The Facebook IPO was heavily supported by major banks, otherwise a loss would have been felt on the first day. Then in the following days, shares for FB went down 11% in value, while Apple and Boeing went up, and in the mean time a government-owned "make-and-do" company like GM pulls its adds off FB because it doesn't see the value of the platform for advertizing.

It's the end of Silicon Valley, is FB. Really. ;) I love life's little ironies.

Indeed. Not only have bubbles like this come and gone since the Tulip bubble in the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie back in the fifteenhundreds, but the headlines are the same all the time. It feels like the "demise of tape" discussions I had for 16 years at HP, and every year some clown would come and tell me my job would be gone next month. Yet somehow these technologies survive, and yet somehow we all need a good old fashioned piece of hardware to run our software and networks on.

The author of the main article suffers from a pure stroke of cognitive dissonance when this sentence is uttered: "The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people". The first argument for the demise of physical technology is the fact that physical technology is now finding its way into the hands of billions of people. That's just, well, ironic.

I'd argue that sites like Facebook and the increasing digitization of all walks of life, be it in communication, documentation or content creation and the enjoyment thereof only spur the profitability of the Silicon Valley giants. Although I do object to the Silicon Valley moniker for any and all hardware development. It would behoove us to realize that the cathode ray tube was a British invention, the mouse/trackball was a Canadian idea, the LED was a Russian invention while LCD seems to have its roots in Austrian and Swiss research, with a lot of ideas from the Koreans and Japanese thrown in.

So firstly Silicon Valley has never been the end-all-be-all of all electronics engineering, secondly the hardware business shows no signs of becoming obsolete any time soon. In short, the main article is self-aggrandizing on quite a few points. I am very happy not to be a student of Mr Blank.

If Silicon Valley is teetering at all, it's down to geopolitical and macroeconomic developments that will see the end of the US as the absolute economic superpower on this planet. I worked at HP for years and years, but for quite a while now the most significant market for HP is the European Union. The GDP's of several Asian nations is steadily growing, the total GDP of the EU is larger than the US GDP and everywhere you see cracks in the US as a whole. Let alone all the unemployed, homeless and uninsured the US counts, but whenever I go to the US, I am struck with the disarray and decay that can be seen everywhere in that country.

Having said that, I don't think the Facebook IPO will bankrupt Apple, HP, IBM, Dell, Canon, Samsung and quite a few other players just yet, so my musings on the balance of power in the world should be taken with quite the pinch of salt.

Isn't that called the Salvation Army? Seriously, there are second hand shops that are run by the mission or humanitarian organizations that will gladly collect your old clothes, shoes, equipment, dishes and whatever you can throw at them. Some of it will be used to give to the poor, others end up in second hand shops who donate their profits to said poor.

This isn't exactly rocket science where I live, I'm afraid.

The African continent doesn't need high speed access to pull itself out of its misery. The African continent needs to find a way to quit being shafted by global corporations and first world governments working in tandem to keep them from developing a decent infrastructure of transportation of food, basic building materials, electricity and health care. To get a more fully developed idea of my argument here, I suggest reading "Bad Samaritans" by Ha Joon Chang of Cambridge. He details quite nicely how the Free Market doctrine of the WTO, IMF and other suchlike organizations are destroying the tariff system that might protect what's left of the markets in non-first-world countries so as to protect Big Business, and thus stifle any upward mobility and innovation that might come from developing nations.

I firmly believe that protection of internal markets, a system of tariffs on import and the national protection of emerging industries using tariff money might do the Africans a wee bit more good than "high speed access", and I am not the only one that agrees with that viewpoint. Nokia, funnily enough, seems to get this. They just introduced the Nokia 103, a very dumb phone which can last up to 10 days on standby and which can be used for speaking 11 hours on a single charge. They market this because they feel quite a few people on the African continent don't even have access to electricity on a regular enough basis to drive a smartphone. And by proxy of that insight, they can't drive a laptop with "high speed access" either.

Another thing that doesn't help are the IP Protection laws that are trying to root out the copying of technology for use in countries that can't afford "the original", and when I say technology I don't just mean content, electronics or physical devices, but also stuff like regular old tools, medicine and lord knows what you can throw at that concept.

As Ha Joon Chang rightfully puts it: Players can only compete on a level playing field if the teams are somewhat balanced. If you have a very disparate and skewed set of players in the world, the only way to deal with that is by having some kind of handicap system in place. In other words, opposite to the free-market and democracy for all doctrines in this world, the playing field simply needs to be kept uneven if a mom and pop shop in Africa ever wants to grow its business in the face of competition from GM, John Deere, Astra Zeneca, Monsanto or IBM, because otherwise these giants will simply wipe out local players in a heartbeat. The analogy is simple. If I can play a round of golf with sticks I managed to buy for 200 USD, I cannot compete about a corporate backed Tiger Woods unless there's a stiff handicap system in place.

So while I feel the OLTP project and all of these people that cry out for high speed access for all Africans are benign have the best of intentions, I also believe they're full of shit and don't know their ass from their elbow. This may sound harsh, but during my 17 years in the IT business I have learned that you never, ever solve anything by attacking random symptoms of a problem rather than finding the root causes and eliminating them.

Once infrastructure, local business and a steady flow of cash are guaranteed, stuff like high speed access to the net will follow. Not the other way around. I don't see how a penniless African could benefit from the ability to read the Wiki on Nuclear Fission or the ability to shop for books on Amazon if he doesn't have food, basic infrastructure or even a bank.

By the way, the previous AC comment was mine. I just migrated to a new Mac, and had forgotten to check if I was logged on to the website at all. Damn. I hate it when stuff like that happens.

Actually, one of the reasons the EU and the North Sea are such heavily regulated territories is because of the famously uncooperative nations you'll find there. They do an enormous amount of bitching, whining, political wheeling and dealing, vetoing, debating and in-fighting before getting to any kind of agreement, and I dare say that's a better model than the Gung-ho, can-do approach US entities take to things at times.

There are some solid reasons why the Gulf of Mexico oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico. BP, not exactly a stakeholder in the area, could get away with lax safety precautions exactly because of the lack of regulation or enforcement thereof, and this caused a wee boo-boo.

I'd say dissent has historically been a more constructive change agent than cooperation on quite a few occasions. Galileo comes to mind as a famous dissenter, and we all know what Zee Germans got done when they decided to start cooperating on a grand scale. Not that they are the only ones, so I do apologize to the Germans for using that example. It's a dead horse, but everyone knows the example. No offense.

Ruling out human error, greed and downright shortsighted sabotage hasn't really been a good idea, historically. I suggest having some Gulf of Mexico shrimp while pondering that notion.

My country being one of them. In the Netherlands, prostitution is indeed legal, but pimping is not. So the ladies are only really allowed to work if they're not the victim of slave trade or extortion. This measure is only partially effective, unfortunately, because some of the ladies are arguably extorted into the business. However, I think the system is vastly superior to zero-tolerance policies such as in Sweden or the US, where prostitutes don't get health care, can't unionize and are usually run out of seedy apartments or neighborhoods.

Having said that, mainland Europe also does not have the litigation culture the US and UK have. One cannot sue people willy nilly. Firstly because one actually doesn't have a service level agreement on paper with a prostitute, so it's pretty much your word against hers, so there's usually very little reason for a court case.

Secondly because frivolous litigation is frowned upon, and this type of stuff would immediately thrown out by a judge. If one actually gets robbed, one could alert the police, and they could technically take action, resulting in prosecution with a minimal amount of damages, more like restitution than actual damages.

IANAL, but I do work as a pre-sales consultant for e-Discovery software for an American company, and I guarantee you that the American's view on the legal system is a hugely different one from what's practiced in mainland Europe.

As far as the United States are concerned, they rank on the #47 spot of the Freedom of the Press index, whereas the Netherlands rank #3 behind Finland, Norway and, funnily enough, Estonia. The Land of the Free doesn't seem to be as free as it wants to let everyone believe.

One example of why this comment and rank are deserved is highlighted in the documentary "Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land" in which the narrative surrounding the Israëli occupation of the West bank and Gaza strip are examined.

In it it becomes clear that US journalists don't deviate from the narrative that AIPAC and the Israëli government present, and memo's are circulated inside networks such as CNN to call Gilo, a Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank, a "nice Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem".

Stories like that are indicative of why the press in the US is indeed not free and arguably run by lobby groups, government and big business. I'm not saying other journalists in the world are without fault, but one can see that international coverage is much more balanced at BBC World and, indeed, Al Jazeera International.

So while Crystal Cox is indeed what looks like a parasite and morally void, your comment about Journalists seems quite fair.

I have 1200+ proofs of purchase standing in a CD cabinet in my living room. When I try to rip those CD's to 320 MP3 (yeah, yeah, go ahead... hit me with the AAC, OGG or FLAC arguments), quite a few of them fail for having developed read problems while standing in my cabinet.

Since I will not invest this money again, I will simply download a FLAC version and convert it, or find a decent 320 rip which I will then tag, supply with cover art and import to iTunes. I only have 400+ albums to go out of my collection, because 700+ are already of said quality by now. The rest is sub-320 Mp3. Don't ask... storage *was* more expensive at some point in time, you know. If they come knocking, I would be delighted to go through my record collection with any interested party. ;)

My point here is that I might be seen as a pirate too because of my downloading behaviour. However, I'm just creating a much needed backup copy for information I have purchased on a physical media. I find the moniker "pirate" somewhat offensive for someone who has put as much effort and money into a music collection as I have.

No. As some other poster already commented, apologizing to his family, or for that matter to all families of people that got persecuted for similar reasons, would go a long way towards the right direction, but a pardon is just silly. The man got convicted, and is dead as a result of what happened A posthumous pardon would just feel like a big wallop of mustard after the meal.

So at the end of the day I find the statement of the House of Lords quite correct, but would appreciate it if someone could apologize for this. Having said that, this is an endless cycle. In Holland, the Catholic Church needs to apologize for the Inquisition, but the protestants need to apologize for what they did to Catholics after the inquisition, the VOC people should apologize to the Indonesians, West-Africans, South-Africans (the black ones), the KNIL people should apologize to some Indonesians, the Japanese should apologize to some KNIL people I know, the English should apologize to us for taking Manhattan away, the Dutch should apologize to the English for giving them Manhattan, etc etc etc.

The apology business is a never ending circle-jerk because if I had a dime for every group that has been maltreated somewhere on the planet during mankind's history, I'd never have to work again.

You might say it's not the same, but I guarantee you there's plenty of people on the street that don't understand the difference in nuance. A restriction is a restriction is a restriction, and quite a few humans have issues accepting those restrictions from the powers that be, whatever their shape may take.

So a reaction against totalitarian States will be similar to a reaction against restrictive Corporate Policies. :)

To copy behaviour, tools and ideas is an Evolutionary force that is embedded in our brains. Quite frankly, it's a force that has done us as a species quite a bit of good over evolutionary history. We are, after all, at the top of the food chain.

There is no possible solution to the "piracy problem" apart from lobotomizing most of mankind. I am very surprised that people don't seem to realize this. If your business model doesn't fit reality, I suggest you try to adapt the business model, not reality.

Why? TOAC had a point. A very valid point. What's funny about this is that on the same page I saw this article, I saw an article entitled "Should science rethink the definition of "Life"?". It even said "With the increase of extremophile discovery in recent years perhaps it's time to reassess what the definition of "life" should be."

And here you are arguing the poster just wants people to believe his or her viewpoint without ever countering the actual counterargument you complain about.

Ad hominem character assassination just isn't cool.

I have to second what the AC said below. That is the most idiotic thing I've heard in a long time.

You're really asking us what the difference is between choosing not to say something or having your government making sure you don't say a given thing? If you are a US citizen AND you would say such a thing, I suggest you print out your Constitution and Declaration of Independence and henceforth use it to wipe your ass with.

Wow.

Actually, I can talk to more than three different people at the same time. Physically, that is.

If they give me an amp, it becomes quite scalable. ;)