I guess that depends on how you define "fair".

If "fair" means that the clowns who slacked off in school, spending their time partying and doing drugs, now make little more than minimum wage while those of us who worked hard make a good living, then I'm all for "fair". Too often, those who tout "fair" do not consider that one's current situation is heavily affected by one's previous decisions. I feel no moral responsibility to compensate for the problems you have caused yourself.

Fair enough, but if the work is the genesis of life, there is no life available to do the work. Your argument is circular.

Care to point out a few (or one)? The amount of steps required to result in all the species on earth would require a vast number of intermediate forms. There is no reason that there should not be a host of intermediate forms now.

Well, I agree that evolution is a theory (I wish people would do a better job of remembering that). I don't agree that it is ridiculously strong, particularly if you are talking about evolution as the origin of life.
In the first place, it violates the second law of thermodynamics. That ought to be sufficient argument against it.
As we learn more about the complexity of the cell, and of DNA, the amount of information contained therein becomes ever more staggering. Five billion years is simply insufficient for any known mechanism to allow that much information to occur through random chance.
Beyond all that, there are no known examples of intermediate species. Considering how much evolution must have occurred (if we assume evolution to be correct) there ought to be scads of intermediate forms walking the planet today. Where are they?

It could be secure, given the following constraints:
1. The computers contain NO mass storage at all.
2. The mass storage is external to the computer and is disconnected from the computer during cloud computing.
3. The computer is rebooted from CD (or DVD) before and after cloud computing.
Of course, the odds on those constraints being met are pretty low if non-technical types are involved.

A closed environment is highly desirable for some users. Consider my mother (and a whole lot of her peers). She's in her 70s. What she knows about computers would not fill a 5x7 card in her recipe file. What she wants to know about computers takes a whole lot less space.

The only reason she has a computer is so that she can email my sister (who lives overseas). Other than that, she has no interest in the thing. Were it not for me, her computer's S/W would never be updated.

For my mother, and her peers, a closed system makes a huge amount of sense. They just want the darn thing to work and do the few things they want done. They don't want to fuss with it. They don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to make the thing secure.

Do I want a closed environment for my development computer? Certainly not. But I use my computer for things that my mother would never comprehend. Computer users are not a monoculture. They exhibit a wide range of wants and needs. For some, an open environment is best. For others, a closed environment is best. The computer world ceased to be a one-size-fits-all realm decades ago.

Well, when I was in university, studying computer science (who'd've guessed that a /. contributor studied comp sci?), KB was defined as 2^10 bytes, MB was 2^20, and GB was a pipe dream (hey, I graduated from uni in 1986). So, for us, kB WAS defined as 1024 bytes. That's how ALL of my textbooks, which I still have btw, defined kB.
Perhaps it was not defined as 1024 bytes everywhere (comp sci types are notorious for having multiple standards), but it was defined as 1024 bytes in a fair number of places.

"In all fairness it is a valid question to pose. Genetically altering humans is a fairly big ethical question. Granted curing color blindness is fairly harmless, but once we know how to do that and accept it can be done it pretty much stands to reason that we will find out how to do other things and will accept doing those."

True, once we learn how to genetically alter humans, we will be faced with the question of what alterations are ethical, moral, acceptable... However, the fact that a technique raises questions does not make a specific use, in and of itself, unethical, immoral, unacceptable. Consider the concept that we should not create explosives because they could be used to harm people. That is true, but explosives can also be used to facilitate mining, construction, etc. There is no doubt, for instance, that Alfred Nobel's invention has been a boon to mankind (even though some have abused it). There are [more expensive] alternatives to explosives. But many of the issues that gene-therapy could resolve have no good alternative cures (there may be the means of treating the symptoms, but no cures). Should we deny the cure on the fear that someone else may abuse the technique?

When I was in grade school, I frequently encountered teachers who, rather than try and determine which two or three students were talking in class, would simply give the entire class detention. Rather than deal with the specific case of abuse, they took the easy way out and penalized everyone. Banning gene-therapy on the fear that someone might abuse it is wrong. It unfairly penalizes those who have done nothing wrong but might well benefit from it.

If they do the live CD right, it should not be terribly inconvenient. Nonetheless, I think you're correct that most people won't do this - they simply won't understand the need for it. Personally, I've been doing on-line banking using a live CD for a couple of years. But then again, I'm somewhat paranoid (but only because everyone is against me 8^).

Would not surprise me if they were using them on some of the very critical loci of their system. And I'd imagine that they would want to actually test the effects of converting to SSD so that they have useful data when trying to determine when to start switching.
A few test installations does not constitute a wholesale change in direction, but they do serve as portents of the future.

Seriously. Google is (believed to be) the largest single user of consumer hard drives. When they start replacing hard drives with SSDs, I will consider HDDs to be done. I wonder what price differential the power savings (don't forget the power for cooling) will cover?

I just have this horrible vision of the technicians upgrading the control system and having to reboot the system. Homer Simpson as the celebrity sales rep? "It's pronounced nuke-you-lar"

These days, most people cannot deal with basic algebra. Case in point: my sister, who has a master's degree in the social sciences, reaches for a calculator to calculate the sales tax on purchases (and she does it because she cannot manage without it).

Why on earth would we expect Joe Average to be able to comprehend the meaning of statistics?

Assuming it lasts 5 years, that works out to about 2 dollars a day. How much does a cup of coffee cost? Or a pack of cigarettes? Or a beer? Or cable TV? Or a DSL connection?

So perhaps this is a good reason to encourage everyone to convert their web sites to HTTPS only?

What this really comes down to is the business model - how you intend to make a profit from your work. If a programmer's business model dictates that he owns the underlying code (and can use bits and pieces to accelerate development of future projects), he will price his work accordingly. If his business model dictates that the customer owns everything, we will price his work based on that model.

Problems tend to arise when customers expect the benefits of the programmer-owns-the-code model (shorter development times, lower costs) as well as the benefits of the customer-owns-the-code model (we own the code, we can hire someone else [cheaper] to do maintenance and upgrades).

In many cases, the root cause is ignorance on the customer's part. If the customer will let you educate them, do so. If they won't let you educate them, when possible, let them be someone else's problem.