Beside, on the rate earth materials, it just happen that China is able to exploit it cheaply but other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.
reply> buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years
replyI'm wondering how that works. I have written software that was still being used, 25 years later, but it was pretty much a "Ship of Theseus," by then.
Old hardware or emulation of old operating systems on new hardware.
replyQuite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.