That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?

No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.

In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.

But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.

No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.

It's been quite a while since a 'normal' PC couldn't do realtime raytracing. Nobody does it because unless you're going for photorealism, rasterization gives you more bang for your buck.

Yeah, like the GE LM500, a purpose designed turbine specifically for electrical generation, except for the fact that it's a minor derivative of the J79 jet engine.

Turbine design is a very high cost process. Most turbines are derivatives of jet engines, because it's a lot cheaper that way. You can't just put a military jet engine directly into a power plant, but the conversion process is usually not expensive.

And the core of a gas plant is a gas turbine. The US has thousands of mothballed jet engines sitting in the Mojave dessert that can be inexpensively repurposed into gas generators.

The law that the UK is threatening to use was created in response to the murder of Yvonne Fletcher.

And frankly, that's fair. A small business is a very risky investment, which also demands an enormous amount of time.

If you get your broker to buy you some shares in Hershey's, then spend one weekend a year doing your taxes and rebalancing, there's no reason why you should get the same kinds of return that a small business owner would expect, who is taking a large risk and investing 70+ hours a week.

The Taliban doesn't have high altitude SAMs.

Inflating your way out of sovereign debt (i.e., printing money) is considered by most to be a default.

A blimp big enough to carry a person around is enormous. It's also a giant sail, and navigating one in any wind, with any sort of traffic, would be very challenging.

Consider Top Gear's experience with DIY blimping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzQq3nOj5c

That is the most out-of-context thing I've ever seen on slashdot. You took the quote that the article was disagreeing with, and presented it as the article's thesis instead. For the curious, here's the final paragraph of the article linked:

How's that? Knight screwed up badly, and the mistake has cost them $400 million dollars. Sounds pretty merit-based to me.

Liquidity isn't about time, it's about spread. Stock markets are double-auction systems, where you are free to bid and offer at any price you want. Trades only occur when someone offers a stock for less than someone else's bid price. The stock has a 'price,' and to buy stock you have to bid a little higher, and to sell you have to bid a little lower. The difference between the bid and offer price is the spread, and the spread represents an inherent transaction cost to most investors.

Now liquidity is just how easy it is to convert your stock into cash. There is always some liquidity, as long as you're willing to accept a bad deal. You offer to sell your stock cheaply enough, or buy high enough, and somebody will buy or sell. Of course, on blue chip stocks, the spread has always been pretty small, so it has never cost a lot to trade in those stocks. But in medium-cap and small-cap stocks, where HFTs have had the biggest impact, they've reduced spreads enormously.

Twenty years ago before the rise of HFT traders, you might had paid a market maker $0.50 / stock on the spread for a trade in a medium-cap stock. If you want to rebalance your investment portfolio annually, those kinds of transaction costs could wipe out your gains. It effectively priced individual investors out of the market, and if you wanted to save money you were forced into the hands of large institutional investors, who will happily charge you a 2% management fee for the pleasure of handling your money.

Today we take it for granted that most stocks have very small spreads, and you can make regular trades without seeing all your gains lost to transaction costs. HFTs have put the Serious Men in Suits market makers out of business, and have pushed the cost of trading down to the point where the individual can manage their own savings, without having to fork over most of their profit to other Serious Men in Suits.

So yeah, you may not like high frequency traders, but they're better than the old-boy networks of "specialists" and stockjobbers that they replaced.

Which frankly, is as it should be. If the Chinese can mine and produce rare earth metals at prices that can put all the competition out of business, that's good for them. But that doesn't mean they should. The world is hungry enough for these metals that they can sell at the same price as Mountain Pass without running out of customers... and at those prices their mines will be incredibly profitable.

Yup. Most rare earth minerals came from the Mountain Pass mine in southern California, until the Chinese priced them almost out of the market in the 1990s.

Probably? Of all people and organizations in the world, I suspect the NSA is the least likely to be relying on GPL'd third party code for their encryption needs.