With slaves you've got parallelization down, but processing speed and inter-slave communication will become the bottleneck. You've also got to feed all these people which costs money.

What if the coffee cup cost $100 to make but was sold for only $5 on the assumption that the money the buyer spends in Folgers coffee would make up for the cost over time?
Then people start growing their own coffee and using the cup to drink it. Now Folgers is losing $95 per coffee cup.

Is that not one of the arguments that device makers use?

The first test run of the giant sphere wasn't very successful either:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEm6XtFhwZk

Personally I think it'd be nice if large corporations could actually fish for input from their technical userbase. It's not like increased communication would be bad.

Considering the dollars that companies spend lobbying the government, being more in touch with people beforehand couldn't hurt either.

Yes - and yet young people wonder why older people get jaded.

Imagine a 1GB file compressed to 25% of the original size (so 250MB).

Decompress the file to memory (not disk!) and process it. My bet is that decompression time will be the least of your worries: the time saved by reading only 250MB of data from disk instead of 1GB will be the more dominant factor in the total time taken.

Combat pilots probably have a lot better spatial awareness than most people. I suspect that would be _very_ important in space, even when not flying a ship.

That would be really easy to automate with Firefox - click the Star to bookmark your site, then click the Star again to edit the bookmark. Add the tag "aicn" and save your changes.

From then on you can type "aicn" into your location bar. Use Firefox Sync to have your bookmarks copied to all your computers.

I'm happy with the streaming service, too. It's way too convenient to complain about for $8/month.

Indeed - they don't need to expand through warfare. Just buy up a country's companies and natural resources.

they compete simply by price

By simple, do you mean saving money by slave wages, no human rights, and abhorrent environmental policies and passing the savings on to the buyer?

We should have heavy tariffs on everything from China until they clean up their act.

Adam Sandler? Depends on which voice he does. :)
- lunch lady
- goat
- etc..

First of all, scarcity of a resource- in this case, shelters- is just how things operate in nature. It's not a sign that something is necessarily wrong, because in a healthy ecosystem, there's never enough to go around for everyone.

Sure, if humans weren't around to muck everything up, nature's balance would be fine. I've talked to a real marine biologist who said people take enough shells from the beach that there is a real shortage in certain areas. I would not call that a healthy ecosystem.

Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.

Should say:

Basically, you could scale your character to take a lesser percentage of damage, but in return you would get lower than usual benefits like experience/honor points, and could affect drop rates, too.