The rumor of a ~$800 iBook came from the same source that indicated a Intel iBook in January. Apparently, the same source that also predicted the Mini and photo iPod.
The Mini is a "loss leader" of sorts, Apple is really betting on the second and hopefully "bigger" Mac that Mini owners eventually buy.
No doubt that the Mini was produced in the hopes of luring Windows customers, but it isn't a "loss leader". I bet we see a $400 Mini within the next year, and even that will be profitable for Apple.
Intentionally crippling their devices to make them sucky-- that doesn't sound so smart. First of all, it damages Apple's reputation in general. Secondly, it kills the hype of the switch, and Apple lives off of the excitement of their customers. When Apple releases a new product, they're going to want people thinking it's the best thing ever, not some cripppled POS. If their first Intel releases aren't substantially better than current models, everyone will be disappointed, question the switch, and developers will wonder if it was worth the trouble to bring their stuff over to x86.
And let's not forget: Jobs is an egomaniac. I'm convinced that he'd rather lose some money than release a product that he thinks is crap.
I think Apple just gave mid summer as an estimate to give the developers of 3rd party applications more time, as well as themselves if they needed it. Now they've figured out that the developers were quick to transition, everyone's bitting at the chops, and delaying it any longer seems to be a bad idea. Can't wait to get my hands on one.
Makes me wonder: is this jump in the schedule because developers were quick to transition, or because customers were holding off their purchases until they saw the new Intel models?
Does anyone appreciate the irony in Microsoft using the PowerPC chip in its XBox and Apple using Intel in its laptops?
I don't think I do. Sounds like each company might be choosing the chip that's best for the products they intend on selling, so...
Of course, as of right now Intel is behind the curve in performance compared to AMD.
It's my understanding that Intel has been developing systems that provide really good performance/power-consumption. Not just processors, but the chipsets/motherboards as well, and the whole package (Centrino and such) does quite well in that regard (allowing a whole system to run on relatively low power) and even better than AMD.
If true, that would explain, in part, Apple's choice of Intel over AMD, as Apple is very focussed on their portable computers/devices.
Apple will be getting the hottest and latest Intel chips--maybe even custom.
What's the point of "custom" chips? Are they doing a particularly strange kind of computing?
My understanding is the iBook and the Mac Mini use the same components.
Surely if Apple announces an Intel based iBook, an Intel based Mac Mini will be there too? Or will follow very shortly.
Minis are closer to Powerbooks, but either way, it raises a question for me. The Mac mini, PowerBooks, and iBooks all use similar components. If the switch to Intel is going to allow Apple to make their laptops thinner, lighter, more power-efficient, and more powerful, wouldn't it be a mistake to upgrade iBooks without upgrading PowerBooks? Otherwise, you'd probably end up with iBooks (the budget model) that were better than PowerBooks (the high-end).
Also, if the Intel iBooks are really that great, and the price drops a couple hundred dollars (which has been reported), then wouldn't it start to cut into the Mini's market? I mean, is it worth getting the Mini for $700 when you can get a much better computer, in laptop form, for $800?
So, if I were Apple, I don't think I'd let there be much of a delay between the release of Intel iBooks and the Intel PowerBooks/Minis. If I didn't do it all at the same time, I wouldn't be planning to sell many PowerPC models during the lag.
Really? I'd say stage 7. Sure, the actual release is a couple months away still, but we've already seen stage 6. Does the life cycle have an alternate version for products we know are coming?
No, one record company executive who had talked to Jobs said that he thought Apple would move to variable pricing in iTunes soon. He admitted that Jobs hadn't said anything of the sort in their meeting, but that it was his speculation.
I'm not saying they won't move to variable pricing, but I wouldn't make a big deal about one record exec's speculation.
Unfortunately I can't find a source, but I've read the guy who came up with the idea of "addiction" as a disease in the first place also thought being any race other than white was a "disease". Regardless of its beginnings, however, it's come to mean something like, "habits that I don't think are good." What's the difference between eating habitually (which we all do), and having an "eating addiction"? Am I addicted to computers, cheeseburgers, my girlfriend, going to my grandmother's for thanksgiving? It seems to depend on whether you think these activities are "healthy", and not on any specific particulars.
However, the meat of this article seems to be about addiction as a "coping mechanism". People, under stress, will exhibit compulsive habits. Being unsure what to do, they go with something they know.
Not quite the same thing, but: If I'm nervous and you sit me down at a table, empty except for a pen, I'll probably pick it up within a minute. If the pen isn't there, i'll find something else to distract myself.
So they're saying something kind of like that. You have certain comfortable habits, which we might call "coping mechanisms". When confronted with stress or angst, you fall into certain old patterns that are comfortable for you, and often they're comfortable because they're somewhat limiting of possibilities and you know what to expect. So when you're under stress, looking for a coping mechanism, and you see something that reminds you of an old comfortable habit, you desire it.
This need not be terribly unhealthy. Like a little kid's favorite blanket, we all have certain people, objects, and habits that make us feel more secure. A shirt, a notebook, a piece of furniture, your cell phone-- you have at least a few things of this sort.
The reward/punishment system is more or less random which increases the players' propensity to keep at it in hopes of success.
What reward? I haven't gotten any food pellets for pressing buttons lately. Anyway, success/failure in games is far less random than success/failure in real life.
Re:Everything bad for you is good for you again
on
Drink Decaf and Die
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· Score: 1
On the other hand, why use a 3 word cliche when you can come up with a brand new 15 word sentance!
Just make sure you're only moderately moderate in your moderation. If you moderate your moderation to an extreme degree, the whole thing's going to hell.
The plots cannot be taken out of context from the book they are presented in...
That was my first thought as well. "Plot points? Quotes?! Are those all we care about?!" Unfortunately, the answer is probably, "In most schools, yes." It's like when they focus on making kids memorize dates and call it history.
When was the Declaration of Independence signed?
"Uh, 1776?"
Good. What was the Declaration of Independence?
"Uh, isn't that where all our laws were written? Like the 10 commandments and stuff?"
And yes, I went to a school like that. Read Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus Rex, and the Odyssey in high school, and it did nothing for me. Not until I read them in college did I have any clue.
These are the Internet Explorer users. These are the people we have to keep telling not to click 'OK' to every damn message box, not to download that attachment... They won't switch. Maybe their ISPs could do it for them...
Um... yeah, that's who'd need to do it. ISPs. The "Internet Explorer users" you're talking about, they just point to their ISP's DNS, and it's entirely an issue of what the ISP's DNS points to.
EU, China, India, Japan... will they really collaborate? I'm not sure they will.
If so, all the more reason the US should remain the authority. Look, I'm presenting a practical argument here. If the US is doing the best job, then there's no need to worry about this whole thing. If, on the other hand, the whole rest of the world puts together their own root servers, and these root servers do a better job of keeping the Internet cohesive and sensible, there's no reason why US ISPs wouldn't start using those servers. What I'm saying is, there's no reason why people can't just use whatever does the best job, and the reason US servers are authoritative is because they're doing a good job and they're voluntarily agreed-upon as the authoritative servers. Right?
(I'll admit here that I'm not a super-geek on these matters, but this is what I've gathered)
The standard that emerges will probably be whatever they bundle with Windows 2020:-)
Pre-packaging an OS with hard-coded DNS servers would be a scary and stupid move.
Extra point for the Dune reference, but I think that if (4) happened, then (3) would happen, which would, within a short time, turn into (1), assuming that the technology doesn't change quickly enough to obsolete the whole argument. In short, if the UN or EU provided better DNS while, at the same time, the US was abusive, people would use the UN/EU servers and they'd become the standard. The only reason US has control and has kept control is that they've done a good enough job that it'd be stupid to not use them.
Hence the oversight committee. If, five years down the line, the US has been naughty, then it's time to seriously think about splitting the internet.
Honestly, I think this is the point that has always given me pause in this case. What's the issue? Currently?
Did the US do lots of bad things with their moderate control over DNS? Anything that's beyond appeal or circumvention?
It seems to me that someone is providing a service, and they're doing a good enough job at it that everyone is using it. So is the rule that, if a service is important to me in some way, no matter the situation or how well it's run, I can demand control? I demand control of Slashdot right now! And my friends FTP server! And my web hosts server!
So by what right does the UN demand control? Does the UN have the right to take over my web host or ISP because they're popular? Their countries probably have a lot riding on the success of computers in general-- does that give them the right to demand control over Intel? What if the UN believes the US army is important to their member country's economies, can they demand control there too?
I guess I'm just missing the point, but someone set up a service, and people use it voluntarily. Why does any outside party have the right to demand control, when it's within their ability to set up their own? Especially so when the problem with setting up your own is that it won't work as well as the original situation? And who is the UN, in particular, to demand control? They are not a government, nor, to my knowledge, do they have any particular mandate to control technological development.
A) All sorts of questions. How is the "Worldwide Press Freedom Index" measured. Who's responsible for that measurement? And who makes up this body? Why did the US score low? Does it count if reporters self-censor? What if the government censors "bad" media? Reporters who lie and break laws? Does it take into account the volume of available newspapers, that mass of news/media being produced, or does one bad event hurt two totally different countries in exactly the same way? "Freedom" is a complicated thing-- how do you expect us to believe that any body came up with a means of measure to give an accurate numerical value, accurate enough allow for specific and absolute rankings of all the different countries of the world?
B) What makes you think that "freedom of the press" is identical with "freedom on the internet"?
I want to see at least a solid 5-10 years of profitability before I'd consider investing a dime, personally.
Except that a tech company with 10 years of profitability could just as easily be on their way out. There are no guarantees either way, but some people might rather invest in an up-and-commer then a tech company gone stale.
All this is not enough to ensure the PS3's failure. To make it complete, Sony needs to:
...allow Vadar to discover that Luke has a twin sister? Then, their failure is complete. If Luke will not turn to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will.
I'll take your mention of an online community to go off-topic and ask a question of my own. I've been trying to find a way to make a particular site, and not being a programmer, I've been hoping that there'd be some open-source software that would let me make it.
The idea is pretty simple, which is to have something like slashdot, i.e. a mix between a forum and a weblog. Threaded discussions and all. However, The big idea would be to have it mostly be a private deal-- members only can read/write/discuss. On the other hand, I'd still like for members to be able to choose any post of their own that they like, and specify that it's public. Each member would then have a weblog, which would basically be a collection of their public posts. Ideally, I'd like everyone to be able to have their own style for the blog-- at least a different style sheet. Oh, and I'd like users to be able to upload pictures as well.
Does anyone have any idea on how to do this? Any software, any collection of plugins? Anything close? The closest I can find are plugins that allow you to have a single login for both phpBB and Wordpress, or something like that, but I'd like to have it be primarily community/discussion-based, multi-user, with blog posts automatically being visible in the discussion area. I might need to write my own, I guess, but I'm not a programmer, so I'd like a shortcut.
I'd stay away from Movable Type. Well, let me back up and say, put a little time into your choice. You can always migrate to other software, but it probably won't be trouble free, so it's better if you can stick with the same package once you start writing.
And it's partially for that reason that I'd advise people to stick with an open source solution. Not for philosophic reasons so much, but because you can make your own changes.
It's not one of those things where open-source advocates talk about the benefits of being able to rewrite sections of your kernel, either. You don't need to be much of a programmer. If you're already writing your own HTML and such, it isn't much of a jump to alter a little PHP here and there.
So if you think you might want to, at some point, dig in a little and customize your weblog, I wouldn't go the closed-source route. I'd basically say that, all things being equal, Wordpress is the way to go. It seems well-supported and feature-rich, and there's a pretty big community behind it. However, try a few out before you commit. OpenSourceCMS gives live demos of both the public and admin sections of both Wordpress and Textpattern, so try them both and make up your own mind. Hell, they're free, so you can even download them, set them up, and try things out.
I've only glanced at some things about plasmids, but I think I had something a bit more sci-fi in mind. I don't mean to suggest this sort of thing in reality, but suppose viruses had long been a... well, a sort tool of evolution. Maybe our bodies developed ways to spread real, expressed genes around to other organisms after birth, and this was, at least to some degree, the cause of the "random mutations" speculated by evolutionary theory.
Now, the process itself being a bit random, sometimes the results weren't so good. You get something like a "bad interaction". Two strands of DNA, beneficial to each organism, when mixed, cause problems. So your body develops a method for weeding out bad interactions. It tries the new DNA out, and if it starts causing problems, this immune system kicks in and cleans things up a bit. In case of a catastrophic combination, the whole organism dies off, which sort of takes care of the problem-- no one with that combination of genes is going to live long enough to pass it on.
If there are not problems, though, the new DNA fits into place, and there's not even a symptom. What if this sort of thing happened all the time, and we're just shooting these viruses around with every interaction, but that people are sufficiently similar genetically that it usually doesn't cause any problems.
Ok, it's a bit of nonsense that I cooked up because I don't really understand these processes, or viruses or plasmids. I guess the overall idea that I had was, what if these things are common, but just don't cause illness in most cases? What if viruses began as a beneficial thing, an aid to evolution? What if it's not proper to think of these viruses as "foreign invaders", but that they're just parts of us that sometimes get out of control? Maybe those are all stupid questions, but I like finding new ways (new to me, at least) of thinking about things.
Under these requirements, what is art?
on
But Is It Art?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As of now, innovation in games is driven more by commerce than by any kind of noble artistic ideal...
Yes, because movie studios and art galleries don't want to make money. Painters and directors have absolutely no commercial hopes for their creations. I know all the professional painters I know aren't trying to sell their paintings.
...games need to become cheaper to make...
Like movies are cheap to make? Yeah, I mean, I can scrounge up a couple hundred million in a weekend. Paint, canvas, they cost money too. More than you'd think.
...and they need to be more accessible to nongamers.
...and paintings need to be made to be more accessible to people who don't look at paintings, movies to people who don't watch movies....
Look, I'm not saying that it isn't possible to improve the game creating/playing community or something, but are they art? Yes. That it can be expensive, commercial, and that it has a limited audience has nothing to do with the question whatsoever. Art can be all of those things. Good art can be all of those things.
...so what happens after the initial explosion of cases is that a disease evolves to limit mortality: the germs that get passed on are the ones that are able to somehow keep the host alive as long as possible to continue the spread...
I've wondered about this before. Wouldn't the ideal of a virus, then, be to reach a benign equilibrium with the host? Some sort of interaction that left the host infected, but symptom-free (or nearly so)? Does the virus, then, become just another hunk of protein our body creates?
How would this change the way we think about viruses and disease? What might this mean about our own evolution? Might we be passing benign 'viruses' around to each other all the time, but without noticing because either there are no symptoms or very few?
Forgive me if these are stupid questions, but it's not really my field.
Slashdot Mirror
The rumor of a ~$800 iBook came from the same source that indicated a Intel iBook in January. Apparently, the same source that also predicted the Mini and photo iPod. The Mini is a "loss leader" of sorts, Apple is really betting on the second and hopefully "bigger" Mac that Mini owners eventually buy.
No doubt that the Mini was produced in the hopes of luring Windows customers, but it isn't a "loss leader". I bet we see a $400 Mini within the next year, and even that will be profitable for Apple.
And let's not forget: Jobs is an egomaniac. I'm convinced that he'd rather lose some money than release a product that he thinks is crap.
Makes me wonder: is this jump in the schedule because developers were quick to transition, or because customers were holding off their purchases until they saw the new Intel models?
I don't think I do. Sounds like each company might be choosing the chip that's best for the products they intend on selling, so...
Of course, as of right now Intel is behind the curve in performance compared to AMD.
It's my understanding that Intel has been developing systems that provide really good performance/power-consumption. Not just processors, but the chipsets/motherboards as well, and the whole package (Centrino and such) does quite well in that regard (allowing a whole system to run on relatively low power) and even better than AMD.
If true, that would explain, in part, Apple's choice of Intel over AMD, as Apple is very focussed on their portable computers/devices.
Apple will be getting the hottest and latest Intel chips--maybe even custom.
What's the point of "custom" chips? Are they doing a particularly strange kind of computing?
Surely if Apple announces an Intel based iBook, an Intel based Mac Mini will be there too? Or will follow very shortly.
Minis are closer to Powerbooks, but either way, it raises a question for me. The Mac mini, PowerBooks, and iBooks all use similar components. If the switch to Intel is going to allow Apple to make their laptops thinner, lighter, more power-efficient, and more powerful, wouldn't it be a mistake to upgrade iBooks without upgrading PowerBooks? Otherwise, you'd probably end up with iBooks (the budget model) that were better than PowerBooks (the high-end).
Also, if the Intel iBooks are really that great, and the price drops a couple hundred dollars (which has been reported), then wouldn't it start to cut into the Mini's market? I mean, is it worth getting the Mini for $700 when you can get a much better computer, in laptop form, for $800?
So, if I were Apple, I don't think I'd let there be much of a delay between the release of Intel iBooks and the Intel PowerBooks/Minis. If I didn't do it all at the same time, I wouldn't be planning to sell many PowerPC models during the lag.
Really? I'd say stage 7. Sure, the actual release is a couple months away still, but we've already seen stage 6. Does the life cycle have an alternate version for products we know are coming?
I'm not saying they won't move to variable pricing, but I wouldn't make a big deal about one record exec's speculation.
However, the meat of this article seems to be about addiction as a "coping mechanism". People, under stress, will exhibit compulsive habits. Being unsure what to do, they go with something they know.
Not quite the same thing, but: If I'm nervous and you sit me down at a table, empty except for a pen, I'll probably pick it up within a minute. If the pen isn't there, i'll find something else to distract myself.
So they're saying something kind of like that. You have certain comfortable habits, which we might call "coping mechanisms". When confronted with stress or angst, you fall into certain old patterns that are comfortable for you, and often they're comfortable because they're somewhat limiting of possibilities and you know what to expect. So when you're under stress, looking for a coping mechanism, and you see something that reminds you of an old comfortable habit, you desire it.
This need not be terribly unhealthy. Like a little kid's favorite blanket, we all have certain people, objects, and habits that make us feel more secure. A shirt, a notebook, a piece of furniture, your cell phone-- you have at least a few things of this sort.
What reward? I haven't gotten any food pellets for pressing buttons lately. Anyway, success/failure in games is far less random than success/failure in real life.
Because no one listens to clichés?
Just make sure you're only moderately moderate in your moderation. If you moderate your moderation to an extreme degree, the whole thing's going to hell.
And what made you think such a ridiculous thing? Last time I checked, we hadn't damaged this place so badly that the moon was more habitable.
That was my first thought as well. "Plot points? Quotes?! Are those all we care about?!" Unfortunately, the answer is probably, "In most schools, yes." It's like when they focus on making kids memorize dates and call it history.
And yes, I went to a school like that. Read Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus Rex, and the Odyssey in high school, and it did nothing for me. Not until I read them in college did I have any clue.
Um... yeah, that's who'd need to do it. ISPs. The "Internet Explorer users" you're talking about, they just point to their ISP's DNS, and it's entirely an issue of what the ISP's DNS points to.
EU, China, India, Japan... will they really collaborate? I'm not sure they will.
If so, all the more reason the US should remain the authority. Look, I'm presenting a practical argument here. If the US is doing the best job, then there's no need to worry about this whole thing. If, on the other hand, the whole rest of the world puts together their own root servers, and these root servers do a better job of keeping the Internet cohesive and sensible, there's no reason why US ISPs wouldn't start using those servers. What I'm saying is, there's no reason why people can't just use whatever does the best job, and the reason US servers are authoritative is because they're doing a good job and they're voluntarily agreed-upon as the authoritative servers. Right?
(I'll admit here that I'm not a super-geek on these matters, but this is what I've gathered)
The standard that emerges will probably be whatever they bundle with Windows 2020 :-)
Pre-packaging an OS with hard-coded DNS servers would be a scary and stupid move.
Or am I wrong?
"If you keep doing what you're doing, we'll...... shut up and do nothing." Oooooo, I'm shakin' in my boots.
Honestly, I think this is the point that has always given me pause in this case. What's the issue? Currently?
Did the US do lots of bad things with their moderate control over DNS? Anything that's beyond appeal or circumvention?
It seems to me that someone is providing a service, and they're doing a good enough job at it that everyone is using it. So is the rule that, if a service is important to me in some way, no matter the situation or how well it's run, I can demand control? I demand control of Slashdot right now! And my friends FTP server! And my web hosts server!
So by what right does the UN demand control? Does the UN have the right to take over my web host or ISP because they're popular? Their countries probably have a lot riding on the success of computers in general-- does that give them the right to demand control over Intel? What if the UN believes the US army is important to their member country's economies, can they demand control there too?
I guess I'm just missing the point, but someone set up a service, and people use it voluntarily. Why does any outside party have the right to demand control, when it's within their ability to set up their own? Especially so when the problem with setting up your own is that it won't work as well as the original situation? And who is the UN, in particular, to demand control? They are not a government, nor, to my knowledge, do they have any particular mandate to control technological development.
B) What makes you think that "freedom of the press" is identical with "freedom on the internet"?
Except that a tech company with 10 years of profitability could just as easily be on their way out. There are no guarantees either way, but some people might rather invest in an up-and-commer then a tech company gone stale.
...allow Vadar to discover that Luke has a twin sister? Then, their failure is complete. If Luke will not turn to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will.
The idea is pretty simple, which is to have something like slashdot, i.e. a mix between a forum and a weblog. Threaded discussions and all. However, The big idea would be to have it mostly be a private deal-- members only can read/write/discuss. On the other hand, I'd still like for members to be able to choose any post of their own that they like, and specify that it's public. Each member would then have a weblog, which would basically be a collection of their public posts. Ideally, I'd like everyone to be able to have their own style for the blog-- at least a different style sheet. Oh, and I'd like users to be able to upload pictures as well.
Does anyone have any idea on how to do this? Any software, any collection of plugins? Anything close? The closest I can find are plugins that allow you to have a single login for both phpBB and Wordpress, or something like that, but I'd like to have it be primarily community/discussion-based, multi-user, with blog posts automatically being visible in the discussion area. I might need to write my own, I guess, but I'm not a programmer, so I'd like a shortcut.
And it's partially for that reason that I'd advise people to stick with an open source solution. Not for philosophic reasons so much, but because you can make your own changes.
It's not one of those things where open-source advocates talk about the benefits of being able to rewrite sections of your kernel, either. You don't need to be much of a programmer. If you're already writing your own HTML and such, it isn't much of a jump to alter a little PHP here and there.
So if you think you might want to, at some point, dig in a little and customize your weblog, I wouldn't go the closed-source route. I'd basically say that, all things being equal, Wordpress is the way to go. It seems well-supported and feature-rich, and there's a pretty big community behind it. However, try a few out before you commit. OpenSourceCMS gives live demos of both the public and admin sections of both Wordpress and Textpattern, so try them both and make up your own mind. Hell, they're free, so you can even download them, set them up, and try things out.
Now, the process itself being a bit random, sometimes the results weren't so good. You get something like a "bad interaction". Two strands of DNA, beneficial to each organism, when mixed, cause problems. So your body develops a method for weeding out bad interactions. It tries the new DNA out, and if it starts causing problems, this immune system kicks in and cleans things up a bit. In case of a catastrophic combination, the whole organism dies off, which sort of takes care of the problem-- no one with that combination of genes is going to live long enough to pass it on.
If there are not problems, though, the new DNA fits into place, and there's not even a symptom. What if this sort of thing happened all the time, and we're just shooting these viruses around with every interaction, but that people are sufficiently similar genetically that it usually doesn't cause any problems.
Ok, it's a bit of nonsense that I cooked up because I don't really understand these processes, or viruses or plasmids. I guess the overall idea that I had was, what if these things are common, but just don't cause illness in most cases? What if viruses began as a beneficial thing, an aid to evolution? What if it's not proper to think of these viruses as "foreign invaders", but that they're just parts of us that sometimes get out of control? Maybe those are all stupid questions, but I like finding new ways (new to me, at least) of thinking about things.
Yes, because movie studios and art galleries don't want to make money. Painters and directors have absolutely no commercial hopes for their creations. I know all the professional painters I know aren't trying to sell their paintings.
Like movies are cheap to make? Yeah, I mean, I can scrounge up a couple hundred million in a weekend. Paint, canvas, they cost money too. More than you'd think.
...and paintings need to be made to be more accessible to people who don't look at paintings, movies to people who don't watch movies....
Look, I'm not saying that it isn't possible to improve the game creating/playing community or something, but are they art? Yes. That it can be expensive, commercial, and that it has a limited audience has nothing to do with the question whatsoever. Art can be all of those things. Good art can be all of those things.
I've wondered about this before. Wouldn't the ideal of a virus, then, be to reach a benign equilibrium with the host? Some sort of interaction that left the host infected, but symptom-free (or nearly so)? Does the virus, then, become just another hunk of protein our body creates?
How would this change the way we think about viruses and disease? What might this mean about our own evolution? Might we be passing benign 'viruses' around to each other all the time, but without noticing because either there are no symptoms or very few?
Forgive me if these are stupid questions, but it's not really my field.