You forgot the standard slashdot disclaimer:

If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

If we take the word "PC" as meaning what it used to, namely "Personal Computer" one can argue that computers are now more personal than ever:

a/ a computer now holds all my personal data, my contacts and calendar
b/ a computer is now almost always on my person
c/ a computer now serves my personal needs instead of me having to teach it what I want it to do.

IN fact smartphones are more PC's than the PC's of the 1980's, as they are more personal, and more personalized, and always on our persons.

The fact that the computer no longer sits on my desk, but rather in my pocket, really is not that important in the long run. The fact is the PC is more personal than ever before. Dividing up statistics according to what kind of units sold might be useful for marketeers, but the reality is that the PC is stronger than ever.

Errm I meant to say that the comments are of much lower quality than the articles. Time to stop commenting before I ruin Slashdot. Goodnight.

Well, on most quality news sites the comments are of much lower quality than the comments. I was just saying that Slashdot is an exception - well, at least in this case.

Only on Slashdot can you find a comment better than the article. Someone give him a modpoint.

An optional flag that has no enforcement mechanism is just asking for government intervention. In any case I don't think DNT will survive, and something else will come in to make ad companies rethink their strategy.

Do you remember the debate about blocking pop-up windows? Very similar complaints from advertisers who said they were 'financing the development of the web' (what a bunch of bullshit, they are just profiting from it). Yet every browser blocks them by default now. I await the day when (tracking) ads will be blocked by default by most major browsers. It's time to take the web back. HTTP is meant to be a stateless protocol.

And yet now almost all major browsers block popups by default.

DNT in some ways was the last resort for ad companies. In the near future all browsersmnow come with adblock. It would be interesting, in the current Apple-Google war, if Apple made Safari block all adds by default. I for one would welcome the web without all the visual pollution.

You think ad networks will be the one who honor DNT? The very same people who profit by tracking?

Frankly I think the whole thing would be better if adblock was just installed by default in every browser.

Ads are nothing less than visual pollution. Tracking is also one of the reasons that we have cookies and all the other security problems with the web. HTTP was meant to be a stateless protocol and should remain so.

I hope you simply forgot the /sarcasm tag.

Well the Europeans at least had elementary sanitation and in general knew about city life. The native Americans hadn't yet invented the wheel. That might have some bearing on the infection rates.

To be honest most of what religious people rally for or against is truly speaking 'junk' in the sense that it is irrational or not understandable. Maybe they think that the world must be perfect in order for their perfect God to exist? Perhaps their notion of God doesn't accept 'felicitous faults'? But really, even the medieval theologians would accept that not everything in the world is ideal. Much of what is called religion today is just emotion, so I do think there is any more of an answer for you than "it insults my dna and or the creator of my dna".

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. " [Hamlet,1,v]

"No discernible effects on their cell viability" - that is to say, as yet to be discerned. Nature has a way of surprising us, and I dare say that is half the fun. Calling something 'junk' just doesn't do justice to the fact that the organism lives in spite of our lack of understanding it. Calling something 'useless' is really not progressing knowledge in my humble opinion. Better to shelve it off to "don't know yet why it is like this" than to write it off as useless.

In fact in some assembly language programs a NOP is often the most elegant operation, especially if you want self-modifying code.

Well, I can do one better - a programming language for DNA computing (so you can not only compile to dna, but even compute with it) :

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dna/

<blockquote>So all in all, an interesting OS - security worse than Windows (i.e., none at all - just random strings of genetic code can alter the OS - you don't neve need root! just physical access!), yet it really works by sheer number of copies.</blockquote>

Yet just a small mutation can have disastrous consequences for the organism. Just insuring the number of copies is not enough. What is interesting is that the DNA copying process actually prevents 'forking' the source code :

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-dna-replication-checkpoint-and-preserving-genomic-14157692

In fact you need a bit more than 'root' to modify the genetic code. In a certain way DNA has more security than any operating system - imagine that DNA synthesis is going on in your body at several million pairs a sec, and yet you are still the same person. Some operating systems have trouble copying a single file that many times and keeping data integrity.

In this case however, you truly get what you pay for. Lion Server is nothing in comparison to Windows Server, though it might be enough for many people.