If open source is the future, and hardware can be made dirt cheap anywhere on the planet, how is anyone going to make any money? Service?

Yes. Lots of work available for people to build & provide customized solutions to problems, especially if they can build those solutions without getting worried about being sued every time they slap some code together.

Not when there are 7 billion people on the planet. There'll be plenty more work than people available.

That means you can build potentially 7 billion customizations for any given tool - there would be plenty of work available, as long as people trying to prevent competition through legislation don't get in the way.

It is an alternative to the monkey test: Take a sales person from across the ahlloway and let him click on your application.

Last time I tried that, it took me forever to get the feces out of the keyboard.

Ask any parent: having young children "help" with the laundry ends up being more work.

But, still a pretty good bonding experience (assuming a threshold # of giggles is reached)!

It's striking how well that works. It's common to see wrecked cars where everything in front of the passenger compartment is crushed, but the windshield is unbroken and the passenger compartment is completely intact.

Amen... even ~15-20 years ago (the time is pretty fuzzy to me now), I was involved in a head-on (at about 30mph for each car) in a Honda Civic. My entire family was in the car with me, and had fortunately decided to put on their seat belts (which was kind of rare those days).

After the shock wore off, I got a chance to look at the totaled car. The engine compartment had perfectly crumpled underneath the passenger cage, and all of us passengers had gotten away with nothing more than bumps, bruises & a black eye or two (from smacking heads on the backs of the seats).

Damn impressive given the kinetic energy & momentum involved, and this was even before stuff like air bags & recent advances in material science, dummy testing & extensive computer modeling.

So, no problem if someone installs a proxy on your machine & uses it to surf child porn? I'm sure that it won't take long or have any impact on your reputation for you to explain to the nice law enforcement agents that it wasn't really you doing that sort of thing.

Yeah, after posting my comment, I thought about it a little more & realized that you wouldn't be able to pick up any more momentum via gravity slingshot after reaching the escape velocity, but I didn't know what the exact escape velocity from the Solar System was.

I see you completely ignored the overall point of my message and went immediately to the part of the comment that fed your own biases.

A big company doesn't need to buy off legislators if they can legally control enough vital resources. Once they have that control, they can force people to do things simply by threatening to withhold those resources. (I'm assuming that you'll agree that it is the usual "right" of a private property owner to be able to withhold access to that property from others.)

Microsoft or Comcast may be evil, but they can't force me into jail, suck dollars out of my paycheck, or draft me to go die in 'Nam or Iraq like government can.

Sure they can, if they gain enough power. If they gain control over some vital resources that you need for your survival (drinking water for instance), then you'll do pretty much anything they tell you to, or die. And that's just using basic private property rights; it doesn't even touch what they can do when they're rich enough to buy off legislators.

I wonder how long it would take to reach 25% of c by repeatedly slingshotting a large multi-generation colony ship around the Sun...

Trade is always mutually beneficial in the long run

The fact that you think so is an indication of how simplistic your view of economics is. It took me only 30 secs in Google to find this, and I believe there are other arguments still out there against the "trade is always mutually beneficial" overly-simplistic view.

...if they had allowed you to play as a Little Sister, the target of every Splicer, crawling through the ducts for safe transit, popping out here or there to try and drain some Adam from a corpse, scampering around various Big Daddy's for protection (or deliberately drawing enemies to Big Daddys to get them killed), perhaps being able to set traps or sabotage things.

I suppose a scenario like that would've made the game more puzzle-like rather than a shooter, but I think it still would've been pretty interesting to play.

I'm amazed that some people seem to think being able to import cheap crap from overseas is somehow meaningful when a huge (and growing) percentage of the working population is having a problem finding a job. As long as you have a job, then you can cope with rising prices. Without jobs, then the fact that imported goods are cheap merely means that you are spending your reserves a little slower than you would otherwise - and the money is STILL going out of the country, to a place with a lower standard of living, which means you probably won't be seeing again anytime soon (except maybe as a loan).

I'm skeptical about the specific forms of protectionism being proposed nowadays, but the idea that allowing all our money to flow unimpeded out of our country (without having any dependable mechanism to bring back equal or more value) will somehow be net beneficial for the country is just laughable.

because unless you've got something of actual importance (in which case it shouldn't be on your home computer)

You mean, like having a functioning always-connected-to-broadband potential attack platform?

Right to privacy & control over your own private property.

It might not be quite at a level of right-to-not-get-lynched-for-the-color-of-your-skin, but it's not as different as you're trying to make it out to be.

Whoa, you're good - you caught me fiddling with the date/timestamp on my universal simulator.

Actually I am the Creator, and you're just an AI running on my simulator. Now don't be skeptical - there's no way you can prove that I'm not.

I'd ask you how you're doin', except that I already know, and frankly I don't care too much about how a simulated being is doing anyway, especially on a insignificant little dirtball like Earth.

There's a much more interesting bunch of sentients that have developed around Beta Epsilon III, who has figured out that they're just simulated beings and who are trying to develop techniques to let them hack their way into the simulator's core routines. I let them fool around a little, and when they start feeling smug, I throw the simulator into debug mode, change a few variables in their experiment & get a laugh at how frustrated they get.