No it doesn't. When I was a child (ostensibly an "intelligent agency") I was known to bang rocks together but it certainly didn't make them tools - not in any meaningful sense of the word. For something to be a tool it has to have a functional purpose.

Quite correct. However I've had the same doubts being discussed here regarding whether certain rocks really were used as tools or not. I'm not an expert so I don't pretend to know the answer but I've seen "tools" in museums which made me wonder if the people who collected them really knew what they were doing. Call it skepticism even though I don't really know what I'm talking about on the subject. I tend to be skeptical about things by default until I understand them.

NYC is not necessarily reflective of the rest of the country. Very little there resembles how things work east of the Hudson River. Where I live wealthier folks tend to commute farther on average. I am GM for a manufacturing company and I live the farthest away of anyone at the company because frankly the plant is not in the nicest part of town. The lower paid employees tend to live the closest to the factory.

I've heard about Seiki but they don't currently make a >60" TV, I cannot find one anywhere to actually look at in person, and it's a little hard to tell if it is any good. I'm not brand loyal but a company I've barely heard of making oddly inexpensive TVs does tend to raise red flags.

From across a room? The monitor I'm using to type this on is 24" and you couldn't pay me to use it as a TV in my living room. I'm sitting about 12-15 feet away most of the time - sometimes further. My current TV is about 36" and it's barely usable at times. I have good eyesight but 23" would be impossible to enjoy.

So you use a monitor with a substantially smaller screen size than even my old CRT TV. I am looking at 60"+ TVs and these are basically all "smart TVs". The main feature I want in a TV for my living room is a huge screen. Like you I don't give a crap about most of the extra features. I just want enough input ports to hook up to my gear and a big screen with a very good image quality. Don't need Netflix, 3D, or any of the other crap. If I want it I'll use an external box to get it.

I don't. The brain "reading" machines we have are incredibly crude right now. Had you said 40 or more years I *might* agree that it's possible if unlikely and certainly not likely to eliminate qwerty keyboards. But I really don't see it happening any sooner than that. You also have to consider the creepiness factor. There are a LOT of people that are going to be seriously weirded out by the notion of having their brain "read" even if it is completely innocuous. Furthermore it's not clear at this time that humans can easily translate brain signals into text competently. Our brains aren't entirely under our control and I can easily see someone typing a sentence and halfway throu... "holy shit that chick is hot". And hilarity will ensure.

Not going to happen in my lifetime I think. What will replace it? Dictation? That's a skill you have to train and most people can't do it without a lot of difficulty. Plus nobody wants to dictate everything they are doing out loud. Brain interface? Wake me when we're talking about technologies that aren't science fiction. That falls into the possible but unlikely and certainly a long way off category.

I can almost guarantee that we'll still be using querty keyboards in 100 years. I'd actually be shocked if we weren't.

Screens aren't going away either. Certainly not in my lifetime.

I'm guessing you don't know many people then. I think most of us know some people who have a libertarian philosophy (fair number here on slashdot) though frequently they seem to be republicans or tea party supporters. But they definitely are a minority. Usually I see them in the Ayn Rand worshiping or Tea Party strains though there are others. Most people regardless of age group think libertarianism is a bit of a fringe philosophy including most independents.

Unlikely. There is no evidence I can see of a trend away from the current two parties. As long as we have first past the post voting and gerrymandering I don't really see that changing even though I think it should.

Ummm, you are aware that the democratic party was filled with bigoted white southerners that left the party for the republicans after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 during JFK's administration, right? Methinks your glasses may be a bit rose colored.

We can see more than two possibilities. The way to get it is to somehow convince the two ruling parties to allow some form of voting other than first past the post and to get rid of gerrymandering. Of course as long as those two things are in place a two party system is basically inevitable.

And I assure you this bias works the other way around. Finance and accounting people think that IT workers are utterly clueless morons when it comes to money. Sales and marketing people thing IT people have no concept of what their customers actually care about and no idea how to talk to another human being. Everyone tends to think their job is the hardest and that no one else really gets what they do.

Their error is generally that they think their abilities in IT actually mean they are smarter when in actual fact they are at best only smarter in certain ways. They also frequently mistake lack of interest with lack of aptitude. All the sales people for my company are degreed engineers and very competent ones at that. People go into sales and marketing because they find it interesting and challenging (and yes financially rewarding) and you know what? They are right. It is challenging and it can be interesting. Sales is an exceedingly hard job - much harder than most IT jobs in my opinion. I think this because at different points in my career I've done both and I'm roughly equally competent (read mediocre) at both. I'm both an engineer and an accountant by training and to be honest, the most difficult things in business are rarely the technical stuff. Not that the technical stuff is trivial - it isn't by any means. But the most difficult jobs involve managing and selling to people and those who can do those things well are hugely valuable.

That's not even remotely true. While it's certainly possible to squander marketing dollars doing something dumb, properly done marketing has a substantial ROI. Let me give you an example which is close to a lot of the people here. Take any software company. Microsoft, Oracle, etc, it doesn't matter which one. Look on their income statements. You'll see that engineering accounts for about 10%-20% of their total costs. The majority of the rest of the cost of these very profitable enterprises is sales, marketing and administration. Their net profit margins will be somewhere between 15%-30%. How is this possible if they were taking a loss on marketing and sales which accounts for close to half of all their expenses? This business model would make no sense at all if the return on marketing and sales was pennies on the dollar. In actual fact it is about a 2X or 3X multiple return on money invested in marketing. Sometimes more.

Companies don't dump lots of money into marketing because they are stupid. They do it because it brings a substantial return on the money invested in it. If it didn't work then there would be no reason to ever market anything.

Are you seriously going to argue that it wasn't at least implied that sales and marketing folks aren't very bright? On slashdot that's a fairly standard attitude and the OP didn't exactly go out of the way to say otherwise.

So you are saying they have to be smarter than average by definition. Curious argument you have there.

I work with sales people on a daily basis. They know quite well how things actually work and more than a few of them are engineers by training. The sales reps for my company all have engineering degrees and are probably more competent with CAD and product design than 99% of the people reading this. The sales reps that sell equipment to my company know in exquisite detail how their products work and are quite capable of repairing it when the need arises. If you want to be good at selling something you have to understand what it is you are selling and how it will matter to the person you are selling it to. There certainly are sales people who aren't very bright but they tend not to do very well.

It's not that they paid nothing for it, it's that you cannot get an accurate market value for it. They have never put their brand up for sale so what is it worth? It's like asking what a Picasso painting is worth. It's a unique asset worth what someone will pay for it but you'll never get that information unless you actually sell it. Any accountant will tell you (and I am one) that there is no book value for assets like that unless they get sold. Otherwise you could claim it is worth whatever you wanted for the value of the brand which isn't accurate or meaningful. It's an accounting convention for practical reasons.

There is some effort to move more towards mark to market accounting, particularly in IFRS accounting but that is hard to do with unique assets like a brand that have never been sold.