One thousand years from now

Sure, if we want to follow the Soviet Union down the toilet.

Thanks, Rich

I guess all I can say is, if it's not your cup of tea, you're not required to do it. For example, you'd never get me to go try to ski. It's cold, there's too much stuff to crash into, and falling down hurts.

When jumping out of an airplane, there are no trees between you and the ground. ;-)

Incidentally, the most dangerous part of sky diving is driving to the drop zone in your car. ;-) This no doubt applies to skiing, as welll.

I've also heard that statistically, it's safer to jump out of a plane (with a 'chute, of course) than to land in one. >:->

Oh, yeah - my first sky diving instructor encouraged us to proselytize. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Exactly. I know when it was getting really bad the Spanish bank Santander snapped up Sovereign which is my bank.

Not all of it. That gets the most press, but the majority of economic impact of electronics is from replacing mechanical systems in goods with much cheaper electronics.

Ignoring repair for the moment, an awful lot of stuff is made at a high level of automation. The series "How It's Made" shows a lot of this. The guts of stuff is also increasingly made cheaper by this progression.

-- Les Cargill

The sequence of events in that past is a path. I mean that when a person does something *now*, they incorporate a massive quantity of inherited information into what they do.

Going forward will also be a path, but we don't know what that path is.

The shoulders are, but people still have to make dollars, or the velocity of money slows and people's ability to participate in civilization is curtailed. It all has to balance out.

-- Les Cargill

Unfortunately, that's not necessarily true. In the Soviet system, there was inadequate production. They didn't even know how to measure what production was in play.

-- Les Cargill

It's about deflation. If only people who earn can buy, then there is a tipping point past which the flow of goods - measured by the velocity of money - starts to decline.

Since the original premise was "what if 1% do everything", then I suppose the 1% would just sell things to each other. I don't think that's what they want, no matter what.

We're *ALL* freeloading to an extent - if you use a principle of physics to build something new, you just did a value added pass lain on top of millenia of accumulated knowlege.

-- Les Cargill

That last one cites the astounding ratio of 1 death per 1000 USPA members per year. The most experienced jumpers are the most likely to die. If 0.1% of skiiers died on the slopes every year, there would be no skiing. Skydiving is very, very dangerous.

The guys I jumped with were insane. They'd wait til the last second to pull, no altimeter, ratty old chutes, having consumed beer all day.

Hmmm... if you factor in the time spent doing it - 6 hours a day skiing, six minutes jumping - the ratio gets much, much more impressive.

John

?Globally, excise/tobacco taxes prop up governments. My hand-rolled cigarettes cost me 4 times what they did just 3 months ago. The cigarettes are the same, it's the value of the dollar that dropped.

Gasoline prices are the surest, truest measure of inflation. Nation-wide historic gasoline prices from DOE.GOV:

Feb 22, 1999 .88 dollars per gallon, Regular grade Jul 14, 2008 4.05 dollars ( 4.60, in Seattle ) [ Today, in Seattle, Regular Grade sells for 2.86 ] So, from early 1999 to mid 2008 the dollar lost 78 percent of its value. [ 78.27 == 100 * ( 1 - .88 / 4.05 ) ]

The DOW Jones Index should be measured in packs of cigarettes.

. ^^^^^^^ IFYPFY!

A hard drive can handle a 40 G shock. It cannot handle even 4G if the surface is firm.

Aside from the fact that I think you knew what I meant.

Got any more flippant, retarded, playground pussy boy commentary?

Sudden stops are always bad. My wife was a perfect example.

A 1970 Cadillac and a concrete wall do not "mix" well.

If you give me a button, I will push it. Famous last words of a great Tralfamadoran Jet Pilot.

Largely but not exclusively.

se

This reminds me of the old Superman episode where Lois dreams she is marrying Superman, but the bad guys have planted a bomb in the wedding cake: and wrapped it with lead foil to defeat Superman's x-ray vision. Well, it was only Lois's dream, it didn't have to make sense.

sting solution.

tems that are based

full visible spectrum,

It is not a path. One change can immediately branch to infinite paths. Your traceback will be a path but it won't reflect what really happened.

/BAH

That does not compute.

krw, when was the last time we heard that one?

/BAH

and

at

Yes. I've seen that. People doing well under a particular system like to pretend they invented all of it themselves.

Pity about sci.electronics.design and comp.dsp . Are they as free-for- all as sci.physics?

It's not infinite (in the aleph[0] sense) , it's highly constrained. The real critical branch points aren't than numerous. Most smaller branch points don't have that much effect.

If it were really wide open, we'd see much less stability than we do.

You think? I agree it's necessarily lossy, but you can get a good firm skeleton of what happened going. That just takes too long.

-- Les Cargill

It don't get much more dopey than that.

This got me to thinking. Jim, you have done analog IC for quite some time. How has mask set cost (NRE) cost and methods varied over the years?