*YAWN*

You're an oddball if you're doing that kind of work.

In most modern IT departments, nobody does custom programming anymore. Solutions are purchased from software vendors, and 90% of those vendors write software for Intel platforms. The long tail uses Sun, IBM, or HP platforms, but those are getting more and more rare as the cost advantages commodity hardware outweigh the performance advantage of proprietary hardware. HP is exiting the business, Sun crashed and burned into an Oracle only platform. The only one left in the space is IBM.

>education is too low for just about any high tech work

Really? Places like Huntsville (NASA), Ann Arbor (U. Michigan), Raleigh (IBM), and Austin (Everybody these days) don't have top talent for tech work?

Maybe not Detroit, but definitely not in Northern California - it's way too expensive to do business there. For an R&D/Skunkworks style office, perhaps drawing on the local talent is worth the cost, but putting general office workers and blue collar labor there is silly when you have nice states like Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, and Michigan which have friendly labor laws and cheaper labor pools, along with some top minds in places like Austin, Huntsville, Raleigh, and Ann Arbor.

All of that is secondary to survival, and until we figure out how to make government leaders stop being such assholes, threatening each others' populations with annihilation, we're going to need plans for defense - and if the enemy leverages space for any tactical or strategic advantage, then so must we.

That said, the article says they're just using telescopes to track stuff in space for military purposes, not building Gundams, so you can untwist your panties now that you know this.

Worse? No.

Just as bad? Arguably yes.

People bag on Christensen without remembering how terrible Mark Hamill was.

We used to play a Star Wars drinking game in college - one of the items was to take a shot every time Luke whines.

Yeah, but I thing GP was looking to use a touchscreen interface with Civ. Not sure if you could get that with streaming.

You'd think Slashdot was populated only by AMD employees.

Seriously, though - the specs are really nice - I'm looking forward to seeing this in production.

> rich white people have drug problems

As someone who grew up in the 80's, drugs have been big with rich, white people for a long, long time. Powder cocaine was the drug of choice for people back then, now it's meth as cocaine becomes more and more expensive, or painkillers for the percieved 'safety', changing to heroin when safety ceases to matter to the addict and cost becomes the primary factor.

In the 40's and 50's, it was GI's coming back from the wars hooked on morphine. In the 60's, it was everything. 70's was when cocaine really took off.

Rich white people have had drug problems as long as there have been rich white people.

Large cookie cutter subdivision homes developed by a single builder do have some of that stuff because it's more economical at scale - and they can create massive hollow boxes for pennies that blow over at the slightest breeze. There are subdivisions near my house that have some of this stuff - they have a lot of trouble selling because the houses just 'feel cheap'. Engineered trusses instead of joists, laminated or metal studs, etc. just give the house the feel that it's not entirely stable, even if it is all valid according to code.

The Chestnut was wiped out due to a fungal plague. Ash and Elm species are currently being devastated by the Ash Borer and Dutch Elm Disease, respectively. Walnut is being killed off by Thousand Cankers disease. I'm waiting for Oak and Maple to be wiped out due to some other exotic pest - perhaps Oak Wilt or some such.