You comment is well put. A distro that is "Debian without systemd dependencies" has a very large built-in audience right out of the gate. And that audience is technically sophisticated, with the ability to contribute. Regardless of whether or not you consider that audience a herd of Luddites (which I do not) it has both critical mass and sufficient know-how and motivation to give Devuan a fast ramp, which is the key to survival in today's crowded distro world.

I've seen these robots, inside and out. Plywood and body putty, mainly, with off-the-shelf electronics and software glued together. Very spiffy-lookging UI, though. Gotta do the pretty part first, you know.

The CEO of the company has an interesting track record -- no time to google it now as I'm headed for the airport -- but he left the taxpayers of Indiana with a $75 million liability when his company harvested a bunch of tax credits and then cratered. Oh... and I think just a couple of weeks ago this CEO said they had built only a hanful of units so far, like under 10.

The plywood and body putty issue can be solved with a few man-years of engineering so that doesn't bother me too much now except that the PR photos may be a bit misleading. The tendancy of the CEO to harvest large quantities of dollars and then move half a continent away must give pause.

Fawlty Towers was a documentary, not fiction.

You are partly right. The correct question is to ask *when* cost per wafer matters. You rightly state that Intel's cost per wafer is higher because it is running leading edge processes. To make money doing that, you have to deliver value to your customer in the form of a chip that can only be manufactured on a leading edge process. If your costomer can derive the same value from a chip made on a cheaper process, the ultimate end-game is that your office cube walls end up at an auction house.

??? Dude, that is the way my great-grandfather farmed when he moved from New York to homestead in the Iowa territory. Most grains haven't been grown from saved seed for two generations. Pigs are now hybred breeds. Dairy has been using artificial insemination breeding programs for two generations. You are a little behind the times, my friend. Before you go spouting off about agricultural science, I suggest you learn some..

The Moffat authority has to be the worst landlord in Silicon Valley. I was involved in trying to find space for an educational non-profit (I am on the board). We looked at some space the Moffat authority had -- what they offered and the prices and terms they put forth were pure, unadultrated lifetime-government-employee unhingedness. It didn't even pass the giggle test. We snorted and moved on. Also... I have some friends at the Carnegie-Melon Silicon Valley campus, which rents from the Moffat authority. What they have to go through is goofy -- the rents are high, it takes forever to get permission to do anything, in part because Moffat has historic status. Hanger 1, in particular, is listed separately on the national register of historic buildings. So not only do you have to find a tennant who actually wants that behemouth space, you need to find a tennant that finds doing business with a capricious, narcissictic, and unhinged landlord entertaining. Good luck.

A few years back when the Navy was still at Moffat, I went to the open house during Fleet Week. They had a lot of interesting stuff going on. Some of the displays were set up in hanger 1, so I wandered in a side door and was looking at displays -- then I heard what sounded like the burner for a hot air balloon. When I looked toward the sound, I noticed it *was* a hot air balloon. They had a couple of balloons set up in a back corner, and they were giving people hot air balloon rides *inside* of hanger 1. And that wasn't the first thing I noticed. Hanger 1 is big.

Yes, well, I can't say if celestial is still part of the curriculum, since I don't sail any more and haven't kept up. I know I would NOT take off from San Francisco to Hawaii with some goofus that didn't know how to do celestical nav and was relying entirely on electronics -- but that's just me. At least not in a boat.... but of course it's been a long time since the airlines navigated the Pacific using a sextant.

Definitely corporate paranoia. I've seen it in action. Company gets big enough that corporate security is a sizable organization. Security hires a couple of professional paranoids to do corporate level security planning. They identify various important people that need to be protected from threats -- they don't have to be actual threats yet, the planners are paid to be professional paranoids and plan for things that *might* happen. And since they can generalize from what has happened to similarly situated executives at other companies, it's hard to say they aren't doing their job correctly. Then you start seeing things like convenient drop-off/pick-up parking near the front door replaced with plazas and fountains so that truck bombs can't park in front of the headquarters lobby.

In any large enough population of employees you will find loonies and criminals, despite the best hiring and interview practices. I even have personal experience -- an employee (a good one) was prescribed some reeeeeally not good for him medication by a well-meaning doctor. The employee became extremely erratic and I was glad for the security measures we had in place. We also got him to a different doctor. In any sufficiently large population, stuff happens -- sometimes quite unpredictably.

Well, I'm kind of with you that this is evidence tampering. But why throw SarBox at them? Why push for two years in prison? This is abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Armed robbery gets lighter sentences -- here we have a case of a fisherman keeping an undersize fish. If somebody gets 3 months of probation for armed robbery, I have a hard time seeing how you can ask for two years for trying to pull a fast switcheroo with a fish. Prosecutors in this country have come unhinged -- they don't prosecute real crime, and they try to notch up wins on soft targets just to make their own win/loss record look good. It makes a farce of the justice system.

eh... maybe. The death march to calculus is not a great way to teach math, IMHO. I think kids should get a big dose of number theory and discrete math in elementary school. Real mathematics is finding patterns, not winning the MIT integration bee.

The best math text books I've seen are from Art of Problem Solving. They do on line math classes, but you can buy the books separately. The on line math classes go at a rocket-ship pace, so they aren't for everybody. The books are wonderful, must kids just will need a slower pace than AoPS on line classes.

That said, yes kids can learn calculus. My daughter finished multi-variable calculus at a local university at age 13. But don't confuse learning calculus with learning real mathematics.

Well, that is awfully defeatist. Sure, a lot of people become wealthy because they had wealthy parents. But that doesn't imply that people without wealthy parents can't become wealthy. It is possible, and working at it plays a signficant role. In my case, I am literally an Iowa pig farmer's orphan boy. Money was tight when I was growing up, but I could afford engineering school at in-state tuition at a land-grant university because of frugal habits. I distinctly remember struggling over DiffEQ homework and thinking to myself: "I can either do what it takes to survive this course, or go home and clean hog barns the rest of my life." That was a powerful motivator, so I worked at it. I also worked very hard, long hours at a couple of failed start-ups. But I kept trying. And what do you know, one finally hit and I was able to make work optional at age 42.

The problem with your attitude is that it allows people to give up. Don't give up. Suppose I was still searching for that first start-up hit? I'd rather die still looking for it than give up. (Actually, I'm looking for the *next* one.)

Now, I'm not saying that if you're not wealthy yet you're doing it wrong. A lot of things can get in the way. But if you aren't *trying* then stop whining. Wealth is more a combination of attitude and habit than a state of being.

You are right about GPS being available, but with a limited constellation. But the prices weren't awful -- in the sailing world they were comparable with other navigation electronics. I learned to sail during the transition -- people still had LORAN receivers, and long-haul sailors still needed to know celestial navigation, but a GPS was certainly a gizmo you could afford for you boat. But sailors crossing the Pacific might go hours without a GPS fix, because not enough birds were in view.

No, it actually is a generic milling machine. It is *marketed* as a CNC mill with a work envelope adequate to complete a cast aluminum AR-15 lower receiver, and the CNC program to do that comes with it. The law here is very well defined. You are right in that selling a "MetallicaShare" machine is questionable, because violating the Metallica copyrights is illegal. But homebuilt firearms are completely legal as long as all applicable laws are followed. Wilson is selling a legal machine that can do many legal things other than build firearms, and can also completely legally mill a completely legal AR-15 lower receiver.

You may not like it. You may not like the way I cook fish. That doesn't matter -- it is legal. The essence of freedom is letting other people do things you don't so much like, as long as they are doing no harm to you.

As to Wilson having the same liability as selling AR-15 lowers, pfffft. According to FBI statistics, more people are killed every year by blunt trauma (a hammer to the head) than by rifles of all types. Go look it up, it's on line. The hardware store isn't liable for selling hammers. Hammers aren't serialized. You don't need a license to carve your own hickory handle for a hammer head. The hardware store isn't liable for selling you a carving chisel if you kill someone with a hammer using a hand-carved handle that you made with a chisel you bought from them. Murder is already a crime. Knowledge of how to build firearms is not a crime.

Except that the laws regarding home-built firearms are very well established and have been well fleshed-out. Believe me, a lot of the corner cases have been adjudicated. Wilson is selling a milling machine. People put hunks of metal in it. A CNC program runs on it. A home-built firearm comes out. That makes Wilson's machine no different from any other CNC milling machine. Look, illiterate craftsmen in Pakistan build AK-47's from scrap metal with hand tools. Are you going to require licenses for metal files now?