Some people (mainly the old engineers) pronounce "giga-" as a "jiga-" sound for some reason. Always sounds funny to me, but I've heard that pronunciation. Obviously Dr Brown was one such old engineer.

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Several points:

From Wikipedia:
"Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, usually in competitive markets" Fairness, regulation, or even free market is not a crucial part of this definition.

In my own personal definition I see capitalism as "free market capitalism"... however there are many ways a free market can be corrupted as both agree upon. However just because the markets are corrupted and not fair and/or unregulated, it's still capitalism.

"Without the ethics and regulation the market will be nothing like fair." I Agree. However people seem to define the robber barons time of monopolies as "capitalism run amok", thus still defining it as capitalism. For example laissez-faire capitalism is capitalism with no or very little regulation. These are phrases and uses of capitalism that seem to be lacking in morality and fairness so they imply that fairness is NOT a requirement of capitalism.

Feudalism is also an economic system. Which people does it serve? Feudalism is only people friendly if you're at the top? You're using a metric for defining the success of an economic system that is not intrinsic to the definition of an economic system. An economic system doesn't care about people, only about how commerce happens.

So, my point is that you can have free market capitalism without regulation or fairness, but you can not have it without personal greed.

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"certainly a part of capitalism"??? If you remove greed, you don't have capitalism. What do you think capitalism is?

Ethical business practices are something imposed upon capitalism to make it more people friendly, it has nothing to do with what capitalism is. Same as regulation.

No, honestly, I'm kind of scratching my head at what your vision of capitalism is. Please explain because if you understand free markets and all, then you should be able to see it for what it is. The motivating factor in capitalism is greed. period. end of story. The goal of capitalism is to set up system where greed motivates people to compete with each other. In this competition, assuming it is somewhat close to fair (i.e. not corrupt, not a monopoly, etc), people's desire for more money will drive the system to create more and more efficient products, to make more and more efficient use of natural resources and people. This has nothing to do with ethics, laws, niceties or anything else. We impose them on capitalism to keep it fair and to protect things we care about from "excesses".

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You forgot one crucial step. There needs to be a step where the voter views the paper receipt before it visibly falls into a box.

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Mod parent up.

I've always figured that the solution is exactly what you just mentioned and I get frustrated in these slashdot discussions that the answer doesn't appear this obvious to everyone.

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The problem with this is that this is that it's an e-book reader primarily. At that price point, you can bet it's going to be quite underpowered. This is equivalent to a netbook vs a real laptop. For a certain portion of the market it'll be just fine and the price will win it over the competition, but for the slashdot crowd, we'll all find it a slow and clunky android tablet and we'll be thoroughly dissatisfied.

I wish the Ipad back luck, but IMHO, this isn't likely to dethrone it. it's just a slightly expanded e-book reader.

(All analysis is based upon the list price and past history. I haven't even looked at the raw specs and haven't done anything resembling honest research.)

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Capitalism is all about using greed as the primary motivating factor behind the economy. "Unbridled", of course not... unless you're against regulation (i.e. republicans) ... then it is all about unbridled greed.

Communism on the other hand, is all about working for the betterment of your neighbors, for the good of the whole, for the satisfaction of doing a good job and you see where that gets you? Capitalism is all about individual greed. If you use it right, if you harness it and bound it with fair competition, the greed motivation works is much than all that group love you get from communism. This is the way of things. This is what the 20th century taught us.

But don't for one tiny iota of a second think that capitalism isn't all about greed, because it is.

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Archangel Michael... giving "the man" a reach-around.

Ok... spell it out for me. Tell me what they should say when a reporter sticks a camera in their face.

Samsung is being treating everyone who ISN'T suing them in the same non-discriminatory manner.

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If there is any bias, it is the bias of expectation as opposed to the bias of conclusion. The idea that ANY SINGLE ONE of these physicists would say "hm... reality doesn't match up with general relativity so I'll just fudge the numbers because I *want* GR to be true" is insane. I would be that the thinking went more like this:

1. Bah... results are slightly wrong, what'd I screw up?
2. Hm.. results must be wrong by the margin of error of the equipment.... no no... that's not it
3. Ok... double checked all equipment and the speed reading is still off....
4. confirmed calibration on all instruments, re-calibrated, re-measured, ... WTF am I doing wrong?
5. Ok, I the 5 smartest people I know double check all equipment, results, calculations, methods, etc.
6. HOLY FUCKEN MOTHER OF GOD CAN THIS REALLY BE TRUE!??
7. Let's show what we found... be cautious... and have have other people repeat the experiment because after all, incredible claims require significant evidence.

What I'm trying to point out here, is that a result like this is any one of these scientist's wet dream. They all would love to "break" the current scientific understanding because that allows them to discover something new. To throw out the word "bias" is misusing it from the typical context. In more typical language it implies that the desire of the scientist drives the result. In this case, the desire of the scientist is for neutrinos to be FTL because that would reap them lots of scientific prestige and then the physics groupies would be all over them.

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What are you smoking? Theoretical limitations aren't too far away. There are lots of games that we can yet play to increase performance, but miles of runway we don't have.

And yes, I remember a headline "Can we break the 1 micron barrier?" and I marvel that we're at 22nm lithography and shrinking.

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I call bullshit. List the stores and I'll call them myself. Even back in the day, MS never "contractually forbid" selling other operating systems, they just charged their license fee based upon each and every computer sold. So in effect the company was paying for a windows operating system even if they never installed it on the machine.

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Nah... that doesn't quite pass the smell test. Capital gains are taxed at 15%... income at 28%. So the argument is that the risk of making this investment is oh so worth it when your take home is 85% of the profits... but "run away scary" when you get to keep *only* 72% of the profits. The numbers just aren't there to support the adjectives you used.

So from an investment standpoint, a minor hit... from a tax standpoint... it's double the money coming in from some MAJOR streams of income. That's a big difference.

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WTF... I must have just run into the fox news talking point section. Which way to the door out of bullshit land?

This is one of the stupidest lines of spoon fed nonsense to come out of the whole Warren Buffett episode. He can't argue that the system should be changed without putting up the money himself? And to what end? Nobody wants to pay taxes but adults realize that it goes toward running our country. I personally think my tax rate should be increased... you know why? not because I want to pay more money, but because I want our country to balance it's budget. But if I volunteered to paid more in taxes, I wouldn't have the money (which I don't want to lose) AND the federal government wouldn't balance it's budget (which I also want). However I still think Obama shouldn't have renewed the bush tax cuts for anyone.

So why the fuck can't Warren Buffett argue that the tax rate on the rich should be increased while not giving away his money to the government? It is perfectly reasonable and logical to argue that he doesn't pay enough in taxes and argue the system should be changed for the benefit of the country! Because if it was changed for all, it might actually make a difference to the country.

Attacking Warren Buffett just shows how fucking nuts the right is. A guy who made his billions from scratch and is giving almost all of it away before he dies.... but watch out, he's arguing that the rich should pay at least the same percentage as middle class folks so fox says he's eeeeeevil and that "he's a socialist too!!!!1111!!11"

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