You're confusing facts and the conclusions that can be drawn from facts.
Fact:
"Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press."
Invalid (or, at best unsubstantiated) conclusion: This must be the result of human activity.
Even if all the data pointed to an incontrovertible warming across the entirety of the globe, it doesn't necessarily follow that anthropogenic sources are the cause. To start passing laws and regulations based on what is quite clearly still mere hypothesis, is about as chicken little as it gets.
I've got one for you. I've observed that when I leave a bowl of water out exposed to the air and the sun, it disappears. So, clearly we must block out the sun and eliminate air, or all the water on Earth will disappear!
And you are complaining about the defensiveness of the hippies?
Yes, actually, I am. I complain about anyone who tries to forcefully change the lives of others because of their personal HYPOTHESIS. There is a world of difference between saying "It's getting hotter, on average" (whether this is true or not is still the subject of debate, Gore's ludicrous opinion not withstanding), and saying "It's getting hotter on average, so it must be the result of human interference, despite a lack of supporting evidence." Such a statement is about as scientific as saying "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, therefore the sun is moving around the Earth." A does not necessarily follow B, and unless you have the evidence to support such a conclusion, you have no business becoming defensive when someone objects to your conjectures. You CERTAINLY have no business forcing others to drastically change their lives without supporting evidence.
So what, does my computer boot up to magic, or are they building a BIOS or LiveCD specific to Chrome?
FTFA:
All applications will be web apps, all data will be stored in the cloud and the operating system will be booted from Flash - no hard disks will be supported.
Boots from flash, be it built-in or external (think SD card), presumably. I'm sure someone will come up with a live CD/PXE boot eventually, though. Plus, it's an open source OS, so someone will eventually hack in standard SATA drivers and the like, if Google refuses to provide them.
Amazon has enjoyed an unfair 5%-10% price advantage over local retailers
Wrong. Local Retailers have suffered an unfair 5-10% theft of their profits compared to amazon. If someone robs you, do you complain that your friends and neighbors weren't robbed to the same extent? You can wax poetic all you want about everyone paying "their fair share", but when party A takes money earned by party B, and uses it for purposes not approved of or supported by party B, it's called theft.
I'll be the first to admit that, in the past, this is exactly the recommendation I follow. However, I've used the beta, the RC, and I'm typing this on RTM, with an official install disk and license sitting next to me waiting until I have time to reinstall everything. Win7 has been rock-solid stable for me (aside from Creative's shite XFi drivers) through every version I've tried. If you are aware of any incompatible software that you need to run, then by all means wait (or run a VM), but otherwise, I have yet to see any reason to wait for a service pack on this one. If someone could provide some concrete reasons to wait, I'd take this article seriously, but otherwise, FUD.
As to upgrading, when has it ever been a good idea to perform a Windows upgrade installation? If you've been running any old version of Windows for 6 months or more, a fresh install is probably indicated anyway (although, I have been running RC on my home system since the day it came out, and I haven't had any Windows Rot yet, still runs as well as when I installed it). Backup your data, wipe the drive, and start from scratch. Bit of a pain in the ass, but that's pretty much a fact of life with Windows.
So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree? Is that the policy you're advocating here? Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general, so one can safely assume that not only were many/most of those killed civilians who had not been involved in the war at all, but also that many of them may well have been opposed to the actions of their government, but powerless to stop them (sound like any country you can think of these days?). And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians, at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.
If it's a government-owned research organization, what right do they have patenting it? Government-owned implies tax-funded, which means that the costs have already been shifted to the general public. How is it legitimate to force people to pay for research and then deny them access to the results? And to preempt those who will bring this up, yes, you can argue that corporations aren't "people", but they are groups of people. Besides which, if a single individual wanted to hack together some wifi cards and sell them to a few people, they would still technically be infringing on the patent, and thus be as liable as a corporate entity.
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights". The concept of freedom revolves around negative rights. Allow me to explain:
The right to freedom of speech. For one person to have freedom of speech requires that others refrain from violating it. For example, I can say what I wish, when I wish, and the only requirement imposed upon others is to refrain from stopping me and thus violating that right. The same obligations then extend from me to others. This is a negative right as it requires others to refrain from acting in violation of that right.
The right to broadband. For one person to have this right requires that someone else provide it. This is a positive right as it requires one person/group to act to provide for another (same applies to healthcare "rights", education "rights", etc).
The essential feature here is reciprocity. Negative rights naturally extend to everyone (if person A must refrain from violating the rights of person B, person B must refrain from violating the rights of person A. Otherwise you must assume that one person is "superior", i.e. has more rights, than another), while positive rights are one-sided (one person's "right" to healthcare imposes an obligation on someone else to provide it). The assumption of equality involves assuming that all have the same rights. Presuming that one person has more or different rights than another presupposes that those persons have different worth, and if you start making that assumption, the idea of natural, inalienable rights flies out the window in favor of arbitrary rights determined by an arbitrary group of people based on arbitrary standards. You can't have rights for some at the expense of others. In the case of broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.), everyone has the same right to work to acquire the resources need to gain access to broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.). Any other concept imposes positive rights, i.e. rights for some at the expense of others.
"Freedom to lose at life" to lose everything and sit cold and sick and hungry under a bridge scrounging for edible garbage while you die of a perfectly curable ailment. What's so great about that that makes it worth defending?
Let's analyze this based on what we've learned. You're implying that because he's hungry, this individual has been deprived of his right to food. If he has a right to food, then someone else has a duty to provide it, which means that the provider is a second-class citizen, a slave to anyone who can't provide for themselves. Because he's homeless, someone has violated his right to have a home. Same situation, the provider of the home is reduced to involuntary servitude (slavery), forced to utilize their skills and resources to provide for someone who can't/won't work to provide for themselves. Because he's sick and dying, he has been deprived of his right to medical care. This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
I'm not saying that if a doctor sees a sick or injured person that they shouldn't attempt to help them. I'm saying that he has no moral obligation to help them. I'm not saying that giving to a charity that helps provide shelter or job training to the homeless is immoral. I'm saying that requiring a person or group to provide for the homeless against their will is immoral.
I wouldn't say it's equivalent to a wave in a public place. A wave is directional. You could always claim you were waving to someone else. A Facebook poke is far more directed and specific. It's more like walking up to someone in a crowd and saying "I see you." There's the issue of this being far more direct and obvious a form of communication. If this can be substantiated by facebook, I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to say she violated a protective order.
Apple Computers has begun a worldwide legal campaign against trademark infringement. Steve Jobs has vowed to sue every fruit tree on the planet found to be violating the trademark on his company's logo. Apparently, it is an orchestrated campaign of infringement, happening on a scheduled, almost seasonal basis.
Seriously, Apple seems to think they own the rights to anything containing, resembling, or suggesting similarity to apples. They do not. The Adults Only logo, Woolworth's logo, etc., are nothing similar to Apple's logo. There is no way a sober, sighted individual is going to confuse any of the above. Apple is acting like a whiny preschooler in art class, crying to the teacher that some other kid stole their idea. Grow the fuck up Jobs, and then show your legal department how to do the same.
Take a gander at John Taylor Gatto's book, An Underground History of American Education. Gatto is an award-winning former New York public school teacher, so he knows the system from the inside out. Simply put, public education was never designed to educate, it was designed to indoctrinate. It has as its basis the Prussian model of schooling. Basically, the idea is to mold young minds to serve the desires of their political controllers. It exists to make them subservient to state interests. At this it succeeds remarkably well. More time spent in schools is more time wasted by students, and more state-sponsored indoctrination of children.
The idea here is to improve performance. There are many complex calculations that need to be performed each frame to properly load balance the cards to achieve significant performance gains. If all that work was being performed by the CPU, it's quite possible that the rendering process could become CPU limited while the graphics cards sit waiting for the CPU to decide which card does what.
"Immoral"? What, because it's proprietary? Are you serious? Get ready to throw out your whole computer, because the whole damn thing is proprietary. You don't have circuit diagrams for the cpu or gpu, you don't have firmware code, nothing. Before you start taking the "moral" high ground about proprietary components, look at what you're typing on. There's plenty of room in the world for proprietary and open source to coexist, RMS' rantings not withstanding.
From the Anandtech article on the subject, it appears that multi-vendor GPU scaling has been implemented, as it was demoed with a GTX 260 and an HD 4890. The mixed-vendor implementation apparently requires Windows 7 to get the card's drivers to work properly (the article was light on details on this point), but it does work. And spare me the "M$ is teh suxorz" garbage. This is aimed at gamers, and like it or not, new games come out on Windows, not Linux, so that's where Lucid's priorities will be for the product launch.
There has been some noise from the big two GPU manufacturers for something similar. I don't have time atm to search for it, but I believe the article I read was on anandtech. Basically, the idea was to create a graphics card with basic functionality like 2D processing built in, but have the actual GPU chipset be user-replaceable by using a socket instead of hard soldering it to the board, so you could just plug in a new chip, and bam! instant 3D processing upgrade, without the unnecessary expense of replacing the whole board. Obviously, such an implementation has its limits (different chips have different bandwidths for the memory controller, for instance), but it would still give you the option of upgrading within a limited subset of the available GPUs. I haven't heard anything about this since, so I guess nothing's come of it yet, but the idea is being toyed with.
There are going to be some performance hits compared to native crossfile/sli implementations. There are three models of the Hydra 200 part, and they each differ in their pcie lanes. The high-end model, which is going on the MSI motherboard, sports two x16 pcie lanes from the chip to the graphics cards (configurable as 2x16, 1x16 + 2x8, or 4x8), but only a single x16 lane from the chip to the pcie controller. So, where a good high-end crossfire or sli board will have two x16 pcie lanes from the controller to the slots for the gpus, this solution will be limited to one x16, limiting the bandwidth available to each graphics card. Exactly how much of a performance hit this would incur remains to be seen, and it probably depends on the cards being used (an older 8000 series geforce doesn't need/won't use as much bandwidth as a gtx 295, for example), but I would expect as gpus grow more powerful and require more bandwidth to keep them fed and working, we will start to see performance deterioration compared to the native crossfire and sli implementations (although lucid can always modify their design to keep pace).
Incidentally, the two lower-end hydra chips will sport a x8 connection to the controller and 2 x8 connections to the cards, and a x16 connection to the controller and two x16 connections to the cards (strictly 2x16, not configurable in any other arrangement)
And as an aside, one might say "Well, competition solves the problem! A competitor can just come in, keep their cars open, and voila they steal market share!" But, of course, that completely ignores fun things like barrier to entry (yes, believe it or not, it costs a fuckton to get into the car manufacturing business), not to mention good ol' fashioned collusion. 'course, libertarians do like to ignore inconvenient facts such as this.
Sure, it costs a lot to get into the market. Turns out, though, that venture capitalists like to make money, too. Given the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a market-changing, potentially market-dominating company, I doubt you'd have too much trouble finding investors. Hell, people actually invested in pets.com, imagine how many takers you would have in the scenario you've described.
Your logic would preclude the development of openness in any industry, given an absence of government regulation. By your logic, open source software should never have come into being, or at least never made it past the basements walls of geeks' parents houses.
This is making a pretty huge assumption about human behavior that most scientific studies of human behavior, in any field, don't bear out.
You may be the one making an assumption here. "Working for their own betterment" leaves much open to interpretation, which is precisely why mathematical models of human behavior fail. What I perceive to be my own betterment may be diametrically opposed to what some other person views as being to their advantage. Essentially different people can be driven by entirely different motivations, and no model can account for that. Some people might see donating their money/time/belongings to a charity to be in their best interests, while another group of people might not. One person might see it in their best interest to save every dime they don't absolutely have to spend, while another might constantly be looking for ways to make an extra dollar by placing their extra income in high-risk investments, while a third person might seek the gratification of immediate consumption.
When I said people work for their own betterment, it was not to imply that everyone works towards the same goals, but rather they work towards the goals they desire. Austrian economics deals with this fact, while Keynesianism does not. I highly recommend going to The Ludwig von Mises Institute, as they have made freely available some of the most influential works pertaining to Austrian economics, including Mise's Human Action and Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.
Human behavior is the basis for the Austrian school of economic thought. Has been from its roots. Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of Austrian economics, titled his magnum open "Human Action". The basic idea of Austrian economics is that the study of economics is an a priori discipline. In other words, you can't implement, from both a practical and ethical standpoint, experiments to study economics on a useful scale. Instead, economics must be viewed as a study of human behavior. Humans are the principle actors in an economic system, so their behavior and drives must be the primary focus of economic study. The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment.
Incidentally, Austrian economics also posits that interference with the operations of markets produces a boom-bust business cycle, by promoting misallocation of scarce resources. It's worth noting that many Austrian economists were predicting our current economic crisis well before it occurred, when the more mainstream Keynesians were still calling it a golden age of economic development.
What is being proposed here is to continue to view markets as purely mathematically modelable phenomena. Economic decisions occur on the most local of levels, the individual level. No model accounts for the variability of the individual. For a Keynesian-style planned economy to function requires omniscience.
I'd never associate with the Earth Liberation Front. Now the Liberation Front of Earth, that's what it's all about. Not like those bastards in the Frontier for Earthern Liberation.
Simply put, FOSS developers usually fall into one of two categories: hackers coding in their spare time and those who work on FOSS projects as part of their job. Those in the former category likely have day jobs, and are already short on time. They do this as a hobby, and if their spare time is spent coding, they don't necessarily have spare time to devote to commenting for reporters. The latter category is contributing code as part of their job. They likely don't have the authority to comment on the record regarding their work, or they have to get permission from the marketing trolls to do so. Either way, if you're getting a response, it's not likely to be quick.
The lesson here is plan ahead. As soon as you know you're going to be working on a story, start asking for comments. If you wait until the last second, you're likely to not get a reply. Yes, reporters can get short deadlines, but you can't expect volunteers contributing their spare time to jump at your say-so, and you have to allow time to get the corporate wheels rolling in the latter case.
I'd think the answer to your question should be obvious by now. We have political teams. Both sides play this game. You come up with a good example. Another is that of Cindy Shehan. She was a hero of the Dems and liberal independents when she was opposing Bush's war, but now that she's opposing Obama's war, despite the fact that it is the same unjustifiable war, she's a pariah to those former supporters. Principles have no place in government, and government has no place in a principled society.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact:
Invalid (or, at best unsubstantiated) conclusion: This must be the result of human activity.
Even if all the data pointed to an incontrovertible warming across the entirety of the globe, it doesn't necessarily follow that anthropogenic sources are the cause. To start passing laws and regulations based on what is quite clearly still mere hypothesis, is about as chicken little as it gets.
I've got one for you. I've observed that when I leave a bowl of water out exposed to the air and the sun, it disappears. So, clearly we must block out the sun and eliminate air, or all the water on Earth will disappear!
Yes, actually, I am. I complain about anyone who tries to forcefully change the lives of others because of their personal HYPOTHESIS. There is a world of difference between saying "It's getting hotter, on average" (whether this is true or not is still the subject of debate, Gore's ludicrous opinion not withstanding), and saying "It's getting hotter on average, so it must be the result of human interference, despite a lack of supporting evidence." Such a statement is about as scientific as saying "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, therefore the sun is moving around the Earth." A does not necessarily follow B, and unless you have the evidence to support such a conclusion, you have no business becoming defensive when someone objects to your conjectures. You CERTAINLY have no business forcing others to drastically change their lives without supporting evidence.
Just a bit too late. I live in Denver, and ate sushi last night... Hey, what's this orange oily spot on my chair?
FTFA:
Boots from flash, be it built-in or external (think SD card), presumably. I'm sure someone will come up with a live CD/PXE boot eventually, though. Plus, it's an open source OS, so someone will eventually hack in standard SATA drivers and the like, if Google refuses to provide them.
Wrong. Local Retailers have suffered an unfair 5-10% theft of their profits compared to amazon. If someone robs you, do you complain that your friends and neighbors weren't robbed to the same extent? You can wax poetic all you want about everyone paying "their fair share", but when party A takes money earned by party B, and uses it for purposes not approved of or supported by party B, it's called theft.
I'll be the first to admit that, in the past, this is exactly the recommendation I follow. However, I've used the beta, the RC, and I'm typing this on RTM, with an official install disk and license sitting next to me waiting until I have time to reinstall everything. Win7 has been rock-solid stable for me (aside from Creative's shite XFi drivers) through every version I've tried. If you are aware of any incompatible software that you need to run, then by all means wait (or run a VM), but otherwise, I have yet to see any reason to wait for a service pack on this one. If someone could provide some concrete reasons to wait, I'd take this article seriously, but otherwise, FUD.
As to upgrading, when has it ever been a good idea to perform a Windows upgrade installation? If you've been running any old version of Windows for 6 months or more, a fresh install is probably indicated anyway (although, I have been running RC on my home system since the day it came out, and I haven't had any Windows Rot yet, still runs as well as when I installed it). Backup your data, wipe the drive, and start from scratch. Bit of a pain in the ass, but that's pretty much a fact of life with Windows.
So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree? Is that the policy you're advocating here? Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general, so one can safely assume that not only were many/most of those killed civilians who had not been involved in the war at all, but also that many of them may well have been opposed to the actions of their government, but powerless to stop them (sound like any country you can think of these days?). And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians, at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.
It's not unusual for governments to devote their greatest abilities to the worst ends (see: Hiroshima, Japan).
If it's a government-owned research organization, what right do they have patenting it? Government-owned implies tax-funded, which means that the costs have already been shifted to the general public. How is it legitimate to force people to pay for research and then deny them access to the results? And to preempt those who will bring this up, yes, you can argue that corporations aren't "people", but they are groups of people. Besides which, if a single individual wanted to hack together some wifi cards and sell them to a few people, they would still technically be infringing on the patent, and thus be as liable as a corporate entity.
Pretty sure you mixed up "former" and "latter" there, unless it was your intent to contradict yourself.
The right to freedom of speech. For one person to have freedom of speech requires that others refrain from violating it. For example, I can say what I wish, when I wish, and the only requirement imposed upon others is to refrain from stopping me and thus violating that right. The same obligations then extend from me to others. This is a negative right as it requires others to refrain from acting in violation of that right.
The right to broadband. For one person to have this right requires that someone else provide it. This is a positive right as it requires one person/group to act to provide for another (same applies to healthcare "rights", education "rights", etc).
The essential feature here is reciprocity. Negative rights naturally extend to everyone (if person A must refrain from violating the rights of person B, person B must refrain from violating the rights of person A. Otherwise you must assume that one person is "superior", i.e. has more rights, than another), while positive rights are one-sided (one person's "right" to healthcare imposes an obligation on someone else to provide it). The assumption of equality involves assuming that all have the same rights. Presuming that one person has more or different rights than another presupposes that those persons have different worth, and if you start making that assumption, the idea of natural, inalienable rights flies out the window in favor of arbitrary rights determined by an arbitrary group of people based on arbitrary standards. You can't have rights for some at the expense of others. In the case of broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.), everyone has the same right to work to acquire the resources need to gain access to broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.). Any other concept imposes positive rights, i.e. rights for some at the expense of others.
Let's analyze this based on what we've learned. You're implying that because he's hungry, this individual has been deprived of his right to food. If he has a right to food, then someone else has a duty to provide it, which means that the provider is a second-class citizen, a slave to anyone who can't provide for themselves. Because he's homeless, someone has violated his right to have a home. Same situation, the provider of the home is reduced to involuntary servitude (slavery), forced to utilize their skills and resources to provide for someone who can't/won't work to provide for themselves. Because he's sick and dying, he has been deprived of his right to medical care. This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
I'm not saying that if a doctor sees a sick or injured person that they shouldn't attempt to help them. I'm saying that he has no moral obligation to help them. I'm not saying that giving to a charity that helps provide shelter or job training to the homeless is immoral. I'm saying that requiring a person or group to provide for the homeless against their will is immoral.
I wouldn't say it's equivalent to a wave in a public place. A wave is directional. You could always claim you were waving to someone else. A Facebook poke is far more directed and specific. It's more like walking up to someone in a crowd and saying "I see you." There's the issue of this being far more direct and obvious a form of communication. If this can be substantiated by facebook, I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to say she violated a protective order.
Apple Computers has begun a worldwide legal campaign against trademark infringement. Steve Jobs has vowed to sue every fruit tree on the planet found to be violating the trademark on his company's logo. Apparently, it is an orchestrated campaign of infringement, happening on a scheduled, almost seasonal basis.
Seriously, Apple seems to think they own the rights to anything containing, resembling, or suggesting similarity to apples. They do not. The Adults Only logo, Woolworth's logo, etc., are nothing similar to Apple's logo. There is no way a sober, sighted individual is going to confuse any of the above. Apple is acting like a whiny preschooler in art class, crying to the teacher that some other kid stole their idea. Grow the fuck up Jobs, and then show your legal department how to do the same.
Take a gander at John Taylor Gatto's book, An Underground History of American Education . Gatto is an award-winning former New York public school teacher, so he knows the system from the inside out. Simply put, public education was never designed to educate, it was designed to indoctrinate. It has as its basis the Prussian model of schooling. Basically, the idea is to mold young minds to serve the desires of their political controllers. It exists to make them subservient to state interests. At this it succeeds remarkably well. More time spent in schools is more time wasted by students, and more state-sponsored indoctrination of children.
The idea here is to improve performance. There are many complex calculations that need to be performed each frame to properly load balance the cards to achieve significant performance gains. If all that work was being performed by the CPU, it's quite possible that the rendering process could become CPU limited while the graphics cards sit waiting for the CPU to decide which card does what.
"Immoral"? What, because it's proprietary? Are you serious? Get ready to throw out your whole computer, because the whole damn thing is proprietary. You don't have circuit diagrams for the cpu or gpu, you don't have firmware code, nothing. Before you start taking the "moral" high ground about proprietary components, look at what you're typing on. There's plenty of room in the world for proprietary and open source to coexist, RMS' rantings not withstanding.
From the Anandtech article on the subject, it appears that multi-vendor GPU scaling has been implemented, as it was demoed with a GTX 260 and an HD 4890. The mixed-vendor implementation apparently requires Windows 7 to get the card's drivers to work properly (the article was light on details on this point), but it does work. And spare me the "M$ is teh suxorz" garbage. This is aimed at gamers, and like it or not, new games come out on Windows, not Linux, so that's where Lucid's priorities will be for the product launch.
There has been some noise from the big two GPU manufacturers for something similar. I don't have time atm to search for it, but I believe the article I read was on anandtech. Basically, the idea was to create a graphics card with basic functionality like 2D processing built in, but have the actual GPU chipset be user-replaceable by using a socket instead of hard soldering it to the board, so you could just plug in a new chip, and bam! instant 3D processing upgrade, without the unnecessary expense of replacing the whole board. Obviously, such an implementation has its limits (different chips have different bandwidths for the memory controller, for instance), but it would still give you the option of upgrading within a limited subset of the available GPUs. I haven't heard anything about this since, so I guess nothing's come of it yet, but the idea is being toyed with.
There are going to be some performance hits compared to native crossfile/sli implementations. There are three models of the Hydra 200 part, and they each differ in their pcie lanes. The high-end model, which is going on the MSI motherboard, sports two x16 pcie lanes from the chip to the graphics cards (configurable as 2x16, 1x16 + 2x8, or 4x8), but only a single x16 lane from the chip to the pcie controller. So, where a good high-end crossfire or sli board will have two x16 pcie lanes from the controller to the slots for the gpus, this solution will be limited to one x16, limiting the bandwidth available to each graphics card. Exactly how much of a performance hit this would incur remains to be seen, and it probably depends on the cards being used (an older 8000 series geforce doesn't need/won't use as much bandwidth as a gtx 295, for example), but I would expect as gpus grow more powerful and require more bandwidth to keep them fed and working, we will start to see performance deterioration compared to the native crossfire and sli implementations (although lucid can always modify their design to keep pace).
Incidentally, the two lower-end hydra chips will sport a x8 connection to the controller and 2 x8 connections to the cards, and a x16 connection to the controller and two x16 connections to the cards (strictly 2x16, not configurable in any other arrangement)
Sure, it costs a lot to get into the market. Turns out, though, that venture capitalists like to make money, too. Given the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a market-changing, potentially market-dominating company, I doubt you'd have too much trouble finding investors. Hell, people actually invested in pets.com, imagine how many takers you would have in the scenario you've described.
Your logic would preclude the development of openness in any industry, given an absence of government regulation. By your logic, open source software should never have come into being, or at least never made it past the basements walls of geeks' parents houses.
You may be the one making an assumption here. "Working for their own betterment" leaves much open to interpretation, which is precisely why mathematical models of human behavior fail. What I perceive to be my own betterment may be diametrically opposed to what some other person views as being to their advantage. Essentially different people can be driven by entirely different motivations, and no model can account for that. Some people might see donating their money/time/belongings to a charity to be in their best interests, while another group of people might not. One person might see it in their best interest to save every dime they don't absolutely have to spend, while another might constantly be looking for ways to make an extra dollar by placing their extra income in high-risk investments, while a third person might seek the gratification of immediate consumption.
When I said people work for their own betterment, it was not to imply that everyone works towards the same goals, but rather they work towards the goals they desire. Austrian economics deals with this fact, while Keynesianism does not. I highly recommend going to The Ludwig von Mises Institute, as they have made freely available some of the most influential works pertaining to Austrian economics, including Mise's Human Action and Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.
Human behavior is the basis for the Austrian school of economic thought. Has been from its roots. Ludwig von Mises, one of the founders of Austrian economics, titled his magnum open "Human Action". The basic idea of Austrian economics is that the study of economics is an a priori discipline. In other words, you can't implement, from both a practical and ethical standpoint, experiments to study economics on a useful scale. Instead, economics must be viewed as a study of human behavior. Humans are the principle actors in an economic system, so their behavior and drives must be the primary focus of economic study. The study of economics can therefore be viewed as a study of groups of self-interested participants working for their own betterment.
Incidentally, Austrian economics also posits that interference with the operations of markets produces a boom-bust business cycle, by promoting misallocation of scarce resources. It's worth noting that many Austrian economists were predicting our current economic crisis well before it occurred, when the more mainstream Keynesians were still calling it a golden age of economic development.
What is being proposed here is to continue to view markets as purely mathematically modelable phenomena. Economic decisions occur on the most local of levels, the individual level. No model accounts for the variability of the individual. For a Keynesian-style planned economy to function requires omniscience.
I'd never associate with the Earth Liberation Front. Now the Liberation Front of Earth, that's what it's all about. Not like those bastards in the Frontier for Earthern Liberation.
Simply put, FOSS developers usually fall into one of two categories: hackers coding in their spare time and those who work on FOSS projects as part of their job. Those in the former category likely have day jobs, and are already short on time. They do this as a hobby, and if their spare time is spent coding, they don't necessarily have spare time to devote to commenting for reporters. The latter category is contributing code as part of their job. They likely don't have the authority to comment on the record regarding their work, or they have to get permission from the marketing trolls to do so. Either way, if you're getting a response, it's not likely to be quick.
The lesson here is plan ahead. As soon as you know you're going to be working on a story, start asking for comments. If you wait until the last second, you're likely to not get a reply. Yes, reporters can get short deadlines, but you can't expect volunteers contributing their spare time to jump at your say-so, and you have to allow time to get the corporate wheels rolling in the latter case.
I'd think the answer to your question should be obvious by now. We have political teams. Both sides play this game. You come up with a good example. Another is that of Cindy Shehan. She was a hero of the Dems and liberal independents when she was opposing Bush's war, but now that she's opposing Obama's war, despite the fact that it is the same unjustifiable war, she's a pariah to those former supporters. Principles have no place in government, and government has no place in a principled society.