I think you are mixing up capitalism with the industrial revolution. Capitalism is fairer than say a caste system, but it doesn't make it good just by this. If every one is trying to maximize it's profit this leads to companies saving on wages. This may happen by improving processes and needing less people (good) or giving little money for huge workload (bad). Now you may say "Law of supply and demand! Nobody is forced to accept a too low wage." While this is technically true, there is always some one desperate enough to sell his work force under value just so he can pay his mortgage and food. So if companies are driving down wages in a whole sector the single person has no chance to get a good deal. There is another factor driving down wages: abundant supply in work force. There are not enough jobs for everyone, haven't been and probably will never be. Just look back in the old days where only the man would go to work and would supply it's family and even than not everyone had a job. Now look at the current situation: today both the man and the woman need to work, to have a decent life. So double the work force and an even bigger dependence leading to lower wages.

Going to research at an university most often means making less bucks than going into the corporate world. Yet those scientists make this step. Not because of the money, but because they love to solve problems. They love it more than a bigger pay check.

But today you are often enough dependent on third-party funding. Now you not only need to be a good researcher but you need to make big claims to the right peoples. And suddenly research becomes a business. Business need to make ROI in a short period of time. But fundamental research needs many years for any results and those often enough get into products maybe one or two decades later. So fundamental research is hampered. But not only this. By working together with the firms that are paying your research, you are no longer independent and your results tend to be biased. Moreover you may need to hold results back until patents are claimed. This all would not happen, if there wasn't financial interest in research.

Speaking for what happens in Germany: less regulation would actually makes it harder to get decent internet if you are not in the right spot in a big city. It's an easy calculation: ROI is way higher in areas with many subscribers that will buy the most expensive services. Good luck if you are in the urban areas. I really don't see how deregulation would solve this kind of problems.

Not Wifi in it's tightest meaning, but internet may be called critical infrastructure nowadays.

And Exabytes of RAM and kilocore CPUs to cope with all the players and the hopefully destructible huge maps full of detail and the physics simulation...

Well I guess not anytime soon. ;)

That is what happens if one privatizes critical infrastructure. Because it is critical, the enterprises can screw you over big times and milk you like a cow–and probably will do so.

Capitalism is bad. You may not see this, if you belong to the lucky ones, but it is neither fair, nor social or sustainable. And I bet my ass, if we were more collaborative, we would be way ahead in technology and social questions. It's collaboration that drives improvement. Just imagine science without it: Every would had to start at 0, not even knowing the fundamentals. Capitalism on the other hand is the exact antithesis of cooperation where everyone fights for it's own good and against all the others.

I started using desktop wikis for writing down my notes. Right now I am using Zim.

Bonus: You can read and edit the files with any text editor as it's just mark-up.

Of course. It's those tech workers who are driving the housing prices up, and not the greedy house owners... Sure.

This sounds quite illusory. "You only need to work hard and you'll become rich." News at ten: nope, won't happen. You need also lots of money to burn and / or lots of luck. What the AC wrote is not defeatist, it is realistic. When I look at the job market, entry positions ask for like 10 years of experience in the field even though they "target" newly graduated academics. I don't even want to think of the struggle of people without a degree. And with your system it's a big gamble to go to university as you will end up with a huge debt.

Dear Slashdot,
didn't you say you knew Beta was broken, what was wrong etc? Didn't you say, you would only redirect not logged in users to Beta? Well, I have my doubts as I am force over with Beta again. And not even a click to Classic works. Great work again with your Beta. I am really proud of you. Well sort of. Well actually I am not. You guys really know how to annoy your user base.

I hate Beta.

Searching a large collection of non-indexed documents from disk is likely disk-bound, yes - except you somehow formulated a very complex search or stream from multiple disks at a time - but maybe you are searching data already in RAM. Traversing an index isn't necessarily a serial process, depending on your data structure. There are parallel implementations for binary and red-black trees, as far as I know. Or one could simply use a forest of as many trees as one has searching threads. (will get worse performance when using less threads than trees). If you only have a sorted list or array you could use a parallel search. If your data is not indexed you are likely to be faster with multiple threads (if there is no other bottle neck like, for example, disk throughput). Maybe you are searching multiple things at the same time (like a string in authors and contents of e-mails) or you are searching with multiple parameters (filetype [type], last access after [date], string in content [foo]) where not all parameters are indexed.

I never stated that my problems are 100% parallelizable. ;) Parsing: Why not? Reflow: And if I have multiple boxes at the same layer? At least as long the dimension are fixed or bounded some parallel processing could be possible, if it would benefit I can't tell.
Often enough there is more than one page opened at a time. With every open page the likelihood of executing multiple JavaScripts rises and with multiple pages getting rendered at the same time you can use parallelism, too.

Many steps can be parallelized, not all, as you pointed out. And even than I am not sure if there wouldn't be a solution for whole-program / link-time optimization, but I'm no professional concerning compiler building. And even then: I happen to compile multiple binary files with one run of make most of the time, so using multiple threads is for free (there is a reason make has the -j option).

I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: almost everything concerning audio and video (images or movies), searching, analyzing, rendering web pages, compiling, computing physics and AI for games.

I can't think of one computing intensive day to day action that is not parallelized or wouldn't be easy to do so.