Exact. The trick is to convert energy from form A to the form B as efficiently as possible. But, this conversion will never be 100% efficient, that is impossible.

To be exact it is a little bit of everything... In addition to the fees and taxes you described, we have one factor that here is called "Lucro Brasil" ("Brazilian Profit" in English).

It works more or less like this: If I want to buy a $100 SSD overseas, I will need to pay $300 (ludicrous import taxes, customs, shipping, etc etc). Then one day a manufacturer decides to make the $100 SSD inside my country. Knowing that the overseas price of $100 is the final consumer price for sale with profits, costs etc already included, then the national SSD would cost me more or less the same $100, right?

Wrong. Why the manufacturer would sell me the national SSD for $100, if he can charge the $300 it would cost me to buy abroad? And that's what everyone does here. And I can not do anything because I can only buy within the country or abroad for the same $300, to purchase for $100 only if I make smuggling.

All time. After all, I as example are running a desktop here. Now if you're talking about a server...

Here we have the same problem, but in our case it affects anything and everything that comes from overseas. I have to pay three times what you Americans pay for an SSD, ridiculous is not it?

Incidentally, interesting question ... Why businesses can freely look around the globe a place to produce things, while we consumers are forced to buy our things in a very restricted manner (You can even import, but only if you pay double or even triple) and for much more than we should? Capitalism and free market for large companies, Dictatorship for consumers?

Please, someone mod the parent as +10 Informative

Things that can go wrong will go wrong sooner or later. Obviously you try build to not go wrong, but it is healthy to have ways to "survive" (in the case of the rocket, able to continue the flight) when things go wrong.

While NASA literally struggled to raise funds to build one Hubble, the NRO had the funds to build many more than three "Hubbles."

(The NRO showed two completed and parts for a third, imagine how many others actually went into space)

Only a minority can see beyond the "show". The rest want what some "guru" claims to be the best thing in the universe, even though it is actually a lie. People want to have the "status" of having an iGadget, even if this iGadget is technically inferior to others.

That for now. The next step of RIAAs: Declare that any audovisual content is now owned by them.

Very, very, very well said, sir. Our doom is exactly this destructive habit of "grow at all costs" when it is impossible to grow indefinitely. Thing that any child perceives, but CEOs are apparently completely unable to understand.

I thought the same thing as you. And I think it shows how much the "businessmen" are hopelessly fucked today.

I would like to agree with you. But as a Brazilian I am sorry to inform you that it is merely another case of our judges who think they are gods and wanting to show who is the boss (but without the necessary competence to do so). If the case involved a "mere ordinary mortal" like me, they would not do anything about

I totally agree. By the comments above I suspect that the problem is actually the lack of quality developers, if you only have "script kiddies" then makes sense to keep the production environment away from them.

But what happens when is the admin of the production environment that does not know what he's doing? And when the developer knows what he is doing but can not do anything because his hands are tied (without access to production)?

Right, but as a practical example I've worked in a power plant where the operating system used is an OS/2.

And why they still use the OS/2 today? Because it does the job, is not connected to any unsecured network that could be used to 0-day attacks (nobody's is stupid to plugging something like that on the internet) and runs happily on an equivalent to a 486 (using backup at hardware level, three separate machines operating as one like a "raid1"). It sits quietly in a corner doing his job and does it very well, there is no reason to replace it by a windows7 or a Unix "simply because it is obsolete."

Humm... Time to nuke eastern Texas from orbit.