Don't forget:

building infrastructure to extract the minerals from the ground.

Any serious mining operations will require real roads that can carry heavy trucks, rail lines and locomotives than can carry millions of tons of ore from mines to foundries and electricity to power all the equipment associated with such industries.

That kind of infrastructure is real wealth, the kind of wealth that generates new wealth. At least there is a reason now that the rest of world my care about the god-forsaken hell hole that is Afghanistan.

Seriously, New England is the only place to surrender to France in the last 200 years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Canada_(1775) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

The U.S. government is pursuing the electronics question, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told the panel. "We're going to go into the weeds on that"

That's not the phrase you want to hear when talking about real-time safety critical software.

The lion share of budget in most organizations goes to make payroll. The NHTSA's budget comes to $1.26 Million per employee. That ratio seems a little high, even for a government agency.

The decks, shoes or whatever always come "pre-shuffled" from some back room.

At the time, the speculation was that the contract with LucasArts required the game to hit some minimum number of subscribers or LucasArts was free to license the Star Wars IP to another MMO developer. When it became apparent that the game wasn't going to get anywhere near the required number, SOE dumbed down the game and launched a media blitz in a bid to pick-up a lot new subscribers. The rest is history.

I played EQ on and off until 2004, when I finally had enough of SOE. SOE must be an integral part of Sony's plan for world domination; otherwise they would have let it crawl off and die the death it deserves.

far more often than technical challenges. This incident provides an enlightening view into Linux development. Working for someone with the social skills of a 13 year old girl, who doesn't actually pay you, never ends well.

Enough with the change the world by giving third world children netbooks that cost more than their family will make in 5 years. If you want to improve the lives of kids in places like Africa, build infrastructure. Yes its expensive, but it actually makes things better, not just provide a feel-good photo-op. If you really want to make a difference in education start in the western economies. Make the "edubooks" sell for close to $100 a pop (a blip in the cost to educate a child in a modern economy) and eventually the economies of scale will push the price low enough that even Niger will be able to afford them.

Arm is an excellent choice for such an implementation. The power profile is good and the number of units that can be crammed onto a wafer mean that costs of fab can eventually go below $1 per processor, with high volume. The future of computing is a place where general purpose CPUs primarily function as controllers and routers for special purpose signal processors and stream processor anyway and x86 processors are overkill for that.

Because you can implement a TV from a computer, but not the other way around.

Post!

That is the main problem with this business model.