Biographies of Isaac Newton do not show Robert Hooke in a good light. He was a pretender to genius and laid claim to ideas that Newton developed in full, whereas Hooke had the most rudimentary sense of them. He was in science what we'd call a patent troll in the field of business. Just because he has a name one might have heard before is no reason to accord to him the profound dignity of scholarship this article purports to bestow. He looked through a microscope. Wow! Newton invented the theory of optics. (And many other things that Hooke very presumptuously claimed to be his own discoveries.)

No doubt, this prediction will soon be added to The iPad Death Watch

Wrong. A conflict with Iran would not profit even defense contractors. The war in Iraq was different - it was profitable because there was no threat to international security. A conflict with Iran, which would be presumptively nuclear, would be an armageddon scenario, and markets would crash. Weapons builders would not fare better in such a conflict than if there had been no conflict. I don't think it's clear to people that private enterprises have more to lose than governments in such a scenario. They have more to gain from Stuxnet than governments do.

No, there is a kind of conflict that even weapons dealers don't profit from. The kind that sends the stock market crashing to new lows. The kind that ruins all of one's trading partners. A conflict with Iran would be terrible for business for everyone in the free world. If my point wasn't clear, that's my point again - that the ones who really have the most to lose in a conflict with Iran would be private enterprises, not nation-states.

It's just assumed that Stuxnet is SOOOO advanced that only a nation-state could devise this zero-day infiltration into the centrifuge system of Iran.

Why assume that nation-states are behind it, and not corporations? A lot of companies would be hard hit if Iran became a threat to stability. Even major defense contractors, who profit from building weapons, would see little upside in a conflict with Iran.

The news and the internet buzz all say that it has to be a government backed thing, but what if it is simpler than that? It is far simpler to imagine that a private concern is behind it. They can pay for the talent. They have as much at stake as any government.

Woz was also first in line to design an Apple computer. That's still one of the coolest things anyone has ever done. The snarky commenters here ought to contemplate this Zen riddle: "What did the bald man say about his comb?" (A: "I'll never part with it.") If Woz wants to hang out with other Apple fans and show his enthusiasm, why paint it as anything but a guy trying to have some fun? I wonder what question Woz will ask Siri on his first try.

Maybe it's a Dyson sphere.

The Prometheus Society has a great article, The Outsiders, on two important studies of IQ, one by Lewis M. Terman, who provided the "Stanford" half of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the other by Leta S. Hollingworth, whose book on her findings is Children Above 180 IQ. Both studies were longitudinal and long-term, drawn from very large pools of subjects.
 
Conclusion? The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be maladjusted.

Your final calculation is wrong. You said 2M macs at $2 apiece, so the profit for exploiting macs would be $4 million, not $2 million. You flubbed where it counted most, in "looking at the final numbers." You make a lot of bad assumptions, too, which will be obvious to anybody who read your post and actually paid attention to it.

You're not ready for release. If I increase text size, words disappear. (Words on the left-hand side of the paragraph are pushed further to the left and become invisible. Words on the right-hand side of a paragraph increase in font size and remain visible.)

I read slashdot on a monitor across the room, so I *always* increase text size. You really have to fix this.

A smart evil genius wouldn't create a plague. He or she would be more interested in creating a strain of tomato (or some other benign plant) with THC or cocaine or opium in its leaves. This is the stuff of folklore, well-known as a can-do sort of idea. It isn't farfetched. I don't know why it hasn't happened already.

AIs in distant galaxies know about Earth already and are just waiting for our AIs to develop tachyon communications. I thought that this was a given.

That listening device hidden in the great seal was invented by Leon Theremin, the same guy who invented the theremin musical instrument.

Crooks can just salt the scene of the crime with DNA not their own.
 
DNA tests are not quick, either - forget what you have seen on TV. The FBI backlog is overwhelming, as it is for State labs in most cities. DNA evidence collected at a crime scene is likely not to be analyzed before the trial date.
 
New York City doesn't have the money to do this, anyhow. The cost would be exorbitant, even with a balanced budget.