The netbook is only going to grow, so long as companies keep making more and more apps for linux, xor companies keep moving their applications onto the web. There's only the balance then of what does a consumer need to run locally versus connected.

Your prediction of low margins may be true to a point---but that is the beauty of globalization. These US companies who want to make only huge profit items will eventually wither from a thousand cuts as Taiwan/Chinese companies decide their happy to make 10 million netbooks with a net profit of 3 bucks each.

If you need specialization, then you're going to pay through the teeth (GPS Navigation / E-Readers). Those companies make a killing on you from both software and hardware. Personally, i wont touch e-readers until they allow me to place them onto a general-computing device. Same reason I've never toughed DRM-Music.... its too expensive and too limiting.

It's called a line connection fee. EVERYONE already pays this. There is no reason that solar CONTRIBUTORS should have to be charged to help the power companies, if anything excel should have to pay them. Think about it, power, they dont have to maintain, service, or otherwise pay to implement, comes into their grid magically.

These guys just want to remain a near monopoly on power generation, so they want to create barriers of entry. People who propose stuff like this should be flogged, or worse.

I don't know which particle it would be, but basically cosmis rays can flip bits. Fortunately, ECC will generally correct this--most times--In the below writeup, IBM is advocating why their advanced ECC chipkill is something that would be very relevant for highly critical servers. The big brand servers basically all use chipkill now.

IBM directly seems to be charging for these reports, but the writeup here.

http://www.ece.umd.edu/courses/enee759h.S2003/references/ibm_chipkill.pdf

Where have you been? they've been blending the content for years. Have you not noticed those annoying mouse over pop ups quite a large number of advertisers use for keywords embedded in articles?

I don't know about you, but i often use my mouse to follow where i read, and before adblockplus came into my life, i wanted to punch my monitor every time i was mined by one of those things.

as you say, 4 light years to the closest star... how fast can we actually propel something with today's technology? It's a ridiculously low % of C as i understand it...then we have to slow it down, so as not to destroy our precious payload in a high-speed impact, or flyby.

The way i see it, without an absolute breakthrough... the only thing I can imagine feasible are purely mechanical probes.

When traveling at such ridiculously low percentages of C, it'll take many thousands of years to visit all but the closest stars--likely even that kind of time for our closest star. Whats the life expectancy of a million dollar o-ring? How long could a bank of computers be designed to operate for before too many units fail from too many cosmic ray hits?

Given today's technology, or even increasing speeds by 10x what we can do with today's technology, I'm having a hard time imagining anything realistic.

If we ever got to the point of creating effective Von Neumann probes (and i think we will) that could make serious exploration, perhaps colonization, possible, across a many thousand year time span.

If we ever got to a point where Terraforming makes something habitable, then perhaps few batches of test-tube baby deployments could be considered. Anything less than a terraformed world, and I'd call it cruel to stick someone unwillingly inside of a can for their whole lives.

I disagree,

When you're a business with a large deployment of PC's, it's ideal to have a uniform platform.

It then gets absolutely unreasonable to upgrade 1000 machines just because the OS manufacturer decided they want to make more money, and wont support your platform after just a handful of years of implementing it.

Also, many software vendors will not even officially support new OS's/IE versions for multiple years after their released.... and if their not supported by the vendor, the business will not willingly jump on board. So it's very likely a business wont even start to deploy the next new OS for 3 years after it's released.

With the monopoly that Microsoft has with their product in the business world, they need to realize that these fast version releases in the desktop alienate everyone from IT to bean counters to management to users.

Vista should not have had a "business" or AD join able version.

I agree,

It seems foolish on so many levels to have this kind of crucial infrastructure on a non-isolated network.

i don't understand why many of these countries (the US included) don't make a provision where an absent vote equals a no vote. this would put a dead stop on laws 'sneaking' through in this manner.

This also makes the politician BE THERE regularly, to do, you know, their job. Otherwise, they get get flagged as voting NO for some such vote or another.

Seems like a win win situation for the public.... but then the politician would actually have to do their job...Ohhh! now i get why this system's not widely implemented. i just had to talk myself through this one.

i find it impressive they have all that hardware for a mere 200k users a day.

Yet, somehow, IBM manages to continually make gobs and gobs of money.

You dont seem to be too familiar with vmware, and it's lack of single points of failure when implemented correctly. Sure, something can fai, but everything else should be able to pickup the slack.

Also, when you're paying per CPU 3K for Vmware licenses, another 3k for MS datacenter licenses, and who knows how much for each license on on each virtual server instance.... that extra 30 watts you're worried about is NOTHING if you can cram 2 more virtual servers onto a CPU.

If it were earlier in the year, and given a choice, i feel many people coming from a moderate climate would surely consider death a viable option versus going to somewhere as cold as duluth.

I feel there's little enough to worry about.

If we first world countries wholly adopt and practice these genetic screenings on a hugely wide scale, and all end up dying horribly because we breed out some UNKNOWN DANGER WILL ROBINSON, then at least we'll have also helped to bring 3rd world citizens out of poverty, since they'll get to inherit everything we had.

I really wonder if it'll help reduce genitic diversity or increase it.

I say this because "rare" traits are often considered attractive traits. a perfect example is red-headed hair. Everyone i know finds ginger ladies quite attractive. Or foreigners, if you ever lived in the Midwest monoculture. Whenever there's a foreigner around, a lot of people will acknowledge their attractiveness.

Now, for how much 'superficial' traits as skin/eye/hair color play a role in the core of genetic's. i do not know.

There is one other HUGE upside to this. Imagine if you have a certain genetic condition, causes you lots of problems. Most people wouldnt say "I'm going to do my part to eliminate this disease from the population by choosing not to have children" that's frankly absurd, and most people would still have kids and hope for the best. This is a HUGE thing for helping to eliminate certain diseases from out population, and helping to reduce the suffering of peoples as a whole.

Now, I'm not saying you're flat out wrong...weather some of these 'diseases' are genetic adaptions just half implemented by nature is anyone's guess.

When i hear about this kind of stuff, i often think it would be incredibly neat to just peek into the future and see where humanity ends up in 100,000 years--or if we're around even.

If i were your employer, I'd fire your ars for not backing up "terabytes of data" before attempting to encrypt it.