Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Good on the French - they are doing it right!

We protest stuff in "free speech zones" and our media ignores the people who are championing the average Joe unless someone walks buy in a sequin dress and clown make-up -- THAT GUY they interview. Ratings magic!

The French kidnap a CEO and nobody goes to jail. Maybe instead of making fun of them, we are the suckers, because we go for decade to decade with our prospects and power diminishing, and eventually we wake up being greeters at WalMart with no retirement savings.

We'll be complaining about the same things in a decade, likely.

In 5 years, there will be self-driving cars replacing the Uber AND the Taxi drivers.

Does anyone have a plan for this?

It's fine to say; "Well, just learn something new" when it's not you with a family and a tight budget having to jump into the marketplace and retrain while competing with people who've done that task their entire life -- but not everyone is as superior as the average person on Slashdot.

What do we do for the 'average person' when there isn't an easy alternative?

If they had the South on their side, that number changes.

Also, they controlled India with a larger population, estimated as being around 100 million for 1600 to 1881; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Brits were supporting the South for their financial and political gain -- so basically, they would be handing us back over to British rule because they didn't like the system they were in.

I think this is revisionist history as seen through the lens of the .1% and I figure the Tea Baggers of today will tell the same story about the poor billionaires trying to make a global market and do-gooders and environmentalists stopping them from creating a paradise one banking collapse after another.

OK, you are going to need to have citations here.

I'm not saying it is impossible, but it seems to twist and turn history to make the plantation owners look like the heroes. The KKK probably couldn't invent better "lenses to see the world."

"It was fought to keep Brittan from reconquering the US."
Well, if the South had won, that would have been possible, because they'd be in debt to Britain and annexed. The Southern elite were throwing their lot in with the Crown. So are you saying they SHOULD have become part of Britain?

"Lincoln didn't free the slaves because he's a nice guy. Lincoln proclaimed emancipation to make the British government's support of slave-owning confederates EXTREMELY unpopular with the British people,"
Economically, today as it was back then, it's cheaper to use Capitalism to keep people poor -- rather than slavery. THEY have to go about feeding themselves anyway, and housing, and you don't have to guard people. Irish were probably cheaper in the North than slaves in the South -- I'll agree with that. But emancipation happened. If the South was unpopular for slavery and it wasn't that great an economic engine -- why the Hell did they keep people in slavery? The people who tried to abolish slavery did so at great risk. Whether you think Lincoln was a "nice guy" or not -- this is a self inflicted wound of the South.

The fact is; the Southern plantations had slaves. It had to have an economic or social reason so they were either profiting or being a bunch of dicks. I'm not seeing the nobility just based on the broad, inconvertible facts of history.

The UK didn't abandon the South because of the slavery issue -- they were blockaded and their ships kept from bringing in supplies. Whether or not it was popular, the crown had all kinds of operations around the world exploiting people. Local opinions didn't seem to matter when it came to making money.

"There were white people working the fields right next to the slaves" -- I never heard that before.

I had been confused on this very topic by learning that people of means in the South were claiming their issue was with imports; they wanted to import goods from anyone they wanted to, and not pay taxes. On recent re-examination with the Tea Party having such a strong correlation to so much of the complaints of the "owner class" of the South. I think I finally understood; the South wanted to get cheaper goods and not pay what would be required to employ FREE CITIZENS of the USA.

And think about it; why would the average, non-rich Southerner have to gain from slavery or cheap imports other than a WalMart discount? Their labor would be undermined while the profits of the wealthy maintained.

So when you look at the Southern argument as an issue of "free trade" -- it was really all about economic slavery all over again. And Tea Baggers today are just as in the dark as the average Southerner fighting to make sure the estate owners got to live like kings.

People should be able to fly the "protest flag" of the South, but they should have to give up 20% of all income to education for someone else's kid for the privilege -- because the education would be wasted on them.

The Civil war was fought for the .1% of the South.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.

I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.

I'm just wondering if "Gender Reassignment" would count for the access to programming?

I can understand "Ladies Night" at a bar, because men will spend to get access to the ladies.

But what happens when people get gender reassignment for "the opportunities"? It might also be convenient for ladies night. Don't be judging.

"Freedom of Speech" is nothing without access to information. If a person cannot get to the Internet, they are confined to commercial forms of information.

In my opinion, if a person could only be informed by CNN, Fox and a Newspaper, they'd be better off not having an opinion at all.

And have you TRIED dealing with any kind of public service or support system without the Internet these days? Paying utility bills?

I think the concept some people have about going without the Internet is pretty old fashioned. You are shut out of a good portion of opportunity, access and "reality."

If they actually told us how to program their microengines, something good might come of it. But they'll probably just BSD-license a list of numbers, as others have.

I liked writing bit-slice microcode at Pixar. I really could get every last bit of power out of the hardware.

Maybe you should learn what communism is before calling anyone "commiefriend". (Which I have to say, is really repulsive. It's sort of like picking your nose over the internet.) I think you are discussing the difference between lasiez-faire ecomomics and regulated markets. Communism is a very great difference in scale from that. And it's never been tried on a national scale just as "free market" has never been tried because there are always economic biases that make it impossible. What there has been so far is socialism.

I think you're missing the fundamental economic issue that drives all of this. It's the provision of essentially infinite amounts of credit. This is done by government, not banks. Essentially all home loans come from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, banks and finance companies are really just front-ends for them and sell their loans to the government once financed.

Given infinite credit, any scarce but necessary resource is going to be bid to absurd values.

It is by no means being a hippie to assert that government should not distort the market for credit, and to expect that urban and suburban land values would return to more realistic rates once the distortion was removed. Too bad that lots of people have already invested in unrealistic land values. They would have to lose.

Superconductors just exclude magnetic flux. I am not getting how it matters what produces the magnetic flux - be it ferromagnetic or electromagnetic. My only Meissner effect demo used a permanent magnet.

We have nVidia helping but not making their own Open Source driver. Intel, after a long period of Open Drivers, said it would require BLOBs for future graphical interfaces. AMD helps with Open Drivers more than nVidia so far but doesn't support them.