's founders have made such a big stink about global warming. They regularly lecuture the rest of the world while they jetset with a 757. And if everyone else has their aircraft tracked by the FAA at all times, why should these guys be exempt from the same rules? Either public tracking is fine, or it's wrong... for everyone involved. If you think flight information should be private, then don't just defend the Google guys, condemn the whole program.
Some people will complain, but this was inevitable. Business-wise, it's silly to throw this much opportunity into the "free" sphere. Rupert Murdoch was right about this; "Content isn't King, it's Emperor". If content is your business, then giving it all away is a great way to go broke fast. Ad revenue will only go so far. If it's good enough, people will pay for content.
Microsoft doesn't buy ruined companies, they buy decent ones and THEN ruin them.
Yeah, Bungie, Visio, and Hotmail sure dissapeared after Microsoft bought them. Oh wait...
Ruin, really? Before Google came along, Hotmail WAS webmail. And it's still hugely successful. Bungie helped fuel the rise of Microsoft's XBox empire. MS's purchase of Great Plains financial software has vaulted the Dynamics line from a small offering that caters to small offices to a large ERP suite that is increasingly muscling in on Oracle's and SAP's territory.
Looking at Microsoft's long history of acquisitions, it's hard to objectively say that most of them were busts. Most of them were purchased simply so that MS could integrate their products into existing suites. Microsoft bought Forethought.. the company that created Powerpoint.. for $14 million dollars. How much money do you think PowerPoint has made for Microsoft over the years? Me, I'd say that purchase has paid for itself many times over. And while you may hate it (and I certainly do), calling PowerPoint a a failure would be pure BS. It's The Standard in presentation software.
There are other numerous examples of now retired software products that, at the time, made tremendous sense to buy. FoxPro, for instance, was enormously popular, and made MS a lot of money. Ditto for Frontpage. For years, if you didn't know HTML, Frontpage was pretty much the way to get a web page up. Again, and it was tremendously successful in the market.
Here's a basic truth that we here at Slashdot are loathe to admit: Microsoft is a successful company because they've got some pretty smart people working there. All that money didn't just come from nowhere. They kinda know what they're doing over there in Redmond, you know?
...is start picking better names for their releases.
I've long said one of the things that hold back open source products from wider acceptance is that the OS/free software communities absolutely suck at marketing. Marketing isn't everything... the product has to be good... but plenty of good products have failed because the marketing effort behind them wasn't up to par. Mindshare is very often won on the ad page. Like it or not, that's reality. This is why companies spend untold millions on marketing. It's important.
Well since the train designs are stolen^H^H^H similar to the Japanese and German high speed trains, there must be relevent safety standards.
The truth is that the Chinese are good at copying things, but haven't shown any real ability to create original things. Their new "indigenous airliner" is almost certainly made with the tooling that McDonnell-Douglas left behind from their ill-fated MD-88 factory they built in China. Which is why, unsurprisingly, their new "indigenous airliner" looks almost exactly like an MD-88.
China is notorious for copyright infringement and stealing designs wholesale. A Chinese company so closely copied the Isuzu Rodeo that the automotive press discovered that many of the parts were interchangeable, including major body pieces. Their new frontline fighter, the J-10, is in many ways a copy of a copy; it's largely considered to be based on the Israeli Lavi, which was in turn based on the F-16. The engine is a straight up copy of a Russian design. Their much vaunted new J-15 naval fighter? A reverse-engineered Su-33 acquired from the Ukraine after the Russians refused a production license.
The only thing that surprises me is that we've went so long WITHOUT more government-controlled internet firewalls. I remember telling people back in 1995 that the U.S. government wouldn't tolerate a free internet for very long. I was wrong on the timeframe, but make no mistake, it's coming. The more repressive regimes of the world were the first, but even the "progressive" governments who supposedly champion a free internet will eventually have to own up to their hypocrisy and clamp down.
The problem is that some people think "progressive" means open and free and enlightened, when at its core, the whole idea of progressivism is basically nannyism... people as children that need to be cared for, with governments as the benevolent and protecting parents. Well guess what... parents lock the doors, set curfews, and make you eat your vegetables. I honestly don't think this kind of thing will fly in the US, not as long as there's a viable GOP. Our own "Net Neutrality" is never going to happen precisely because too many people fear it'll morph into this kind of nannyism. "For our own good", and all that rot.
Solution: destroy "financial services" industry. At this point it serves no purpose whatsoever, just sucks resources. Trade and investment can be handled without giant middlemen running their scams.
You think financial services aren't important? We're a market economy. Money is the grease in that engine. Who else would you want to handle financing?
Yeah, lets get rid of people that handle capital and arrange financing. We'll replace them with, oh, maybe a committee?
While we're at it, let's get rid of engineers. I mean, they don't DO anything... just sit around in a fancy office and draw on paper or play with their computer all day. It's not like they do real work or anything.
How about paying the government deficit that is about to default in a month so humans can habitat Earth first
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet. To leave this planet, we must advance the state of the art. To advance the state of the art, we must spend money on human space exploration/colonization.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
Why must we leave the planet? Nothing is going to happen to it. The Earth is a lot tougher than we are, and will be here for a long long time, so "man is destroying Earth" isn't a reason. Are you betting on the mother of comets or asteroids hitting?
As far as deficits not going away, uh, yes, they can. It's just a matter of will. In fact, I say to you that, one way or the other, deficits are going away soon. Because either we're going to get our fiscal house in order and cut our budgets, or we're simply going to default, declare the debt null and void (with all of the hellishness on Earth that entails), and start over. We don't really have much of a choice otherwise. It's either fix it or go all Tyler Durden and blow it all up for a fresh start.
I think the Munich government is still on it but may be wrong.
In a couple of years, you're going to see the same thing with LVM. There'll be an article with a title along the lines of "LVM ends their experiment with Linux" in 2013 or 2014 or so.
What will kill this is the same thing that's killed Linux on the business desktop everywhere else... lack of commercial business apps and app support. Because even with idealogical issues aside, there is no "Linux OS". There are dozens of Linux OS's, and even "related" distros... such as Debian and Ubuntu... frequently have software that's incompatible.
Really.That's a decision Ronald Reagan made in 1982, when he shut down efforts to convert the US to the metric system.
Now, of course, the US has trouble exporting to a world where nobody has Imperial-sized tools or fasteners.
That's a silly argument, and flatly wrong. Where our products are good, we have no problem whatsoever importing our products to the rest of the world. Where our products suck, we have a hard time selling them here, let alone to export markets.
The Constitution allows Congress to spend money to provide for the general welfare of the United States; the health care insurance mandate is arguably unconstitutional, but the other things you mentioned are allowed.
Allowed is not the same thing as "mandated in the Constitution". So while I'm very much in favor of cutting the defense budget and reducing the size of the military, we need to start with non-essential things in the budget, and they need to be cut the deepest.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
Yes, that pretty much sums it up. People lament the "decline of rail", but our rail sector is bigger than it's ever been. So what those people are really lamenting is the the decline of passenger rail, which was largely replaced by personal automobile ownership and the rise of air travel. What remains is a large, thriving cargo rail industry that for the dollars spent, is among the most cost efficient ways of moving goods on Earth.
Similarly, in the air, we came to the conclusion that it was more efficient to move large amounts of people at subsonic speeds than it was to get smaller amounts of people to their destination faster. As a lifelong aviation freak that thrilled at the sight of fast airplanes, my logical side reluctantly admits that the Concorde model of flight... small numbers of people, expensive fares, fast travel... is never going to be as economically feasible as cramming lots of people in a boring subsonic airplane. With the ability to get work done over the Internet, there simply isn't that burning need to get to the other side of the country an hour faster.
My one hope for a silver lining in the death of civilian supersonic travel is that perhaps it will open up room for older (and just as romantic) modes of travel: airship and passenger ship travel. Airliners destroyed those sectors (along with passenger rail) because they were the fastest way to travel. Perhaps if the speed of "gettin' there" is no longer as important, there will be room in the market for economical, trans-ocean travel on airships and ocean liners again. A slim chance, but it's there (and no, I don't count vacation cruise ships as the same thing... I'm talking about regularly scheduled efficiency travel from non-carribean seaports).
Since Apple's products seem to be merging somewhat... OS X Lion will incorporate some of the features from the iPad and iPhone... how fast do they think these "A chips" will get? Will they eventually replace Intel chips in whatever passes for an iMac one day? Will we see the day when Apple makes most of the parts that goes into their products themselves, rather than subbing out major systems? Will the PowerPC fanboys that so loudly cried foul! when Apple "sold out" and went to Intel rejoice? Is an ARM-based chip "think different" enough from Intel for their liking?
I was wondering what would happen if we were *really* in a war with someone like Russia, and you just THOUGHT you were playing a game, but come to find out you were really controlling some defense system, and just killed a few hundred people in the real world.
Greetings, Professor Falken. How about a nice game of chess?
Actually? No, it is not a serious issue. 800,000 GOVT employees *not working* is status quo, is it not?
You know, I get really fucking sick of this attitude.
And no matter how hard you or your friends worked, it doesn't change the fact that we have too many people working for the government. We have more people on government payrolls now than the entire manufacturing, mining, energy,and agriculture sectors combined.
There are some vital services provided by the government, and by the people that work for the government. But be honest. There are also thousands of government jobs that, if they dissapeared tomorrow, most of the public would never even notice. I work in the aviation sector, and I've been involved in the FAA grant process. There are tremendous amounts of money being spent unneccessarily. There are large swaths of people out there that get a paycheck from government largesse. The problem is that it's a false largesse, with 40 cents on the dollar being borrowed. We simply can't continue like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't see an iOS based IDE working.
First off, start at the basics: iOS isn't going to "replace" OS X, because they share the same codebase. I know some people here will balk at this description, but iOS is nothing but OS X optimized for mobile touchscreen devices. They're basically the same operating system. This is why it's so easy to incorporate iPad software into Lion. This isn't a situation like Microsoft had, where their early mobile operating systems... Win CE... were from a completely different codebase than the NT-based PC systems. So a PC-type desktop OS isn't going to disappear from Apple's product line.
Second, while I see the corporate appeal to Apple in forcing customers to their own home-brewed "A" based CPU's (and the friction they've had with Intel lately), even if they do this, it doesn't necessarily mean a "PC" is really disappearing from their product line. If it's got a USB port and a video miniport, then you can essentially make it a PC. I don't see the A processors being powerful enough for real desktop use, but that could change in the near future. I could also see Apple abandoning the truly professional-grade workstation market if they're going to focus completely on consumer devices.
But to sum it up, even as radical as Steve Jobs can be at times (remember, he wanted the first edition of the iMac to ship without a keyboard until wiser heads talked him down from that ledge), I just don't see him completely eliminating all desktop options. Some form of real desktop computer from Apple will continue to be on the market. Reduce consumer choices in that regard, yes... he'll do that in a heartbeat and demand that you love him for it. But eliminate the option itself? No.
I don't know, a picture of Stallman might have been a better shot. One of the biggest names in OSS over the sign for a company well noted for being the most closed in technology.
And no one would have gotten the joke. People would have said "What's up with the dirty hippie on the Apple store"? Everyone knows the Windows logo. Outside of the Slashverse, a few academics, and some industry people, no one knows who Richard Stallman is or what he stands for. And even if they did, it still wouldn't have been as funny as the Windows logo.
...and cops wonder why we hate them?
The criticism and complaints against these officers is completely justified... they should face charges at a formal hearing for this... but a blanket statement about "we hate cops" makes you look silly and juvenile. Government... federal, state, and local... has become far too powerful. But they're not yet the Nazis you and other perpetually outraged Slashdotters make them out to be.
Usually while doing a Google image search. I was searching for everything from ships to aircraft, so this doesn't appear to be just a porn/warez problem.
Still, there's a major difference between this and Windows malware. The "Install me now" routine pops up, but you have to voluntarily enter your username and password for it to infect you on the Mac. You can become infected on Windows just by surfing the wrong website. But I suppose it's only a matter of time before the scumbag malware makers of the world find a way around that.
The people in charge of this reboot... Dan Didio, Jim Lee, Geoff Johns... are some of the prime people responsible for screwing DC up over the past decade. So now they're going to hand the repair job to the same people that helped muck up the works? Sometimes I think Warner Brothers wants to kill DC off.
And some of the costume redesigns... radically changing Superman's outfight without the red tights and adding a military style collar? His costume has only been popular for 70 years, but hey, what does everyone else know.
Here's my first prediction for the "new" DC universe.... the reboot won't stop DC's habit of pushing a major "event" series every year, with so many tie-ins that you can't keep up (or afford to buy all the $3-plus issues). And the marketing for it will be the same crap we've heard ever since Crisis On Infinite Earths... "THIS is the event that changes EVERYTHING"... until the next event, that is.
Maybe now is a great time to quit collecting and just walk away.
"Thanks, but no thanks, we don't want your GMO anymore, we saw what it does."
Speak for yourself, and not for the rest of us.
DOS was a pretty good OS for low end hardware. Unlike a Unix clone, it was never meant to be a server, and so it didn't really need multitasking. It was simple, stable, and once you learned the various commands, easy to use. My only gripe about it was the memory limitations.
More to the point, this is a private person doing something privately with their earned fortune, its none of the WSJs business.
Yes it is, because Google's founders have made such a big stink about global warming. They regularly lecuture the rest of the world while they jetset with a 757. And if everyone else has their aircraft tracked by the FAA at all times, why should these guys be exempt from the same rules? Either public tracking is fine, or it's wrong... for everyone involved. If you think flight information should be private, then don't just defend the Google guys, condemn the whole program.
Some people will complain, but this was inevitable. Business-wise, it's silly to throw this much opportunity into the "free" sphere. Rupert Murdoch was right about this; "Content isn't King, it's Emperor ". If content is your business, then giving it all away is a great way to go broke fast. Ad revenue will only go so far. If it's good enough, people will pay for content.
Microsoft doesn't buy ruined companies, they buy decent ones and THEN ruin them.
Yeah, Bungie, Visio, and Hotmail sure dissapeared after Microsoft bought them. Oh wait...
Ruin, really? Before Google came along, Hotmail WAS webmail. And it's still hugely successful. Bungie helped fuel the rise of Microsoft's XBox empire. MS's purchase of Great Plains financial software has vaulted the Dynamics line from a small offering that caters to small offices to a large ERP suite that is increasingly muscling in on Oracle's and SAP's territory.
Looking at Microsoft's long history of acquisitions, it's hard to objectively say that most of them were busts. Most of them were purchased simply so that MS could integrate their products into existing suites. Microsoft bought Forethought.. the company that created Powerpoint.. for $14 million dollars. How much money do you think PowerPoint has made for Microsoft over the years? Me, I'd say that purchase has paid for itself many times over. And while you may hate it (and I certainly do), calling PowerPoint a a failure would be pure BS. It's The Standard in presentation software.
There are other numerous examples of now retired software products that, at the time, made tremendous sense to buy. FoxPro, for instance, was enormously popular, and made MS a lot of money. Ditto for Frontpage. For years, if you didn't know HTML, Frontpage was pretty much the way to get a web page up. Again, and it was tremendously successful in the market.
Here's a basic truth that we here at Slashdot are loathe to admit: Microsoft is a successful company because they've got some pretty smart people working there. All that money didn't just come from nowhere. They kinda know what they're doing over there in Redmond, you know?
...is start picking better names for their releases.
I've long said one of the things that hold back open source products from wider acceptance is that the OS/free software communities absolutely suck at marketing. Marketing isn't everything... the product has to be good... but plenty of good products have failed because the marketing effort behind them wasn't up to par. Mindshare is very often won on the ad page. Like it or not, that's reality. This is why companies spend untold millions on marketing. It's important.
Well since the train designs are stolen^H^H^H similar to the Japanese and German high speed trains, there must be relevent safety standards.
The truth is that the Chinese are good at copying things, but haven't shown any real ability to create original things. Their new "indigenous airliner" is almost certainly made with the tooling that McDonnell-Douglas left behind from their ill-fated MD-88 factory they built in China. Which is why, unsurprisingly, their new "indigenous airliner" looks almost exactly like an MD-88.
China is notorious for copyright infringement and stealing designs wholesale. A Chinese company so closely copied the Isuzu Rodeo that the automotive press discovered that many of the parts were interchangeable, including major body pieces. Their new frontline fighter, the J-10, is in many ways a copy of a copy; it's largely considered to be based on the Israeli Lavi, which was in turn based on the F-16. The engine is a straight up copy of a Russian design. Their much vaunted new J-15 naval fighter? A reverse-engineered Su-33 acquired from the Ukraine after the Russians refused a production license.
The only thing that surprises me is that we've went so long WITHOUT more government-controlled internet firewalls. I remember telling people back in 1995 that the U.S. government wouldn't tolerate a free internet for very long. I was wrong on the timeframe, but make no mistake, it's coming. The more repressive regimes of the world were the first, but even the "progressive" governments who supposedly champion a free internet will eventually have to own up to their hypocrisy and clamp down.
The problem is that some people think "progressive" means open and free and enlightened, when at its core, the whole idea of progressivism is basically nannyism... people as children that need to be cared for, with governments as the benevolent and protecting parents. Well guess what... parents lock the doors, set curfews, and make you eat your vegetables. I honestly don't think this kind of thing will fly in the US, not as long as there's a viable GOP. Our own "Net Neutrality" is never going to happen precisely because too many people fear it'll morph into this kind of nannyism. "For our own good", and all that rot.
>
You can complain to the paper, but it will just go to a jackass editor that even has a MORE overblown sense of self-worth.
Jackass editors start out as jackass writers. The biggest jackass moves to the top.
I think people would be a little surprised if they realized just how dense and shallow most journalists are.
Solution: destroy "financial services" industry. At this point it serves no purpose whatsoever, just sucks resources. Trade and investment can be handled without giant middlemen running their scams.
You think financial services aren't important? We're a market economy. Money is the grease in that engine. Who else would you want to handle financing?
Yeah, lets get rid of people that handle capital and arrange financing. We'll replace them with, oh, maybe a committee?
While we're at it, let's get rid of engineers. I mean, they don't DO anything... just sit around in a fancy office and draw on paper or play with their computer all day. It's not like they do real work or anything.
How about paying the government deficit that is about to default in a month so humans can habitat Earth first
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet. To leave this planet, we must advance the state of the art. To advance the state of the art, we must spend money on human space exploration/colonization.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
Why must we leave the planet? Nothing is going to happen to it. The Earth is a lot tougher than we are, and will be here for a long long time, so "man is destroying Earth" isn't a reason. Are you betting on the mother of comets or asteroids hitting?
As far as deficits not going away, uh, yes, they can. It's just a matter of will. In fact, I say to you that, one way or the other, deficits are going away soon. Because either we're going to get our fiscal house in order and cut our budgets, or we're simply going to default, declare the debt null and void (with all of the hellishness on Earth that entails), and start over. We don't really have much of a choice otherwise. It's either fix it or go all Tyler Durden and blow it all up for a fresh start.
And the libertarians hijacked that name from the old school socialists.
Because old school socialists wanted government out of the marketplace and a minimal number of laws. Oh wait...
The Foreign Ministry left Linux back to windows just a little while back:
http://cuduwudu.com/2011/02/germany-bids-farewell-to-linux/
I think the Munich government is still on it but may be wrong.
In a couple of years, you're going to see the same thing with LVM. There'll be an article with a title along the lines of "LVM ends their experiment with Linux" in 2013 or 2014 or so.
What will kill this is the same thing that's killed Linux on the business desktop everywhere else... lack of commercial business apps and app support. Because even with idealogical issues aside, there is no "Linux OS". There are dozens of Linux OS's, and even "related" distros... such as Debian and Ubuntu... frequently have software that's incompatible.
Really.That's a decision Ronald Reagan made in 1982, when he shut down efforts to convert the US to the metric system.
Now, of course, the US has trouble exporting to a world where nobody has Imperial-sized tools or fasteners.
That's a silly argument, and flatly wrong. Where our products are good, we have no problem whatsoever importing our products to the rest of the world. Where our products suck, we have a hard time selling them here, let alone to export markets.
The Constitution allows Congress to spend money to provide for the general welfare of the United States; the health care insurance mandate is arguably unconstitutional, but the other things you mentioned are allowed.
Allowed is not the same thing as "mandated in the Constitution". So while I'm very much in favor of cutting the defense budget and reducing the size of the military, we need to start with non-essential things in the budget, and they need to be cut the deepest.
So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?
Yes, that pretty much sums it up. People lament the "decline of rail", but our rail sector is bigger than it's ever been. So what those people are really lamenting is the the decline of passenger rail, which was largely replaced by personal automobile ownership and the rise of air travel. What remains is a large, thriving cargo rail industry that for the dollars spent, is among the most cost efficient ways of moving goods on Earth.
Similarly, in the air, we came to the conclusion that it was more efficient to move large amounts of people at subsonic speeds than it was to get smaller amounts of people to their destination faster. As a lifelong aviation freak that thrilled at the sight of fast airplanes, my logical side reluctantly admits that the Concorde model of flight... small numbers of people, expensive fares, fast travel... is never going to be as economically feasible as cramming lots of people in a boring subsonic airplane. With the ability to get work done over the Internet, there simply isn't that burning need to get to the other side of the country an hour faster.
My one hope for a silver lining in the death of civilian supersonic travel is that perhaps it will open up room for older (and just as romantic) modes of travel: airship and passenger ship travel. Airliners destroyed those sectors (along with passenger rail) because they were the fastest way to travel. Perhaps if the speed of "gettin' there" is no longer as important, there will be room in the market for economical, trans-ocean travel on airships and ocean liners again. A slim chance, but it's there (and no, I don't count vacation cruise ships as the same thing... I'm talking about regularly scheduled efficiency travel from non-carribean seaports).
Since Apple's products seem to be merging somewhat... OS X Lion will incorporate some of the features from the iPad and iPhone... how fast do they think these "A chips" will get? Will they eventually replace Intel chips in whatever passes for an iMac one day? Will we see the day when Apple makes most of the parts that goes into their products themselves, rather than subbing out major systems? Will the PowerPC fanboys that so loudly cried foul! when Apple "sold out" and went to Intel rejoice? Is an ARM-based chip "think different" enough from Intel for their liking?
I was pretty good at it when I was a kid.
I see your battleship, and raise you a fleetwide combat sim.
I was wondering what would happen if we were *really* in a war with someone like Russia, and you just THOUGHT you were playing a game, but come to find out you were really controlling some defense system, and just killed a few hundred people in the real world.
Greetings, Professor Falken. How about a nice game of chess?
Actually? No, it is not a serious issue. 800,000 GOVT employees *not working* is status quo, is it not?
You know, I get really fucking sick of this attitude.
And no matter how hard you or your friends worked, it doesn't change the fact that we have too many people working for the government. We have more people on government payrolls now than the entire manufacturing, mining, energy,and agriculture sectors combined.
There are some vital services provided by the government, and by the people that work for the government. But be honest. There are also thousands of government jobs that, if they dissapeared tomorrow, most of the public would never even notice. I work in the aviation sector, and I've been involved in the FAA grant process. There are tremendous amounts of money being spent unneccessarily. There are large swaths of people out there that get a paycheck from government largesse. The problem is that it's a false largesse, with 40 cents on the dollar being borrowed. We simply can't continue like this.