Why is it that Republicans continually spout lies and bullshit when something happens that they don't like and turn the story around to blame the Democrats for it? What is it that you're always angry and pissed off?
Without even bothering to check the facts you instantly blame Clinton, hoping that if you say it with enough conviction people will blindly believe it.
It is blind moronic sheep like yourselves that voted in this insane government, and believe their made up reasons for starting a war. With a straight face you say that Republicans are for small government and spending cuts while Democrats are for big government and spending increases when the facts show the complete opposite!
I'm sick and tired of this propagandist bullshit spewed by Republicans. Republicans need to collectively get their heads out of their asses before they suffocate and take the rest of us with them.
(Why is it that Slashdotters always mod down comments they disagree with politically?)
Clearly you lost your job when Clinton's term ended;)
Oh, I think we can blame Clinton for a lot of things that happened on his watch, such as a couple of Al Qaeda attacks and 90% of the preparations for 9/11. We can blame him for getting up there on national TV and lying through his teeth about the Monica Lewinsky affair, then turning around and confessing after she testified to the special prosecutor. We can perhaps not blame Clinton for the dot com market crash the way we would not blame Calvin Coolidge for the Crash of 1929.
Clinton basically partied for 8 years while Rome burned. I think he will go down in history as one of the more mediocre presidents, even though he was generally popular up until the scandal. Nixon accomplished more in his 5 years in office than Clinton did in 8, despite his dismal popularity ratings. GW Bush is another president who doesn't care about popularity polls, and he has some major accomplishments as well, the India rapprochement being only the latest. In the long term Bush will go down in history as a great promoter of democracy in the world, having brought it to two key countries, initiating a trend toward democracy across the entire region. I don't recall that your former employer did anything remotely like that; he did shake hands with lots of dictators and terrorists, however.
As for the appointing of liberal and anti-business judges, perhaps I called it wrong on Judge Spencer but that doesn't alter the general trend. As for your "facts" about debt, the real fact is that the dot com crash of 2001 swung the U.S. into debt, not anything that Bush did. His tax cuts amounted to a few hundred billion dollars that helped bring about a strong economic recovery. Once again, a Republican takes the blame for Democratic excesses. Sheep, indeed!
The desktop is not going away any time soon. These amazing handheld all purpose gizmos are not about to replace the desktop until certain technologies are enhanced big time:
- batteries. You can run a heavy, hot laptop for about 2-3 hours before needing a lengthy recharge. You can run a handheld PDA for roughly the same amount of time; current drain scales up proportionately. You are going to need a couple of orders of magnitude better power sources to replace a desktop; 12 hours of continuous use per day for several days, I would guess.
- data input. The desktop/laptop has this amazing invention, the full size keyboard, that lets us enter tons of information more quickly and accurately than any other method. Having used a Palm handheld and mobile phone for years I can safely conclude that the keyboard is in no danger of being replaced. Speech recognition still sucks and that's the one possible alternative.
- display. Desktops have awesome displays; it's not uncommon to have 19" or 24" displays these days, nice crisp LCD screens. Nothing compares to this. Teeny little 3" screens are not going to replace these any time soon.
- storage. Desktops start at 40G of permanent storage and go up to terabytes. Nothing else can compare. What's more, our storage needs are growing, not shrinking. We're not going to switch to Pocket PC/Phone/consoles that have maybe a 10G memory card or a 30G hard disk and give up our 250 giggers.
- connectivity. A desktop is on DSL or Cable or T1 or dial-up and is a reliable way to access the internet. Handheld devices have to be in range of a wireless hub or in network for cellular connections. The widely available connectivity for broadband handheld devices simply doesn't exist yet. My previous apartment was in some kind of Verizon dead zone, in a big suburb next to Boston so it would have been impossible to have handheld broadband or even handheld slow dialup. THere's a tremendous amount of infrastructure to be built, just to displace an existing infrastructure that works pretty well.
As storage is further miniaturized and as voice input and battery technology improve, we will doubtless see a displacement of casual desktop/laptop use with handhelds, such as Blackberry-style email reading and Palm/PPC-style organizer functions, but for heavy lifting, the desktop will remain. When 8 megapixel cameras are the norm and everyone's using digital video cameras with their huge demand for disk space, we're going to want those capacious, fast desktops even more.
Phones will probably get a little smarter but convergence tools such as the Treo can only do so much. People still want phones to act like phones. It's going to take a lot of tech to move us to the next level.
Simple. The uncertainty surrounding RIM was hurting their business and was going to continue to. By resolving the dispute sooner they keep many customers they might have lost and have a better chance of attracting more. NTP could have kept this dragging through the courts for years and possibly sunk RIM in the process. Gotta love corporate shakedowns.
Well, not exactly. Obviously NTP's strategy was to drag this out as long as possible, though one wonders where they get the money to do this. But the patents are about to be invalidated by the USPTO, so NTP's case was about to be seriously undermined.
In my opinion, it's simply that Judge Spencer didn't like RIM for whatever reason and kept ordering them to settle. I am surprised that RIM didn't move to have him recused from the case for prejudicial statements. Spencer clearly had decided RIM was guilty despite past and present USPTO rulings and didn't want to admit he was wrong. Another anti-business Clinton appointee throwing his weight around, it looks like.
These SEC and New York AG investigation orgies are more about politics than about protecting the public from evil corporate behavior. For example, in the case of Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, it's about how to use his job as a springboard to the governorship. He talks a tough line about long time insurance industry practices that are of questionable harm, caused the resignation of AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, and is continuing to go after this company as though it's the incarnation of evil. He waxes eloquent about how these companies hurt the common consumer, when in fact he has little grounds for such a claim. But it plays well on network news.
The SEC can pretty much go after anyone they feel like. Any large company is bound to have a few irregularities in their procedures. Whether this merits the kind of microscopic scrutiny that the SEC has been utilizing in recent years is another question. IBM is a company with a history of being completely cooperative with the feds when it comes to monopolistic practices. Intel and Cisco are similar. They announce full cooperation, make their procedures transparent, and the feds either go away or slap them on the wrist with a fine of a few million for some technicality.
We in the U.S. are our own worst enemies; while our corporations labor under a host of rules and regulations that are often contradictory and sometimes counter-productive, companies in places like China are charging full steam ahead, eating our lunch. It riles me to read about yet another strike for "fair pay and working conditions" or another city trying to levy new taxes on its local industries even as overseas firms proceed to take over nearly every manufacturing sector but military related.
I think the United States should take one state and declare it a Special Economic Zone where manufacturing can be conducted tax free and with only basic checks and controls. Keep the "watchdog" agencies like the SEC off their backs and just let them compete. We will probably be surprised at the competition and productivity that will result.
All true, but those five words "I should have backed up" really say it all. No one should trust their web hosting provider to back things up, maintain all equipment in perfect condition, avoid all subpoenas, and stay in business forever. One or more of these things is bound to happen.
A prior webhosting company I had used for years (and recommended to several others) experienced a hard disk failure which took down my email and web sites for about 10 days during which time they were attempting to "recover data from the disk". They ignored my peevish comments as to why weren't they using disk arrays or similar redundant systems. Their backups were quite incomplete as well. I switched providers and have been basically satisfied ever since.
The take-home lesson is to run daily backups; there can never be too much redundancy unless you have no data of any value whatsoever. For $9.95/month one can't expect too much of a hosting service. For $500/month one still can't trust them to avoid making mistakes or caving in to litigation threats and other cowardly tactics. A simple shell script and ssh/scp commands will work wonders;)
Keep in mind that when Steve Jobs left Apple the first time, he went off and founded Next Computers, which came out with a remarkable Unix-based GUI. He captured the public's imagination with the Next cube but made a couple of strategic errors such as initially restricting the product to the educational market. A reporter asked him how an ordinary person could acquire a Next cube and Jobs famously replied, "Enroll."
Jobs also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, the premier animation film company that has created such blockbusters as Toy Story and The Incredibles.
Then when Jobs returned to Apple, taking over from a string of lackluster bean counter executives, he inspired the company to produce some world class products such as the iPod and the iMac. The iPod is the must have product of 2005, and the Mac laptops are at the top of their class.
I'd say Steve Jobs is more than just a showman, though clearly he loves the limelight. Microsoft is the white bread, corporate standby that does the heavy lifting on corporate and consumer desktops but is otherwise an uninspired market follower, not a market leader.
That's OK, here's an idea you can take and run with. Sell 5 second sound bites to advertisers, so that when you bring up your web page you will hear this cacophony of voices clamoring for your money.
I mean, if that guy can make hundreds of thousands of $'s with his idea, then this ought to work too.
This is hardly news; for years, headphones have been known to cause hearing loss, and ear buds are merely the extreme expression of this kind of problem. Recently in September 2005 there was a flurry of articles about this issue, according to a quick google search.
There's evidence of a general decline in hearing sensitivity in movie theatres and airplanes. The intensity of airplane overhead speaker volume has recently become almost painful to my ears, and it seems to be consistent across different airlines. Movie theatres as well have cranked up the volume. I find myself covering my ears during the previews, which tend to have intense, compressed action with a lot of music and narrative to pump up the adrenaline. Generally when the main feature begins the sound volume settles down a bit but it can still be worrisomely loud.
I am worried that we in the U.S. are becoming a nation of half-deaf electronic addicts, cranking our headsets and PA systems ever louder to compensate, perhaps unknowingly, for our diminishing sensitivity to sound.
I only hope that ENT doctors and researchers continue to find ways to repair the ear's mechanisms and perhaps develop nerve repair techniques or we're gonna have a huge population of elderly deaf people 50 years from now (with commensurate increase in volume of PA systems etc.).
And given the fact that currently adult stem cell research is approaching 40 different applications and embryonic stem cell research has currently found, uhm, zero , I'm okay with that.
These are "facts" promulgated by the anti-embryonic stem cell fundamentalist Christians. A columnist in the Weekly Standard a few months ago said almost exactly the same thing, and the argument is exactly as specious.
Declaring that one line of research is promising while another line is unproductive, even though no one completely understands either type of stem cell and its biological pathways just yet, is typical non-scientific pontificating by people with an axe to grind.
The fact is that scientists suspect that great things will come of ESC research. Who knows, a better understanding of ESCs may help scientists to learn how to coax pluripotent adult stem cells into becoming totipotent (like embryonic cells).
There's a lot of excitement right now in the scientific community about the potentialities of stem cell research and while some of it may turn out to be dead ends, it's dangerous and ignorant to predict and declare in advance which avenues those will be.
I want there to be a cure for paralysis and other debilitating conditions. I work with MS patients and have witnessed firsthand a terrible disease which may benefit from stem cell research. There is already some laboratory evidence that stem cells repair myelin sheaths in rats with an MS-like condition.
How can we deny people a cure for these conditions based on some religious sect's reservations? It's lunacy, and hypocracy, and will ultimately fail because even if we (the U.S.) choose not to support such research, others around the world with a clearer vision and more common sense certainly will, and we'll all be going abroad to get our paralysis and Alzheimer's and MS and Parkinson's cures.
As for volunteering for stem cell treatments--I'm planning to put into my living will that if I succumb to Alzheimer's or quadraplegia or similar debilitation, sign me up for whatever experiments might hold a prayer of helping me or at least yielding data that will help others.
Talking heads? I would hope for a lot more than that, in an age of video camera phones and video digital cameras heading south of $100. People can now video all sorts of newsworthy and not-so-newsworthy events and post them on their blogs. That's actually a rather exciting development.
I have found some of these audio "podcasts" to be utterly boring and tedious to wade through; unlike with text, it's rather difficult to scan down to the end to see if there's an interesting point in there somewhere, and I have yet to find an audio player that accelerates the sound on the fly (why can't Real and WMP do these simple tasks yet?). Listening to some guy stuttering and umming and ah-ing, no thanks; would rather read a well-written piece than waste my time like that.
But video will be more fun and informative because a video is worth a thousand words, and the patter becomes almost irrelevant. Maybe I'm different, but I find video on the web still to be fresh and exciting while more static presentations are getting to be old hat. Of course there's the inevitable commercials you have to sit through to get to the substance of a video in many cases, and once again the video player won't let you fast forward but I suppose it's a small price for an essentially free service.
He asked for volume product availability that a company like Dell can provide but mom and pop stores and DIY solutions can't begin to address.
Your answer is typical of solo techies who post on Slashdot, college students or working programmers or technosavvy others who extrapolate their personal, home computing experience to the entire world.
Someone who needs to get 50, or 500, or 5000 standardized desktops and be able to image the hard disks as they require is going to have to negotiate a sales deal with a reasonably large and stable company like Dell. It's not reasonable to expect them to try to save $50/machine on the Windows "tax" by going to the corner computer store or even a slightly larger local systems integrator who may or may not be around in a couple of years when the desktops need servicing or replacement.
It's also not reasonable to expect non-technical end users out there in the mass consumer market to go to the corner store, have a machine put together to their specifications, and then run the Fedora or Ubuntu setup DVD. That's simply not going to happen, much less ask them to "buy the parts, screw them together", etc.
In reality, Microsoft has a lock on both the mass market and the business market, leaving only the fringe technosavvy customers and Mac lovers to use the alternatives. MS is using their power as any other business would, locking the manufacturers into a Windows-only offering that ignorant customers go along with.
But just wait. As Linux continues to improve, it will become a bargaining chip for manufacturers to force down the Windows tax if not eliminate it entirely. It's not quite yet time for Dell and Gateway and HP to tell Microsoft they're switching to 50% Linux, but that day may not be far in the future.
Unlikely, but exciting if they pull it off
on
Writing Genetic Code
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Bacteria are already used to synthesize organic materials by reprogramming their DNA. For example, some antivirals and antibiotics are manufactured this way; the desired pattern is injected into the bacteria's genome and it will then produce that pattern. Venter's project is really just an extension of that approach.
I have doubts as to the likelihood of success using present science; in twenty years, perhaps it will be possible, but today it's really casting about in the dark. Even something as elemental as a bacteria is an incredibly complex thing, with a sophisticated genome and complex organelles working in biochemical harmony to reproduce, to "mate" by conjoining with other bacteria, and to adapt and thrive in a very wide variety of conditions.
Bacteria have been around for billions of years and, as Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are living in the Age of Bacteria. In a few short years it seems unlikely that even brilliant scientists can recreate these things. Modify some, yes, but completely create from scratch something that is going to be viable--well, that's going to be interesting to see.
That said, if they can pull it off the possibilities of its use, for good or evil, are endless. They can be encoded to synthesize all sorts of compounds, eat nasty pollutants, generate fossil fuels, attack disease microbes, or be diseases themselves. Luckily, the human body has a pretty comprehensive immune system that will adapt to just about anything except retroviruses like AIDS that reprogram the immune system itself.
All the America-bashers and Bush-bashers come out of the closet yet again to rant about how "America is not free" and similar slogans, without addressing the actual topic.
Does no one on the Slashdot forum wish to discuss the national security issues which are behind the wiretapping, not to mention that other "scandal" regarding testing for radioactivity around Moslem sites?
I do not favor giving up any of my rights unless there is a clear benefit and a timetable for restoring those rights. That's why I support the temporary extension of the Patriot Act rather than the permanent extension advocated by the Bush administration.
Suppose someone out there is trying to smuggle a Soviet-era warhead into a major U.S. city. This scenario is probably realistic, given that the Russians have not accounted for all of their warheads and other nuclear material, not to mention the fanaticism and determination of the Muslim extremists. This is not a theoretical threat but a real one; if they *could* kill millions of people here, they *would*.
Given this scenario, is it really so terrible and wrong and evil for the NSA to be using wiretapping and internet-tapping to try to gather intelligence? That seems rather mild by comparison to the catastrophe described above. Would you prefer to wait politely until some container ship floats into New York Harbor and takes away three million lives? Not me; I would rather be prepared and knowledgeable (and alive).
That said, the major issue is that the U.S. intelligence community is not the world's best, and probably doesn't get the support it needs to do a first class job. Probably it can't, in such an open society. Israel's intelligence is probably the world's best and I have no idea how they do it, but if we get another warning about a 9/11-like attack from them I sure as hell hope we listen this time.
The Bush Administration has made its share of blunders and I would like to see them cooperating a little more with Congress and friendly governments; Bush and his team have a go-it-alone attitude which was satisfying in the dark days after 9/11/2001 but which just doesn't work in the long term.
Yes, anonymous coward, the U.S. is not a perfect country, but I doubt yours is either, wherever that may be. We have made mistakes, and no doubt we'll make plenty more. But we've also done great things and we're still groping and stumbling our way toward a better society and a more peaceful world.
Insightful. Eliot Spitzer's office has been going after soft targets, often painstakingly struggling to interpret particular corporate actions as "crimes".
If Spitzer were truly an outstanding AG, he'd be going after organized crime, which has to be costing the country a lot more than these vaguely unethical insurance company "accepted practices" and so-called price fixing.
There are thousands of instances of businesses having to pay protection/shakedown money, front organizations for drug dealers, petty mobsters laundering dirty money, and the impact of all this is much worse than any of the "crimes" that he's gone after so far.
I don't believe companies should get away with collusion and price fixing, but an AG of an important state like NY should be focussing on the real crime, not technicalities.
As for the music industry, it's all about greed. If they force Apple to raise prices, probably sales will drop, but that remains to be seen.
The U.S. patent system is seriously flawed. In my opinion, it's all these vague "business process" patents that have really screwed things up. They get hundreds of thousands of these applications per year clogging up the system, and the net result is that nothing gets done before at least three years, as the article points out.
Even worse is that the business process patents make it nearly impossible to implement anything without violating someone's patent. I looked into patenting an invention that had to do with a linux-powered answering machine and soon discovered that almost everything you can imagine has been patented. Some guy got a patent for "compressing a voice recording". So do I have to ignore his patent and let him sue me, or send him money for something that's a questionable "innovation" at best? Perhaps megacorporations can afford this hassle but not that many individuals, I would think.
The patent system was originally intended to encourage innovation by protecting people's rights to their inventions, and it has now been perverted into a thicket of pointless, indefensible rules that inventors must navigate to get a product out the door.
Probably the solution is to tighten up the definition of an invention and, as so many in this forum and elsewhere have pointed out, invalidate software patents and business process patents. Even Congress is supposedly getting wind of the problem, but I'm not holding my breath until it's solved.
Yes, you're quite right, but it doesn't work for Yahoo. I've confirmed this on the sourceforge.net discussion board. It has something to do with Yahoo's protocols. I still don't understand it because GAIM has my list of buddies, and it has the ability to not pop up a message, so why can't it do so? I guess it's just a customized feature that they don't feel like implementing at this time. Perhaps it's doable through a plugin.
Yahoo spim can't be blocked with Gaim 1.5 and earlier; every couple of days I find a message on my screen "Hi I'm Honey Bunny, check out my pix! Not there? Oh too bad, maybe later!" and this kind of crap. I don't want or need unsolicited instant messages but there appears to be no way to block them generically with GAIM even though the feature exists on Yahoo's client. I have to block each of these bots retroactively. Grr. I have about two Yahoo buddies and maybe I should just tell them to move to MSN or AOL.
Actually I think there will be several levels of user interface depending on the needs and abilities of the user. There will continue to be very basic, ATM-like interfaces for specific and focussed applications such as a touchscreen map kiosk for tourists. Keyboards aren't going away any time soon, either. But the really cool stuff will come out of games and military tech and will further revolutionize how we learn and communicate.
Helmets with surround sound and surround video will probably get popular as they help people to navigate increasingly complex online communities. You'll end up looking down a tunnel (someone else here mentioned "Descent") that you can navigate, "floating" along and occasionally detouring down side tunnels. The walls of the tunnel will consist of colorful 3D icons and words and lines and who knows what else. A gadget attached to your hand will allow you to wave at the things you're interested in, open doors, push buttons, etc. Perhaps the fancier gadgets will include tactile feedback. It will be very much a virtual world.
Phone calls made with your goggles on would be a simulation of face-to-face contact, with a 3-D representation of your conversation partner (or what they want you to see, at least). What people really look like will probably become a guarded secret, somewhat like your real name versus your handle.
I think the other big thing will be intelligent speech, a step beyond speech recognition. The hardware will soon be there for people to carry on useful conversations with machines, not just for the magic of transcribing faithfully but for the machine to understand and react to your words in a reasonable manner. Probably customer service departments will move further down that road, and I do hope they get past this intermediate phase of "I did not understand" to something that hears individual words and sleuths out your meaning more intelligently.
Eventually, the concept of user interface will be more like a lifestyle decision--do I want to wear my computer goggles today, or just my earbuds? You'll carry a little box in your pocket and occasionally it will say, "Sir, you have a call from So-and-so. Shall I put him through or take a message?" There are some real opportunities here for people in the right fields, and probably a bunch of people will find their jobs drastically altered if not eliminated. Should be an interesting 20 years.
The news article is short on facts. So, what's this guy's motivation for uploading a movie to the internet? Did they even establish that he possesses the movie or a copy of it? Did he admit to such possession? What about his computer that was supposedly "cleaned"--what makes them think so, and how can they prove it? And, one might ask, how can they establish that this alleged uploading cost them $100,000.
There are a lot of unanswered questions here. This is typical of the big media companies now, just like the Mafia: shake down the little people and get the word out that you should toe the line and pay your protection money, or we'll get you.
I do agree that circumstantial evidence seems to suggest he's a bit more tech savvy than one might think, but on the other hand, a tech-savvy person can also get their network broken into or their password stolen. Basically, this company doesn't have a leg to stand on. Maybe that's why they're shaking him down for so much money, to make him feel he has no choice but to settle.
Agreed, this article is a little off the mark. Apple is a pioneer in this field and inevitable there are going to be some shifts as the industry adjusts itself. Certainly it makes more sense to sell some tunes for different prices, just as movies tend to sell for more at first and then end up in the discount bin when they're old hat.
I think by demonstrating that it's possible to be a profitable "middle man" in the online music business, Apple has in fact saved the tushies of the music companies by offering an alternative to napster-like music trading systems. This exemplary system can be emulated by the music companies, if they so wish and assuming they have the intellect and vision, or they can go through Apple or Real or whoever else jumps in (Microsoft, probably).
The iPod would not have succeeded if Apple had tied it strictly to their iTunes database and disallowed any other formats. The secret of success for any great product is its power to do one thing really well and flexibly, emphasis on the latter. They had to let people rip CDs to their iPods, and of course that will lead to trading and avoiding paying for tunes, but it also allowed the iPod to revolutionize the "walkman" generation's listening habits.
Business Week is a pretty astute publication but this is clearly a case of short term-ism getting in the way of seeing what a revolutionary product the iPod really is--and now they're doing it again with videos. Should be interesting to see where they go with this. I think iPod may eventually absorb the cell phone and handheld organizer and we'll see excellent high capacity, wifi/cell-enabled personal bliss bars in everyone's shirt pocket in a few years.
It's not surprising to me that Yahoo's hit count is so high. A lot of people probably have Yahoo! bookmarked as their home page from way back, just as lots of others have MSN or even Netscape.com. But the Yahoo brand is a household world, maybe about 70% as pervasive as Google. (I would argue that no one would browse to MSN if it weren't shoved in their face when they start up IE.) When people want to check the sports scores or headlines, Yahoo is a convenient portal to go to. The millions of Yahoo!Mail users can easily jump to the news and other sections. Yahoo!Shopping is a widely trusted framework for online shopping. Yahoo!Finance is a pretty well designed and customizable way to check one's stock listings. Yahoo just has a lot of stuff.
What they don't have is intelligent discussions on their comment boards. One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to click on a "discuss this story" link and interact with other readers, but the level of civility and intelligent analysis is really low, much worse than Slashdot (which is fair to middling these days). I guess it's a revealing slice of lower-to-middle America, though.
True, but still the article itself has a questionable thesis. He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software. In fact, there are thousands of open source programs which are used every day including at such companies as Microsoft. Or is no one at Microsoft using Perl, FTP or Emacs? That seems unlikely.
There is a tremendous and powerful set of server tools such as Apache web server, the aforementioned Perl, PHP, MySQL, and all the thousands of Unix/Linux command line programs that are used to run most of the world's servers. You would hardly expect Andrew Brown to complain of how limited and buggy Apache Web Server is and how much better Microsoft IIS is, not to mention Linux and MySQL and Perl/PHP--a laughable claim that would not be supported by the facts. This seems to sink his thesis; LAMP is the server to beat and has been a thorn in MS's side for years and are really your classic opensource, community-developed and supported applications.
I think it would be more fair to look at the bigger picture. Open source and public domain software pretty much dominates the back end, and on the front end Windows software rules. Yet, recent distributions of Linux are getting increasingly solid and easy to install and use. Recent versions of Firefox and OpenOffice and Gimp pretty much do everything any user will ever need, are solid and featureful and under constant development and improvement.
I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now. Is there room for improvement in the OSS model? Of course. Wait another year or two and (as he himself points out) version 3.1 of OOo will surely be fantastic, along with Linux kernel 2.8 and Firefox 3.5 and on and on. After a certain point, no commercial software will be worth the hundreds of dollars differential; the user experiences will be too close to call. There will be a natural shift away from Windows lock-in and we'll be buying our $100 laptops running Ubuntu or Suse or Fedora while Microsoft scrambles to be the next Google. Should be an interesting next five years or so.
Even better--download and burn a live CD of Knoppix or similar single disk Linux OS, boot to it, and use the hard disk for data storage only. You will never look back.
Linux has a great firewall built in, separate accounts to keep system files safe, and tons of free software on board. In this day and age, you can boot up a modern distro and have basically everything you need--browser, word processor, spreadsheet, email client, games, music, video.
And there are no viruses in the Linux world (that one hears about, at least).
Dump your dangerous OS and you will never look back.
Much more likely a scenario is that the body's immune system will want to attack the virus. Even though we know that it's going after nasty cancer cells and leaving good cells alone, the body doesn't know that and so anti-viral defense mechanisms will kick in.
Cancer cells survive and replicate because they look like ordinary somatic cells to the immune system, except that their self-limiting replication mechanism is broken and they are dividing like mad. The body just keeps on nourishing them, thinking nothing is wrong.
The body, on the other hand, almost always knows a virus is out of place. Probably the trick will be to suppress the immune system through moderate doses of cytoxin or other chemotherapy drugs just long enough to let the virus kill the cancer, and (one hopes) not long enough to allow too many other opportunistic infections to develop.
If they could mount this thing on a trailer and deploy it rapidly to trouble spots around the globe, they could really blow away mischief makers. Imagine for example unleashing a few mini-tornatos on a terrorist training camp or on advancing enemy soldiers.
The U.S. Army could also position them offshore of an annoying country like Venezuela, issue an ultimatum that their leader submit to fair elections, and then just release hundreds of these things onto their coastline. The havoc wreaked will be tremendously out of proportion to the cost of the construction and deployment, and at no danger to our personnel.
It could also be used to clean up an area after a dust storm; the vortex would literally whisk away the particles.
There are probably a lot of other uses but right now I'm only thinking of military ones.
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Clearly you lost your job when Clinton's term ended
Oh, I think we can blame Clinton for a lot of things that happened on his watch, such as a couple of Al Qaeda attacks and 90% of the preparations for 9/11. We can blame him for getting up there on national TV and lying through his teeth about the Monica Lewinsky affair, then turning around and confessing after she testified to the special prosecutor. We can perhaps not blame Clinton for the dot com market crash the way we would not blame Calvin Coolidge for the Crash of 1929.
Clinton basically partied for 8 years while Rome burned. I think he will go down in history as one of the more mediocre presidents, even though he was generally popular up until the scandal. Nixon accomplished more in his 5 years in office than Clinton did in 8, despite his dismal popularity ratings. GW Bush is another president who doesn't care about popularity polls, and he has some major accomplishments as well, the India rapprochement being only the latest. In the long term Bush will go down in history as a great promoter of democracy in the world, having brought it to two key countries, initiating a trend toward democracy across the entire region. I don't recall that your former employer did anything remotely like that; he did shake hands with lots of dictators and terrorists, however.
As for the appointing of liberal and anti-business judges, perhaps I called it wrong on Judge Spencer but that doesn't alter the general trend. As for your "facts" about debt, the real fact is that the dot com crash of 2001 swung the U.S. into debt, not anything that Bush did. His tax cuts amounted to a few hundred billion dollars that helped bring about a strong economic recovery. Once again, a Republican takes the blame for Democratic excesses. Sheep, indeed!
The desktop is not going away any time soon. These amazing handheld all purpose gizmos are not about to replace the desktop until certain technologies are enhanced big time:
- batteries. You can run a heavy, hot laptop for about 2-3 hours before needing a lengthy recharge. You can run a handheld PDA for roughly the same amount of time; current drain scales up proportionately. You are going to need a couple of orders of magnitude better power sources to replace a desktop; 12 hours of continuous use per day for several days, I would guess.
- data input. The desktop/laptop has this amazing invention, the full size keyboard, that lets us enter tons of information more quickly and accurately than any other method. Having used a Palm handheld and mobile phone for years I can safely conclude that the keyboard is in no danger of being replaced. Speech recognition still sucks and that's the one possible alternative.
- display. Desktops have awesome displays; it's not uncommon to have 19" or 24" displays these days, nice crisp LCD screens. Nothing compares to this. Teeny little 3" screens are not going to replace these any time soon.
- storage. Desktops start at 40G of permanent storage and go up to terabytes. Nothing else can compare. What's more, our storage needs are growing, not shrinking. We're not going to switch to Pocket PC/Phone/consoles that have maybe a 10G memory card or a 30G hard disk and give up our 250 giggers.
- connectivity. A desktop is on DSL or Cable or T1 or dial-up and is a reliable way to access the internet. Handheld devices have to be in range of a wireless hub or in network for cellular connections. The widely available connectivity for broadband handheld devices simply doesn't exist yet. My previous apartment was in some kind of Verizon dead zone, in a big suburb next to Boston so it would have been impossible to have handheld broadband or even handheld slow dialup. THere's a tremendous amount of infrastructure to be built, just to displace an existing infrastructure that works pretty well.
As storage is further miniaturized and as voice input and battery technology improve, we will doubtless see a displacement of casual desktop/laptop use with handhelds, such as Blackberry-style email reading and Palm/PPC-style organizer functions, but for heavy lifting, the desktop will remain. When 8 megapixel cameras are the norm and everyone's using digital video cameras with their huge demand for disk space, we're going to want those capacious, fast desktops even more.
Phones will probably get a little smarter but convergence tools such as the Treo can only do so much. People still want phones to act like phones. It's going to take a lot of tech to move us to the next level.
In my opinion, it's simply that Judge Spencer didn't like RIM for whatever reason and kept ordering them to settle. I am surprised that RIM didn't move to have him recused from the case for prejudicial statements. Spencer clearly had decided RIM was guilty despite past and present USPTO rulings and didn't want to admit he was wrong. Another anti-business Clinton appointee throwing his weight around, it looks like.
These SEC and New York AG investigation orgies are more about politics than about protecting the public from evil corporate behavior. For example, in the case of Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, it's about how to use his job as a springboard to the governorship. He talks a tough line about long time insurance industry practices that are of questionable harm, caused the resignation of AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, and is continuing to go after this company as though it's the incarnation of evil. He waxes eloquent about how these companies hurt the common consumer, when in fact he has little grounds for such a claim. But it plays well on network news.
The SEC can pretty much go after anyone they feel like. Any large company is bound to have a few irregularities in their procedures. Whether this merits the kind of microscopic scrutiny that the SEC has been utilizing in recent years is another question. IBM is a company with a history of being completely cooperative with the feds when it comes to monopolistic practices. Intel and Cisco are similar. They announce full cooperation, make their procedures transparent, and the feds either go away or slap them on the wrist with a fine of a few million for some technicality.
We in the U.S. are our own worst enemies; while our corporations labor under a host of rules and regulations that are often contradictory and sometimes counter-productive, companies in places like China are charging full steam ahead, eating our lunch. It riles me to read about yet another strike for "fair pay and working conditions" or another city trying to levy new taxes on its local industries even as overseas firms proceed to take over nearly every manufacturing sector but military related.
I think the United States should take one state and declare it a Special Economic Zone where manufacturing can be conducted tax free and with only basic checks and controls. Keep the "watchdog" agencies like the SEC off their backs and just let them compete. We will probably be surprised at the competition and productivity that will result.
All true, but those five words "I should have backed up" really say it all. No one should trust their web hosting provider to back things up, maintain all equipment in perfect condition, avoid all subpoenas, and stay in business forever. One or more of these things is bound to happen.
;)
A prior webhosting company I had used for years (and recommended to several others) experienced a hard disk failure which took down my email and web sites for about 10 days during which time they were attempting to "recover data from the disk". They ignored my peevish comments as to why weren't they using disk arrays or similar redundant systems. Their backups were quite incomplete as well. I switched providers and have been basically satisfied ever since.
The take-home lesson is to run daily backups; there can never be too much redundancy unless you have no data of any value whatsoever. For $9.95/month one can't expect too much of a hosting service. For $500/month one still can't trust them to avoid making mistakes or caving in to litigation threats and other cowardly tactics. A simple shell script and ssh/scp commands will work wonders
Keep in mind that when Steve Jobs left Apple the first time, he went off and founded Next Computers, which came out with a remarkable Unix-based GUI. He captured the public's imagination with the Next cube but made a couple of strategic errors such as initially restricting the product to the educational market. A reporter asked him how an ordinary person could acquire a Next cube and Jobs famously replied, "Enroll."
Jobs also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, the premier animation film company that has created such blockbusters as Toy Story and The Incredibles.
Then when Jobs returned to Apple, taking over from a string of lackluster bean counter executives, he inspired the company to produce some world class products such as the iPod and the iMac. The iPod is the must have product of 2005, and the Mac laptops are at the top of their class.
I'd say Steve Jobs is more than just a showman, though clearly he loves the limelight. Microsoft is the white bread, corporate standby that does the heavy lifting on corporate and consumer desktops but is otherwise an uninspired market follower, not a market leader.
That's OK, here's an idea you can take and run with. Sell 5 second sound bites to advertisers, so that when you bring up your web page you will hear this cacophony of voices clamoring for your money.
I mean, if that guy can make hundreds of thousands of $'s with his idea, then this ought to work too.
Good luck!
This is hardly news; for years, headphones have been known to cause hearing loss, and ear buds are merely the extreme expression of this kind of problem. Recently in September 2005 there was a flurry of articles about this issue, according to a quick google search.
There's evidence of a general decline in hearing sensitivity in movie theatres and airplanes. The intensity of airplane overhead speaker volume has recently become almost painful to my ears, and it seems to be consistent across different airlines. Movie theatres as well have cranked up the volume. I find myself covering my ears during the previews, which tend to have intense, compressed action with a lot of music and narrative to pump up the adrenaline. Generally when the main feature begins the sound volume settles down a bit but it can still be worrisomely loud.
I am worried that we in the U.S. are becoming a nation of half-deaf electronic addicts, cranking our headsets and PA systems ever louder to compensate, perhaps unknowingly, for our diminishing sensitivity to sound.
I only hope that ENT doctors and researchers continue to find ways to repair the ear's mechanisms and perhaps develop nerve repair techniques or we're gonna have a huge population of elderly deaf people 50 years from now (with commensurate increase in volume of PA systems etc.).
Declaring that one line of research is promising while another line is unproductive, even though no one completely understands either type of stem cell and its biological pathways just yet, is typical non-scientific pontificating by people with an axe to grind.
The fact is that scientists suspect that great things will come of ESC research. Who knows, a better understanding of ESCs may help scientists to learn how to coax pluripotent adult stem cells into becoming totipotent (like embryonic cells).
There's a lot of excitement right now in the scientific community about the potentialities of stem cell research and while some of it may turn out to be dead ends, it's dangerous and ignorant to predict and declare in advance which avenues those will be.
I want there to be a cure for paralysis and other debilitating conditions. I work with MS patients and have witnessed firsthand a terrible disease which may benefit from stem cell research. There is already some laboratory evidence that stem cells repair myelin sheaths in rats with an MS-like condition.
How can we deny people a cure for these conditions based on some religious sect's reservations? It's lunacy, and hypocracy, and will ultimately fail because even if we (the U.S.) choose not to support such research, others around the world with a clearer vision and more common sense certainly will, and we'll all be going abroad to get our paralysis and Alzheimer's and MS and Parkinson's cures.
As for volunteering for stem cell treatments--I'm planning to put into my living will that if I succumb to Alzheimer's or quadraplegia or similar debilitation, sign me up for whatever experiments might hold a prayer of helping me or at least yielding data that will help others.
This study really is just "proving" the obvious.
Talking heads? I would hope for a lot more than that, in an age of video camera phones and video digital cameras heading south of $100. People can now video all sorts of newsworthy and not-so-newsworthy events and post them on their blogs. That's actually a rather exciting development.
I have found some of these audio "podcasts" to be utterly boring and tedious to wade through; unlike with text, it's rather difficult to scan down to the end to see if there's an interesting point in there somewhere, and I have yet to find an audio player that accelerates the sound on the fly (why can't Real and WMP do these simple tasks yet?). Listening to some guy stuttering and umming and ah-ing, no thanks; would rather read a well-written piece than waste my time like that.
But video will be more fun and informative because a video is worth a thousand words, and the patter becomes almost irrelevant. Maybe I'm different, but I find video on the web still to be fresh and exciting while more static presentations are getting to be old hat. Of course there's the inevitable commercials you have to sit through to get to the substance of a video in many cases, and once again the video player won't let you fast forward but I suppose it's a small price for an essentially free service.
Bring on the video podcasts!
He asked for volume product availability that a company like Dell can provide but mom and pop stores and DIY solutions can't begin to address.
Your answer is typical of solo techies who post on Slashdot, college students or working programmers or technosavvy others who extrapolate their personal, home computing experience to the entire world.
Someone who needs to get 50, or 500, or 5000 standardized desktops and be able to image the hard disks as they require is going to have to negotiate a sales deal with a reasonably large and stable company like Dell. It's not reasonable to expect them to try to save $50/machine on the Windows "tax" by going to the corner computer store or even a slightly larger local systems integrator who may or may not be around in a couple of years when the desktops need servicing or replacement.
It's also not reasonable to expect non-technical end users out there in the mass consumer market to go to the corner store, have a machine put together to their specifications, and then run the Fedora or Ubuntu setup DVD. That's simply not going to happen, much less ask them to "buy the parts, screw them together", etc.
In reality, Microsoft has a lock on both the mass market and the business market, leaving only the fringe technosavvy customers and Mac lovers to use the alternatives. MS is using their power as any other business would, locking the manufacturers into a Windows-only offering that ignorant customers go along with.
But just wait. As Linux continues to improve, it will become a bargaining chip for manufacturers to force down the Windows tax if not eliminate it entirely. It's not quite yet time for Dell and Gateway and HP to tell Microsoft they're switching to 50% Linux, but that day may not be far in the future.
Bacteria are already used to synthesize organic materials by reprogramming their DNA. For example, some antivirals and antibiotics are manufactured this way; the desired pattern is injected into the bacteria's genome and it will then produce that pattern. Venter's project is really just an extension of that approach.
I have doubts as to the likelihood of success using present science; in twenty years, perhaps it will be possible, but today it's really casting about in the dark. Even something as elemental as a bacteria is an incredibly complex thing, with a sophisticated genome and complex organelles working in biochemical harmony to reproduce, to "mate" by conjoining with other bacteria, and to adapt and thrive in a very wide variety of conditions.
Bacteria have been around for billions of years and, as Stephen Jay Gould put it, we are living in the Age of Bacteria. In a few short years it seems unlikely that even brilliant scientists can recreate these things. Modify some, yes, but completely create from scratch something that is going to be viable--well, that's going to be interesting to see.
That said, if they can pull it off the possibilities of its use, for good or evil, are endless. They can be encoded to synthesize all sorts of compounds, eat nasty pollutants, generate fossil fuels, attack disease microbes, or be diseases themselves. Luckily, the human body has a pretty comprehensive immune system that will adapt to just about anything except retroviruses like AIDS that reprogram the immune system itself.
All the America-bashers and Bush-bashers come out of the closet yet again to rant about how "America is not free" and similar slogans, without addressing the actual topic.
Does no one on the Slashdot forum wish to discuss the national security issues which are behind the wiretapping, not to mention that other "scandal" regarding testing for radioactivity around Moslem sites?
I do not favor giving up any of my rights unless there is a clear benefit and a timetable for restoring those rights. That's why I support the temporary extension of the Patriot Act rather than the permanent extension advocated by the Bush administration.
Suppose someone out there is trying to smuggle a Soviet-era warhead into a major U.S. city. This scenario is probably realistic, given that the Russians have not accounted for all of their warheads and other nuclear material, not to mention the fanaticism and determination of the Muslim extremists. This is not a theoretical threat but a real one; if they *could* kill millions of people here, they *would*.
Given this scenario, is it really so terrible and wrong and evil for the NSA to be using wiretapping and internet-tapping to try to gather intelligence? That seems rather mild by comparison to the catastrophe described above. Would you prefer to wait politely until some container ship floats into New York Harbor and takes away three million lives? Not me; I would rather be prepared and knowledgeable (and alive).
That said, the major issue is that the U.S. intelligence community is not the world's best, and probably doesn't get the support it needs to do a first class job. Probably it can't, in such an open society. Israel's intelligence is probably the world's best and I have no idea how they do it, but if we get another warning about a 9/11-like attack from them I sure as hell hope we listen this time.
The Bush Administration has made its share of blunders and I would like to see them cooperating a little more with Congress and friendly governments; Bush and his team have a go-it-alone attitude which was satisfying in the dark days after 9/11/2001 but which just doesn't work in the long term.
Yes, anonymous coward, the U.S. is not a perfect country, but I doubt yours is either, wherever that may be. We have made mistakes, and no doubt we'll make plenty more. But we've also done great things and we're still groping and stumbling our way toward a better society and a more peaceful world.
Insightful. Eliot Spitzer's office has been going after soft targets, often painstakingly struggling to interpret particular corporate actions as "crimes".
If Spitzer were truly an outstanding AG, he'd be going after organized crime, which has to be costing the country a lot more than these vaguely unethical insurance company "accepted practices" and so-called price fixing.
There are thousands of instances of businesses having to pay protection/shakedown money, front organizations for drug dealers, petty mobsters laundering dirty money, and the impact of all this is much worse than any of the "crimes" that he's gone after so far.
I don't believe companies should get away with collusion and price fixing, but an AG of an important state like NY should be focussing on the real crime, not technicalities.
As for the music industry, it's all about greed. If they force Apple to raise prices, probably sales will drop, but that remains to be seen.
The U.S. patent system is seriously flawed. In my opinion, it's all these vague "business process" patents that have really screwed things up. They get hundreds of thousands of these applications per year clogging up the system, and the net result is that nothing gets done before at least three years, as the article points out.
Even worse is that the business process patents make it nearly impossible to implement anything without violating someone's patent. I looked into patenting an invention that had to do with a linux-powered answering machine and soon discovered that almost everything you can imagine has been patented. Some guy got a patent for "compressing a voice recording". So do I have to ignore his patent and let him sue me, or send him money for something that's a questionable "innovation" at best? Perhaps megacorporations can afford this hassle but not that many individuals, I would think.
The patent system was originally intended to encourage innovation by protecting people's rights to their inventions, and it has now been perverted into a thicket of pointless, indefensible rules that inventors must navigate to get a product out the door.
Probably the solution is to tighten up the definition of an invention and, as so many in this forum and elsewhere have pointed out, invalidate software patents and business process patents. Even Congress is supposedly getting wind of the problem, but I'm not holding my breath until it's solved.
Yes, you're quite right, but it doesn't work for Yahoo. I've confirmed this on the sourceforge.net discussion board. It has something to do with Yahoo's protocols. I still don't understand it because GAIM has my list of buddies, and it has the ability to not pop up a message, so why can't it do so? I guess it's just a customized feature that they don't feel like implementing at this time. Perhaps it's doable through a plugin.
Yahoo spim can't be blocked with Gaim 1.5 and earlier; every couple of days I find a message on my screen "Hi I'm Honey Bunny, check out my pix! Not there? Oh too bad, maybe later!" and this kind of crap. I don't want or need unsolicited instant messages but there appears to be no way to block them generically with GAIM even though the feature exists on Yahoo's client. I have to block each of these bots retroactively. Grr. I have about two Yahoo buddies and maybe I should just tell them to move to MSN or AOL.
Actually I think there will be several levels of user interface depending on the needs and abilities of the user. There will continue to be very basic, ATM-like interfaces for specific and focussed applications such as a touchscreen map kiosk for tourists. Keyboards aren't going away any time soon, either. But the really cool stuff will come out of games and military tech and will further revolutionize how we learn and communicate.
Helmets with surround sound and surround video will probably get popular as they help people to navigate increasingly complex online communities. You'll end up looking down a tunnel (someone else here mentioned "Descent") that you can navigate, "floating" along and occasionally detouring down side tunnels. The walls of the tunnel will consist of colorful 3D icons and words and lines and who knows what else. A gadget attached to your hand will allow you to wave at the things you're interested in, open doors, push buttons, etc. Perhaps the fancier gadgets will include tactile feedback. It will be very much a virtual world.
Phone calls made with your goggles on would be a simulation of face-to-face contact, with a 3-D representation of your conversation partner (or what they want you to see, at least). What people really look like will probably become a guarded secret, somewhat like your real name versus your handle.
I think the other big thing will be intelligent speech, a step beyond speech recognition. The hardware will soon be there for people to carry on useful conversations with machines, not just for the magic of transcribing faithfully but for the machine to understand and react to your words in a reasonable manner. Probably customer service departments will move further down that road, and I do hope they get past this intermediate phase of "I did not understand" to something that hears individual words and sleuths out your meaning more intelligently.
Eventually, the concept of user interface will be more like a lifestyle decision--do I want to wear my computer goggles today, or just my earbuds? You'll carry a little box in your pocket and occasionally it will say, "Sir, you have a call from So-and-so. Shall I put him through or take a message?" There are some real opportunities here for people in the right fields, and probably a bunch of people will find their jobs drastically altered if not eliminated. Should be an interesting 20 years.
The news article is short on facts. So, what's this guy's motivation for uploading a movie to the internet? Did they even establish that he possesses the movie or a copy of it? Did he admit to such possession? What about his computer that was supposedly "cleaned"--what makes them think so, and how can they prove it? And, one might ask, how can they establish that this alleged uploading cost them $100,000.
There are a lot of unanswered questions here. This is typical of the big media companies now, just like the Mafia: shake down the little people and get the word out that you should toe the line and pay your protection money, or we'll get you.
I do agree that circumstantial evidence seems to suggest he's a bit more tech savvy than one might think, but on the other hand, a tech-savvy person can also get their network broken into or their password stolen. Basically, this company doesn't have a leg to stand on. Maybe that's why they're shaking him down for so much money, to make him feel he has no choice but to settle.
Agreed, this article is a little off the mark. Apple is a pioneer in this field and inevitable there are going to be some shifts as the industry adjusts itself. Certainly it makes more sense to sell some tunes for different prices, just as movies tend to sell for more at first and then end up in the discount bin when they're old hat.
I think by demonstrating that it's possible to be a profitable "middle man" in the online music business, Apple has in fact saved the tushies of the music companies by offering an alternative to napster-like music trading systems. This exemplary system can be emulated by the music companies, if they so wish and assuming they have the intellect and vision, or they can go through Apple or Real or whoever else jumps in (Microsoft, probably).
The iPod would not have succeeded if Apple had tied it strictly to their iTunes database and disallowed any other formats. The secret of success for any great product is its power to do one thing really well and flexibly, emphasis on the latter. They had to let people rip CDs to their iPods, and of course that will lead to trading and avoiding paying for tunes, but it also allowed the iPod to revolutionize the "walkman" generation's listening habits.
Business Week is a pretty astute publication but this is clearly a case of short term-ism getting in the way of seeing what a revolutionary product the iPod really is--and now they're doing it again with videos. Should be interesting to see where they go with this. I think iPod may eventually absorb the cell phone and handheld organizer and we'll see excellent high capacity, wifi/cell-enabled personal bliss bars in everyone's shirt pocket in a few years.
It's not surprising to me that Yahoo's hit count is so high. A lot of people probably have Yahoo! bookmarked as their home page from way back, just as lots of others have MSN or even Netscape.com. But the Yahoo brand is a household world, maybe about 70% as pervasive as Google. (I would argue that no one would browse to MSN if it weren't shoved in their face when they start up IE.) When people want to check the sports scores or headlines, Yahoo is a convenient portal to go to. The millions of Yahoo!Mail users can easily jump to the news and other sections. Yahoo!Shopping is a widely trusted framework for online shopping. Yahoo!Finance is a pretty well designed and customizable way to check one's stock listings. Yahoo just has a lot of stuff.
What they don't have is intelligent discussions on their comment boards. One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to click on a "discuss this story" link and interact with other readers, but the level of civility and intelligent analysis is really low, much worse than Slashdot (which is fair to middling these days). I guess it's a revealing slice of lower-to-middle America, though.
True, but still the article itself has a questionable thesis. He talks of OpenOffice as though it represents all open source software. In fact, there are thousands of open source programs which are used every day including at such companies as Microsoft. Or is no one at Microsoft using Perl, FTP or Emacs? That seems unlikely.
There is a tremendous and powerful set of server tools such as Apache web server, the aforementioned Perl, PHP, MySQL, and all the thousands of Unix/Linux command line programs that are used to run most of the world's servers. You would hardly expect Andrew Brown to complain of how limited and buggy Apache Web Server is and how much better Microsoft IIS is, not to mention Linux and MySQL and Perl/PHP--a laughable claim that would not be supported by the facts. This seems to sink his thesis; LAMP is the server to beat and has been a thorn in MS's side for years and are really your classic opensource, community-developed and supported applications.
I think it would be more fair to look at the bigger picture. Open source and public domain software pretty much dominates the back end, and on the front end Windows software rules. Yet, recent distributions of Linux are getting increasingly solid and easy to install and use. Recent versions of Firefox and OpenOffice and Gimp pretty much do everything any user will ever need, are solid and featureful and under constant development and improvement.
I think Brown is a bit impatient for the future to be here now. Is there room for improvement in the OSS model? Of course. Wait another year or two and (as he himself points out) version 3.1 of OOo will surely be fantastic, along with Linux kernel 2.8 and Firefox 3.5 and on and on. After a certain point, no commercial software will be worth the hundreds of dollars differential; the user experiences will be too close to call. There will be a natural shift away from Windows lock-in and we'll be buying our $100 laptops running Ubuntu or Suse or Fedora while Microsoft scrambles to be the next Google. Should be an interesting next five years or so.
Even better--download and burn a live CD of Knoppix or similar single disk Linux OS, boot to it, and use the hard disk for data storage only. You will never look back.
Linux has a great firewall built in, separate accounts to keep system files safe, and tons of free software on board. In this day and age, you can boot up a modern distro and have basically everything you need--browser, word processor, spreadsheet, email client, games, music, video.
And there are no viruses in the Linux world (that one hears about, at least).
Dump your dangerous OS and you will never look back.
Much more likely a scenario is that the body's immune system will want to attack the virus. Even though we know that it's going after nasty cancer cells and leaving good cells alone, the body doesn't know that and so anti-viral defense mechanisms will kick in.
Cancer cells survive and replicate because they look like ordinary somatic cells to the immune system, except that their self-limiting replication mechanism is broken and they are dividing like mad. The body just keeps on nourishing them, thinking nothing is wrong.
The body, on the other hand, almost always knows a virus is out of place. Probably the trick will be to suppress the immune system through moderate doses of cytoxin or other chemotherapy drugs just long enough to let the virus kill the cancer, and (one hopes) not long enough to allow too many other opportunistic infections to develop.
If they could mount this thing on a trailer and deploy it rapidly to trouble spots around the globe, they could really blow away mischief makers. Imagine for example unleashing a few mini-tornatos on a terrorist training camp or on advancing enemy soldiers.
The U.S. Army could also position them offshore of an annoying country like Venezuela, issue an ultimatum that their leader submit to fair elections, and then just release hundreds of these things onto their coastline. The havoc wreaked will be tremendously out of proportion to the cost of the construction and deployment, and at no danger to our personnel.
It could also be used to clean up an area after a dust storm; the vortex would literally whisk away the particles.
There are probably a lot of other uses but right now I'm only thinking of military ones.