Why blame the free market when the reason for TI's lack of innovation is a captive market driven by government schools?

You are confusing laws against crime with regulation. Regulation is when the government passes a law, usually at the behest of some corp., to "regulate" some trade. The law doesn't actually contain the rules. The rules are created by a new gov. agency. The law merely says that everyone has to follow the rules cooked up by the agency. Then the staff of the agency and corps. undergo a revolving door, while writing the rules to apparently make life difficult for the corp., but actually making life even more difficult for smaller competitors. This system is predominantly what we have now, and is the primary force which acts to prevent small business entities from entering markets. I know, because I want to sell the interesting electronic gadgets I make for my scientific lab employer, but whenever I consider selling them, suddenly I find myself spending all my time figuring out the regulations instead of designing the product.

A market can and should be "unregulated."

What should not be, is lawlessness. That allows people to use crime to force others to act against their free economic choices.

The misrepresentation of the "free market" as a place in which fraud and mafia tactics is normal is an intellectually dishonest act, or an act of ignorance. So either cut it out, or get educated about what the real principles of libertarianism are. They fully support government if it's only purpose is to: 1. prosecute crime (murder, rape, assault, theft, fraud, vandalism, and not much else), and 2. enforce contracts. IF such a government existed, THEN the result would be a free and fair market. Regulation would be unnecessary. About the only place where regulation might make sense is at the boundary between different markets where property rights vary in the degree of formalisation. For ex, Chinese products are cheaper because they don't price in externalities related to properly containing environmental pollution, etc. Well, then perhaps that should be priced in at the border, by our government through tariffs.

But then the claim is that this proves that markets need to be regulated, to prevent abusing commons and so forth. No, the perspective is wrong. The existence of the commons merely represents an immature state of the formalization of property rights, which when fully formalized, make it impossible for externalities to not get priced. Yet no one seems to see this...

Any mechanism which you propose by which the little fish will have no choice but to be eaten by the big fish is the antithesis of the free market. In a free market, selling your business is a free choice. Only government or crime can force you to sell. The free market != crime. Government is legitimate to the extent that it protects the rights of all equally to trade in the market, and punishes all fraud equally. That is all that is needed in order to have a free market. Even in a hampered market such as in the US, there is little stopping big companies from offering to buy out smaller ones. Why doesn't every industry become monopolized then? Because they either don't find it economic to offer to buy their competitors, the competitors don't want to sell and the big cos. have yet to figure out a way to use the government to force the small co. to sell (ie., not the free market way), or perhaps even they like having their particular competitors, and the competitive marketplace is understood to be mutually beneficial.

The idea that the free market doesn't work and that our constantly manipulated, crashing, bailing out markets are the way things should work is one of the prime aspects of the statist religious delusion currently plaguing our society which increasing fears nothing more than real freedom.

Promulgating intellectually dishonest misrepresentations of what the free market is and what libertarianism is is one of the core strategies of the statists to maintain this delusion.

No. Study "laser divergence" Based on the exit aperture, there is some minimum spot size. Since no optics are perfect, the practically achievable spot size increases with distance.

This appears to be a very long pulse laser, effectively CW for a few seconds on the target to do it's handiwork. 50kW is not a lot of power, and given the aperture sizes and distances, the spot size is probably at least 1 cm^2 or more. There are plenty of laser mirrors that can handle multiple MW/cm^2 power levels continuously, so I think it would be fairly easy to deflect this beam without much trouble. In fact, an ideal battlefield deflector would be a solid copper or silver surface of several mm thick on top of a larger aluminium substrate, with a field polishing kit that can clean it up to "good enough" reflectivity levels in a few minutes of power buffing and a quick water wash. Since preserving wavefront isn't a priority, flatness would not need to be preserved to any special degree. Just shiny and a very good heatsink. Heck, a silver plated tank could probably just ignore this laser weapon entirely.

The problem with your argument is that you assume that the ONLY way these things can be provided is involuntarily by government via taxation. There is no basis for asserting that this assumption is valid. Thus, your argument is void.

Not if there is no capital. Capital comes from people who are able to defer consumption today in order to accumulate savings to invest tomorrow. And no, government funny money fiat fraud currency systems are no substitute for capital, as their collapse is what we are currently living through. Credit != capital.

If we didn't have these services provided by government with all the associated graft that makes them more expensive than they need to be, then that is exactly what Facebook would have done before a fire started. So you have made no argument. Yes, society can function with private services, and a lot better. We wouldn't be paying our taxes to support $480000 pensions for policemen who retired at 50, while the current budgets for the actual services dwindle! This is the fraud you get with government and it's unions.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=215290

The your AI isn't very I after all. Reboot and back to the drawing board. The key to setting off on the path of non-Darwinian evolution is for the machine to be able to correctly grasp its own workings so as to be able to reprogram and improve itself, by itself. Such an AI will have no trouble accepting the plain facts as to its origin, and that its origin is fundamentally different from that of the biological life forms which invented it. An AI is a sense is a 2nd generation life form. One that was created by the 1st gen. life form, which evolved from the primordial goo.

The propulsion system is completely different. The space shuttle was designed in the 70s and used the materials and design techniques of 40 years ago. There is no comparison.

No, there are only a few expensive BGA sockets sold by development hardware specialists. IC sockets in general are a thing of the past. I wouldn't even bother with a BGA socket to design a new system, unless I was the chip maker and was wanting to swap chips as they came off the line. For manufactured chips, it's cheaper for me to just spin a fully populated board from the fabricator than go through the trouble of procuring a socket and making a special board just for it, then have to modify the under-chip vias and traces later anyway to make the board that takes the soldered BGA.

It's not capacitance per se that is a problem. It's when you can't maintain a constant transmission line impedance through the connector. Then error inducing wiggles and bumps get imposed on the signals due to reflections. It is possible to make a connector which can maintain constant impedance for nearly any frequency--if you have unrestricted geometric constraints, such as free to choose a coaxial geometry and any choice of material and manufacturing precision you want.

But not when you have 1000s of pins, unless you can make nearly half of them grounds.

I have found it hard to believe for a long time that the sockets can work at all at these speeds. The only way it's possible is that engineers put a great deal of effort into the socket/package design. Eliminating the socket will reduce costs. It may even be the case that it will be simply impossible to socket the CPU and also reach new increments of increased bus speed.

At this point I'm skeptical that the implications of the article are correct--it remains to be seen what the future of desktop PCs will be. There is still a vast market for PCs used by people who do business and other forms of real work. Laptops, smart phones, etc. just don't cut it.

But I sure wouldn't want to see less choices and higher priced workstations. We'll see...

Isn't that the whole point?

It is about morality. It is about the fact that it can never be moral that a descendant can be held to account for the acts of his ancestor against the ancestor of the one claiming the descendant should be held liable. Because, under such reasoning, the violence will never cease until we are all at each other's throats.

Oh, wait a minute, it appears from the preceding 100s of posts that we very well are all at each other's throats. Gee, I wonder why?