Those who RTTFA (read the third fine article) may have noted the discrepancy between what Mr. Mark Bregman of Symantec does when he travels to China, versus what he sells to the rest of us: he uses a dedicated laptop for China trips, and wipes the device before and after travel. On the other hand, he defends farming out coding to China based on 1) all the big s/w vendors do it, and 2) why worry about malicious code from China, when there have been terrorist attacks on the US committed by US citizens?

Rebuttals, off the cuff:
1) Evidently, capitalists don't just sell the rope that hangs them, they'll also teach you how to tie the noose.
2) Timothy McVeigh and 8 "pro-life" murders over the course of 20 years, vs. opportunity to open back doors into virtually every PC in the United States. I think we need to check whether Mr. Bregman has registered as a lobbyist for the China Central News Agency.

I missed out on the Redhat IPO, so I pitched all of my IRA (but not the 403(b) or 401(k)) into the Google IPO at $80. I've never taken profits to re-diversify, but it's been working out damn well. My continued thanks to Brin and Page for leaving money on the table and allowing retail investors to get a taste.

The Facebook IPO looks to be old school, with the 0.1% getting the lion's share of the initial (and perhaps sole) profits from any run up in market price. I have little control over what my index funds admins elect to do, but I don't see any point in retail investors buying until after the feeding frenzy is over and we've got a few months to see where their P/E settles in.

Abstract: Apple is making boatloads of money selling stuff to people. Reconfiguring the company into an enterprise services firm is an unacceptable risk.

'Waaaay back in the day, I was invited to an Apple roadmap presentation for the various big Mac users in the greater LA area (mainly aerospace corps). Dating myself, the main heads up was the upcoming Mac IIfx. The current sealed lips paradigm wasn't always graven in stone.

But, that was before Windows 95 almost ate Apple's lunch, and Macs got kicked to the curb across "the enterprise"... almost simultaneously across North America. Almost as quickly, the ecosystem of Mac-related enterprise solution vendors ditched the platform. When Jobs returned to refocus the company's direction, the focus was on what he had left to work with: consumers (with bones thrown to graphics/video/audio pros). You could see this in his original product mix: iMac, iBook, the restyled G4 mini-towers, and eventually the iPod.

This ended up working so well that quite a few consumers really wanted to haul their Apple gear back to the enterprise... which is how Apple first got there, one MacPlus at a time. Now, with the iPhones and Pads, people aren't just sneaking their toys in, they're putting in purchase orders, and the IT departments are forced to adjust.

It's not completely unreasonable for them to ask Apple to rework their products to make this a bit easier. It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath: Apple isn't equipped to service the enterprise, and doesn't want to spend the money to make it happen. The boys and girls in Cupertino would need to spend tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to set up the hardware/software/people infrastructure - more or less from scratch - to provide reasonable enterprise marketing and support.

And why? There's not all that much profit in selling to the enterprise, except in services. Virtually *all* of the non-Asian computer vendors have reconfigured themselves into enterprise services companies that just happened to sell some hardware/software for them to integrate, and the Asian companies are on the same path.

Apple, meanwhile, is making a boatload of money selling hardware/software to people. There is plenty of foreseeable risk and little known upside to reengineering themselves into the likes of IBM/HP/Dell.

Many comments have already given excellent examples of how destructive SOPA/PIPA (and for that matter) ACTA are to our ability to use the internet, so I won't rehash them.

However, you may need to address the reason these battles are fought: the idea that copyright violation/piracy is theft.

As Matt Yglesias put it, the difference between theft and copyright violation is the difference between stealing a jar of spaghetti sauce from The Sauce Factory, and reading the label to replicate the recipe at home. In the first case, I've taken a physical thing from The Sauce Factory, and they can't sell it. In the second case, they have the recipe for the sauce, and I have the recipe for the sauce. If I use the recipe to make the sauce instead of buying it, I may have denied The Sauce Factory a possible sale. That is what SOPA/PIPA/ACTA are all about, making it easier for someone with an idea to keep selling the idea, known in the trade as collecting rent.

So, what would Jesus do? If your friend is an observant Christian, an excellent analogy is Feeding the multitude: Jesus' disciples had bought some bread. Via the agency of the Lord, the idea of bread is used to miraculously multiply the supply to feed the multitude of people that had followed Jesus from nearby towns. Instead of sending the people home to buy their bread from the bakers, he freely provides it, thus denying the grain farmers and bakers the sales, or rent, that they would otherwise have collected money from. In modern copyright terms, this made Jesus a pirate. Was Jesus wrong to use the knowledge of breadmaking to make more?

> the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.

Reply, abstracted - Libertarian bullshit.

In a liberal democracy, a government provides those goods and services which in some way meet a cost-value metric of the citizens and their representatives, or they eventually go away. As with any large private organization, when inertia develops, it can take a while to eliminate funding for goods and services that don't pass the metric.

The broad brush claim that (in this case) the US Federal government is strictly a cost center is libertarian dogma (or a GOP primary season talking point), not a fact-based argument.

You make good points. However, neither a 3D printer nor a lathe/mill is really geared for someone who isn't prepped to put in a lot of time learning the tool. Then, there's the issue of right-tool-for-the-job. I think 3D printers are still best suited as a prototyping tool, although once tuned up they can also work well for creating plastic parts that would be a wee bit of a challenge on a mill (eg. gears). I've seen print tests with porcelain mix that put out complex shapes ready to fire... a niche I doubt you'd see handled by a mill.

Finally, we're starting to see complete printing kits below the US$500 mark. If they prove out their promises to assemble and print (decently) within a weekend or a day, it may prove the tipping point that leads to mass marketed $200 printers from - hell, pick a name - HP, Samsung, Lenovo, or currently-unknown-Chinese brand. At that point, 3D printers and low end mills wouldn't be an either-or choice... buy both.

No, we wouldn't have gone. At the Apollo program's peak, the US was willing to spend 0.8% of GDP on getting men on the Moon. But, it doesn't make sense to talk "Apollo" in isolation. This was but a part of a massive reaction to contemporary Soviet technical advances. Today, Apollo's portion of GDP would equal $1t, or 30% of the 2011 Federal budget.

Without the space race, we may have put someone in orbit by now, but still be thinking about landing on the moon. Robotic probes would have rolled over enough of the Moon's surface that the Federal government would conclude that there was no point to the added expense of a human being (remember to mouse over). Republicans wouldn't even be wasting their breath telling fairy tales about restarting a Moon effort, were it not for the lingering inertia of moon-shot infrastructure in key electoral districts.

Private efforts? Please. Without the force-fed Federal expenditures that created our aerospace knowledge base, the risk to R&D investments - starting basically from scratch - would have been too high relative to expected rewards.

Within the payload limits, there's no reason not to over-engineer the hell out of a space platform. Value engineering a rover closer to the mission plan would have saved time/money, but would have added to the risks of failure. Utter mission failure is the major cost sink for working in space, so it pays to add sigmas when possible.

The critical variable is the limited number of opportunities for interplanetary launches as a function of time and lining up rockets. NASA could be lofting $1000 Aibos with high gain antennas stuck in their okoles. but, if our little pals don't return any data, you didn't save $300m on the probe, you pissed away $120m on the launch.

While the AC brings up good points, rooftop PV panels are beginning to become as popular as solar water heaters, and there are several spots where wind-powered generators take advantage of the Venturi effect from the trade winds squeezing around and over the islands. There are plans to place arrays of PV panels on especially well insolalated portions of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai, but there are a number of issues to deal with first. Some of these the AC invoked, and some relate to generating power in one spot and shipping it out, while leaving the residents paying >$0.50 kw/hr for local power cranked out by 1mw diesel generators (eg. screwing the locals).

At the moment most Hawaiian electricity is generated by diesel oil fired steam and gas turbines, which is why our costs swing widely depending on the cost of crude, all of which is shipped from outside the US. I usually pay about $0.32 kw/hr. Fortunately, I don't feel the need to run the a/c much, and my mac mini server is very power efficient.