Under one of the stipulations for many industries (automotive was the focus for this article), the Western corp must:
* Partner with a Chinese company
* Share design and technical info
* License design and IP in such a way that the partner company can create new designs from the original and derivative works are owned by the Chinese company
Damn that cut and paste! The comment I meant to reply to was this:
On a side note I hope that IBM really does merge with Apple because after this deal I think I am not going to get another Thinkpad and start buying Powerbooks instead.
The main thing IBM is getting is freedom from Microsoft. As long as they had the PC line they couldn't totally piss off MS as they could raise the price on Windows to the Normal level. (MS have done this once)
Considering how many people I've seen making this statement in this thread, I have to wonder if perhaps this was part of the intent.
Microprocessors is a more profitable business to IBM than PC's were. IBM has all the reason in the world to facilitate Apple's success. Especially since they no longer compete in that space. All upside for IBM, and no downside.
The main thing IBM is getting is freedom from Microsoft. As long as they had the PC line they couldn't totally piss off MS as they could raise the price on Windows to the Normal level. (MS have done this once)
Yes, but that was found to be a legally actionable item in their anti-trust case. I believe they're now prohibited from doing that.
The most interesting bizarre theory behind some of this was posed at The Register. They claim that IBM may be interested in buying or allying with Apple. It makes some sense, Apple are certainly one of the big vendors for IBM's Power chips, and it would give them a nice UNIX desktop to push, while giving Apple a little more "corporate credibility" and give them a chance to creep into the business desktop market more.
Realistically though, I just don't quite see it. I don't think Apple could quite take the image hit that being owned by IBM would entail, nor do I think the gains would really suit IBM that well. Perhaps some sort of closer alliance may result, but I would expect that to be about as far as things go. Still, and interesting but of completely wild speculation.
What might slightly more sense would be IBM and Apple forming a subsidiary as a joint venture, and creating a standard business desktop/notebook line, and possibly both of them re-branding it and selling it under their own brands. This would address the issue of the Mac being a single-source vendor, and allow for product cycles and features that more closely reflect the needs of business, without diluting Apple's brand equity in the consumer/specialty market.
Interesting. The Reuters story states that Lenovo takes ownership of the "Think" brand name, whereas the news.com article states that IBM only grants them the right to use it for 5 years. I wonder which it is? That could be a critical factor in future branding of IBM products.
Somehow, I doubt that IBM would have forfieted their right to the "Think" meme altogether.
(2) There will NEVER be another notebook brand that has the superb keyboards that the Thinkpads do. Those keyboards make the machine. Between the keyboard and the support network, it's easy to see why Thinkpads are such a consistent number one choice.
One thing I don't recall seeing mentioned in the article is whether IBM held on to the rights of their intellectual property (keyboards and such). If IBM were to subsequently to begin offering a PPC based notebook (OS X or otherwise), would they still retain the rights to their more celebrated features?
Also, I wonder if the deal for the "Think" trademark is exclusive. Or will IBM retain the right to use it for other product lines?
The questions becomes -- will it be successful, or will five years from now people be talking about the "good old days" when IBM made their PCs with quality and usability in mind.
Lenovo is buying a lot of expertise for their money in this area, so maybe they'll be able to pull it off. Or maybe not. Personally, I'm an Apple guy now for my laptops, so I couldn't really care less:).
And, if not, it'll take about five years for the glow of the IBM brand equity to wear off should Lenovo fuck up.
By that time, IBM will have safely distanced itself from an inferior product, not to mention accumulated a tidy profit from their share in Lenovo.
IBM then simply dumps their interest in Lenovo, and washes their hands of the whole mess.
People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.
You mean their hardware used to be reliable, back in the days of the K series servers. And I'd also say they had the most advanced Unix back in those days, too.
But that was then, this is now. I've had nothing but problems with their rp series. And don't even talk to me about their disk arrays, I have 2 Sure-Sores issuing I/O errors for the last 8 months, even after HP has replaced virtually every part, including the back-planes, updating the firmware, and replacing the drives twice over.
As for HP-UX, at this late date it still doesn't even have support for shadow passwords (yeah, Trusted Host, I know - but have you ever tried writing scripts to audit that infernal database they use?), except as a non-supported kludge, and that only as of 11i.
At my shop, we're dumping both HP and Sun in favor of IBM's p-series servers (AIX not Linux), and I'm getting a lot more sleep at night.
Still, until Steve Jobs starts knocking on doors looking to sell Apple, it's just silly to talk about stuff like this- it's just not going to happen unless it's Steve's idea... rrright. That's what he's been building the company up for, a sale! Ha!
Considering Steve has his iTunes and iPod business going great guns, perhaps the Mac business isn't as important to Apple as it once was.
Maybe Steve is looking to sell his PC division, too!
Please explain how this is going to or could put Microsoft out of business? Is Apples market share going to magically grow from under 5% to over 80%? There is no chance that this merger will kill Microsoft as IBM will still continue to distribute MS products and they are what are in high demand.
Well, I doubt it could do that, but that isn't the point. Huge as it is, one of the reasons IBM is (allegedly) getting out of the PC hardware business because the margins aren't big enough to make being in it worthwhile. While Macs have a smaller niche, Apple makes a higher profit per machine sold than most PC vendors.
Anyway, consider the possibility of OS X on P-series workstations and workgroup servers. While it's doubtful there would be a massive paradigm shift, there are quite a few opportunities for expanding the Mac market share, and a whole lot of potential bucks to be made.
I can't imagine IBM allowing a foreign manufacturer to sell products with IBM's name/logo on it. Seems awfully risky to their rep.
I don't know that IBM selling out entirely is a foregone conclusion. There's an article by the Register that speculates what's being negotiated is more likely a joint venture than a buyout. Which makes sense. IBM would still be able to maintain control of the branding in that case.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are simply no jobs to go around.
I don't know that jobs will be eliminated, but they may change. When I first got into IT in the late 1970s, you needed a shift of about 20 people just to run a mainframe. People to monitor the console, people to mount the tapes, people to run the printers, etc. Eventually most of those jobs were eliminated, i.e. automated tape libraries replaced tape handlers, online archival systems largely replaced the need to print massive reports, and automation software determined what jobs to run when and checked for error conditions. Everybody thought that was the end of having a career in IT.
But that was back in the '80s, before the tech boom of the '90s. True, there weren't as many jobs running mainframes, but plenty of new jobs opened up such as LAN and Unix admins, network techs, security specialists, etc. Instead of jobs being eliminated, suddenly there were more jobs than there were people to fill them.
If you're just going to sit on your ass and expect make a career out of what you're doing now, then you'll probably be out of a job eventually (ask any COBOL programmer or tape handler from the '80s). But if you keep learning new skills as technology evolves, you'll probably always have a job. When I first moved from mainframes to Unix in the early '90s, Unix systems were fairly primitive and required a lot of massaging. Now that they've evolved to the point where they've acquired nearly mainframe like reliability, they need less admins to support, but on the other hand you have new ancillary technologies like SAN's that also require specialized knowledge to manage. These days, I spend more time on SAN management than I do on Unix administration proper.
I've been through this before. Remember, even if they replace the administrator with management automation, someone has to admin the management automation too. Make sure that someone is you.
I, for one, am glad that Intel is losing. I hope that IBM beats the pants off of it.
Well, you're already getting your wish in the enterprise space. There are sure a lot more Power servers than Itanium ones out there.
Of course, on the desktop it's another story. Power isn't going anywhere there unless the world changes to Macintosh. Nice as they are, I just don't see that happening. Too much is invested in x86.
I get the feeling there must be more to the story than meets the eye here. If this woman had been paralyzed for 20 years, wouldn't her muscles be atrophied? Even if you repaired the nerve damage, it seems to me she wouldn't have just been able to get up and walk, at least without a lot of restorative therapy.
So, while I agree that exploration is good in its own right, we need to apply financial sense to the effort of exploration itself, and we aren't doing that as much as we should.
Sorry to see you got moded as a Troll, because, as much as I hate to admit it, you do have a point.
As spectacular as some of our maned missions have been, their cost/benefit ratio in terms of advancing the state of the art has been dubious. While putting men on the moon was quite possibly the greatest achievement in history, it really did little to help us develop a sustainable model for maned space flight.
Perhaps by having invested more in infrastructure, as you point out, such as propulsion and navigation system, we would have had a more viable, economical and sustainable model for maned space flight, albeit at the sacrifice of immediately gratifying, but ultimately unsustainable, one shot deals like the Apollo program.
I don't think it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be educational. BTW, I wrote a JE a while back with this very idea: Prior Art.
That's nothing. Back in the 80's a buddy and me wrote a game based on the Kennedy assassination for the Commodore 64.
It was kinda cool. It played a cheesy version of "Hail to the Chief" while you shot at the president. If you remember the kind of sounds that came out of a Commodore, you know what I mean.
Naturaly, not everybody thought it was as funny as we did. My girlfriend came home from work, took a look at our game and the collection of beer bottles around the apartment, and made a face like she'd bit into a lemon. She asked us, "Don't you two shingle-heads have anything better to do?"
I gave a copy of it to friend to take to work with him at the water department. He showed it to some old man who worked there. I understand the old geezer flipped out, and threatened to call the FBI on us.
We uploaded it up to some bulletin board, and promptly got banned after some of the other customers complained.
I guess we should have stuck with it, since it looks like there's a buck to made.
But we didn't exactly get a lot of encouragement at the time. Didn't look very promising. I wonder if there's still a copy of our version floating around on the net some where?
You know people are crazy when they think it's better to spend public money on missiles than on schools.
You know people are stupid when they don't know why the federal government was established in the first place. Read the Constitution. It enumerates, among other reasons, that this government is being established "to provide for the common defense". It doesn't say anything about "provide for the common education", in fact the first public schools didn't appear until 1840, nearly 50 years after the government was established.
In any event, education is mostly funded by local taxes, and defense is funded mostly by federal taxes, so again, we're talking apples and oranges here. Federal money not spent on defense will not necessarily be spent on education, because it isn't the federal government's job to fund education in the first place.
If you didn't know that, apparently the tax dollars spent on your education went down the toilet.
Corporate welfare for defense contractors is good for big corporations.
Where did I ever advocate corporate welfare for defense contractors? Simply paying a private entity for goods and services is not "welfare". Subsidizing a company that would go out of business otherwise would be, but I never advocated doing that. If they can't compete in the market place, fuck 'em, let 'em fold.
A generally educated population is good for everyone (even if you pay for a private education, you'll probably want a decent number of skilled potential employees, and indeed employers).
Yes it is. But you're assuming that if the public sector doesn't provide an education, no education will be provided. As I pointed out, most people already are paying for their children's education through property taxes anyway.
The government isn't in the business of providing shoes, either, but the last time I checked, shoes of every style, color, size and price are easily available.
What gives the government the right to pay for other people's education with your money? There's various moral theories of why this is OK. The one I like is the idea of the social contract.
A contract is a voluntary agreement entered into by two or more consenting parties. Where did I give my consent to be party to this "social contract"?
The first premise is that you don't own the country you live in (seems reasonable), and therefore that you owe the landlord (government) some kind of rent.
That's downright asinine. The government is not the "landlord", nor the owner of the country either. People owned property prior to the establishment of the government. The government was established, in part, to protect private property. Property ownership was prior to government.
If there is no landlord/government, there is no-one to uphold your claim to your property so you don't really own anything anyway.
I'd like to see you break into my house and explain to my Doberman that he doesn't own the property without government to enforce his claim.
Best of luck.
That's a silly statement. Of course I can exercise force as an individual to enforce my claim to my property. Government is simply the collective delegation of that use of force to a central authority.
Now, the government is not required to spend your rent solely on improving your own life any more than your (real life) landlord is -- the money is legitimately owned by the government.
The primary function of government, as I pointed out, is protection of the rights of the individuals who created it. The government is here to serve me, I am not here to serve the government (unless this is a dictatorship, that is). As far as whether the money is legitimately the governments, I refer you to the "takings clause" of the 5th Amendment.
Therefore, given a democratic mandate, the government should be free to spend the money on anything which is in the interest of a substantial segment of the population, so long as no laws are broken.
"Democratic mandate", eh? So if two or more muggers "vote" to take your money for the "common good" (aka the benefit of the muggers), the fact that you've been outvoted legitimizes the mugging?
You don't seem to understand the concept that while the immediate benefit goes to the student, it will propagate back to the society.
Who is "society"? Point to it.
"Society", as you are pleased to call it, is only an aggregation of individuals. What you are proposing is to take money away from individual A for the benefit of individual B. That may be good for individual B, but it is certainly not good for individual A. Or simply, it benefits some members of society at the expense of other members of society.
There's no such thing as "the good of society". That's a tip-off you're getting handed a line of bullshit right there. Nobody ever had to use that line to convince you to do something that was in your interest. If something is in your interest, they can tell you how and why it's in your interest. The only time the "for the good of society" line comes out is when they can't tell you how something is in your interest, indeed, it's usually a pretty good sign that what's being proposed is very much against your interests.
Again, all (compelling) moral issues aside, the simple economical reason for giving grants is that it will result in higher revenues for the grantor.
Compelling moral issue: stealing is wrong.
If an unskilled worker makes $20,000 and pays $3,000 in taxes and an educated one makes $50,000 and pays $10,000, that would mean a net revenue increase of $280,000 over a 40-year career for the government.
Excuse me, but that $50,000 job will still exist whether or not a particular individual is educated to fill it or not. Simply getting an education will not make a job magically appear out of your ass. Education may qualify you for a job that already exists, but it doesn't create the job. Somebody will still fill that job, even if it isn't necessarily you.
That will fund a whole lot of essentials.
What are these "essentials", and essential to whom?
And as I pointed out, those jobs that are taxed will still exist whether or not any particular individual is qualified to fill it.
Like the military.
I hate to point this out, but until the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, authorizing the federal government to lay and collect income taxes, the military was quite adequately funded by tariffs and excise taxes. Funding the military alone would not require the collection of an income tax.
But you don't have to pay anyone else now, do you?
What difference does that make? Whether I pay a private party for them or I pay through taxes, I still pay for them.
This is basic economics. It's better for you to live in a country in which other people earn well, too.
I understand that. But I fail to see why other people earning well is contingent on my being forced to fund their education. Let me point out, I earn considerably more than our friend who had his education funded by taxpayers like me, and I don't have a college education.
All government programs are funded by tax revenue (well, except under the current President) and you receive direct benefit from it.
No, I don't receive a direct benefit from them. Explain how you think I receive a direct benefit from them.
How did you get that money? Was your country invaded by the Soviets at any point?
You're talking apples and oranges again. Everybody presumably has an interest in having their life and property protected. Therefore, everybody has an interest in subsidizing the military.
There's a distinction between subsidizing services that everyone derives an equal benefit from, and being forced to subsidize a service that's beneficial to one group or individual at the expense of other groups or individuals.
Did you go to elementary school?
Yes, my parents paid for that through property taxes. Let me point out that they still had to pay property taxes to support the public schools long after I was no longer attending. If they had been able to keep the money they paid in property taxes, rather than support those schools, they would have been able to send me to a private school for considerably less than they paid in property taxes over a lifetime.
Have you ever been the victim of a crime?
Yep. And? How did paying taxes prevent that?
The reality is that you're able to make money because someone else's money was spent to give you the opportunity to do so. That's how civilized societies work.
Straw-man. I've never disputed that there are services, such as defense, that need to be publicly funded. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's desirable to publicly fund everybody's wants and needs, nor that we all benefit proportionately from our contributions to public goods and services. In fact, in most cases, we don't. Which is why the public sector should be limited to the absolute minimum.
What's going on in the USA is that we're in the process of forfeiting our economic dominance by screwing up our legal system such that doing business with American companies is becoming more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. It's not like there are many industries where we enjoy a monopoly any more, and these kind of laws are just further incentive for other countries to take their business elsewhere.
Did you go to school? Do you drive on a road? Does the police patrol your block? Does the military defend your homeland?
Those are services I derive a direct benefit from, and if I didn't pay government for them, I'd still have to pay somebody else to provide (most of) them.
What we're talking about here is, the government is taking my money to spend for somebody else's benefit. I derive no benefit from having spent the money for the parent poster's having received an education and holding down a $70k job.
Apples and oranges here.
The idea is that an unskilled worker will make, what, $20,000 a year, a college-educated one probably around $45,000-$75,000. All moral issues aside, the government views the increased tax revenue as a fair trade.
That's fine for the government, but their using my money to make this "fair trade" with.
When this person whom the government educates at my expense gets his $70k job, they don't send me refund out of his taxes.
The fact that the government may benefit from tax revenues generated from investing my money doesn't necessarily mean any of those benefits accrues to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Under one of the stipulations for many industries (automotive was the focus for this article), the Western corp must:
* Partner with a Chinese company
* Share design and technical info
* License design and IP in such a way that the partner company can create new designs from the original and derivative works are owned by the Chinese company
Well, tying the two stories together, it doesn't look like IBM is going to have any problem with that
Damn that cut and paste! The comment I meant to reply to was this:
On a side note I hope that IBM really does merge with Apple because after this deal I think I am not going to get another Thinkpad and start buying Powerbooks instead.
Shoulda previewed!
The main thing IBM is getting is freedom from Microsoft. As long as they had the PC line they couldn't totally piss off MS as they could raise the price on Windows to the Normal level. (MS have done this once)
Considering how many people I've seen making this statement in this thread, I have to wonder if perhaps this was part of the intent.
Microprocessors is a more profitable business to IBM than PC's were. IBM has all the reason in the world to facilitate Apple's success. Especially since they no longer compete in that space. All upside for IBM, and no downside.
The main thing IBM is getting is freedom from Microsoft. As long as they had the PC line they couldn't totally piss off MS as they could raise the price on Windows to the Normal level. (MS have done this once)
Yes, but that was found to be a legally actionable item in their anti-trust case. I believe they're now prohibited from doing that.
The most interesting bizarre theory behind some of this was posed at The Register. They claim that IBM may be interested in buying or allying with Apple. It makes some sense, Apple are certainly one of the big vendors for IBM's Power chips, and it would give them a nice UNIX desktop to push, while giving Apple a little more "corporate credibility" and give them a chance to creep into the business desktop market more.
Realistically though, I just don't quite see it. I don't think Apple could quite take the image hit that being owned by IBM would entail, nor do I think the gains would really suit IBM that well. Perhaps some sort of closer alliance may result, but I would expect that to be about as far as things go. Still, and interesting but of completely wild speculation.
What might slightly more sense would be IBM and Apple forming a subsidiary as a joint venture, and creating a standard business desktop/notebook line, and possibly both of them re-branding it and selling it under their own brands. This would address the issue of the Mac being a single-source vendor, and allow for product cycles and features that more closely reflect the needs of business, without diluting Apple's brand equity in the consumer/specialty market.
Dell may have a point there.
But going forward that will be Lenovo's problem, not IBM's.
Interesting. The Reuters story states that Lenovo takes ownership of the "Think" brand name, whereas the news.com article states that IBM only grants them the right to use it for 5 years. I wonder which it is? That could be a critical factor in future branding of IBM products.
Somehow, I doubt that IBM would have forfieted their right to the "Think" meme altogether.
(2) There will NEVER be another notebook brand that has the superb keyboards that the Thinkpads do. Those keyboards make the machine. Between the keyboard and the support network, it's easy to see why Thinkpads are such a consistent number one choice.
One thing I don't recall seeing mentioned in the article is whether IBM held on to the rights of their intellectual property (keyboards and such). If IBM were to subsequently to begin offering a PPC based notebook (OS X or otherwise), would they still retain the rights to their more celebrated features?
Also, I wonder if the deal for the "Think" trademark is exclusive. Or will IBM retain the right to use it for other product lines?
The questions becomes -- will it be successful, or will five years from now people be talking about the "good old days" when IBM made their PCs with quality and usability in mind.
:).
Lenovo is buying a lot of expertise for their money in this area, so maybe they'll be able to pull it off. Or maybe not. Personally, I'm an Apple guy now for my laptops, so I couldn't really care less
And, if not, it'll take about five years for the glow of the IBM brand equity to wear off should Lenovo fuck up.
By that time, IBM will have safely distanced itself from an inferior product, not to mention accumulated a tidy profit from their share in Lenovo.
IBM then simply dumps their interest in Lenovo, and washes their hands of the whole mess.
People knock HP-UX but personally I find it pretty good, plus the hardware is a damn site more reliable than Suns sorry offerings.
You mean their hardware used to be reliable, back in the days of the K series servers. And I'd also say they had the most advanced Unix back in those days, too.
But that was then, this is now. I've had nothing but problems with their rp series. And don't even talk to me about their disk arrays, I have 2 Sure-Sores issuing I/O errors for the last 8 months, even after HP has replaced virtually every part, including the back-planes, updating the firmware, and replacing the drives twice over.
As for HP-UX, at this late date it still doesn't even have support for shadow passwords (yeah, Trusted Host, I know - but have you ever tried writing scripts to audit that infernal database they use?), except as a non-supported kludge, and that only as of 11i.
At my shop, we're dumping both HP and Sun in favor of IBM's p-series servers (AIX not Linux), and I'm getting a lot more sleep at night.
Still, until Steve Jobs starts knocking on doors looking to sell Apple, it's just silly to talk about stuff like this- it's just not going to happen unless it's Steve's idea... rrright. That's what he's been building the company up for, a sale! Ha!
Considering Steve has his iTunes and iPod business going great guns, perhaps the Mac business isn't as important to Apple as it once was.
Maybe Steve is looking to sell his PC division, too!
Please explain how this is going to or could put Microsoft out of business? Is Apples market share going to magically grow from under 5% to over 80%? There is no chance that this merger will kill Microsoft as IBM will still continue to distribute MS products and they are what are in high demand.
Well, I doubt it could do that, but that isn't the point. Huge as it is, one of the reasons IBM is (allegedly) getting out of the PC hardware business because the margins aren't big enough to make being in it worthwhile. While Macs have a smaller niche, Apple makes a higher profit per machine sold than most PC vendors.
Anyway, consider the possibility of OS X on P-series workstations and workgroup servers. While it's doubtful there would be a massive paradigm shift, there are quite a few opportunities for expanding the Mac market share, and a whole lot of potential bucks to be made.
I can't imagine IBM allowing a foreign manufacturer to sell products with IBM's name/logo on it. Seems awfully risky to their rep.
I don't know that IBM selling out entirely is a foregone conclusion. There's an article by the Register that speculates what's being negotiated is more likely a joint venture than a buyout. Which makes sense. IBM would still be able to maintain control of the branding in that case.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are simply no jobs to go around.
I don't know that jobs will be eliminated, but they may change. When I first got into IT in the late 1970s, you needed a shift of about 20 people just to run a mainframe. People to monitor the console, people to mount the tapes, people to run the printers, etc. Eventually most of those jobs were eliminated, i.e. automated tape libraries replaced tape handlers, online archival systems largely replaced the need to print massive reports, and automation software determined what jobs to run when and checked for error conditions. Everybody thought that was the end of having a career in IT.
But that was back in the '80s, before the tech boom of the '90s. True, there weren't as many jobs running mainframes, but plenty of new jobs opened up such as LAN and Unix admins, network techs, security specialists, etc. Instead of jobs being eliminated, suddenly there were more jobs than there were people to fill them.
If you're just going to sit on your ass and expect make a career out of what you're doing now, then you'll probably be out of a job eventually (ask any COBOL programmer or tape handler from the '80s). But if you keep learning new skills as technology evolves, you'll probably always have a job. When I first moved from mainframes to Unix in the early '90s, Unix systems were fairly primitive and required a lot of massaging. Now that they've evolved to the point where they've acquired nearly mainframe like reliability, they need less admins to support, but on the other hand you have new ancillary technologies like SAN's that also require specialized knowledge to manage. These days, I spend more time on SAN management than I do on Unix administration proper.
I've been through this before. Remember, even if they replace the administrator with management automation, someone has to admin the management automation too. Make sure that someone is you.
I, for one, am glad that Intel is losing. I hope that IBM beats the pants off of it.
Well, you're already getting your wish in the enterprise space. There are sure a lot more Power servers than Itanium ones out there.
Of course, on the desktop it's another story. Power isn't going anywhere there unless the world changes to Macintosh. Nice as they are, I just don't see that happening. Too much is invested in x86.
But hey, it's nice to dream.
I get the feeling there must be more to the story than meets the eye here. If this woman had been paralyzed for 20 years, wouldn't her muscles be atrophied? Even if you repaired the nerve damage, it seems to me she wouldn't have just been able to get up and walk, at least without a lot of restorative therapy.
Is there something I'm missing here?
I would not be surprised to see Apple use the chips if they get the OS ported to it.
Do you know if this chip uses the PPC instruction set, or a derivation of it?
Or does this chip use a different instruction set altogether?
When a government ends up with BSODs on 60000 computers, it can't be good for Microsoft.
No, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for the rest of us!
Let's hope Congress plans to upgrade soon!
See? Even Microsoft is good for something!
So, while I agree that exploration is good in its own right, we need to apply financial sense to the effort of exploration itself, and we aren't doing that as much as we should.
Sorry to see you got moded as a Troll, because, as much as I hate to admit it, you do have a point.
As spectacular as some of our maned missions have been, their cost/benefit ratio in terms of advancing the state of the art has been dubious. While putting men on the moon was quite possibly the greatest achievement in history, it really did little to help us develop a sustainable model for maned space flight.
Perhaps by having invested more in infrastructure, as you point out, such as propulsion and navigation system, we would have had a more viable, economical and sustainable model for maned space flight, albeit at the sacrifice of immediately gratifying, but ultimately unsustainable, one shot deals like the Apollo program.
I don't think it's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be educational. BTW, I wrote a JE a while back with this very idea: Prior Art.
That's nothing. Back in the 80's a buddy and me wrote a game based on the Kennedy assassination for the Commodore 64.
It was kinda cool. It played a cheesy version of "Hail to the Chief" while you shot at the president. If you remember the kind of sounds that came out of a Commodore, you know what I mean.
Naturaly, not everybody thought it was as funny as we did. My girlfriend came home from work, took a look at our game and the collection of beer bottles around the apartment, and made a face like she'd bit into a lemon. She asked us, "Don't you two shingle-heads have anything better to do?"
I gave a copy of it to friend to take to work with him at the water department. He showed it to some old man who worked there. I understand the old geezer flipped out, and threatened to call the FBI on us.
We uploaded it up to some bulletin board, and promptly got banned after some of the other customers complained.
I guess we should have stuck with it, since it looks like there's a buck to made.
But we didn't exactly get a lot of encouragement at the time. Didn't look very promising. I wonder if there's still a copy of our version floating around on the net some where?
You know people are crazy when they think it's better to spend public money on missiles than on schools.
You know people are stupid when they don't know why the federal government was established in the first place. Read the Constitution. It enumerates, among other reasons, that this government is being established "to provide for the common defense". It doesn't say anything about "provide for the common education", in fact the first public schools didn't appear until 1840, nearly 50 years after the government was established.
In any event, education is mostly funded by local taxes, and defense is funded mostly by federal taxes, so again, we're talking apples and oranges here. Federal money not spent on defense will not necessarily be spent on education, because it isn't the federal government's job to fund education in the first place.
If you didn't know that, apparently the tax dollars spent on your education went down the toilet.
Corporate welfare for defense contractors is good for big corporations.
Where did I ever advocate corporate welfare for defense contractors? Simply paying a private entity for goods and services is not "welfare". Subsidizing a company that would go out of business otherwise would be, but I never advocated doing that. If they can't compete in the market place, fuck 'em, let 'em fold.
A generally educated population is good for everyone (even if you pay for a private education, you'll probably want a decent number of skilled potential employees, and indeed employers).
Yes it is. But you're assuming that if the public sector doesn't provide an education, no education will be provided. As I pointed out, most people already are paying for their children's education through property taxes anyway.
The government isn't in the business of providing shoes, either, but the last time I checked, shoes of every style, color, size and price are easily available.
What gives the government the right to pay for other people's education with your money? There's various moral theories of why this is OK. The one I like is the idea of the social contract.
A contract is a voluntary agreement entered into by two or more consenting parties. Where did I give my consent to be party to this "social contract"?
The first premise is that you don't own the country you live in (seems reasonable), and therefore that you owe the landlord (government) some kind of rent.
That's downright asinine. The government is not the "landlord", nor the owner of the country either. People owned property prior to the establishment of the government. The government was established, in part, to protect private property. Property ownership was prior to government.
If there is no landlord/government, there is no-one to uphold your claim to your property so you don't really own anything anyway.
I'd like to see you break into my house and explain to my Doberman that he doesn't own the property without government to enforce his claim.
Best of luck.
That's a silly statement. Of course I can exercise force as an individual to enforce my claim to my property. Government is simply the collective delegation of that use of force to a central authority.
Now, the government is not required to spend your rent solely on improving your own life any more than your (real life) landlord is -- the money is legitimately owned by the government.
The primary function of government, as I pointed out, is protection of the rights of the individuals who created it. The government is here to serve me, I am not here to serve the government (unless this is a dictatorship, that is). As far as whether the money is legitimately the governments, I refer you to the "takings clause" of the 5th Amendment.
Therefore, given a democratic mandate, the government should be free to spend the money on anything which is in the interest of a substantial segment of the population, so long as no laws are broken.
"Democratic mandate", eh? So if two or more muggers "vote" to take your money for the "common good" (aka the benefit of the muggers), the fact that you've been outvoted legitimizes the mugging?
You don't seem to understand the concept that while the immediate benefit goes to the student, it will propagate back to the society.
Who is "society"? Point to it.
"Society", as you are pleased to call it, is only an aggregation of individuals. What you are proposing is to take money away from individual A for the benefit of individual B. That may be good for individual B, but it is certainly not good for individual A. Or simply, it benefits some members of society at the expense of other members of society.
There's no such thing as "the good of society". That's a tip-off you're getting handed a line of bullshit right there. Nobody ever had to use that line to convince you to do something that was in your interest. If something is in your interest, they can tell you how and why it's in your interest. The only time the "for the good of society" line comes out is when they can't tell you how something is in your interest, indeed, it's usually a pretty good sign that what's being proposed is very much against your interests.
Again, all (compelling) moral issues aside, the simple economical reason for giving grants is that it will result in higher revenues for the grantor.
Compelling moral issue: stealing is wrong.
If an unskilled worker makes $20,000 and pays $3,000 in taxes and an educated one makes $50,000 and pays $10,000, that would mean a net revenue increase of $280,000 over a 40-year career for the government.
Excuse me, but that $50,000 job will still exist whether or not a particular individual is educated to fill it or not. Simply getting an education will not make a job magically appear out of your ass. Education may qualify you for a job that already exists, but it doesn't create the job. Somebody will still fill that job, even if it isn't necessarily you.
That will fund a whole lot of essentials.
What are these "essentials", and essential to whom?
And as I pointed out, those jobs that are taxed will still exist whether or not any particular individual is qualified to fill it.
Like the military.
I hate to point this out, but until the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, authorizing the federal government to lay and collect income taxes, the military was quite adequately funded by tariffs and excise taxes. Funding the military alone would not require the collection of an income tax.
But you don't have to pay anyone else now, do you?
What difference does that make? Whether I pay a private party for them or I pay through taxes, I still pay for them.
This is basic economics. It's better for you to live in a country in which other people earn well, too.
I understand that. But I fail to see why other people earning well is contingent on my being forced to fund their education. Let me point out, I earn considerably more than our friend who had his education funded by taxpayers like me, and I don't have a college education.
All government programs are funded by tax revenue (well, except under the current President) and you receive direct benefit from it.
No, I don't receive a direct benefit from them. Explain how you think I receive a direct benefit from them.
How did you get that money? Was your country invaded by the Soviets at any point?
You're talking apples and oranges again. Everybody presumably has an interest in having their life and property protected. Therefore, everybody has an interest in subsidizing the military.
There's a distinction between subsidizing services that everyone derives an equal benefit from, and being forced to subsidize a service that's beneficial to one group or individual at the expense of other groups or individuals.
Did you go to elementary school?
Yes, my parents paid for that through property taxes. Let me point out that they still had to pay property taxes to support the public schools long after I was no longer attending. If they had been able to keep the money they paid in property taxes, rather than support those schools, they would have been able to send me to a private school for considerably less than they paid in property taxes over a lifetime.
Have you ever been the victim of a crime?
Yep. And? How did paying taxes prevent that?
The reality is that you're able to make money because someone else's money was spent to give you the opportunity to do so. That's how civilized societies work.
Straw-man. I've never disputed that there are services, such as defense, that need to be publicly funded. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's desirable to publicly fund everybody's wants and needs, nor that we all benefit proportionately from our contributions to public goods and services. In fact, in most cases, we don't. Which is why the public sector should be limited to the absolute minimum.
Shouldn't that be: "What's going on in the USA?"
What's going on in the USA is that we're in the process of forfeiting our economic dominance by screwing up our legal system such that doing business with American companies is becoming more of a pain in the ass than it's worth. It's not like there are many industries where we enjoy a monopoly any more, and these kind of laws are just further incentive for other countries to take their business elsewhere.
Did you go to school? Do you drive on a road? Does the police patrol your block? Does the military defend your homeland?
Those are services I derive a direct benefit from, and if I didn't pay government for them, I'd still have to pay somebody else to provide (most of) them.
What we're talking about here is, the government is taking my money to spend for somebody else's benefit. I derive no benefit from having spent the money for the parent poster's having received an education and holding down a $70k job.
Apples and oranges here.
The idea is that an unskilled worker will make, what, $20,000 a year, a college-educated one probably around $45,000-$75,000. All moral issues aside, the government views the increased tax revenue as a fair trade.
That's fine for the government, but their using my money to make this "fair trade" with.
When this person whom the government educates at my expense gets his $70k job, they don't send me refund out of his taxes.
The fact that the government may benefit from tax revenues generated from investing my money doesn't necessarily mean any of those benefits accrues to me.