Except building a house is a one time endeavor. A better analogy would be to build a house on the foundation of another house and then remodel it a dozen times and then add on a few additions. Soon there after divorce your spouse and find another to guide the new additions and find another site upon which you can move that house to and hopefully not have to deal with that awful foundation.

So you can choose which mail server or java vm you use but not which syslog daemon you want to use?

How many people are just using a browser to do whatever they do on a PC? Whatever else they do there is an icon on the Desktop for launching the program. A business user might have some special apps but average users have a very small selection. Except of course gamers and even those are starting die off.

So lets say that you have this super secret network smartphone and you had a super secret topic that you wanted to talk about with another super secret person. Where could you have this discussion and should you even be talking out loud? Wouldn't you need to be in a building somewhere that has sound insulation, or some other mechanism to keep your voice from being picked up from some other microphone than the one on your super secret smart phone? Or is it a fancy camera phone and not meant for voice? I hope that the camera is better than the one on my smartphone.....

World renown philosopher who wrote many well received books on his thoughts, changed whole countries and inspired uncounted multitudes, MAY have had a point? Here we are staring at the very brink of capitalism collapsing and I am guessing that he is laughing in his grave.
Sure communism has not worked out in the end, which I believe is a failing of humanity not the ideal, however it is completely condescending to sum up in such a title.

To say that these things can not make anything useful is very far from correct. Checkout RepRap which is a very similar device to makerbot. Its firmware has the code built in to print the parts it is made from and is one of the tenants of the project. The video on the RepRap home page explaining the project is brilliant. These projects are indeed very worthy of getting funded.

The problem that needs to be solved is the reason for the spark. The reason for the spark is the need for the ignition of fuel. Switching to laser beam driven electron motors would be crazy cool (or whatever other cool use there is for a laser in an electric motor if there is one). "Fixing" something that is not broke with a gadget that needs to bought (and thus sold) seems like a great idea for an infomercial, not a solution to the worlds problems.

I was just looking at an SGI Fuel on ebay this morning and wondering if I could virtualize it with Qemu or Bochs...
But seriously I wonder why SGI never compiled their stuff on a Linux / GNU kernel and moved off MIPS.

Oracle has owned Berkley DB and Sleepycat since February 2006 and it is still in fine shape. Still open source and still used the same as it ever was. I suspect that MySQL will be the same.

Back in 1995 IBM unveiled the ThinkPad 701C which had a folding keyboard. These should be resurrected and put into Netbooks. It really was a slick way to shrink a full sized keyboard. For some reason that notebook was the only one ever to have that keyboard.
I have a BlueTooth Folding keyboard that is almost OK but it lacks many keys and you are forced to use meta keys for too many items.

Stand alone GPS has every road in the palm of your hand w/o any connection where Google's maps need gigabytes of pixel based maps at each resolution you want to view.

I have (and really like) a Nokia Internet tablet with Maemo Mapper and it is great but I am constantly managing the maps prior and during a trip. The golld old Garmin V had the whole US inside it just worked.

Another plus for stand alone is water navigation. Although a much smaller segment, I would think that small craft GPS would never switch to Google.

That is the ugliest SGI ever made!! I spent the late 90's on Indys, O2s, Octanes (the real ones), Onxys, and Origins and they all were beautiful. Maybe they should outsource design to Apple and get some mojo back.

I agree!! I thought that the alternative to norm and pushing the bounds was what this crowd was all about.

As far as doing the math, if they take the money they save from hardware and provide good jobs to people that can not be outsourced (this setup is going to need on-site hands) how about commending them for that. They should get some small US town (with a fat pipe) to help on the taxes for bringing tech jobs to them.

Absolutely!! I routinely tell my children that I pay for their life, not their lifestyle. I take care of needs not wants. When they can routinely come up with the money for the want, then they can buy it.

However there are circumstances that would be require it. We live in a small Wisconsin community and school is three easy blocks away, downtown is 7. In a big metro area I am sure life is different (they can have it).