Unfortunately the rumor is that IBM selected the 8086 crapitecture (segemented addressing) because it was so weird that it would never come to compete with their own high-end proprietary products.

There were lots of practical reasons for IBM to use the 8086 in the form of the 8088. It had compatibility with the existing base of 8080 CP/M software, the 8 bit external bus could use 8080 peripherals and halved the memory granularity, and Intel was willing to allow alternate sources. The prime alternative was the 68000 which lacked an 8 bit external bus and was more expensive to produce.

That New York Times article does not discuss reliability. Routine maintenance needs have gone down in some cases but outright failures which completely disable a vehicle are more common and what routine maintenance is needed is more expensive.

The problem, though, is that anyone has a monopoly when you get specific enough.

Prosecutors take advantage of this in anti-trust trials. When they went after ALCOA just before World War 2, the market was considered virgin aluminum and excluded recycled aluminum and other metals like steel. They simultaneously argued that ALCOA had gained market share at the expense of any competitors by excessively expanding production and lowering price while simultaneously arguing that ALCOA needed to be constrained to prevent shortages of aluminum during the war.

The reason car electronics cost so much is that they don't sell very many of them, relatively speaking. Even cars that sell very well will only sell a few hundred thousand units per year and the design cycles are at least for a 4-8 year production run minimum. Electronics advances WAY faster than car companies can keep up with. The GPS in my truck (a 2009 model) is laughably obsolete albeit still useful. My company makes a part for a backup camera for one of the big US auto makers and the volumes simply aren't enough to get huge economies of scale even at a few hundred thousand a year. Plus they often do stupid stuff like design the parts to use custom connectors instead of off the shelf ones that would cost far less.

This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.

I hate automatic transmission vehicles because I loose fine-grain control over the speed of the vehicle especially on slippery surfaces and in emergency deceleration situations.

I hate them because they are less reliable and have a higher cost of ownership. I hate "electronic" transmissions even more. I also hate power anything for the same reason. Car companies are incredibly cheap so any extra complexity adds to the unreliability faster than the convenience. They deliberately go out of their way to obfuscate systems so only they can repair and maintain them and encourage forced obsolescence.

Just apply public pressure. Prominently advertise that nVidia policies are preventing support of their products.

The manufacturers do not like to advertise this so specifications are in short supply. I ran some of my own tests on various unused USB Flash drives I had laying around and none of them retained data more than a year whether powered or unpowered so I assume they do no background scrubbing. SSDs generally have better documentation and will specify something like 1 year of unpowered retention. Beware of "typical" specifications which have almost no meaning.

Unfortunately high density Flash memory has a retention of months to years unless it is scrubbed. That makes it great for SSDs which are regularly used but useless for archival purposes or even as a replacement for magnetic and optical removable media in many applications.

I thought Mote Prime was short on fossil fuels (and radioactives). Why not ask the Moties?

I thought using hydraulics and fiber optics was obvious and such things are common in hazardous industrial environments. I remember seeing demonstrations of fluidic logic although I am not sure it scales down well enough compared to MEMs logic:

http://www.eetimes.com/documen...

I wonder how it would compare though to a much faster dedicated silicon on insulator process with 100^2 micron feature size.

Radiation. Our electronics and robotics thrive on miniturization however that is not useful when you're dealing with radiation. You want really thick circuits. You want something that can be swiss cheesed by the radiation all day and all night for years on end and still work.

It is a little trickier than that. Finer circuits present a smaller cross section; for example if the cross section decreases faster than the stored charge, then resistance to single event upset becomes greater which is the case with the later DRAM generations. Thinner substrates have less volume to capture stray charge which can act in a way similar to minority carrier injection. That explains why silicon on insulator is a good way to increase radiation resistance; the silicon volume to capture charge is smaller.

How does shit like this make it past any kind of review?

There is little or no criminal and civil liability for the company.

That does not solve anything when the funds are fungible. Increased revenue designated for a specific purpose will displace general revenue which can then be allocated to pork projects. Lotteries used for educational funding are a good example of this.

Parallel construction also gets around 4th amendment restrictions on searches and seizures. The remedy for an unlawful search or seizure is exclusion of evidence but that does not apply when parallel construction is used.

There are a lot of things in the USA that are not supposed to exist. Secret laws, secret courts, secret trade agreements. Secret police. Secret police blacksites. Secret "crowd control" weapons for the secret police to use domestically. Torture. Rendition. Off-shore prisons. Extrajudicial assassination.

Secret interrogation centers:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-...