If SF has become as cliched as you imply, I think a fair amount of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of publishers, as I discuss in more detail in this comment.

I doubt science fiction has "run out of steam," in terms of authors or imagination any more than science or technology has run out of steam due to a lack of imagination. Rather, I wonder if the science fiction publishing business has either run out of steam or become an active roadblock between writers and readers. It seems that most publishers are trying a play-it-safe approach that demands giving out the same thing over and over again.

This is based partially on what I see in bookstores and partially on my own experience, which I discuss extensively in Science fiction, literature, and the haters. It begins:

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

This question arose from two overlapping events. The first came from reading Day of the Triffids (link goes to my post); although I don't remember how I came to the book, someone must've recommended it on a blog or newspaper in compelling enough terms for me to buy it. Its weaknesses, as discussed in the post, brought up science fiction and its relation to the larger book world.

The second event arose from a science fiction novel I wrote called Pearle Transit that I've been submitting to agents. It's based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness--think, on a superficial level, "Heart of Darkness in space." Two replies stand out: one came from an agent who said he found the idea intriguing but that science fiction novels must be at least 100,000 words long and have sequels already started. "Wow," I thought. How many great literary novels have enough narrative force and character drive for sequels? The answer that came immediately to mind was "zero," and after reflection and consultation with friends I still can't find any. Most novels expend all their ideas at once, and to keep going would be like wearing a shirt that fades from too many washes. Even in science fiction, very few if any series maintain their momentum over time; think of how awful the Dune books rapidly became, or Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. A few novels can make it as multiple-part works, but most of those were conceived of and executed as a single work, like Dan Simmons' Hyperion or Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (more on those later).

The minimum word count bothers me too. It's not possible for Pearle Transit to be stretched beyond its present size without destroying what makes it coherent and, I hope, good. By its nature it is supposed to be taunt, and much as a 120-pound person cannot be safely made into a 240-pound person, Pearle Transit can't be engorged without making it like the bloated star that sets its opening scene. If the market reality is that such books can't or won't sell, I begin to tie the quality of the science fiction I've read together with the system that produces it.

If the publishing system itself is broken and nothing yet has grown up to take its place (I have no interest in trolling through thousands of terrible novels uploaded to websites in search of a single potential gem, for those of you Internet utopians out there), maybe the source of the genre's troubles isn't where PC Pro places it.

Based on essays like Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out, How Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, and Paul Graham's Why Nerds are Unpopular, I'm not so sure. Those essays look back, yes, but I don't think I've seen the kind of fundamental shift described in the article. The Beer and Circus mentality on colleges still seems alive and well.

I'd love to be wrong. But I don't think I am.

MIA. It's not being discussed publicly by anyone inside Apple, so far as I've seen. Incidentally, all this SSD love makes me wish Apple would offer an SSD build-to-order option for those sweet new iMacs. An external FW drive could house movies and music. That would be sweet and relatively easy for Apple: they already SSDs in MacBooks Pro.

Did you read the site you linked to? It says: "However, data directly comparing the efficacy or effectiveness of these two types of influenza vaccines are limited and insufficient to identify whether one vaccine might offer a clear advantage over the other in certain settings or populations."

You say, "Furthermore, it has been shown to be effective against viruses that have undergone some genetic drift." But there's nothing about that in the CDC site.

It's about the 50th comment recommending a Macbook, despite the other 50 comments noting that a Macbook doesn't qualify for any of the OP's needs. To be fair, a MacBook Pro gets closer than you think, as stated in this comment and its children. The relevant question to problems like the OPs is often, "Are you dealing with the relevant parameters?" If the answer is "no," what should you be dealing with? That's what comments like the linked one are dealing with.

It's a shame that buying a Mac comes with an EULA demading you work as a freelance PR agent for Apple.

I don't truck with fanboys, but that doesn't mean a MBP shouldn't at least be in the running.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I thought I'd point out that you can apparently get an external port replicator, but it's a) honkin' ugly and b) expensive.

See also this post on the same subject WRT Macs.

I switched a few years ago and couldn't be happier.

This has been true for a while, and even before Apple switched to x86; see, for example, Paul Graham's March 2005 essay, The Return of the Mac :

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it's not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker's computer.

A 13" MacBook will fulfill some but not all of the requirements listed by the OP (the major missing one being a dock) for $1,200, and it's relatively easy to virtualize and/or dual boot all three major OSes (Windows, Linux, OS X). What more is there?

Actually, we can recommend something: a laser printer. The manufacturer probably doesn't matter as much as the fact that you go laser, which seem to have far longer lifespans than inkjet printers. Other commenters below recommend HPs, but I doubt it really matters; I have a Brother HL 2040 and have for about four years, and it's given me no problems.

Some netbooks are, and some aren't (Sony has a 7" device, IIRC). What's more likely the case is that netbooks are blending into normal laptops. At the moment, you can buy very small portable computers for ~$200 and essentially scale along all sorts of axes up to $3,000+ MacBook Pros, Toughbooks, Thinkpads, etc.

That basically means that the boundaries are blurring, which is probably a good thing for consumers.

You can see my commentary here:

The Magicians is a surprise and delight: its language is not overly showy and yet often contains an unexpected surprise, especially at the ends of sentences, as this early description shows: "Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain attempt to brace himself against whatever blow was coming from the heavens, and which would logically hit the tall people first." Until the last clause, one could be reading any novel, fantasy or otherwise, but saying that a blow from heaven would hit the tall first gives us Quentin's personality in a single line, and yet its ideas are spun coherently across the entire novel.

See also Lev Grossman's piece in the WSJ, Good Books Don't Have to be Hard:

It's not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it's something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there's a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Why? You really don't know? Okay...

The big problem is that Jordan depends on cliche and an adolescent view of sexuality to fuel his novels. I read the first six books in middle school, and at the time my Dad wanted to see some of the "dragon books" I read -- he got through a couple of Wheel of Time novels before giving up. I thought he didn't know what he was talking about.

When I tried reading them again in college, my literary taste had developed enough to make the problems so obvious that I wondered how I read them in the first place: the characters were flat, the writing stale, and Jordan seemed to have so little grasp of how people behave.

That so many people defend Jordan's writing is one reason for the unfair "genre/literary" divide afflicting science fiction and fantasy.

There is good science fiction and fantasy out there; most recently, Lev Grossman's The Magicians astonished me. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is excellent. I could go on. Given that there is some really, really good material out there, the continued fascination with Robert Jordan or his brother-in-writing Terry Goodkind surprises me.