I didn't mean to claim that I though trade secrets in code were a good thing, merely that they were a reason a company might not want to open their source code. Patents are not such a reason. (Also, I don't believe software patents should be valid. Copyright, yes. Trademarks, yes. Trade secrets, yes. But software should not be patentable. [And copyrights should have a much more limited duration.])

You left out "trade secrets". That would be plausible if the software were sufficiently innovative.

That's "tool using", not "tool making", but I wouldn't be surprised if dogs could to simple tool making. A cow was recently documented making a backscratcher.

If rolling a styrofoam ball is using a tool, adapting a towel to a flyswatter is making a tool. I'll admit that I've never met someone who was that limited. Everybody used to be able to whittle something, if not something fancy, but I think that knives are now generally not used that way. I don't even know if rubber bands are still used to launch folded paper (which is multiple instances of tool making).

I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.

While money != capital, capitalism isn't basically about improving anything. It's about using the capital you have (i.e. stuff that's under your control, which includes money) to increase the amount of capital you have. This often improves things for at least some subset of the people, but that's a side effect, and if it's missing, what is described is still capitalism.

It may even be true. But the article I read didn't say how many qbits they had on the chip, or what the error rate was.

There are already commercial quantum computers from DWave https://www.dwavequantum.com/ . They're rather limited, but they exist. But I don't expect them to be general purpose turing complete by 2029 with very many qbits. Possibly by 2035. And I don't expect them to be personal computers until they stop needing to be cooled with liquid gasses (i.e. supercooled). But I wouldn't bet that this will never be possible.

I expect that there are groups in the government that have reasonable expertise in that area. But I see no evidence either of what they are (probably some folks in DoD and NSA might have relevant expertise) or reason to believe that they would be tasked with the review.

Well, yes. But this *is* Adafruit's side of the story. Perhaps Flux has some plausible justification, and we just haven't heard it.

(OTOH, there don't seem to be ANY positive reviews of the Flux company or it's products in the comments.)

OTOH, this is an attached processor, so it's in addition to your current setup. Still doesn't sound likely to blow circuit breakers, but possibly equivalent to running two computers.

There are, or at least were, many applications that were useful and on Windows, but not available on Linux or BSD. Switching off of those can be a significant cost. But if you change the underlying system, those probably won't be available anyway.

The core is a LONG way from the surface. Volcanoes aren't. The mantle plumes move slowly.

OTOH, we've known that the magnetic poles were getting ready to switch for decades now. We don't know when or why or how long it will take. This is probably related to that, but we don't have any really good models.