At the risk of being modded troll I'll ask if anyone knows the TCO on these Linux roll outs. If Spain has lower tech wages it might be much lower than Windows, but in the United States at least there's tonnes of cheap Windows IT gurus but if you want someone that can admin your Linux boxes you'll pay through the nose. Google Docs and other web apps might be changing that though, at least until you hit college.

Our food supply is based on oil. We don't rotate crops anymore. We couldn't possibly make enough food if we did. Instead we generate nitrogen as a by-product of oil and pump it back into the soil.

If the oil stops flowing some Americans might have to tighten their belts, but people around the world that depend on our surplus food would just starve...

not at all. You need to ask yourself who has disposable income. It's mostly teenagers, They're young, and stuff that's repetitious to you is brand new to them. . There's a smattering of young married women (who, as it turns out, make most of the buying decisions in a family after the teenage years, and yes I know not all of them are married any more). But a more discerning is usually made up of middle aged men who don't have much in the form of disposable income (nerds aside)

not a weakness. Microsoft does this is a) to maintain backwards compatibility (which locks businesses in since they'd have to re-purchase or re-write tons of software) and b) to fix bugs and work around limitations in other vendor's software ( again, lock in ).

In office there's something called the 80/20 rule. 80% of your customers only use 20% of your features, but it's a _different_ 20% for just about every customer. There's always 1 feature a customer can't live without. That's what keeps 'em locked in :).

The danger from dropping rarely used features and picking just one way to do things is that you'll force your users to spend lots of money switching over to the 1 way you picked, and they'll start asking if they should look for alternatives.

and scaling back XBox. The CEO more or less said he wanted to cut XBox because it wasn't profitable enough, and Nokia is a no-brainer. Microsoft lost the smart phone/tablet war big, and they've probably got redundancies to eliminate.

The part that I'm wondering about is with these new, ultra efficient companies that merge up like crazy how much work is there going to be for the rest of us to do? Between that an automation it just looks like we're running out of work to do..

I find it hard to believe Nokia can lose 12,500 jobs and still be a company. Yeah, yeah, redundancies and all.

Or maybe they can, but what's that mean for the rest of us in this era of mergers where Company A buys Company B and suddenly there are half as many jobs. If that's really the case then we're just plain running out of work to do...

Companies don't pay fines until their less than the profit made from the behavior. It's scary to think how much money Apple must have made off fixing the markets.

Yeah but you can bring guys in to do the work cheap. There's already work being done to open up the work visa program to blue collar labor.

It's like that line from Temple of Doom. "Again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away, Dr Jones"...

it may be possible to implant this inside the eye and have augmented reality without p*ssing off the people around you.

Wait, are you suggesting there are _other_ uses for augmented reality? Sir, you've just blown my mind.

If it's not a calculator and/or transforms into a robot why would you want it?

I think the worry with these systems is that as the economy gets worse there's a temptation to stop running them correctly to save money. In the1800s kids drank booze because it was a good way to get safe water...

they'd never make it out of the Sheldon Primary

For those of you that don't know, any serious candidate for office in America gets approved by the top 1% here before they're allowed to run because without the support of the very rich they can't win.

Titanfall shipped with the audio decompressed because the alternative was to use a spare core to run the audio decompression. A good sound card takes the load off an overtaxed CPU. If you're rockin' an i5+ then that's not a problem, but otherwise it helps.

It's just socialism. This is how we do socialism in the United States. We don't have enough work for people to do any more. Too much outsourcing and too much automation. So we either start letting people die in the streets or we start redistributing wealth.

Thing is we spend most of the 50s-90s talking about how Socialism is Evil (tm) . It's heavily engrained in our populace. So we needed a form of Socialism that Americans could stomach. Enter the "Military Industrial Complex". Eisenhower built it up out of fear of another recession and regretted it. It pretty much warps our entire society...

Because it hangs with any rig less than $400. Put a GTX 660 in this year so I could keep gaming in Win 7 after the forced upgrade from XP.