No shit, eh? I would rather go to IKEA than the Brick any day of the week.

dear Brick:
First: fuck you.

Second: If you had a giant sign in the front window of your store that said "All sofas are $5" and then when people demanded their $5 sofa and you said "Nuh uh", you'd be sued for false advertising. Therefore:

Third: Suck it up and deal with it. It won't put you out of business. Fire the clod who lost you all that money, but honour your mistakes.

Example: Back in the late 1990s, A certain online musical instrument website was selling the (then new) Yamaha CS2X keyboard for $450. Why? Because someone fucked up and switched the price with the CS1X (which was wrongly priced at $850). I bought the CS2X, and loved it. It was a great keyboard that I got for dirt cheap. I still have it, even though two of the keys don't work anymore. And I still go back to that retailer. Their prices are competitive (they're not really higher or lower than anyone else by very much) but I saved $400 with them. That bought my loyalty. Now, I don't always buy from them all the time, but I *go there first* and if they have what I want at a fair price, I will usually buy from them. If someone has the same thing at a super cheap price, then I'll buy from the cheaper, but if all things are roughly equal, I'll go with the people who fucked up AND HONOURED THE DEAL. Because I know I can trust them.

So, dear Brick: fuck off. I may have to build IKEA stuff, but 9 times out of 10 it's cheaper and better than your junk.

Yes, more expensive that they mythicla $300 MS laptop that runs everything,

Ummm, the last laptop I bought was a refurbed Dell i5 w/4GB ram and a 1TB HD for $285. They are not mythical - you can get them all over them place. Just look.

Holmes scholar Leslie Klinger, who challenged the estate, celebrated the ruling.

Holmes scholar Leslie Klinger, who challenged the SCUM SUCKING PARASITE LAWYERS AND WORTHLESS TWATWAFFLE DESCENDENTS OF DOYLE, celebrated the ruling.

TFTFY

Fuck You. Fossil fuels are finite and getting more finite every day (by definition of being finite and subject to extraction). You need to embrace the future NOW. The future, whether you like it or not, is decentralised and localised. Fukushima's put paid to centralised nuclear systems, and renewables are within striking distance of price parity with fossil and nuclear. So, get over it, and adjust your business model NOW before someone adjusts it for you.

Ideas? SUPPLY the means of your reinvention. You've captured a large portion of the US Congress and the Canadian Parliament. They bark your bullshit at your pay and command. Pay them to sing a different tune. You and the fucking vampire squids that are wrapped around the face of humanity jamming their blood funnels into whatever smells like money, also known as the Banking System, basically own these pathetic weasels and the good little chimps of the MSM will dance to you money song.

Face it, the war in Iraq that dumped trillions into the squid^H^H^H^H^H banking and military sectors didn't pan out with the cheap fuel as you had hoped - oil is still around $90 - $100bbl no matter how much you try to pump out of the ground. So, face it, game over. So you now need to transform yourselves into something else. Rebuilding the grid and switching to renewables will be cheap compared to the road you're going down now. So, get over it, and get with it. OWN your own destruction, or be OWNED and destroyed. Stupid fucks.

1. They said the same thing when the Mellotron was built back in the 1960s. In fact, members of the Musicians Union would picket Moody Blues concerts because they felt the Mellotron was taking away jobs from hard working union member musicians.

2. No recording of an orchestra is going to sound like sitting in the same room with an orchestra playing. Period. End of discussion.

3. There are PLENTY of instrumental bands that are doing just fine. Examples:
Animals as Leaders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCsWlOo9qgw
Explosions in the Sky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mqBMmhgsjM
And boodles of electronic music bands that have no interest in whether or not you dance to them, for example:
Boards of Canada: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8ZBT-VHrA&list=PLZqsyBiYZFQ1SDoE-ulm6Qlpt7jetkEMH
among many others.

Then this howler:

Purely instrumental groups like Booker T and the MGs, as well as solo performers like Herbie Hancock or John McLaughlin, seem not to take the spotlight as they once did.

WTF? Booker T's bass player died last year. HE WAS 70 YEARS OLD. How many pop bands of any stripe are in the spotlight at age 70? Herbie Hancock is 73. John McLaughlin is 71. They Are Old People. What do you expect from them? Then this bit of cluelessness:

It is apparent that unless someone with a young fresh face is singing, today's producers will not attempt to seriously promote them.

It's not their producer's job to promote them. It is their PROMOTER'S job to promote them. That's why they're called PROMOTERS. The producer helps direct and manage the PRODUCTION of the record. Believe me - I know these things.

This article is basically flamebait.

You're assuming electricity will stay at the same price. If energy resources continue to shrink relative to global demand, energy may well double or triple in cost over the next decade or so, accelerating its savings projections accordingly.

Considering CO2 freezes at -78C... Yikes. That's cold...

"So basically, your post is laden with iron."

I saw that too, and wondered, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? IF they know what converse means, then they're being ironic, if they don't then it's ironic that they don't, so no matter what you do, it's ironic, only the irony is directed differently depending. In fact, it becomes tautologically ironic, because he might be ironically posing to not know what it means, and thusly showing his irony in a self conscious way. It's like Goedel's "This sentence is false". Only dumb.

To run MS Office and watch cat videos on Youtube? Not very? THen I guess "Good Enough" computing will will moderate the situation....

FUCK YOU.

Make a phone with a video out and USB. The "computer" is just the CPU. The ICT Algorithm

INPUT | PROCESSING / memory | OUTPUT (feedback) |

shows the phone and tablet as having the same Processing/memory as the PC. The only difference is in INPUT and OUTPUT. Therefore, the way to remove PCs from the world is fairly straightforward: allow phones the same input and output options. This can be done with bluetooth keyboards and a video connector to access a larger screen. Being able to connect to a printer would also be a nice effect.

With data in the cloud, there is little reason for such a device to not exist. Why it doesn't yet, I have no idea. MY understanding is that was EXACTLY where Apple was going, until Jobs died. Then the cowards took over and they're doing a rear guard action ever since, viz, the cylindrical / inferior MacPro, etc. The iPad should be the new MacBookPro by now, but, that would take vision and guts, something not found at Apple sans Jobs, or in Japan (culturally) or at Microsoft (ever). Maybe Google will put something together.

What we're looking at is (as noted by others here) that PCs are a VERY mature market. You can only do word processing so fast. If an app complies in 5 minutes, you're not gaining that much labour time by doubling the speed to 2min 30sec. And if an action takes 10 seconds, and you can do it in 1 with some new crazy processor, you're not gaining that much. There ARE applications where speed matters (rendering video, for example) but those are edge cases, not the majority. Remember when benchmarking was done with an "Unsharp mask filter on a 40meg Photoshop file"? How long does that take anymore? A second? Two? We're in the land of Good Enough Computing. And if there is anything that should keep AI fundies like Kurzweil awake at night, it's that. It's not that we can't use more speed and power, we just don't need it for 99% of what we do, and so our money will go into things are are technologically "inferior" but infinitely practical and dirt cheap.

So, yeah - Apple, MS, Samsung, whoever - they could kill the PC tomorrow. Just let datapads multitask, power USB (for keyboard / mouse / graphics tablet / printer etc), and have a convenient HDMI port out. Most of those things already exist to a certain degree already - so now it's just a matter of time before the iOS / Chrome / Windows / Android catch up to the need.

And it's pretty cheap. Go here: http://neolucida.com/

is that you end up with Google simply having a conversation with itself, as your automated response is met by another automated response, which then triggers an automated reply and so on. No one saying anything, and it all happening at light speed.

" 'Truly private money is an inferior alternative to the money that comes with the backing of a political authority. "

in other words, state sanctioned VIOLENCE.

FTFY