There should have been plenty of businesses to buy up and use that hardware. There's never a shortage of people that could put computer hardware to good use. otoh I've seen economists talking about how in the 70s businesses spent 40 cents of every dollar on investment and now it's like 10 cents, with the rest going into the shareholders/investor's pockets, so it's possible we're just seeing the effect of run away parasitism sucking all the capital out of our economy (I think the quote was something like:"Finance used to be a way to get money into productive businesses, now it's a way to get money out").

But I think it's more likely that a lack of demand for Sun hardware existed. If you're selling something for 1/10 retail it's because nobody really wants it...

Sun was run out of business by cheap Intel hardware + free Linux devouring their core business (expensive high performance workstations and servers). Nobody makes money on Java. Even IBM doesn't. They make money hiring out cheap Indian programmers. That didn't leave Sun a viable product. Intel hardware + Linux (Lintel?) got too cheap too fast. It didn't matter if you're Sun box was 10x faster. I could roll out 100 Lintel boxes for 1/10 the price.

at least not in early builds. It was MDI (multiple document interface). Maybe it was in betas or something, but back when tabs were first introduced in Firefox Opera still had an MDI interface. I remember trying it and being frustrated with how clumsy MDI was for changing between pages...

to bring the cheese. Most competitive tournaments are chock fully of expensive as hell lists. It's not like League of Legends where cheap unites are competitive. You'll get blown off the table by $150 Knight Titans and $90 Riptides if you bring an elcheapo army built from the starter sets.

is "Race to the Bottom", not "competitive workforce". It's a matter of perspective really. You're one of the lucky winners. If you had the wind knocked out of you by a few more rounds of offshoring though things might turn out differently for you.

I didn't say humanity was going away. I said that a substantial amount of the population was going to be stuck living in abject poverty for 50/60 years until our economy somehow catches up and finds new jobs for them. This is what happened when the Industrial revolution hit. A whole lot of completely unnecessary Human suffering...

it pretty much _did_ happen. There was a 60 year period during the industrial revolution when millions were put out of work and tossed to the wayside. There's a reason why Luddites existed. They weren't forward think people. They were Luddites for Pete's sake. They were living in the misery caused by a lack of jobs in their day.

The industrial revolution caused massive unemployment, and it took the economy 60 years to catch up and start creating new jobs. If you lived after that period things got better as new tech created new jobs. If you lived during that period and weren't born wealthy life was Nasty, Brutish and Short. I'd like to skip that cycle this time.

Oh and there's one other thing: we're better at automation this time. So there's a good time the cycle will last a _lot_ longer. e.g. instead of 60 years of poverty we might be looking at 100, 200 or more while we wait for Star Trek style replicators and massive population declines to fix things.

Right, but the conversation that's being had around this is what are we going to do with all these people that we don't need anymore. Sure, we can say that the economy will catch up, but that might take 50, 60 years. In the meantime we'll have 2 or 3 lost generations who live in terrifying abject poverty. It'd be nice if this time around we did something about that...

Um... All the "Virtua" games are developed in house. Freakin' Reiko Kodama (google her) made Seventh Dragon. They might not have made their last few racers but it's pretty clear from the graphics/style they had heavy input on all of them. Forza, made by the same studio as Outrun 2/2006 is a wildly different game. Yakuza's pure Sega too.

OTOH you can see what happened when they tried the "hands off" approach with Aliens: Colonial Marines. The got taken for a ride. Too bad. After Gearbox patched it the game was a solid 5. Ok, playable, and kinda fun if you're an Alien's fanboy. Of course, the patch was larger than the base game, so there is that.

that have actually been perverted. Say what you will about Obamacare but there's no part about that law that isn't functioning as intended. Maybe you disagree with the intent of the law, but it's doing exactly what it was written to.

You're problem isn't with the laws, it's with the yahoos writing them.

and all those videos of the cut scenes from Armored Core getting passed off as gameplay. Hell, there were videos of George Lucas saying the PS2 could render Episode I. I knew tonnes and tonnes of people who bought Sony's hype and didn't get a Dreamcast.

And as someone who's burned discs in 2001 I wouldn't call piracy on the Dreamcast easy. You needed specific burning software, good quality discs and the know how to find isos. You've just taken out 95% of the market for piracy.

On the other hand Sega's Dreamcast marketing was terrible. They had the best looking games of all time and what did they do? Sonic rappin' with NBA Stars... Dear lord, what a mess.

where the heck have you been. Here's a list of just some of the excellent games Sega made since the Dreamcast:

Virtua Fighter 4
Outrun 2/2006
Virtua On Marz
Yakuza (multiple games)
Aliens vs Predator
Aliens: Isolation
The entire Total War Series
Sonic Colors
Sonic Generations
Hell Yeah: Wrath of the Undead Rabbit
Project Diva
Seventh Dragon.

I could go on. Yeah, Sega let some stinkers. But so did EA. See my post elsewhere in the thread for what really killed them.

for all the complaining about how bad Sonic Boom is people forget that Sonic 2006 was wildly profitable. From a business standpoint it's hard to argue with that. Sonic Boom is awful, but not much worse/glitchy than 2006 was. Then there's Aliens:Colonial Marines. Gear Box ripped them off. Period. It's painfully obvious that they took Sega's money and spent it on Borderlands 2. It would cost more to litigate that than Sega would ever get back though, so they're screwed. You could argue Sega should have kept a closer eye on Gearbox, but games like Aliens:CM were Gearbox's bread and butter. It's ridiculous that they'd pull that on Sega, since it pretty much burns every bridge they'll ever have in the industry. But then again who would have thought something as mediocre as Borderlands (which I like, but let's face it, it's just really, really OK) would be one of the biggest games of last gen.

So what else has Sega done wrong since the Saturn? Yes, the Saturn/32x were epic, epic failures. I guess there was Shenmue, but honestly that could have been it's generation's Grand Theft Auto.

Now, what's _really_ killing Sega is the same thing that's killing _all_ Japanese game makers: US and European companies are eating them alive. Heck, bloody Farcry 4 is selling well in Japan. Meanwhile Final Fantasy games are doing so-so.

There's a video blog that did a good video on it, I think it's here but I might have the wrong video. Either way the kinds of games the Japanese did best have been taken over by the likes of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

[A]s a college educated person, they should know the approximate age of the universe, that the universe is expanding, and that we know that because of the red shift. They should know, roughly, the scale of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, etc

Why should a farmer, or a software writer, be able to put even an approximate number (OK, understanding red shift is pretty basic) to any of those factoids. Surely it is far more important to know that the effects of capsaicin are mediated by the TRPV1 receptor ... or am I naval gazing? ;) (Believe it or not, but that question was actually put to me over lunch this weekend.)

OK, any science graduate must have a working knowledge of the basics of physics, chemistry and maths (as these are the building blocks of the other sciences). Knowing that the universe's age is measured in billions rather than thousands of years doesn't hurt either, (but really, if you thought the universe was 5 billion years old that is not going to affect most of the work you do in biochemistry).

However increasingly when "facts" are only a few keystrokes away memorising them becomes less important, while recognising fact vs non-fact becomes more so.

Bill Nye is ... saying that too many people lack basic scientific literacy.

I can read what Bill Nye is saying. What I'm saying is that, in the context in which he answered that question, his diagnosis is wrong. It's not so much a database that is required, as a bullshit detector.

I'm not sure, perhaps your knowledge of immunology is so good as to be comparable to amount to a knowledge of "age of the universe ... the scale of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, etc." But even if your work in science has never brought you into contact with CST, you ought to be able to assess the credibility of evidence led by anti-vaxxers for example.

CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.

And neither should we expect them to be experts outside their own field. I should have no reasonable expectation that a farmer (Nye wrote "regular software writers and farmers") would have expertise in astrophysics for example. And as science requires ever more specialisation, I should have no reasonable expectation either that an astrophysicist be an expert in pharmacology (just don't try telling any physicist that! ;)

The problem is not so much the lack of knowledge about "scientific topics," it the lack of humility in regard to those who have knowledge. You are free, of course, to contradict the orthodoxy in absolutely any field of science, but it is impertient to do so unless you have done the hard yards and made yourself an expert. The knowledge, the skill rather, that everyone ought to possess (and this IMO is more important than direct knowledge of "science topics") is the skill to assess the credibility and authoritativeness of sources of scientific "information." It is this skill, in light of the increasing supply of disinformation, that a science education ought to impart.

You may think that measles isn't that serious (you'd be wrong), but it could just as easily have been polio. The inability to sort out scientific information from scientific disinformation kills!