Jeez, I finally get it! And here I thought the whole strategy of destroying a country through decades of economic sanctions based on political ideology two generations out of date was one of the great disasters of US foreign policy. But it's actually a clever strategy to turn a whole nation into a think tank and foster innovation the old fashioned way: by creating necessity! It's so simple!
It's been clear for many years that part of M$'s strategy has been to maintain a high overall cost of personal computing, and thereby ensure that they are getting a slice of a big pie. If the total cost of a computer falls - if the pie shrinks - their slice will shrink with it. Their strategy has therefore been to write software that requires more and more demanding hardware, not to offer enriched user experiences (as claimed) but rather as a rationalization for keeping costs up.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.
I think even the scantest review of history will show you to be wrong. Take Lindbergh, for example, crossing the Atlantic. That event took the world by storm in a way that hasn't been seen since the Apollo landings. There was a very real possibility that he wasn't going to make it, and he very nearly didn't. If it'd been an empty plane flying on autopilot, there would have been nothing like the interest or enthusiasm for crossing the Atlantic nonstop.
Also, the statement that, "Robots do a radically better job for a tiny fraction of the price" is half wrong. They do a decent job for a tiny fraction of the price. The geological data the Apollo astronauts obtained in just a few days on the moon, for example, outstrips what we've yet gotten after years of probing Mars.
Customers wanting to rip their DVD collections to their computers, download music they can play on any device, or incorporate copyrighted works into original creative works find that there is no straightforward, legal way to do these things.
These 'customers' only 'find' this out if they start making money by doing this illegal activity. As long as you make no money, there is really very little legal recourse that copyright holders have unless they go to the trouble of trying to demonstrate that you have caused them damages. That is pretty damn difficult to prove, despite the RIAA's army of litigators hard at work at it. So what happens is that while such activity may be technically illegal for everyone, the defacto situation in practice is that common people do what makes common sense, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Would it be nice if the legal technicalities matched up better with common sense? Sure. Does it really matter if they don't? For all practical purposes, nope, not really.
Privacy is a transitional concept that is only meaningful at our current state of technology. As technology progresses, privacy will continue to erode. Eventually, nanobots will be everywhere, including inside your own body scanning your thoughts - thoughts which by then will already be pugged directly into the Internet or whatever its future incarnation happens to be called.
Bottom line: enjoy your privacy while you have it. In 100-150 years, there will no such thing. There will also be no crime (without getting caught), no criminal trials, or even any lying without getting caught for ordinary people. The powers that control the infrastructure, whether governments or corporations or whatever, might be a different story - or they may simply be scofflaws, it's hard to say.
Your points are moot. Of the seven points of mine you addressed, six sailed right over your head. My original criticism stands because you don't gamble hundreds of millions of dollars on the weather; you show up prepared, rain or shine - or dust.
Here's an assigned exercise for you: make an excuse for the stupidity that allowed NASA to crash a Mars probe by forgetting to convert units between imperial and metric. Good luck. You're going to need it. Maybe when you're done with that you can get back to me about the fucking dusters.
Your post is highly confused: you are mistaking what companies are currently providing with what consumers want.
While there are differences in the bandwidth capacities of different lines, they are all grossly underutilized in the marketplace. Twisted copper pair lines can easily support 100MB/s when correctly implemented. So can powerlines. Japan just launched a satellite service that will provide 1GB/s. Local wi-fi can easily achieve 100MB/s as well.
As I said, consumers - including yourself as you outline in your post - increasingly want a single service provider to deliver high-speed, low-cost connectivity. This is not necessarily what the market is currently delivering, but that has no bearing on what people actually want.
I think you are dazed and confused about my comment, as you repeated much of what I said and implied: all telecom is just 0s and 1s, and consumers increasingly want a single service that bundles everything into a single digital communication package. One bill, plenty of bandwidth, and all standard service forms - phone, internet, tv, etc is covered. Whether you actually use a telephone handset or not to make your calls is up to you. The point is that it will be a single company providing you with connectivity.
Yahoo, Google, etc. are going into the telco business because the telcos are not doing their job.
Telecommunications, along with music, are probably the best current examples of industries whose decades-old business models are being mangled by digital technology. Just as it no longer matters by what means you get the 0s and 1s that comprise your music, it no longer matters by what means you get the 0s and 1s that comprise your telecommunications - that's not just phone, but internet, TV, messaging, etc.
The older telcos are scrambling because owning twisted copper pair lines is no longer enough to ensure a profitable revenue stream - there are several other ways into people's homes now: co-axial, satellite, wireless, powerlines, and fiber.
What consumers are increasingly going to want is a comprehensive telecom service: phone+TV+internet. Some providers are already in this market, like Comcast. They will NOT need a webportal in order to be successful. But this does not mean that Google or Yahoo could NOT be successful if they decided to provide an alternative telecom service, say with the floating wi-fi blimps I keep reading about. The best we can hope for is that Google will enter the market, provide some genuine competition for Comcast et al and drive prices down and quality up.
the only rational people I know who have any lingering doubts about it are deeply religious and take the Bible quite literally.
Conflating terms and ideas seems to be a theme of this thread, and of the evolution debate in general, and so I'll take the opportunity to point out another instance highlighted by your comment: articulateness and rationality should not be conflated.
People who are deeply religious and who hold fundamental beliefs without any basis of evidence are not rational. And while it might be fair to say they are irrational in this one sphere of discourse, that is basically the same as saying they are functionally schizophrenic. It would be more accurate simply to say that people can be articulate without being rational. Just because a person is intelligent enough to coherently express their thoughts, as your deeply religious friends no doubt are, that says nothing about the quality or rationality of those thoughts. It is quite possible to thoroughly and eloquently articulate extremely poor, utterly irrational ideas - just ask Hitler or Bin Laden.
With rationality, you can't just talk the talk. You really must walk the walk too.
But, as you're a slashdot poster, you, of course, know more about designing for the mixed environments of Earth's gravity and atmosphere, storing the Rovers until they move to Florida, transporting the Rovers to Florida, launch phase, cruise phase, entry phase, descent phase, landing phase, deployment phase, rolloff phase and the Martian surface environment, than the thousands of people who had a hand in designing, building, testing, launching and operating the Rovers.
Oh that's right, there's never been an egregious oversight or moronic mistake made by NASA scientists - certainly not those working on Mars missions. They would never do something as stupid as, say, crash a $500 million probe by forgetting to convert imperial units to metric...
Spare me your silly tirade. If NASA is dumb enough to bork their missions by failing to convert units, they're plenty stupid enough to allow dust on solar panels to kill their missions because they have no way to clean them off. What good is an extra instrument if none of them work for lack of power? NASA has so far been lucky with these probes. There could have been a dust storm the day after they landed and that would have been it, game over. Then you'd be singing my tune. Here's a quick planning tip that applies not just on Mars but here on Earth too: when there's a billion dollars on the line, you don't gamble on the fucking weather.
Huh? Even if you can produce hydrogen efficiently, you're still left with two other large problems: 1) where do you get the energy to produce it? And 2) how do you utilize it?
For the first question, presumably the energy comes out of your wall socket. That's great, since that can include green sources such as wind and solar. No problem there unless... you're not at home.
For the second problem, well, now you're bubbling out all this hydrogen gas from water. How, exactly, are you going to convert that into a usable form? It doesn't do any good as a gas, unless you're in the 1920s airship business. So you're going to have a compressor or cryogenic liquifier system in your home that then transfers liquid hydrogen to your car? Well, maybe. And then there's the whole matter of getting cars to run on hydrogen. I'm not saying these are insurmountable problems. I'm just saying you've still got 90% of your problems ahead of you.
Yeah, yeah, mod me troll, whatever. Sorry to tread on everyone's precious pocket-protector sympatico over NASA's egregious oversight not to put fucking dusters on their billion-dollar-probes' solar panels. But I'm afraid I'm just not in the business of making excuses for stupidity. We had a goddamn car driving around on the moon forty years ago when the world's most powerful supercomputer had no more muscle than your cellphone. And fucking dusters are an insurmountable space engineering problem?
And as for Antarctica posing formidable problems for equipment, does anyone here honestly think that Burt Rutan or the engineers at any major oil company couldn't have dusters designed and built within a year that would withstand conditions there just fine? I didn't think so.
Yeah, yeah, mod me troll, whatever. Sorry to tread on everyone's precious pocket-protector sympatico over NASA's egregious oversight not to put fucking dusters on their billion-dollar-probes' solar panels. But I'm afraid I'm just not in the business of making excuses for stupidity. We had a goddamn car driving around on the moon forty years ago when the world's most powerful supercomputer had no more muscle than your cellphone. And fucking dusters are an insurmountable space engineering problem?
And as for Antarctica posing formidable problems for equipment, does anyone here honestly think that Burt Rutan or the engineers at any major oil company couldn't have dusters designed and built within a year that would withstand conditions there just fine? I didn't think so.
You're vastly overcomplicating something that is really quite simple. This is because Mars is not space. There are environments on Earth that are very much like Mars, with the exception of higher atmospheric pressure and the possibility of water precipitation. Building a duster that would work in Antarctica or the dusty Siberian tundra is trivial compared to the real challenges of spaceflight. It's a DUSTER. It. Just. Isn't. That. Complicated.
The optimum design would be nothing like a conventional car windshield wiper. Think closer to a free-spinning ostrich-feather duster driven by a magnetic actuator that is automatically pulled clear of the panels by gravity. That's one moving part, gravity doing half your work for you, and since it doesn't rain on Mars there would be a chance of breaking within the first ten years of continuous use of close to zero. Total added weight = less than 1 lb per panel. Seems like a fair trade to ensure the rover doesn't drop dead from a bit of dust. And that's just one solution off the top of my head.
There are parts of the rovers that are genuinely rocket science. Solar panel dust-removers are not among them.The only valid objection to having panel wipers on the rovers is that their original expected lifetime was only 90 days.
Free is the wrong word. The word you (and this author) are looking for is "cheap". That's it. It's not a new even a new application of an existing idea, let alone a genuinely new idea. Stuff gets cheap as technology progresses, and past a certain point, things are so cheap companies can afford to incorporate give-aways - whether their own stuff or someone else's - into their advertising. That's the entirety of this idea. The rest is fluff that reduces right back to the simple concept of 'cheap'.
Nothing is ever really free. Even if something doesn't cost you anything, it always costs somebody something. Bill Gates could give away Windows 'free' to everyone for a year. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be costs associated with doing so: even if users downloaded it as freeware it would still cost someone money to host and pipe the data, if not Bill on his own servers then somone else - including end users with their comcast connections.
The only thing that is really free in life is air.
AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs.
Can someone explain to the newbs out here like me why, exactly, it has to be individual programs that are coded to take advantage of multithreading and parallel processing instead of the OS or some background application (like Intel's "Application Accelerator")?
Justice was served, and you got the shysters to pony up 11 times what they would have paid if they'd just purchased the photos in the first place.
Bollocks. Where's the disincentive here? This damages award is absolutely useless. Does anyone think this corporation hasn't stolen 12 other pictures from other photographers and thereby still made the theft worthwhile?
I don't know how large this corporation is, but the damages should be a multiplier in the hundreds or thousands if justice is really to be served. History shows us conclusively that the only way to get corporations to behave decently is for them to be absolutely terrified of breaking the law. That's the whole point of gazillion-dollar lawsuits.
How much of these applications run client-side? The thought of using a sluggish word-processor turns my stomach - and not the typing, but the menu interaction and so on. It reminds me of my recent cell phones. New and flashy and fully-featured as they are, it drives me out of my gourd that there is a 1/4-second delay when pressing every button. I can't stand that. I have an ancient Nokia - monochrome amber and all - and it responds instantly navigating through the address book, settings, or texting. If these online applications are anything like using a newer cell phone, count me out.
Here's another little hint: start making ALL websites accountable for their content. We do need better oversite of the DNS sysem anyway. So then if you're in violation? BAM, your site gets pulled from DNS. Yahoo et al will fall in line instantly, as will anyone else who is serious about keeping their site up. All the tens of millions of junk sites out there pushing malware and other garbage will just start getting shut off. If they want to spend the time money creating new sites with new links every day, fine - but it'll make the whole spam/malware livelihood a hell of a lot less viable.
Here's an analogy: you open up a store and sell whatever you like in it. Then it turns out some of the stuff you're selling - guns, drugs, fake medicine, fake brand-name clothes, whatever - is not lawful. So you either pull that crap from your store or you get shut down. QED. And of course this is all orders of magnitude easier for websites. Hell, a crawler system looking for malware you do the monitoring and enforcement automatically. This solution should have been implemented years ago.
1. Self replicating molecules. I'm not sure how precise the conditions for getting life started are, but it probably isn't something we would see very often.
Probably? How do you know, exactly? It may be that in the presence of liquid water and organic molecules, self-replicators are inevitable given even realtively modest amounts of time (thousands or millions of years). A recent article in Discover magazine points to the possibility of life arising within 'warm' water ice as well. You could just as easily, and 'probably' more correctly, claim that life is probably inevitable under anything near Earthlike conditions.
2. Conditions remaining stable for those molecules for a very long time.
Evidence from the celestial bodies in our own solar system suggests that after initial formation and bombardment by early solar system debris, conditions are relatively stable for extremely long periods of time - hundreds of millions to billions of years - virtually without exception.
3. Symbiotic relationships developing between organisms. (requirement for multi-cellular life)
Everything we know about biology suggests that this is completely inevitable, unless you mean symbiosis in its strictest sense. In the broad sense I suspect you mean - ecological interdependence - virtually all organisms are dependent upon other organisms either directly or indirectly.
4. The creativity mutation. (for lack of a better term.)
While this may indeed be rare, it is instructive to observe that many mammals exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence. Were we to disappear tomorrow, another language-based tool-using and ultimately technological civilization would almost certainly evolve from other primates (gorillas, chimps or orangs). Were other primates to disappear, monkeys would almost certainly evolve to fill those niches. And so the regression continues backward through to our most primitive mammalian ancestors. Suddenly we seem almost... inevitable.
You were going great until the part where you began to plead for developers to leave Linux out of the 'One-Click, Just Works' loop so you could hard-hack the code yourself. That's not the only solution to the problem of intrusive, bloated software that functions only as thinly-veiled malware whose real purpose is advertising through brand reinforcement.
The solution is simple: viable alternatives. The granddaddy of all examples is Google. What do people want out of a search engine? Here's a hint: they don't want a crappy search service that is actually just a vehicle for delivering banner-ads (Yahoo, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, AOL, and all the others that have come and gone over the years). No, they want a good, clean search service. Google delivered. And guess what? After just 8 years they're a fucking $150 billion company.
So what is the solution on Linux? Stuff that just works: functionality without the bloated, brand-filled, ad-filled crapware. The for-profit companies like Google that adhere to this modus operandi will continue decimate their competition, as will the providers of freeware and shareware who do likewise.
Ubuntu in particular is off to a pretty good start by managing updates and software installation primarily through a utility (synaptic et al) instead of letting apps of any kind, crapware or otherwise, install themselves willy nilly. Combine strict enforcement of this installation management with a filtering service ("You're about to install the Spam-Blocker Toolbar. You really don't need to. It'll slow down your system and provide almost no useful functionality. If you really do need the functionality, here are a list of better, ad-free alternatives that provide similar services:..." and you've be a long way toward helping Grandma keep her system clean.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, I finally get it! And here I thought the whole strategy of destroying a country through decades of economic sanctions based on political ideology two generations out of date was one of the great disasters of US foreign policy. But it's actually a clever strategy to turn a whole nation into a think tank and foster innovation the old fashioned way: by creating necessity! It's so simple!
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Also, the statement that, "Robots do a radically better job for a tiny fraction of the price" is half wrong. They do a decent job for a tiny fraction of the price. The geological data the Apollo astronauts obtained in just a few days on the moon, for example, outstrips what we've yet gotten after years of probing Mars.
These 'customers' only 'find' this out if they start making money by doing this illegal activity. As long as you make no money, there is really very little legal recourse that copyright holders have unless they go to the trouble of trying to demonstrate that you have caused them damages. That is pretty damn difficult to prove, despite the RIAA's army of litigators hard at work at it. So what happens is that while such activity may be technically illegal for everyone, the defacto situation in practice is that common people do what makes common sense, and that's pretty much all there is to it. Would it be nice if the legal technicalities matched up better with common sense? Sure. Does it really matter if they don't? For all practical purposes, nope, not really.
Bottom line: enjoy your privacy while you have it. In 100-150 years, there will no such thing. There will also be no crime (without getting caught), no criminal trials, or even any lying without getting caught for ordinary people. The powers that control the infrastructure, whether governments or corporations or whatever, might be a different story - or they may simply be scofflaws, it's hard to say.
Here's an assigned exercise for you: make an excuse for the stupidity that allowed NASA to crash a Mars probe by forgetting to convert units between imperial and metric. Good luck. You're going to need it. Maybe when you're done with that you can get back to me about the fucking dusters.
I only comment on what is relevant. You made no relevant points, and therefore got the reply you deserved.
While there are differences in the bandwidth capacities of different lines, they are all grossly underutilized in the marketplace. Twisted copper pair lines can easily support 100MB/s when correctly implemented. So can powerlines. Japan just launched a satellite service that will provide 1GB/s. Local wi-fi can easily achieve 100MB/s as well.
As I said, consumers - including yourself as you outline in your post - increasingly want a single service provider to deliver high-speed, low-cost connectivity. This is not necessarily what the market is currently delivering, but that has no bearing on what people actually want.
You are confusing supply with demand.
I think you are dazed and confused about my comment, as you repeated much of what I said and implied: all telecom is just 0s and 1s, and consumers increasingly want a single service that bundles everything into a single digital communication package. One bill, plenty of bandwidth, and all standard service forms - phone, internet, tv, etc is covered. Whether you actually use a telephone handset or not to make your calls is up to you. The point is that it will be a single company providing you with connectivity.
Telecommunications, along with music, are probably the best current examples of industries whose decades-old business models are being mangled by digital technology. Just as it no longer matters by what means you get the 0s and 1s that comprise your music, it no longer matters by what means you get the 0s and 1s that comprise your telecommunications - that's not just phone, but internet, TV, messaging, etc.
The older telcos are scrambling because owning twisted copper pair lines is no longer enough to ensure a profitable revenue stream - there are several other ways into people's homes now: co-axial, satellite, wireless, powerlines, and fiber.
What consumers are increasingly going to want is a comprehensive telecom service: phone+TV+internet. Some providers are already in this market, like Comcast. They will NOT need a webportal in order to be successful. But this does not mean that Google or Yahoo could NOT be successful if they decided to provide an alternative telecom service, say with the floating wi-fi blimps I keep reading about. The best we can hope for is that Google will enter the market, provide some genuine competition for Comcast et al and drive prices down and quality up.
Conflating terms and ideas seems to be a theme of this thread, and of the evolution debate in general, and so I'll take the opportunity to point out another instance highlighted by your comment: articulateness and rationality should not be conflated.
People who are deeply religious and who hold fundamental beliefs without any basis of evidence are not rational. And while it might be fair to say they are irrational in this one sphere of discourse, that is basically the same as saying they are functionally schizophrenic. It would be more accurate simply to say that people can be articulate without being rational. Just because a person is intelligent enough to coherently express their thoughts, as your deeply religious friends no doubt are, that says nothing about the quality or rationality of those thoughts. It is quite possible to thoroughly and eloquently articulate extremely poor, utterly irrational ideas - just ask Hitler or Bin Laden.
With rationality, you can't just talk the talk. You really must walk the walk too.
Oh that's right, there's never been an egregious oversight or moronic mistake made by NASA scientists - certainly not those working on Mars missions. They would never do something as stupid as, say, crash a $500 million probe by forgetting to convert imperial units to metric...
Spare me your silly tirade. If NASA is dumb enough to bork their missions by failing to convert units, they're plenty stupid enough to allow dust on solar panels to kill their missions because they have no way to clean them off. What good is an extra instrument if none of them work for lack of power? NASA has so far been lucky with these probes. There could have been a dust storm the day after they landed and that would have been it, game over. Then you'd be singing my tune. Here's a quick planning tip that applies not just on Mars but here on Earth too: when there's a billion dollars on the line, you don't gamble on the fucking weather.
Huh? Even if you can produce hydrogen efficiently, you're still left with two other large problems: 1) where do you get the energy to produce it? And 2) how do you utilize it?
For the first question, presumably the energy comes out of your wall socket. That's great, since that can include green sources such as wind and solar. No problem there unless ... you're not at home.
For the second problem, well, now you're bubbling out all this hydrogen gas from water. How, exactly, are you going to convert that into a usable form? It doesn't do any good as a gas, unless you're in the 1920s airship business. So you're going to have a compressor or cryogenic liquifier system in your home that then transfers liquid hydrogen to your car? Well, maybe. And then there's the whole matter of getting cars to run on hydrogen. I'm not saying these are insurmountable problems. I'm just saying you've still got 90% of your problems ahead of you.
And as for Antarctica posing formidable problems for equipment, does anyone here honestly think that Burt Rutan or the engineers at any major oil company couldn't have dusters designed and built within a year that would withstand conditions there just fine? I didn't think so.
And as for Antarctica posing formidable problems for equipment, does anyone here honestly think that Burt Rutan or the engineers at any major oil company couldn't have dusters designed and built within a year that would withstand conditions there just fine? I didn't think so.
Pathetic.
You're vastly overcomplicating something that is really quite simple. This is because Mars is not space. There are environments on Earth that are very much like Mars, with the exception of higher atmospheric pressure and the possibility of water precipitation. Building a duster that would work in Antarctica or the dusty Siberian tundra is trivial compared to the real challenges of spaceflight. It's a DUSTER. It. Just. Isn't. That. Complicated.
There are parts of the rovers that are genuinely rocket science. Solar panel dust-removers are not among them.The only valid objection to having panel wipers on the rovers is that their original expected lifetime was only 90 days.
Nothing is ever really free. Even if something doesn't cost you anything, it always costs somebody something. Bill Gates could give away Windows 'free' to everyone for a year. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be costs associated with doing so: even if users downloaded it as freeware it would still cost someone money to host and pipe the data, if not Bill on his own servers then somone else - including end users with their comcast connections.
The only thing that is really free in life is air.
Can someone explain to the newbs out here like me why, exactly, it has to be individual programs that are coded to take advantage of multithreading and parallel processing instead of the OS or some background application (like Intel's "Application Accelerator")?
Does that mean my patent for using a gift certificate while ordering products over the phone is no good? Damn...
Bollocks. Where's the disincentive here? This damages award is absolutely useless. Does anyone think this corporation hasn't stolen 12 other pictures from other photographers and thereby still made the theft worthwhile?
I don't know how large this corporation is, but the damages should be a multiplier in the hundreds or thousands if justice is really to be served. History shows us conclusively that the only way to get corporations to behave decently is for them to be absolutely terrified of breaking the law. That's the whole point of gazillion-dollar lawsuits.
How much of these applications run client-side? The thought of using a sluggish word-processor turns my stomach - and not the typing, but the menu interaction and so on. It reminds me of my recent cell phones. New and flashy and fully-featured as they are, it drives me out of my gourd that there is a 1/4-second delay when pressing every button. I can't stand that. I have an ancient Nokia - monochrome amber and all - and it responds instantly navigating through the address book, settings, or texting. If these online applications are anything like using a newer cell phone, count me out.
Here's an analogy: you open up a store and sell whatever you like in it. Then it turns out some of the stuff you're selling - guns, drugs, fake medicine, fake brand-name clothes, whatever - is not lawful. So you either pull that crap from your store or you get shut down. QED. And of course this is all orders of magnitude easier for websites. Hell, a crawler system looking for malware you do the monitoring and enforcement automatically. This solution should have been implemented years ago.
1. Self replicating molecules. I'm not sure how precise the conditions for getting life started are, but it probably isn't something we would see very often.
Probably? How do you know, exactly? It may be that in the presence of liquid water and organic molecules, self-replicators are inevitable given even realtively modest amounts of time (thousands or millions of years). A recent article in Discover magazine points to the possibility of life arising within 'warm' water ice as well. You could just as easily, and 'probably' more correctly, claim that life is probably inevitable under anything near Earthlike conditions.
2. Conditions remaining stable for those molecules for a very long time.
Evidence from the celestial bodies in our own solar system suggests that after initial formation and bombardment by early solar system debris, conditions are relatively stable for extremely long periods of time - hundreds of millions to billions of years - virtually without exception.
3. Symbiotic relationships developing between organisms. (requirement for multi-cellular life)
Everything we know about biology suggests that this is completely inevitable, unless you mean symbiosis in its strictest sense. In the broad sense I suspect you mean - ecological interdependence - virtually all organisms are dependent upon other organisms either directly or indirectly.
4. The creativity mutation. (for lack of a better term.)
While this may indeed be rare, it is instructive to observe that many mammals exhibit a remarkable degree of intelligence. Were we to disappear tomorrow, another language-based tool-using and ultimately technological civilization would almost certainly evolve from other primates (gorillas, chimps or orangs). Were other primates to disappear, monkeys would almost certainly evolve to fill those niches. And so the regression continues backward through to our most primitive mammalian ancestors. Suddenly we seem almost ... inevitable.
The solution is simple: viable alternatives. The granddaddy of all examples is Google. What do people want out of a search engine? Here's a hint: they don't want a crappy search service that is actually just a vehicle for delivering banner-ads (Yahoo, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Excite, AOL, and all the others that have come and gone over the years). No, they want a good, clean search service. Google delivered. And guess what? After just 8 years they're a fucking $150 billion company.
So what is the solution on Linux? Stuff that just works: functionality without the bloated, brand-filled, ad-filled crapware. The for-profit companies like Google that adhere to this modus operandi will continue decimate their competition, as will the providers of freeware and shareware who do likewise.
Ubuntu in particular is off to a pretty good start by managing updates and software installation primarily through a utility (synaptic et al) instead of letting apps of any kind, crapware or otherwise, install themselves willy nilly. Combine strict enforcement of this installation management with a filtering service ("You're about to install the Spam-Blocker Toolbar. You really don't need to. It'll slow down your system and provide almost no useful functionality. If you really do need the functionality, here are a list of better, ad-free alternatives that provide similar services: ..." and you've be a long way toward helping Grandma keep her system clean.