The charm and a lot of the value those original versions of Star Wars had was due to the limitations and how they managed to work around them. The first scene (ya know, where Leia's ship gets badgered by a Star Destroyer) was awesome at the time, I remember how the theater went wild at the very first scene of the movie just from it being so awesome. Today, of course it isn't as impressive anymore, we're used to such scenes by now. But that's not what made the movie a classic. What did was that in its time it had the maybe best and certainly some of the most impressive special effects. Giving them a makeover does of course improve them, but it also cheapens them...
Precisely - consider someone redoing "2001" and replacing all those amazing miniature shots with CGI to "improve it".*
Any art work's original form is what gives it its cultural and historical significance. Rewriting it is okay - let culture and history decide if it is improved.** But rewritng it and then trying to suppress the original, which retains its popularity is artistic malfeasance, which only the abusively remodelled copyright system makes possible.***
*My kids were astonished when I explained that their was no CGI in the movei!
**There are many examples of works being redone by their creator, Fowles "The Magus", Bishop's "Eyes of Fire", Tolkien's "The Hobbit", Clarke's "Against the Fall of Night", etc.
***The retroactive extension of copyright for the equivalent of multiple lifetimes was a theft of public assets of enormous proportions for the benefit of immortal private corporations.
This is precisely why the "Copyright Term Extension Act" was awful law to begin with. 17+17 years should be plenty of time to make a heap of money off of a movie, book, or piece of music. Certainly George Lucas has made more than his fair share of money off of Star Wars, and that money did incentivize him to go out and make the prequels. Had the original 17+17 rule for copyright been in effect today, the copyright on Star Wars would be expiring this year instead of 100 years after the death of George Lucas.
Dare I say it? Fans must do what they can to accelerate its transfer to the public domain. If this will only happen 100 years after George Lucas is dead then....
Competitive pressures will find a balance between tight screening procedures and not inconveniencing the passengers. It may be necessary to establish some rules as to what is allowed on with some agency tasked with determining if airlines are successfully keeping those things off of the planes.
We did this before the creation of the TSA - competitive pressures led to the cheapest possible screeners and not inconveniencing passengers, and no real security of any kind -- movie theater and theme park style "gate screening".
Reforming TSA does not logically entail "privatization". (To paraphrase playwright Hanns Johst: "When I hear the word privatization..., I release the safety on my Browning!")
I think your sig should read:
"Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but will still be weaker than individuals."
Having some experience with trying to view things with laser red light and LPS yellow light I am inclined to think that monochromatic light sources make perceiving scenes correctly relatively difficult, and visually tiring also. I'd like to see the traffic safety implications of this studied.
The problem was not with Marx's analysis, but with his conclusions.
That is the point indeed - that Marx's analysis of real-world Capitalism was very good. His theory of about the imaginary system of Communism was similar to other 19th Century utopian notions -- unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. The only place where Marx's real ideas of Communism were put into effect were in Israeli Kibbutzim, where they proved workable as long as the community remained small (several hundred people) and, ironically, agricultural. The dictatorships of Russia, China and North Korea founded on "cults of personality" have little to with Marx.
Oddly enough in the middle to the 20th Century another distinctly 19th Century utopian socio-economic theory arose -- Libertarianism -- which is likewise unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. Like Communism in Kibbutzes, it is likely to only workable in small groups if at all. Libertarians however so far have failed to found any such communities that I can discover.
So the fabulous amazing U.S. wage multiplier for product costs in now 275%? Where did you pull that number from?
The labor portion of a product - and the "penalty" for using U.S. labor - is usually fantastically overstated in these discussions.
Look at this estimate for an Apple hi-tech product, the iPod family:
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/07/a_fair_labor_ipod_what_would_i.html
According to this the price increase would be more like 23%, 1/12 your fake made up claim.
He means that "the weekend" means you have two days off.
The five day work week we take for granted was a gift of unionization demanding better working conditions.
You are again missing the point. The point is that each journal selects which articles to publish. If Science didn't reject over 70% of its submissions, publishing in that journal wouldn't carry such significance -- and what most people having these arguments conveniently forget is that the majority of rejections for high-profile journals are made at the initial stage of editorial triage. That is the primary value that the journals are providing: the job of filtering out the bad papers for their readership.
Interesting that you bring up Science. It is a premier journal, and its name carries great weight and it has no per-article download charges. For the cost of just subscribing to the magazine you have unlimited access to everything they have ever published. There exists, as far as I can determine, no substantial basis for the per-article access charge of these private journals - many foundations and other NFP organizations have no problem running their scientific journals without needing to lock up the content.
Pluto and Charon orbit around a non-fixed barycenter that is actually outside of both Pluto and Charon. Pluto/Charon is really a binary Dwarf Planet with 3 moons. Which, honestly, is fucking awesome.
Absolutely! Further more its physical and orbital characteristics clearly associate it with the recently discovered Kuiper Belt Objects. It is should not be viewed as a "pathetic little planet wannabe" but as the King of the KBOs (Eris would be the Queen).
Sounds to me like he stole the cloth from his employer. Trash or not, it wasn't his property.
If I throw something in a waste receptacle deliberately, with the intention of getting rid of it permanently with no expectation of any return from its disposal (quite the opposite - I'm paying someone to take it off my hands), when do I voluntarily relinquish rights of ownership? Clearly the contents of a landfill are not the separate private property of all the people who ever threw something away that ended up there.
I am not a lawyer (perhaps one will chime in) but i strongly suspect that there is law regarding the separation in ownership of materials intentionally thrown away. The police for example do not need any sort of warrant to search through your trash put out for disposal - which indicates you no longer own it.
Yeah, but lumber is way more than ten times as easy to come by as Na2S2O3.
And why would that be?
Sodium thiosulfate can be produced in a one-step reaction from sodium sulfite and elemental sulfur. Sodium sulfite is a waste byproduct of scrubbing sulfur from coal power plant flue gas, sulfur is now a waste byproduct of de-sulfuring high sulfur petroleum (the production of which is increasing as we are forced to use less desirable petroleum deposits). Surplus sulfur now exists in large amounts (millions of tons) and sodium sulfite production capacity far exceeds demand - combining two abundant extremely cheap chemicals in a simple single step process results in an abundant extremely cheap product.
If you want a comparison product - a simple chemical product made from cheap raw materials in a simple reaction - think "cement". No problems coming by that.
"Nuclear is dangerous and bad and scary!" -- the coal energy lobby
And mdsolar. Guy's a fucking idiot, just look at his submissions.
Anti-nuclear crackpots are why we can't have nice things, like non-40 year old plants, and thorium reactors.
No, the hippies aren't holding back nuclear power. It is being held back by the high capital cost and long construction lead time* of nuclear power plants that make them unattractive investments for building new plants compared to coal or natural gas. It takes much longer for the trivial fuel cost and high plant availability of nuclear to pay-off those upfront costs.
*And, no, the hippies aren't running up the costs and lead times by demanding unreasonable safety features and studies. Well built nuclear power plants are quite safe, but only because stringent safety standards are followed. The definitely non-hippie Edward Teller pioneered these strict safety standards. When you don't do that you get -- Fukushima.
And the alternative is? Communism? Nice idea, but it has been shown to fail by history...
Regulated capitalism, of course -- which has been shown by history to succeed far better than the unregulated sort.
I really can't do better to summarize that history than Elizabeth Warren:
Okay, a young country, George Washington is in his first term and we have a credit freeze. There is a financial panic. Every ten to fifteen years there is a financial panic in our history. Just look at it. And there is a big collapse, trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out, until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and we say we can do better than this. We don't have to go back to this type of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations. FDIC insurance. It is safe to put your money into banks. Glass-Steagall. Banks won't do crazy things. And some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis... some recessions but no crisis, no banks failing. No big crisis. Then what happens? We say that regulation is a pain, it's expensive, we don't need it. So we start pulling the threads out of regulatory fabric. And what is the first thing that happens with that? We get the S and L crisis. Seven hundred financial institutions fail. Ten years later what do we get? Long term capital management when we learn that when one thing collapses in the world that it collapse everywhere else. In the early two thousands, we get Enron which tells us that the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.
Ending most recently with the Great Recession of 2008, from which we have not yet recovered. (Oh yes, there was that extraordinary rescue by the government to prop up those brilliant innovative capitalist heroes, and to keep the Wall Street bonuses flowing. But no regulatory reform to speak of.)
...But product-wise, they should have no fear. MS Office is very much entrenched and the newcomer has to offer something drastically better to have a chance.
However OpenOffice, in all of its incarnations, never offered such a thing. It was slower; it had more bugs; it was different...
True OpenOffice was (somewhat) different, though keeping the same basic UI design. But now it is MSOffice 2010 that is different -- they threw out the UI that hundreds of millions of people were familiar with and replace it with the monumentally misguided "ribbon" UI. And - in keeping with MS tradition - they give you no option of using the classic interface - you use the ribbon or nothing buddy - and default to saving everything in new backwards-incompatible formats.
So now OpenOffice/LibreOffice offers something drastically better - by not being different and staying the same as MS Office 2003.
MS gave me the push to entirely abandon their entire office suite. We have MSOffice 2010 at work, but I don't use it - I do my job perfectly well with OOO/LO (also LO runs on my Linux workstation giving me fewer reasons to switch to the mandatory MS desktop box) and that it is the only thing running on computers that I own.
Oracle's typical initial behavior when taking over OOO, forcing the LibreOffice fork, also gave me the opportunity - when I uninstalled OOO to install LO - and it popped up the question form to explain why I was uninstalling, to tell them what I thought of Larry Ellison.
Re:Lying about their age
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 1
Herman Hollerith invented the mainstay of the IBM product line in 1889... (obviously)
Re:Lying about their age
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 1
I seem to recall they were in business in the nineteenth century, not as IBM of course...
Correct. Herman Hollerith invented the mainstay of the IBM product line in 1989, sold his punch card tabulating machines to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890, and incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. IBM was the result of a 4-way merger, but any one of the other 3 businesses could have been left out and we would still have an IBM - not so the Tabulating Machine Company, it is the predecessor of IBM.
Re:IBM = Innovator? Not in my lifetime.
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 1
What are you smoking? IBM invented the term PC. When I was growing up (also 30ish), computers were either "IBM compatible", or an Apple. Floppy disks were "IBM format". Hell, I still know people that refer to a non-Mac PC as "an IBM". IBM is synonymous with the PC revolution where I'm from (the US), but maybe it's different where you're from.
I have posted on this thread several times defending IBMs still admirable record of genuine innovation, but the "IBM compatible" desktop (now known as the Wintel platform) isn't it. The name "Wintel" tells the story - somebody else's OS and somebody else's processor in a decent-but-not-ground-breaking systems package. The dominance of the IBM compatible was simply a case of the power of market dominance - it was IBM so businesses bought it. Microsoft went on to replicate this model in the 1990s - the market success of so many Microsoft "me too" products being due to its desktop market dominance.
. That means that IBM's innovations will no longer (or at least far less) be in the field of hardware and software...
IBM is still a world-leader in solid-state research, and develops and releases fundamental hardware advances on a regular basis. Its software innovation includes the remarkable AI demonstration of Watson with Jeopardy this year.
Re:Happy Birthday IBM
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Agreed. IBM hasn't been doing much innovation over the past 10 years
It is one of the few American businesses today that still vigorously conducts basic research. It is also constantly churning out new technological innovations that invigorate the entire field of computing (copper-on-silicon, silicon-on-insulator, etc.).
A fantastic achievement, Here's to the next 100 years.
I tend to think of IBM as being older than 100 years because the punch-card tabulating equipment, invented by Herman Hollerith, that was the mainstay of its dates to 1889, and I have viewed his Tabulating Machine Company (formed in 1896) as the true origin of the business that is IBM today. Anyone who remembers the days of punch cards remembers those Hollerith codes -- a coding scheme in use for nearly a century. It has always seemed to me the "senior member" of the four-way merger, the only one that was truly essential.
Actually they sold the machines which helped to track the jews their death numbers etc.. the ovens probably were built by Krupp.
The gas btw. was manufactured by IG Farben.
All of these companies still exist, although IG Farben now has a different name.
IG Farben helped operate Auschwitz so that it could use its slave labor in its chemical plants, but the Zylon B gas was manufactured by the Degussa AG subsidiary Degesch. Degussa AG still exists under the same name.
In a sense, Steve Jobs renovated the shell of 20th century Apple to create 21st century Apple. The current version only really owes elements of the MacOS UI to the original macintosh. So Apple didn't really survive the revival.
So was the 70s Apple dead in the 80s, since the Mac owed nothing to speak of to the Apple I/II? There may be a case for your claim, but the lack of a direct descendant of the original MacOS in the current product lineup isn't it. (I acknowledge that a case can be made that the original Apple start-up did not survive into the 80s, but what start-up organization does survive its growth into a multinational?)
They're really handy for detecting time dilation caused by variations in the gravitational field....
And the dilation caused by motion. Note that one of the organizations developing this is Draper Laboratories - home of the world's best inertial navigation systems. This would be a crucial component for a new compact, low cost (as military equipment goes) ultra-accurate inertial guidance system for weapons that is NOT dependent on GPS. Ever heard of GPS jammers?
Slashdot Mirror
...
The charm and a lot of the value those original versions of Star Wars had was due to the limitations and how they managed to work around them. The first scene (ya know, where Leia's ship gets badgered by a Star Destroyer) was awesome at the time, I remember how the theater went wild at the very first scene of the movie just from it being so awesome. Today, of course it isn't as impressive anymore, we're used to such scenes by now. But that's not what made the movie a classic. What did was that in its time it had the maybe best and certainly some of the most impressive special effects. Giving them a makeover does of course improve them, but it also cheapens them...
Precisely - consider someone redoing "2001" and replacing all those amazing miniature shots with CGI to "improve it".*
Any art work's original form is what gives it its cultural and historical significance. Rewriting it is okay - let culture and history decide if it is improved.** But rewritng it and then trying to suppress the original, which retains its popularity is artistic malfeasance, which only the abusively remodelled copyright system makes possible.***
*My kids were astonished when I explained that their was no CGI in the movei!
**There are many examples of works being redone by their creator, Fowles "The Magus", Bishop's "Eyes of Fire", Tolkien's "The Hobbit", Clarke's "Against the Fall of Night", etc.
***The retroactive extension of copyright for the equivalent of multiple lifetimes was a theft of public assets of enormous proportions for the benefit of immortal private corporations.
This is precisely why the "Copyright Term Extension Act" was awful law to begin with. 17+17 years should be plenty of time to make a heap of money off of a movie, book, or piece of music. Certainly George Lucas has made more than his fair share of money off of Star Wars, and that money did incentivize him to go out and make the prequels. Had the original 17+17 rule for copyright been in effect today, the copyright on Star Wars would be expiring this year instead of 100 years after the death of George Lucas.
Dare I say it? Fans must do what they can to accelerate its transfer to the public domain. If this will only happen 100 years after George Lucas is dead then....
We did this before the creation of the TSA - competitive pressures led to the cheapest possible screeners and not inconveniencing passengers, and no real security of any kind -- movie theater and theme park style "gate screening".
Reforming TSA does not logically entail "privatization". (To paraphrase playwright Hanns Johst: "When I hear the word privatization..., I release the safety on my Browning!")
I think your sig should read: "Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but will still be weaker than individuals."
Having some experience with trying to view things with laser red light and LPS yellow light I am inclined to think that monochromatic light sources make perceiving scenes correctly relatively difficult, and visually tiring also. I'd like to see the traffic safety implications of this studied.
The problem was not with Marx's analysis, but with his conclusions.
That is the point indeed - that Marx's analysis of real-world Capitalism was very good. His theory of about the imaginary system of Communism was similar to other 19th Century utopian notions -- unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. The only place where Marx's real ideas of Communism were put into effect were in Israeli Kibbutzim, where they proved workable as long as the community remained small (several hundred people) and, ironically, agricultural. The dictatorships of Russia, China and North Korea founded on "cults of personality" have little to with Marx.
Oddly enough in the middle to the 20th Century another distinctly 19th Century utopian socio-economic theory arose -- Libertarianism -- which is likewise unconnected with the realities of human behavior and the complexities of the real world. Like Communism in Kibbutzes, it is likely to only workable in small groups if at all. Libertarians however so far have failed to found any such communities that I can discover.
So the fabulous amazing U.S. wage multiplier for product costs in now 275%? Where did you pull that number from? The labor portion of a product - and the "penalty" for using U.S. labor - is usually fantastically overstated in these discussions. Look at this estimate for an Apple hi-tech product, the iPod family: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/07/a_fair_labor_ipod_what_would_i.html According to this the price increase would be more like 23%, 1/12 your fake made up claim.
He means that "the weekend" means you have two days off. The five day work week we take for granted was a gift of unionization demanding better working conditions.
You are again missing the point. The point is that each journal selects which articles to publish. If Science didn't reject over 70% of its submissions, publishing in that journal wouldn't carry such significance -- and what most people having these arguments conveniently forget is that the majority of rejections for high-profile journals are made at the initial stage of editorial triage. That is the primary value that the journals are providing: the job of filtering out the bad papers for their readership.
Interesting that you bring up Science. It is a premier journal, and its name carries great weight and it has no per-article download charges. For the cost of just subscribing to the magazine you have unlimited access to everything they have ever published. There exists, as far as I can determine, no substantial basis for the per-article access charge of these private journals - many foundations and other NFP organizations have no problem running their scientific journals without needing to lock up the content.
Pluto and Charon orbit around a non-fixed barycenter that is actually outside of both Pluto and Charon. Pluto/Charon is really a binary Dwarf Planet with 3 moons. Which, honestly, is fucking awesome.
Absolutely! Further more its physical and orbital characteristics clearly associate it with the recently discovered Kuiper Belt Objects. It is should not be viewed as a "pathetic little planet wannabe" but as the King of the KBOs (Eris would be the Queen).
Wasn't it "Li-gnux"?
Sounds to me like he stole the cloth from his employer. Trash or not, it wasn't his property.
If I throw something in a waste receptacle deliberately, with the intention of getting rid of it permanently with no expectation of any return from its disposal (quite the opposite - I'm paying someone to take it off my hands), when do I voluntarily relinquish rights of ownership? Clearly the contents of a landfill are not the separate private property of all the people who ever threw something away that ended up there.
I am not a lawyer (perhaps one will chime in) but i strongly suspect that there is law regarding the separation in ownership of materials intentionally thrown away. The police for example do not need any sort of warrant to search through your trash put out for disposal - which indicates you no longer own it.
Yeah, but lumber is way more than ten times as easy to come by as Na2S2O3.
And why would that be?
Sodium thiosulfate can be produced in a one-step reaction from sodium sulfite and elemental sulfur. Sodium sulfite is a waste byproduct of scrubbing sulfur from coal power plant flue gas, sulfur is now a waste byproduct of de-sulfuring high sulfur petroleum (the production of which is increasing as we are forced to use less desirable petroleum deposits). Surplus sulfur now exists in large amounts (millions of tons) and sodium sulfite production capacity far exceeds demand - combining two abundant extremely cheap chemicals in a simple single step process results in an abundant extremely cheap product.
If you want a comparison product - a simple chemical product made from cheap raw materials in a simple reaction - think "cement". No problems coming by that.
"Nuclear is dangerous and bad and scary!" -- the coal energy lobby
And mdsolar. Guy's a fucking idiot, just look at his submissions. Anti-nuclear crackpots are why we can't have nice things, like non-40 year old plants, and thorium reactors.
No, the hippies aren't holding back nuclear power. It is being held back by the high capital cost and long construction lead time* of nuclear power plants that make them unattractive investments for building new plants compared to coal or natural gas. It takes much longer for the trivial fuel cost and high plant availability of nuclear to pay-off those upfront costs.
*And, no, the hippies aren't running up the costs and lead times by demanding unreasonable safety features and studies. Well built nuclear power plants are quite safe, but only because stringent safety standards are followed. The definitely non-hippie Edward Teller pioneered these strict safety standards. When you don't do that you get -- Fukushima.
And the alternative is? Communism? Nice idea, but it has been shown to fail by history...
Regulated capitalism, of course -- which has been shown by history to succeed far better than the unregulated sort.
I really can't do better to summarize that history than Elizabeth Warren:
Okay, a young country, George Washington is in his first term and we have a credit freeze. There is a financial panic. Every ten to fifteen years there is a financial panic in our history. Just look at it. And there is a big collapse, trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out, until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and we say we can do better than this. We don't have to go back to this type of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations. FDIC insurance. It is safe to put your money into banks. Glass-Steagall. Banks won't do crazy things. And some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis... some recessions but no crisis, no banks failing. No big crisis. Then what happens? We say that regulation is a pain, it's expensive, we don't need it. So we start pulling the threads out of regulatory fabric. And what is the first thing that happens with that? We get the S and L crisis. Seven hundred financial institutions fail. Ten years later what do we get? Long term capital management when we learn that when one thing collapses in the world that it collapse everywhere else. In the early two thousands, we get Enron which tells us that the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.
Ending most recently with the Great Recession of 2008, from which we have not yet recovered. (Oh yes, there was that extraordinary rescue by the government to prop up those brilliant innovative capitalist heroes, and to keep the Wall Street bonuses flowing. But no regulatory reform to speak of.)
However OpenOffice, in all of its incarnations, never offered such a thing. It was slower; it had more bugs; it was different...
True OpenOffice was (somewhat) different, though keeping the same basic UI design. But now it is MSOffice 2010 that is different -- they threw out the UI that hundreds of millions of people were familiar with and replace it with the monumentally misguided "ribbon" UI. And - in keeping with MS tradition - they give you no option of using the classic interface - you use the ribbon or nothing buddy - and default to saving everything in new backwards-incompatible formats.
So now OpenOffice/LibreOffice offers something drastically better - by not being different and staying the same as MS Office 2003.
MS gave me the push to entirely abandon their entire office suite. We have MSOffice 2010 at work, but I don't use it - I do my job perfectly well with OOO/LO (also LO runs on my Linux workstation giving me fewer reasons to switch to the mandatory MS desktop box) and that it is the only thing running on computers that I own.
Oracle's typical initial behavior when taking over OOO, forcing the LibreOffice fork, also gave me the opportunity - when I uninstalled OOO to install LO - and it popped up the question form to explain why I was uninstalling, to tell them what I thought of Larry Ellison.
Herman Hollerith invented the mainstay of the IBM product line in 1889... (obviously)
I seem to recall they were in business in the nineteenth century, not as IBM of course...
Correct. Herman Hollerith invented the mainstay of the IBM product line in 1989, sold his punch card tabulating machines to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890, and incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. IBM was the result of a 4-way merger, but any one of the other 3 businesses could have been left out and we would still have an IBM - not so the Tabulating Machine Company, it is the predecessor of IBM.
What are you smoking? IBM invented the term PC. When I was growing up (also 30ish), computers were either "IBM compatible", or an Apple. Floppy disks were "IBM format". Hell, I still know people that refer to a non-Mac PC as "an IBM". IBM is synonymous with the PC revolution where I'm from (the US), but maybe it's different where you're from.
I have posted on this thread several times defending IBMs still admirable record of genuine innovation, but the "IBM compatible" desktop (now known as the Wintel platform) isn't it. The name "Wintel" tells the story - somebody else's OS and somebody else's processor in a decent-but-not-ground-breaking systems package. The dominance of the IBM compatible was simply a case of the power of market dominance - it was IBM so businesses bought it. Microsoft went on to replicate this model in the 1990s - the market success of so many Microsoft "me too" products being due to its desktop market dominance.
. That means that IBM's innovations will no longer (or at least far less) be in the field of hardware and software...
IBM is still a world-leader in solid-state research, and develops and releases fundamental hardware advances on a regular basis. Its software innovation includes the remarkable AI demonstration of Watson with Jeopardy this year.
Agreed. IBM hasn't been doing much innovation over the past 10 years
It is one of the few American businesses today that still vigorously conducts basic research. It is also constantly churning out new technological innovations that invigorate the entire field of computing (copper-on-silicon, silicon-on-insulator, etc.).
A fantastic achievement, Here's to the next 100 years.
I tend to think of IBM as being older than 100 years because the punch-card tabulating equipment, invented by Herman Hollerith, that was the mainstay of its dates to 1889, and I have viewed his Tabulating Machine Company (formed in 1896) as the true origin of the business that is IBM today. Anyone who remembers the days of punch cards remembers those Hollerith codes -- a coding scheme in use for nearly a century. It has always seemed to me the "senior member" of the four-way merger, the only one that was truly essential.
Actually they sold the machines which helped to track the jews their death numbers etc.. the ovens probably were built by Krupp. The gas btw. was manufactured by IG Farben. All of these companies still exist, although IG Farben now has a different name.
IG Farben helped operate Auschwitz so that it could use its slave labor in its chemical plants, but the Zylon B gas was manufactured by the Degussa AG subsidiary Degesch. Degussa AG still exists under the same name.
In a sense, Steve Jobs renovated the shell of 20th century Apple to create 21st century Apple. The current version only really owes elements of the MacOS UI to the original macintosh. So Apple didn't really survive the revival.
So was the 70s Apple dead in the 80s, since the Mac owed nothing to speak of to the Apple I/II? There may be a case for your claim, but the lack of a direct descendant of the original MacOS in the current product lineup isn't it. (I acknowledge that a case can be made that the original Apple start-up did not survive into the 80s, but what start-up organization does survive its growth into a multinational?)
They're really handy for detecting time dilation caused by variations in the gravitational field....
And the dilation caused by motion. Note that one of the organizations developing this is Draper Laboratories - home of the world's best inertial navigation systems. This would be a crucial component for a new compact, low cost (as military equipment goes) ultra-accurate inertial guidance system for weapons that is NOT dependent on GPS. Ever heard of GPS jammers?