Dont think of the children - it will land you in jail!

Sailing ships require one highly trained person and several numbsculls. Generally, numbsculls are cheap. A modern rig can be sailed by a single person most of the time, and only requires extra crew members when the sails need adjusting (probably 30 minutes once or twice a day while out at sea). All sea-going ships require at least one person nominally awake and alert 24 hours a day (not pissed out of their heads - the more common case in reality).

The economics of sail mean more ships is better than bigger ones above a certain point - don't put all your eggs in Bernie Madoff. Long enough for 20 - 25 knotts is big enough. One huge ship is a Victorian solution to the need to minimise fuel consumption. If you are not using consumable fuel, there is more to be gained by minimising risk, improving manoeverability, reducing the cost of terminal facilities, and speeding loading and unloading.

And they were solar powered too! (Sailing boats rely on the Sun to power the wind).

We have far superior sailing technology now, and it does not require lithium batteries. This is a giant leap into stupidity.

So I heard but it isn't true: I tried it on my Thinkpad T61 when Unity first appeared, and Mint would not even install, despite Ubuntu having run fine since the T61 was manufactured. Fortunately I discovered

> apt-get install gnome-fallback-shell

and all is well (Not quite: the bastard that failed to make Unity/Gnome/Kde an option during the install process should still redeem his one-way ticket to the Gulag).

Their drivers aren't crap, but they aren't up to nVidia's standards. I've a 7970M in my laptop, which I got when it was a brand new chip, and it has been a trial. So there are two big issues it has had, only which could be relevant to the PS4:

1) Issues with Enduro, that's AMD's hybrid GPU switching. The laptop can use the integrated Intel 4000 graphics for easy stuff and fire up the 7970M for hard stuff. Well until fairly recently, that didn't work that well. The 7970M didn't operate at full capacity, something with the drivers was inefficient. You could see it on other laptops which has a mux to allow you to switch off the iGPU. With just the 7970M they ran much faster. AMD finally got it (mostly) fixed, but it took for damn well ever. Also when it first came out, the interface for choosing GPUs was really clunky.

2) OpenGL issues. AMD has sucked at the OpenGL for as long as I can remember, and it never seems to get better. They SUPPORT it, but it doesn't work well. On nVidia, GL and DX run equally fast. They are both first-class APIs and there really is no speed or capability difference between them. On AMD, not so much. Recently the issues I've seen were with Brink and HFSS. Brink was a shit (man it was a waste of money) game that used iD Tech 4. As such, OpenGL. On my AMD GPU, it never ran well despite being WAY passed the spec needed. Tried it on a lesser spec nVidia system, flawless. Said problems were all over the forums. With HFSS we set up a desktop at work with a cheap AMD chip, a 7570 or something like that, just for basic graphics (it was server class hardware, so no good iGPU). The user reported HFSS worked over RDP, but not local and sure enough, that was the case. So it occurred to me: HFSS will use OpenGL to accelerate its interface. Out came the AMD card, in went a cheap nVidia GT 210, and HFSS worked fine.

Now of those, the OpenGL problem could be problematic to the PS4, since that's what it uses. Maybe they won't have a problem since this is ONLY a GL driver and they've had time and all that, but I worry. The PS4 may lose its, on paper, graphics advantage due to driver issues. It would suck for Sony if their console which has more graphics units and more memory bandwidth had lesser GPU capabilities because AMD can't work out a good GL driver.

At any rate the overall situation is AMD still has problems nVidia drivers don't. I really like AMD's hardware, it is often faster and is nearly always a good price, but I get continually bit with driver issues. Not something huge like "The system blue screens and won't run," but things that are very real and very annoying. Hence I have nVidia in my desktop and I've seriously considered replacing the card in my laptop (it is a Clevo laptop and the card is field replaceable). They aren't perfect, but I find them WAY less problematic.

And don't even get me started on Linux drivers. There is NO comparison there. nVidia binary drivers is lightyears ahead of anyone else.

Sony actually intended for it to be the graphic chips. Early on they were doing graphics demos of things running on a number of Cell chips. However, it wasn't good at that either and as the PS3 went in to hardware development, it was clear that they'd need a real GPU.

Well rather than just admit that the Cell wasn't ready for a consumer device (I mean who the fuck tries to put first gen technology in a consumer device) they decided to make it the CPU instead, and had nVidia make them a GPU.

Ultimately Cell's long term problem has been GPUs themselves. As you say Cell sucks as a general purpose CPU. No problem, that wasn't really its design. However as a stream processor it can't keep up with the new GPUs. That wasn't an issue when it was designed (this was back in the pre nVidia 8800 days) but now it gets out stream processed by GPUs.

Hence it has kinda just languished. IBM has chattered about it a bit, but nothing has happened.

Because they can't do anything about you. The reason your own government is more of a concern than foreign governments is they have power over you whereas foreign governments do not. Now yes, technically foreign governments can go after someone, like North Korean kidnappings or the US drone program, however by and large they have little control over citizens of other nations.

In terms of looking at civilians, you think that is new? Most people in a country are civilians, as in not in the military. That doesn't mean they aren't involved in things a nation might take interest in. A simple example would be spies. You think they are military officers? No, they are regular civilians, or often diplomats.

Also in some countries, like China, the line is considerably less clear. The PLA outright owns many industries, and has their hands in many others, so even were you to take the line that spying is only for military things, well that would be rather unclear there.

That aside, I've seen little enough protesting period, and none that seems to be people mad about civilian spying. It is DOMESTIC spying that seems to bother them. They are mad that the NSA is (allegedly) spying on Americans which they are not supposed to do according to the law. I haven't seen any protests complaining about foreign spy agencies doing it, and they do it, make no mistake.

Spying on foreign nations is the NSA's business. If you don't like that, then it is something to take up with your representitive, but I would have to ask why all of a sudden you have a problem with it, since that has ALWAYS been its business. The NSA is the US's signals intelligence agency. It's reason to be is to spy on the electronic communications of foreign powers.

Now, you can argue the US shouldn't spy at all if you like, but you do have to realise that would put the US at basically the only major nation that didn't. More or less all nations have intelligence agencies. The UK has the SIS (and the Security Service to an extent), France has the DGSE, Canada has the CSIS, Switzerland has the NDB, Finland has the SUPO, China has the MSS, Russia has the SVR (and realistically the FSB, FSO and GRU as well). Nations spy on each other. They have for a long, LONG time.

The flap with the NSA is that they have been spying on American citizens. That is something they are not supposed to do. While some countries, like China, have a unified intelligence apparatus (the MSS is their spy agency, secret police, all that jazz), the US purposely has divided agencies. The NSA, CIA, etc are not supposed to collect intelligence on Americans. That is only supposed to be done by law enforcement, and then only in compliance with court orders.

That the NSA would spy on other nations is not only unsurprising, it is the reason they exist.

In terms of China being an enemy, well you can't really think in those terms. Nations don't have friends and enemies so much as they have interests. As such other nations can align or not align with those interests to different degrees. If you mean an enemy as a nation they are at war with then no, but of course they US hasn't officially gone to war in a rather long time. However China is certainly a nation the US would have many reasons to watch. They are quite authoritarian, the military is heavily mixed up in their economy (I'm talking direct ownership of things), they have imperialistic ambitions and they have a lot of weapons. Thus it should not be surprising if the US has interest in watching them.

Also if you think the US is irrelevant, you need to wake up and have a look at world affairs. The US is an extremely influential country in a tremendous amount of ways. It is the only military superpower at the moment, it controls the world's reserve currency, it has the largest economy in the world, it exports culture (in the form of books, TV movies, video games, that kind of thing) like no other in history and so on. You might wish the US was not relevant, but it is, very much so.

Also it isn't small. Buy a globe. Or use a search engine. The US is the 4th largest country in the world by land area, and 3rd largest by population. If that is "too small" by your metric, then I don't want to know what you rank most countries (which are, by definition, much smaller).

1) Eliminate the candidates with bad luck: shuffle the CVs and cut the deck on two, and discard one half (they were unluck, by definition)

2) Fire all the candidates from a cannon applying a powerful side draft, so candidates fall in a two-dimensional array.

3) Select the candidate(s) closest to the centre of the fallout.

It may be that the cost of shipping to America made it uneconomic to ship to a country that had a native computer industry.

In the 60's and 70's selling from one country to another was not a widespread activity generally. People just did not expect to do it.