With proper implementation, you could build chips that essentially are functional programs with this, and swap between programs as required. Fans of Haskell would likely realize some interesting benefits.

Perhaps the idea can be refined.

If Google were to partner with Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon and buy up the whole shebang, it could be reformatted into something more useful for everyone--say, some kind of not-for-profit venture (and hence not interested in competition, meaning that the smaller labels wouldn't be squashed) that focused on distributing music to people and money to the artists, and promoting the work of various artists of merit.

You know, like how the RIAA was originally supposed to be.

Providing standard, known licensing terms to everybody as part of the setup, so everyone could compete on the same ground, would probably do more to help the music industry than anything else.

The reason I suggest a 'partnership' of this sort is to prevent any monopolistic tendencies--regardless of the intent to not be evil, owning the vast majority of the music industry does more or less amount to a monopoly, and the SEC won't like that.

NaCl has some possibilities here. It offers a framework for more or less arbitrary x86 code inside a browser framework--so yes, you can have your 4X or your RPGs or even your FPSs inside a browser just fine.

Wasn't Microsoft Bob the source of "clippy"?

Perhaps if I make a rage-face at the computer, it'll run away and delete its system files...

If you have to ask why it did that, then you either need to learn more about how computers work or pay attention to what you're clicking.

So given that sousveillance (not a typo; look it up) has emerged as a counter to the prevelance of CCTV, is there a way to detect the use of XRays in public fora?

There's some not-too-terribly effective geiger counters out there, but I don't think those do XRays too terribly well. Film badges, while effective for measuring a daily dose, are hardly going to tell you where you got it from.

I'm fairly sure there were stories like this going around when email became popular, and people started using it to, y'know, communicate with each other.

Before that, cellphones--telephones--hell, I bet even the telegraph was implicated in adultery.

(WHAT.ARE.YOU.WEARING.STOP
SIX.SKIRTS.HOOPS.CRINOLINE.BUSTLE.CHEMISE.HAT.STOP
NO.GLOVES.YOU.NAUGHTY.WENCH.STOP)

And back before that, it was letters.

Anything people have ever used to communicate has been implicated in adultery, because that's sort of how to set up a liason, ain't it?

At least atmospheric-noise-derived one time pads will still be valid. Pity to have to go to that, though.

Never said I'd live to see it in person. Be nice to know the species, with adequate preparation, could conceivably continue.

\O'course, if some more research went into cryogenics...

I find this somewhat comforting. The Earth is becoming less and less 'special' with new worlds being found nearly every day now--worlds that may sustain life. Now it turns out that the universe is 'flawed' from our perspective, too. In a way, it's sort of optimistic--there's a way that it could be better, and the possibility arises that maybe it'd be possible to find a 'better' place.

Now how the hell am I supposed to get a full VR Metaverse pipe when I'm shreddin' the Santa Monica on my Smartwheels(tm) if I can't get any kind of pipe up to the Street? Totally lame.

Google's primary business function is 'search', though they've attempted to diversify with documents and the like.

Microsoft's primary business function is documents and the like, though they've attempted to diversify with search.

There's a very low barrier to individual users to choose between them for either (given that MS has put its document processing online for free, last I heard) so, in the end, it's likely that the superior product (whether marketed better or actually better) will triumph in marketshare.

Bring this back up in 18 months, and we'll likely see some clear differential if there really is an actual difference in the applicability of either one's functions.

That, and the students' own systems. Most non-CS students aren't going to be at anything other than "normal end-user" levels of savvy--and apparently normal end-users actually buy stuff from spam, because it keeps coming, and it keeps being popular.

That's a situation that P2P would be helpful for--seed meters with a (signed) firmware flash, then have other meters poll their neighbors every N hours for the current revision number and suck it down if they don't have it.

Depending on your network, you could have it distributed in fairly short order.

(This way, you're using your bandwidth more effectively, y'see.)

Idle thought: connectionless multicast updates, with a repeating transmission of the same content over and over again, and bittorrent-style glue on the receiving end. Absent any interference, all the meters would get it at once; with interference, it may take a few repetitions to assemble all the packets.

Organizations that would be impacted by a 'singular sysadmin' already take measures to counter that possibility.

For instance, in an organization that I have worked with, the principle of assigning least privelege is adhered to strictly: users are given as little privelege as possible; helpdesk personnel only have enough privelege to modify computer settings (install printers and the like) and modify AD entries for the users in their section; progressively higher--more priveleged--levels require progressively more hurdles before they can make their changes.

And further, everything is traceable and documented; changes made without authorization are easily detectable and capable of being rolled back; the associated accounts can be locked down quickly for investigations as necessary.

Does it make it a bureaucratic nightmare to get things done? For normal business cases, no; if the user needs software installed, they submit a request to the helpdesk, and they get their software--assuming that they're authorized for it, anyway, but licensing is a whole other kettle of fish.

This is all possible because the possibility of a single person holding control over the network was recognized as undesirable at the start, and measures were taken to ensure that many administrators would hold the keys to making changes, and that they would be held accountable for said changes.

Similar principles hold in other places as well--this is how most large enterprise networks work (some are managed better than others), and most open-source projects with any success rate will operate their repositories in a similar fashion, with access controls, least-privelege, and accountability being built into their procedures from the beginning.

This DAN sounds, to me, like an overcomplicated anarcho-collectivist "let's make everybody important!" kind of communal fuckery. Especially with the "forking" thing, you're almost guaranteed to end up with vast quantities of incompatible systems fighting each other to determine the One True Path. It's too complicated to work effectively, and there will be too much bureaucratic overhead to make any decisions in an agile enough fashion to matter.