So, you are saying, two competing companies doing about the same thing. One quits the business, the other goes on to be HUGELY successful, and I'm the idiot for calling the quitting company's manegement idiots?

Yes, you're an idiot. Because you have completely failed to grasp that while the two companies 'were' doing 'about the same thing' at one point - that didn't last long. The hugely successful one ended up finding success by doing something entirely different.
 

You may have missed what I wrote: "Google sells ads, nothing else even comes close on their books."

I didn't miss it all, I merely explained what you were too stupid to grasp.

The pace of life has changed. That is the issue. Young people, who've been reared on dizzyingly fast-paced entertainment such as first-person shooter games, are not thrilled at the idea of racing at five miles per hour (or sometimes less) in a sailboat for four hours. Nor do they find it exciting to play shuffleboard or do golf. By the standards of today, those sports are boring.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head here, and pretty much every other comment on this article can be modded '-5 completely irrelevant'. Where you miss is that it's bigger than just the pace of the games - it's also the costs of the hobby, the space taken up, and the time to master. Since they opening of the console gaming and PC era, generally the society wide interest in any hobby or activity that isn't on the computer/console or can't be picked up for the cost of the latest hot title or mastered in a few evenings has been waning.

In 1999 Fast Search and Transfer was neck and neck with google for speed, volume, and accuracy. The board at FAST were idiots and said there was no money in search and basically stopped trying and let google win.

From the fate of other 'search' companies (some of which were very good), I'd say the board at FAST were correct - and that you're the idiot.

Google isn't a multi-billion dollar company because they're exceedingly good at search - they're a multi-billion dollar company that's exceedingly good at delivering advertisements (only a fraction of which are on their search pages).

And the links to your peer-reviewed studies are... where?

Any energy you manage to get, will be lost someplace else because you put these devices in the heat flow.

You sir, are ignorant as fuck. It's a sad comment on the state of affairs that a clueless bullshit comment like your could be moderated informative.

We've been extracting energy from waste heat, without incurring extra losses, for over a century now - it's been a standard practice in steam engineering since the 1800's. In the same way, if you put these devices in an IC engine's exhaust you can recover energy that would otherwise simply be vented into the atmosphere without incurring any losses "someplace else".
 

Don't let them fool you with all this "waste heat" garbage, at least until you understand the Thermodynamic laws that govern all this and can explain what a heat engine is.

Before cautioning others to educate themselves, first pull your head out of your own ass and educate yourself.

Straw man.

Sadly, straw men dominate this discussion. Thank you for seeing them for what they are.

From TFS: "You can see how it would be viewed with skepticism; after all, these are the individuals who will give Watch Dogs a review score, which many gamers rely on to help them make a purchasing decision."

Come on, we're all adults here. We all know the industry gives perks to reviewers in exchange for favorable reviews. This is just more blatant than most.

"The problem here is that people have been using the argument that Open Source is better because these issues can't happen "because" of the visibility."

No, just no. No one with any sort of a clue ever argued these issues cannot happen with Free Software.

No, they haven't made that claim in so many words. But they've sure as hell implied it for years now. That's the whole line of thought that Raymond's statement (quoted in TFS) is based on.

The amount of backpedaling and smoke blowing in this discussion awesome.

That's the OP's point - you're missing my point, which is that it's not really so unfathomable at all. By 1981, we'd already in less than a decade gone from pocket calculators being expensive rarities to being practically given away in breakfast cereal. LORAN was already widely available in a compact box. Etc... etc... By 1981, the accelerating pace of technology was already clearly visible to anyone who was looking. (Which I was at the time.)

What I missed/didn't grasp the full import of is that between 1981 (the year of my high school graduation) and 1991 (the year of Desert Shield/Storm) GPS went from being a highly classified piece of military hardware to a handheld commercial unit. There were actually more units in the civilian world than in the Army. (Folks were actually buying handheld GPS units at sporting goods stores and sending them to soldiers in the field because there was a shortage of officially available and issued GPS units!) But given the rapid advance of IC's into the civilian/commercial world, I shouldn't have been surprised at all. (OTOH, the full story of the DOD's role in developing IC's wasn't fully known/grasped at the time.)

I always thought the most unlikely technological development in my lifetime was the handheld GPS device. It would be "most unlikely" because it required tremendous, simultaneous, and largely unforeseen advances in several different technologies, each of which was hard to predict in 1981.

Yes... and no. In 1981, the pieces and precursors of pretty much everything on your list was already in place. Very little of it was available down at Radio Shack, granted, but much of it was already in use (at a minimum) by the military.

Especially when you consider, science has a hard time predicting future trends and technologies, yet Science Fiction seems to have been fairly accurate in predicting, if not outright influencing, future technological trends.

Certainly, if you cherry pick the hell out of the (tens of?) thousands of "predictions" made across the last century or so... science fiction seems remarkably prescient. In reality, the picture is much bleaker. In reality, science fiction is not much better at predicting the future than a million monkeys pounding away on typewriters.

This. As a former bookstore owner, the parent grasps what the grandparent is clueless about.

Yes, there's scrap from cars. Duh. Less and less each year though - most cars are recycled, and the steel quantity in each individual vehicle is dropping with each model year to save weight.

But you still need someone to strip the car and transport the material to the forge site. You still need fuel for the forge. Etc... etc... Here in the real world, that's called infrastructure. I have no idea what it's called inside that piece of rotted shit you call a brain.

A decent blacksmith needs nothing but raw materials.

Think real hard jackass - where do the raw materials comes from? What do you think infrastructure is? And yes, I've met real blacksmiths and seen them at work - and very, very few of them work from scratch. (And if you think making decent quality charcoal is easy... I've got a bridge to sell you.)

Graduating from apprenticeship requires actually making your own tools from raw materials.

Assuming they graduated from an apprenticeship program in the first place. The individual to whom I replied had merely taken classes.

Taking a class in x isn't the same as being x. Not to mention, blacksmiths need fairly significant infrastructure behind to be of any kind of use.