I think 99% of Americans would support this.

I don't think you can get 99% of Americans to agree that the earth isn't flat.

Riiiight - just like the quality control guys are a cost centre, and the safety standards people, too.

jacks0n may have been overly harsh, but he makes a good point. A friend of mine was in a certain air force, and his officer once addressed the group. Paraphrased, he said that their only job is to deliver missiles, and if you're not delivering missiles you better be making it easier for somebody to do that. IT is the same: your job is to enable by default, and disable only when you absolutely must. Now, when it's your job to answer for breaches, everything looks like a threat, yet while that's an understandable and useful frame of mind, it needs to be balanced with getting real work (remember, delivering missiles) done efficiently. Safety standards are useful, but there's a reason combat aircraft turn off anti-collision lights on missions.

In this case, I don't see portable electronics going away. In fact, I see them become more powerful, more highly-personal, and more popular, so IT Departments would be wise to find a way to keep them useful without compromising too much in security. Calling them "toys" or "whiz-bang gadgets" is a rather poor attitude for a geek who's supposed to see their uses better than the unwashed masses.

No, the 5% ($105 million) means that's what the RIAA agrees is Limewire's share of the responsibility. It's not outrageous to claim that the person who actually downloaded those songs is 95% responsible.

Sure, you can cite many examples of companies that were in the right place at the right time (Yahoo, Google), or are examples from the time I was referring to (MS, Apple).

Right place at the right time is precisely one (if not the) formula to success, so I don't understand why you're discounting that. Yahoo! and later Google would not have been successful if the web wasn't so big that we couldn't easily find what we wanted. Microsoft being picked by IBM to build PC-DOS is the stuff of lore, and Apple ][ certainly was a right-place-right-time product.

There is even the chance that, even today, you can beat the odds and turn a small company into a success, but it's certainly not as likely as it once was.

I don't really know what numbers we might use to prove the comparison you want to make, but I don't think it was more likely back in the day. Apple's early competitors included Atari, Commodore, and many others who ultimately didn't make it. Microsoft fought Lotus and WordPerfect and GEM and others. Success was not at all likely, much less guaranteed. Do you know of Stacker? Stac had a clever disk compression product, Microsoft killed them. Netscape had the first good web browser, Microsoft killed them. Apple killed a number of third party apps, not to mention the clones. This is a bloody, bloody path if you care to look back.

The problem is that it's incredibly hard in today's environment to survive as a small business, much less flourish. If you achieve any success at all, you'll attract the attention of larger companies who will either buy you out (a good outcome from your perspective, maybe not so good for the industry) or use their much deeper pockets to try and put you out of business through lost-leader pricing or outright anti-competitive practices.

Apple and Microsoft both had to contend with IBM, in an era where nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. I don't see how that was any easier.

Behemoths generally have groups of analysts whose sole raison d'être is to seek out new lines of business. If anything new appears on the horizon and looks like it will generate revenues, these organizations are quick to jump in, buy out or push out any competitors, or even quash new technologies if they feel it may compromise the profitability of existing revenue streams.

Again, I disagree. Behemoths indeed have certain advantages, but quickness is almost never one of them. Microsoft was late to music players, and late (or too early, if you want to take that perspective) to the modern smart phone and tablets, and not particularly early in game consoles. IBM was late enough to personal computers that Apple got itself a foothold, and late enough to PC operating systems that DOS and Windows survived. You can easily look at Android to pick out a number of features that Apple was or is late at. Google itself was playing catch-up in things like web mail, and of course phone and tablet OS.

It all adds up to an environment that heavily favors large corporations at the expense of small businesses. This is not news and I find it hard to fathom that anyone can honestly feel that is not the case.

I'm not arguing that this is not the case, I'm arguing that this is not a new case. I'm saying that small companies have always had a very tough time, especially when they tread into areas that big companies become interested in. In fact, it was far worse back then when we didn't even have anti-trust laws.

Now, I do agree with you that many start-ups seem to be primarily interested in getting bought than building itself into a big company, but how much of that is just wanting the quick buck and not willing to put in the real work ("kids these days"), and how much is your thesis that it's not possible anymore? Facebook, for example, doesn't seem that interested in being bought out.

There was a time when one could dream of starting a small niche business and if done right, grow it into a large and successful company.

Microsoft was founded in 1975 by two guys. Apple was founded in 1976 by two guys. Adobe was founded in 1982 by two guys. Red Hat was founded by two guys in 1993. Amazon was founded in 1994 by one guy. Yahoo! was founded by two guys in 1995. Google was founded in 1997 by two guys.

Some of the founders may not have been poor at the time, but I'm not aware of them being already wealthy, either. So what "there was a time..." are you talking about? Most small businesses have always had a hard time and many do not survive, but the Dream is very much alive.

The stark lesson is: do not develop for Apple platforms. No matter how shiny or revolutionary the hardware, and no matter how brilliant your idea, Apple will rip you off.

...which is why Apple has paid out over a billion dollars to developers?

Here's the real lesson: don't go into a business where you are easily replaced. In the eBook business on iPads, Apple is not easily replaced. Content authors are not easily replaced. eBook apps, however, are plentiful. The fact that the distinguishing feature they point to is "auto-scrolling" should tell you how tough it is to stand out as an eBook app, even if Apple gave them what they would perceive as a fair fight.

They spent "nearly a year and a half of our lives and over a million dollars in cash and sweat equity" on an eBook app. The odds of them recovering this investment was never good. Even if iBooks didn't exist, you might notice that Amazon and Barnes and Noble both have eBook readers for the iPad (and what makes you think they play "fair" when it comes to pricing?). I don't know how much they think they deserve to keep, but they'll probably have to sell half a million books to break even, which is no easy feat under the best circumstances.

It's not illogical. The logic is simple: God is omnipotent; God made it so; therefore it is.

No, omnipotence is entirely illogical. For example, can God create a rock so heavy that even He could not lift it? If He can, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't lift. If He cannot, then He's not omnipotent because there's a rock He can't create.

You're thinking of vocational/technical training programs

No, Joe The Dragon is thinking of software engineering, which colleges like to pretend is a solved problem. Once in a while we come up with a new and useful technique - like object-oriented programming and others before it - but the core problem of dealing with million-line source code remains a very hard one worthy of study. How many schools prepare their students to deal with this?

Ideally, the graduate of a four-year college should be well-positioned to enter industry with a solid background *or* pursue graduate school to become a scholar. If they fail at this, then they are either producing way too many students (the academe doesn't seem to be able to absorb thousands of CS graduates each year) or the curriculum leans too much to one side. I would assert that a CS graduate who doesn't understand pointers is a victim of an overly-theoretical curriculum, for example.

When fuel is cheap, and likely to stay that way, why invest a bunch of money developing more expensive energy sources that won't pay off for decades?

Indeed.

Want cheap energy alternatives to burning fossil fuels? Figure out how to make the government STOP handouts such as this

...in which case we'll be back to the first problem you identified: no one willing to invest until it's probably too late. I agree that governments should generally keep out of healthy markets, but this obviously isn't a healthy market.

But that is efficient. It's competition, sure in the short term is would be much much more efficient to only have one delivery company, and one phone company, and one grocery store, and one make of car, and one internet provider, and so on. But in the longer term the efficiency costs of the duplicated work are more than covered by competition driving productivity.

You've missed my point, which isn't that on-line is necessarily less efficient than brick-and-mortar. The scenarios I cited are meant to illustrate that on-line isn't inherently more efficient. The FedEx trucks in your neighborhood may be usually full, but in the suburbs or rural areas they may have to travel longer distances to deliver fewer packages. That's why the first word in my response was "arguable".

Lower incentive != stop. You seriously think that raising prices won't decrease demand?

Of course it will, but that wasn't my point, either. The problem is that sycomonkey said "it is so much cheaper and more efficient" as a blanket statement, and I'm pointing out that once tax obligations are assessed, on-line shopping isn't "so much cheaper" anymore. What the on-line stores have today, in practice, is a special right to sell tax-free goods, not some inherent efficiency in the system. Using that special advantage as an excuse to avoid taxes is absurd.

It is so much cheaper and more efficient than traditional storefronts

Arguable. A local store gets a relatively large shipment of merchandise to sell, so the cost (in terms of money, environmental damage, traffic, etc.) of shipping is spread over the entire lot. A customer may make several purchases (including from neighboring shops) on a single trip, which spreads the cost of driving over the number of items. Some customers might even walk or bike to the local store, or stop by on the way home, further minimizing that segment of the cost.

In the on-line version, if you buy everything from Amazon, in some cases they can hold shipment until all the items are complete, but in many cases even stuff you purchased at the same time are shipped separately. If you don't buy everything from Amazon, or if the order actually goes to some associate/affiliate (whatever they call it, those third party merchants) of amazon.com, then certainly they will ship separately. If you and your neighbor both buy something on-line, but one ships UPS and the other FedEx, then there'd be two trucks coming to your block instead of one. Not terribly efficient at all.

if people are forced to pay sales tax on purchases [...], then that is going to lower the economic incentive to purchase online.

Do you realize that this statement could not be true unless on-line shopping is actually less efficient and more expensive? If on-line shopping is really "so much cheaper and more efficient" even after taxes were properly assessed, why would anybody stop?

False. Products should not be designed in a vacuum, then tossed on the public to see what sticks. More cores might mean more potential computing power, but it usually also means more power consumption, more space, more heat, not to mention the inevitable introduction of hardware and software bugs that are exposed by the different architecture. These problems can cause undesirable results like increased size and/or weight, shorter battery life, higher cost, etc.

Good product design requires balancing of all these factors for the tasks that the designers anticipate you will be using it for. Some day you will probably have a phone that's more powerful than you thought you'd ever need today, but that doesn't mean manufacturers should optimize today's phone for a feature they can't even imagine yet.

I bet you couldn't actually de-identify a good medical database. First of all, race, age, weight and the like are big factors, so you can't remove those. A lot of diseases are genetic, so you really want a "family tree" instead of just individual records. A lot of other diseases are environmental, so you want those, too. I wouldn't be surprised if three or four of these public attributes and relationships would already uniquely identify a person, or at least narrow the search down to just a few possibilities.

the HUD visor or helmet were (still?) exceedingly expensive due to the tiny LCDs spec-ed at SVGA and XGA resolutions.

Apple ships millions of phones with 3.5", 326 ppi screens that iSuppli estimates to cost $28.50 each. Maybe they underestimated, so let's say a pair would cost $80, which is still in the price range of a cool video game add-on like the Kinect.

What I don't really understand is why this can't simply be a fine print statement. Most entries will not win the contest, so whatever country they are from isn't actually relevant. Just double-check that the winners have the appropriate qualifications.