Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.

I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.

If they actually told us how to program their microengines, something good might come of it. But they'll probably just BSD-license a list of numbers, as others have.

I liked writing bit-slice microcode at Pixar. I really could get every last bit of power out of the hardware.

Maybe you should learn what communism is before calling anyone "commiefriend". (Which I have to say, is really repulsive. It's sort of like picking your nose over the internet.) I think you are discussing the difference between lasiez-faire ecomomics and regulated markets. Communism is a very great difference in scale from that. And it's never been tried on a national scale just as "free market" has never been tried because there are always economic biases that make it impossible. What there has been so far is socialism.

I think you're missing the fundamental economic issue that drives all of this. It's the provision of essentially infinite amounts of credit. This is done by government, not banks. Essentially all home loans come from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, banks and finance companies are really just front-ends for them and sell their loans to the government once financed.

Given infinite credit, any scarce but necessary resource is going to be bid to absurd values.

It is by no means being a hippie to assert that government should not distort the market for credit, and to expect that urban and suburban land values would return to more realistic rates once the distortion was removed. Too bad that lots of people have already invested in unrealistic land values. They would have to lose.

Superconductors just exclude magnetic flux. I am not getting how it matters what produces the magnetic flux - be it ferromagnetic or electromagnetic. My only Meissner effect demo used a permanent magnet.

We have nVidia helping but not making their own Open Source driver. Intel, after a long period of Open Drivers, said it would require BLOBs for future graphical interfaces. AMD helps with Open Drivers more than nVidia so far but doesn't support them.

Maybe you need a Slashdot License. They come from the Ministry of Housinge.

There is no theoretical reason that a room-temperature superconductor cannot exist.

Room-temperature superconductors would be really cool. It's not clear that electromagnetic propulsion gets you to orbit, though. Once there, sure it works.

Multiple-Tesla fields that are changing their orientation rapidly in time aren't particularly healthy to be around. Induced currents in your nerves, heating, etc. That MRI field is acceptable because it's DC. That is, if you don't have any ferromagnetic objects on you.

No, the superconductors are not simple magnets.

What's on the tele then?

Rockets being the only solution does not automatically mean rockets are a viable solution. Please quit ignoring the real challenges presented.

Unfortunately, this can't be approached as an engineering problem and get the result you would like. It needs to be approached as a problem in fundamental research of the physics underlying our world.

There were lots of efforts to miniaturize the vacuum tube. They only resulted in smaller tubes. It took new insights in fundamental physics before people could understand how to make a transistor. There were many experiments with germanium (a natural semiconductor) that could have led to the transistor before 1947 if anyone had understood what was happening.

Some steel. Not all of them. That's why the refrigerator magnet doesn't stick to that silver door.

A field strong enough to work on water would kill you first.