You'll take a bribe to pretend to use their search engine to find products. This helps them persuade advertisers that people use Bing to find products - and so they should advertise on Bing and pay top rate. Now, of course they're paying out more than they're taking in, or the books would be written in black ink.
Now what happens when they stop bribing people to pretend to use their search to find products - as eventually they must? Three guesses, no peeking at the answers.
Exactly. On the other hand, ion propulsion may give a distinct light signature - and enough of it to indicate an active spacefaring culture. I wonder if we're looking for that fingerprint. For sure once that becomes the mode of space travel, there will be no hiding any more.
In Zimbabwe they were the breadbasket of Africa. But their farmers were white, the descendants of European colonists mostly. They ran off the white farmers or killed them - by government mandate - and gave their farms to Army thugs with no training, experience or motivation to be farmers.
Are you aware of some paint that's harder than glass? I'm not. I would be interested in that. Glass particles abrade surfaces that are softer than them. For all cases of "Volcanic tephra" the list of minerals harder than them would be: diamond.
Welcome back old friend. I hope you're with us for a while.
First, the moral position: If I was them, I'd come here. I can't hold it against them if they do what I would do if I were in their place. How could I do that? I could tell myself I was an idiot? Legal? What is legal? If your daughter needs bread you do what you have to do to get her bread - weather, obstacles, international borders notwithstanding. The borders don't matter to her - if she doesn't get calories she'll die no matter which side of a border she's on.
Telling the people of Africa to "move to where the food is" is cynical at best.
Actually, none of them are reading this because Internet access is sparse in the Sahele, and they have other stuff to look at. That means I'm being insentive for show to my fellow Internet geeks. Yeah, that's what this is about.
You're probably pinning me as some "don't care" prick. I really do care. I just don't see what I can do. If I give these people money, it winds up in the hands of the junta that's killing them.
Look, this is Africa. I have a reasonable amount of disposabe income and if I could actually help the poor there with it they could have it. But I can't. The best I can do is to say: move to where the food is. If you can find a path out of Africa, go!.
I'm guessing you're assuming more than one developer per indoor pool. I can see where a mistaken drive for economy might drive you to those dire straits, but I would endeavor to dissuade you from that false economy. Each developer is more than adequately connected to his peers via telepresence. He doesn't need physical proximity and in fact that is a deterrent to productivity. Excessive contact with humans in an uncontrolled setting can set a good programmer back six months. It's best if each has his own pool.
Programmers as a rule have control issues. If you try to defeat this, you'll lose 90% of why you hired them. Control is an important aspect of security. Programmers who are confident they have control of their personal situation write more secure code than programmers in doubt. It's best if you put them by the pool with iron-clad contracts that alleviate any issues in this regard they might have, so they can focus on producing for you the best possible product.
That's so sexist. I don't know what to say except that I'm deleting you from my "slashdot friends". You're a sick puppy.
The pool though as a practical matter should be coed and clothing optional, as most coders prefer their pools that way and that's the best path to good code.
To promote aid in most regions of Africa, you have to be prepared to deliver that aid against armed resistance, or accept that that aid might be coopted to feed the army that oppresses people who need aid. That's not really helping.
I really do want to help these folk, and I can think of no better way to do that than to repeat the message of the great (and missed) Sam Kinnison: Move to where the food is. You're in a freaking desert where things don't grow. MOVE.
The thing that killed the PDA is that Microsoft mindfucked (sorry, there's no better term) the vendors into believing that PDA users truly needed some such abortions as pocket Excel and Pocket Word. Once they accepted that, Windows Mobile was assumed of course, since those apps don't run on anything else. This very experience - define the scope, own the scope, kill the scope should give us pause about adopting Microsoft's mobile offerings in the future.
It's not about the widget - it's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. Once sold on the Microsoft apps, the PDA vendors were doomed to failed products that delivered a negative experience because WiMo truly does suck. The PDA died a premature death because we tried to run a poor OS on it. Many of these devices today give good service having been converted to an alternate OS. I remember my own experience with this. I learned to swear like a drunken sailor. These devices, once you put a sane OS on them, are still worthy of some great stuff to this day. They are more perfomant than the onboard computers for Apollo 11. WiMo? The man-years this OS has cost me in conjunction with Pocket Excel is in the scores. Let me put it this way: WiMo has caused me to fail my commitments. I won't be using it again because when I commit I intend to deliver.
This is also what dooms the netbook to diminishing share. Now that netbook vendors have been convinced to not deliver Linux as their OS, the category will disappear. The low requirements, performance and reliability of Linux is what built this market and now the Microsoft has convinced the OEMs to abandon that in favor of their bloated, poorly performant, unreliable OS, the benefits are gone. I don't know if the vendors are complicit in this, but the result is the same. Netbooks are low margin, low cost equipment and having pushed Windows down on them, they perform not well at all. It'st not hard to argue that they should be abandoned - even though with Linux they totally rock. It will not occur to any one of the linux netbook vendors to spin off a Linux netbook company (under the usual corporate veil of deniability). The Netbook companies have taken the Windows deal, and so the cool netbooks are gone and the category is dead. This is the effect of Microsoft: it suffocates innovation by cutting off the air supply.
This is also a grand opportunity for any company that wants to scoop up the market that Asus created and has been persuaded to abandon. There's a lot of milk left in this cow.
The engine isn't the only important part of a jet aircraft. Apparently flying a jet aircraft through what's effectively 200 miles of sandblasting has other deleterious effects such as sandblasting the windshield, abrading the skin of the wing and other forward parts and trailing parts including the tail, obstructing the pitot tubes that gauge airspeed. Some of these effects are immediate and inconvenient (landing an aircraft when the windscreen is frosted glass can be challenging), and some are not immediately apparent but can cause aircraft failure several months after the ash is gone. Trailing edge surfaces can also be affected in subsonic aircraft, though these can be less important because critical control lines can not be routed aft of trailing edge surfaces. The mobility of ailerons and flaps can be affected by grit. This grit can cause failures in flight because the maintenance schedules for aircraft do not account for flying through powdered glass.
Let's review: Glass is harder than steel. Volcanic ash is glass. Volcanic ash in the air can be as course as 1.5", or as fine as 60 microns. The skin of aircraft are predominately aluminum. Aluminum is not as hard as steel. These ash particles can abrade aluminum. If you fly though enough abrasive, the skin of your aircraft will wear through.
The way airlines work some of these aircraft might be rotated to routes far from northern Europe, placing almost anyone at risk. Did that commuter plane from San Francisco to San Diego accumulate ash damage over the North Atlantic? You don't know.
It's better safe than sorry I think. We have a long history of airlines ignoring common sense and basic safety to put butts in the seats. They need regulation to keep them from getting stupid.
It's not like volcanos were just recently discovered. They predate airlines by a good bit, and Iceland volcanos go off on a regular basis. I say it's part of the normal order of the day for these airlines. If they're not insured against this risk then it's their own cost because they're self-insured. I'll bet some of them are getting compensation from their insurance and want to be compensated twice to improve their bottom line. Getting paid twice to not carry passengers is almost three times as profitable as getting passengers to grandma's house - especially if Grandma's house is in Finland, since they save some accellerated depreciation on a very expensive aircraft.
Even now companies are hoarding IPV4 address space. More companies will invest in these valuable collectibles, locking up ever larger unused ranges. New markets in IPv4 address futures will arise. Rising costs, or claims thereof, will lead to ISPs charging even more for the temporary use of these valuable commodities. Great profits will be made before the migration to IPv6 is complete.
The price on Palm will continue to decline until somebody thinks the price is cheap enough for the patents. It's not prudent to overpay, and today the price is too high for just the patents.
I think the ideal arrangement is a C3000 max config blade cluster tower driving 8 40" LCD displays. Preferably seating would be a motorized recliner with six degrees of freedom. There should be sufficient audio facilities to provide a pleasant working environment for the programmer. This setup should be arranged on a well lit patio next to a heated indoor pool. There should be plenty of staff to bring refreshments, fresh towels, and printouts. For ad-hoc diagrams some "sidewalk chalk" can be handy.
While I was talking about Wm. Shakespeare and thinking about 1001 Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm WRT to Disney, I did say any remembered artist, so let's look at your example, "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell.
Although not even a retelling of the story but an adaptation of the characters intended as parody of race relations issues in "Gone With The Wind", "The Wind Done Gone" written by Alice Randall was published in 2001 by Houghton Mifflin. The book did not even reference any of the character names or even set locations of the story in "Gone With The Wind" but merely implied them. The heirs of Mitchell sued, claiming it was an "unauthorized sequel". A judge found grounds to issue an injunction and the book was blocked from market for two months before the injunction was overturned. After a large legal fees and considerable risk to the author and publisher an undisclosed settlement was reached, "an unspecified contribution to Morehouse College".
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory they're the same, and in practice they're not. Even though you may be correct in a perfect literal interpretation of the legal issues this has little bearing on the actual state of copyright in practice today.
So no, unless you've got a publisher with a great lawyer and a good bit o'cash, you can't "take Gone With the Wind, completely rewrite it in my own words with different names for the characters and set it in the American revolution".
I'm sure someone is working on this. Creative has the Zii that looks promising. In addition to a Cortex A8 it has a stemcell 64-unit floating point processing element array and all the System on a Chip stuff. All that and 512MB RAM fits on a SODIMM.
Up to now while the performance per watt for ARM was fantastic, it just wouldn't clock up enough to make it worthwhile to gang them on that scale. Now that they have ARM running at 1GHz they're going to give it a go. I imagine you could fit hundreds of those little rascals in a 2U chassis. At Google's scale they're probably cheap too. They'd probably save so much money on power and cooling the things would pay for themselves.
Imagine if you will that Wm. Shakespeare had to contend with modern copyright law. He's only one example - any remembered artist will do. How much of the works of "Bard of Avon" would be permitted under current law? Actually, almost none of it. A sonnet or two. And because his unsourced output was so small we would not know of him at all. England's national poet would have been silenced by copyright law as we know it. Almost all of the stories he retold as plays would now be lost forever because they were derived from bardic tales or previous plays that would have been protected by copyright. We grant him great respect now not because he invented these stories, but because he told them well.
Every play, each story, was derived or influenced - as was common in that day and should be common still - by the bardic tales passed down in oral tradition that today would be protected. It was in his wry telling of these tales, the wit that he added, that made them so durable that we know them still. If he had not retold them in his special way they would be lost to time. Today he would be Disney'd out of his art - as a great many grand geniuses are today being silenced by the tyranny of copyright monopolies.
Every creative person needs to understand and acknowledge the source of their creation, or at least that they've built upon one. And they need to submit to a future where others build upon their work. We call this evolution culture. Modern copyright law admits no such culture. Each of them needs to understand that modern copyright law dooms them to ignominy, as our current masters of culture need new sales to drive their market numbers and this works against literary immortality. It's a Devil's bargain.
And so, breeding a generation devoid of culture we reap what we sow. If kids can't adopt the culture of their parents because they're proscribed from experiencing what it was by copyright law, they will invent their own. These inventions will by necessity be primal. Primitive. Animalistic. That can be art, but it can't be durable art.
So, artists and inventors are actually harmed by the current state of law. They should oppose it as it prevents their art from going viral and being a part of our culture.
By preventing the natural course of social evolution through copyright law, we naturally regress to the primitive at an abhorrent rate. That's not the purpose of copyright enshrined in the US Constitution. The purpose of that clause was to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts."
Here is a perfect example of why people hate Microsoft's market monopolies. They acquired a flight simulator company and slaughtered all of the competition with the product by being excellent in the field. For 25 years they made fantastic profits on it, raising an almost impassible barrier to entry for new companies. A thriving ecosystem for third party hardware and software products emerged, from contollers to cockpit simulators to full-blown moving rooms costing tens of thousands of dollars.
And one day, being the last one standing in the field - having created a product that is a fine evolution of consumer flight simulation, they give it up. Not because the product's not making money - it is. Not because there's no market for it - there is. But simply because there's noone left on the field to kill, so they're bored with it.
This should tell you something about the lifecycle of their products. There's not just a bottom end where they kill them off to cut their losses. There's also a top end where they kill them off for excessive success. We saw this with IE too, and a team was reconstituted there only because they were losing market share and control of the user experience of the Internet, which worked against their vertical goal of control of average user experience from server to desktop.
When copyright is extended a copy of every work extended is stolen from each of us because it would otherwise be rightfully ours and is not. That's stealing.
A long term gradient from this to the oxygen free microbes we've recently heard about and you've got a life cycle that creates oil. Now if that's the case we should capture some samples, diddle some DNA to accellerate the process and create an algae sequence that takes garbage and produces gasoline - or experiences runaway growth and turns the entire planet into green slime.
Hm... the plot's going to need some work but for a rough sketch that will do for a start.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll take a bribe to pretend to use their search engine to find products. This helps them persuade advertisers that people use Bing to find products - and so they should advertise on Bing and pay top rate. Now, of course they're paying out more than they're taking in, or the books would be written in black ink.
Now what happens when they stop bribing people to pretend to use their search to find products - as eventually they must? Three guesses, no peeking at the answers.
Exactly. On the other hand, ion propulsion may give a distinct light signature - and enough of it to indicate an active spacefaring culture. I wonder if we're looking for that fingerprint. For sure once that becomes the mode of space travel, there will be no hiding any more.
In Zimbabwe they were the breadbasket of Africa. But their farmers were white, the descendants of European colonists mostly. They ran off the white farmers or killed them - by government mandate - and gave their farms to Army thugs with no training, experience or motivation to be farmers.
Now Zimbabwe needs food aid.
Are you aware of some paint that's harder than glass? I'm not. I would be interested in that. Glass particles abrade surfaces that are softer than them. For all cases of "Volcanic tephra" the list of minerals harder than them would be: diamond.
Welcome back old friend. I hope you're with us for a while.
Since you would school me, specifically which part of Africa is immune to these ills?
First, the moral position: If I was them, I'd come here. I can't hold it against them if they do what I would do if I were in their place. How could I do that? I could tell myself I was an idiot? Legal? What is legal? If your daughter needs bread you do what you have to do to get her bread - weather, obstacles, international borders notwithstanding. The borders don't matter to her - if she doesn't get calories she'll die no matter which side of a border she's on.
Telling the people of Africa to "move to where the food is" is cynical at best.
Actually, none of them are reading this because Internet access is sparse in the Sahele, and they have other stuff to look at. That means I'm being insentive for show to my fellow Internet geeks. Yeah, that's what this is about.
You're probably pinning me as some "don't care" prick. I really do care. I just don't see what I can do. If I give these people money, it winds up in the hands of the junta that's killing them.
Look, this is Africa. I have a reasonable amount of disposabe income and if I could actually help the poor there with it they could have it. But I can't. The best I can do is to say: move to where the food is. If you can find a path out of Africa, go!.
I'm guessing you're assuming more than one developer per indoor pool. I can see where a mistaken drive for economy might drive you to those dire straits, but I would endeavor to dissuade you from that false economy. Each developer is more than adequately connected to his peers via telepresence. He doesn't need physical proximity and in fact that is a deterrent to productivity. Excessive contact with humans in an uncontrolled setting can set a good programmer back six months. It's best if each has his own pool.
Programmers as a rule have control issues. If you try to defeat this, you'll lose 90% of why you hired them. Control is an important aspect of security. Programmers who are confident they have control of their personal situation write more secure code than programmers in doubt. It's best if you put them by the pool with iron-clad contracts that alleviate any issues in this regard they might have, so they can focus on producing for you the best possible product.
I'm wondering if you could avoid power naps in a Barcalounger with six degrees of freedom. I thought that was implied.
The benefits of inebriation? What did you think I meant by "refreshments"? Milk?
That's so sexist. I don't know what to say except that I'm deleting you from my "slashdot friends". You're a sick puppy.
The pool though as a practical matter should be coed and clothing optional, as most coders prefer their pools that way and that's the best path to good code.
To promote aid in most regions of Africa, you have to be prepared to deliver that aid against armed resistance, or accept that that aid might be coopted to feed the army that oppresses people who need aid. That's not really helping.
I really do want to help these folk, and I can think of no better way to do that than to repeat the message of the great (and missed) Sam Kinnison: Move to where the food is. You're in a freaking desert where things don't grow. MOVE.
The low requirements, performance and reliability
I meant that to say: "The low requirements, high performance and reliability"
But slashdot doesn't allow me to edit my posts - which I usually like. Dammit.
The thing that killed the PDA is that Microsoft mindfucked (sorry, there's no better term) the vendors into believing that PDA users truly needed some such abortions as pocket Excel and Pocket Word. Once they accepted that, Windows Mobile was assumed of course, since those apps don't run on anything else. This very experience - define the scope, own the scope, kill the scope should give us pause about adopting Microsoft's mobile offerings in the future.
It's not about the widget - it's about the opportunities it enables, the possibilities it creates. Once sold on the Microsoft apps, the PDA vendors were doomed to failed products that delivered a negative experience because WiMo truly does suck. The PDA died a premature death because we tried to run a poor OS on it. Many of these devices today give good service having been converted to an alternate OS. I remember my own experience with this. I learned to swear like a drunken sailor. These devices, once you put a sane OS on them, are still worthy of some great stuff to this day. They are more perfomant than the onboard computers for Apollo 11. WiMo? The man-years this OS has cost me in conjunction with Pocket Excel is in the scores. Let me put it this way: WiMo has caused me to fail my commitments. I won't be using it again because when I commit I intend to deliver.
This is also what dooms the netbook to diminishing share. Now that netbook vendors have been convinced to not deliver Linux as their OS, the category will disappear. The low requirements, performance and reliability of Linux is what built this market and now the Microsoft has convinced the OEMs to abandon that in favor of their bloated, poorly performant, unreliable OS, the benefits are gone. I don't know if the vendors are complicit in this, but the result is the same. Netbooks are low margin, low cost equipment and having pushed Windows down on them, they perform not well at all. It'st not hard to argue that they should be abandoned - even though with Linux they totally rock. It will not occur to any one of the linux netbook vendors to spin off a Linux netbook company (under the usual corporate veil of deniability). The Netbook companies have taken the Windows deal, and so the cool netbooks are gone and the category is dead. This is the effect of Microsoft: it suffocates innovation by cutting off the air supply.
This is also a grand opportunity for any company that wants to scoop up the market that Asus created and has been persuaded to abandon. There's a lot of milk left in this cow.
The engine isn't the only important part of a jet aircraft. Apparently flying a jet aircraft through what's effectively 200 miles of sandblasting has other deleterious effects such as sandblasting the windshield, abrading the skin of the wing and other forward parts and trailing parts including the tail, obstructing the pitot tubes that gauge airspeed. Some of these effects are immediate and inconvenient (landing an aircraft when the windscreen is frosted glass can be challenging), and some are not immediately apparent but can cause aircraft failure several months after the ash is gone. Trailing edge surfaces can also be affected in subsonic aircraft, though these can be less important because critical control lines can not be routed aft of trailing edge surfaces. The mobility of ailerons and flaps can be affected by grit. This grit can cause failures in flight because the maintenance schedules for aircraft do not account for flying through powdered glass.
Let's review: Glass is harder than steel. Volcanic ash is glass. Volcanic ash in the air can be as course as 1.5", or as fine as 60 microns. The skin of aircraft are predominately aluminum. Aluminum is not as hard as steel. These ash particles can abrade aluminum. If you fly though enough abrasive, the skin of your aircraft will wear through.
The way airlines work some of these aircraft might be rotated to routes far from northern Europe, placing almost anyone at risk. Did that commuter plane from San Francisco to San Diego accumulate ash damage over the North Atlantic? You don't know.
It's better safe than sorry I think. We have a long history of airlines ignoring common sense and basic safety to put butts in the seats. They need regulation to keep them from getting stupid.
It's not like volcanos were just recently discovered. They predate airlines by a good bit, and Iceland volcanos go off on a regular basis. I say it's part of the normal order of the day for these airlines. If they're not insured against this risk then it's their own cost because they're self-insured. I'll bet some of them are getting compensation from their insurance and want to be compensated twice to improve their bottom line. Getting paid twice to not carry passengers is almost three times as profitable as getting passengers to grandma's house - especially if Grandma's house is in Finland, since they save some accellerated depreciation on a very expensive aircraft.
Even now companies are hoarding IPV4 address space. More companies will invest in these valuable collectibles, locking up ever larger unused ranges. New markets in IPv4 address futures will arise. Rising costs, or claims thereof, will lead to ISPs charging even more for the temporary use of these valuable commodities. Great profits will be made before the migration to IPv6 is complete.
The price on Palm will continue to decline until somebody thinks the price is cheap enough for the patents. It's not prudent to overpay, and today the price is too high for just the patents.
I think the ideal arrangement is a C3000 max config blade cluster tower driving 8 40" LCD displays. Preferably seating would be a motorized recliner with six degrees of freedom. There should be sufficient audio facilities to provide a pleasant working environment for the programmer. This setup should be arranged on a well lit patio next to a heated indoor pool. There should be plenty of staff to bring refreshments, fresh towels, and printouts. For ad-hoc diagrams some "sidewalk chalk" can be handy.
The plaque will read: "The last manned US spacecraft."
While I was talking about Wm. Shakespeare and thinking about 1001 Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm WRT to Disney, I did say any remembered artist, so let's look at your example, "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell.
Although not even a retelling of the story but an adaptation of the characters intended as parody of race relations issues in "Gone With The Wind", "The Wind Done Gone" written by Alice Randall was published in 2001 by Houghton Mifflin. The book did not even reference any of the character names or even set locations of the story in "Gone With The Wind" but merely implied them. The heirs of Mitchell sued, claiming it was an "unauthorized sequel". A judge found grounds to issue an injunction and the book was blocked from market for two months before the injunction was overturned. After a large legal fees and considerable risk to the author and publisher an undisclosed settlement was reached, "an unspecified contribution to Morehouse College".
The difference between theory and practice is that in theory they're the same, and in practice they're not. Even though you may be correct in a perfect literal interpretation of the legal issues this has little bearing on the actual state of copyright in practice today.
So no, unless you've got a publisher with a great lawyer and a good bit o'cash, you can't "take Gone With the Wind, completely rewrite it in my own words with different names for the characters and set it in the American revolution".
I saw some speculation today that Apple might buy ARM. Although that could happen, Google's the one that needs the exascale computing (pdf).
Since Intel seems determined to go down with the WinTel ship, somebody oughtta.
I'm sure someone is working on this. Creative has the Zii that looks promising. In addition to a Cortex A8 it has a stemcell 64-unit floating point processing element array and all the System on a Chip stuff. All that and 512MB RAM fits on a SODIMM.
Up to now while the performance per watt for ARM was fantastic, it just wouldn't clock up enough to make it worthwhile to gang them on that scale. Now that they have ARM running at 1GHz they're going to give it a go. I imagine you could fit hundreds of those little rascals in a 2U chassis. At Google's scale they're probably cheap too. They'd probably save so much money on power and cooling the things would pay for themselves.
Imagine if you will that Wm. Shakespeare had to contend with modern copyright law. He's only one example - any remembered artist will do. How much of the works of "Bard of Avon" would be permitted under current law? Actually, almost none of it. A sonnet or two. And because his unsourced output was so small we would not know of him at all. England's national poet would have been silenced by copyright law as we know it. Almost all of the stories he retold as plays would now be lost forever because they were derived from bardic tales or previous plays that would have been protected by copyright. We grant him great respect now not because he invented these stories, but because he told them well .
Every play, each story, was derived or influenced - as was common in that day and should be common still - by the bardic tales passed down in oral tradition that today would be protected. It was in his wry telling of these tales, the wit that he added, that made them so durable that we know them still. If he had not retold them in his special way they would be lost to time. Today he would be Disney'd out of his art - as a great many grand geniuses are today being silenced by the tyranny of copyright monopolies.
Every creative person needs to understand and acknowledge the source of their creation, or at least that they've built upon one. And they need to submit to a future where others build upon their work. We call this evolution culture. Modern copyright law admits no such culture. Each of them needs to understand that modern copyright law dooms them to ignominy, as our current masters of culture need new sales to drive their market numbers and this works against literary immortality. It's a Devil's bargain.
And so, breeding a generation devoid of culture we reap what we sow. If kids can't adopt the culture of their parents because they're proscribed from experiencing what it was by copyright law, they will invent their own. These inventions will by necessity be primal. Primitive. Animalistic. That can be art, but it can't be durable art.
So, artists and inventors are actually harmed by the current state of law. They should oppose it as it prevents their art from going viral and being a part of our culture.
By preventing the natural course of social evolution through copyright law, we naturally regress to the primitive at an abhorrent rate. That's not the purpose of copyright enshrined in the US Constitution. The purpose of that clause was to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts."
Here is a perfect example of why people hate Microsoft's market monopolies. They acquired a flight simulator company and slaughtered all of the competition with the product by being excellent in the field. For 25 years they made fantastic profits on it, raising an almost impassible barrier to entry for new companies. A thriving ecosystem for third party hardware and software products emerged, from contollers to cockpit simulators to full-blown moving rooms costing tens of thousands of dollars.
And one day, being the last one standing in the field - having created a product that is a fine evolution of consumer flight simulation, they give it up. Not because the product's not making money - it is. Not because there's no market for it - there is. But simply because there's noone left on the field to kill, so they're bored with it.
This should tell you something about the lifecycle of their products. There's not just a bottom end where they kill them off to cut their losses. There's also a top end where they kill them off for excessive success. We saw this with IE too, and a team was reconstituted there only because they were losing market share and control of the user experience of the Internet, which worked against their vertical goal of control of average user experience from server to desktop.
$browser=isitie(); if $browser then ieisbrokepage() else [...]
When copyright is extended a copy of every work extended is stolen from each of us because it would otherwise be rightfully ours and is not. That's stealing.
A long term gradient from this to the oxygen free microbes we've recently heard about and you've got a life cycle that creates oil. Now if that's the case we should capture some samples, diddle some DNA to accellerate the process and create an algae sequence that takes garbage and produces gasoline - or experiences runaway growth and turns the entire planet into green slime.
Hm... the plot's going to need some work but for a rough sketch that will do for a start.