I'll agree that certain distros are highly insecure, but equally there are hardened distros that will run essentially the same software. Obviously, software that violates security protocols won't run under a hardened distro (if the distro is any good, that is!) so it's not 100% the same. The lead between Windows and Linux should really be measured from "useful best to useful best" rather than "OTS to OTS" (since nobody runs OTS in practice, all systems are tweaked in some fashion) or "worst to worst" (since all OS' in their worst configuration have no security at all). I would dispute the idea that the best Windows configs are orders of magnitude closer to the best Linux configs, in their hardest configurations - GRSecurity + RBACS + Linux Capabilites + Netfilter + L7 Routing is still a very tough combination to beat in terms of the level of granularity of control. It certainly beats Windows' permissions families plus Windows' firewall in terms of what you can do and what you can restrict.

Agreed that Linux is not a magic security bullet. I wouldn't agree that no OS is unbreakable -- no -useful- OS is unbreakable, yes, but it's quite possible to make a useless OS that's unbreakable. Although, as Microsoft has found, it's also possible to make a useless OS that's very breakable indeed.

Put a hardened Windows system and a hardened Linux system in the same room, then run just standard vulnerability scanners over them. I am willing to bet cold hard cash that the Windows system will be flagged as having potential problems and that the Linux system will not.

(How do I define "hardened"? Microsoft has a free tool that tells you if the system is running in a hardened configuration. For Linux, start with a security distro that includes GRSecurity and/or RBACS and essentially follow the same procedures as advised by Microsoft. If you want specific instructions, the NSA have a guide on how to harden Linux - and indeed how to harden Windows. To be fair, you should apply both.)

Define "business applications" in your context. For many years, "Exchange" was considered a "business application" that "could not run under Linux" - which, whilst technically true, was also technically false since oGo and other near-100% Exchange clones have been around for a long time. SQL Server is only marginally acceptable, as tools like "Dezign for Databases" will transliterate SQL Server databases into other database syntaxes and there's really very little that SQL Server can do that cannot be reproduced by any means whatsoever on Ingres, Oracle, DB/2, Informix or PostgreSQL - all of which run perfectly well under Linux. (You only need one server that supports what you need to do, so it is an "or" not an "and".)

For the most part, that leaves web-based applications (which, by definition, will run on any desktop) and "office productivity tools" (aka "office maiming tools"), most of which either have clones or will run directly. In the case of MS Office, both. (Yes, Office can be run under Linux.)

Because anything that runs under OS/X will be IBCS-compliant, anything that runs under OS/X can be made to run natively (not emulated, NATIVELY) under Linux, although that would require that IBCS support be reintroduced.

I thought it was cowbell.

There are many, many genes involved in different forms of cancer, the most this will do is impact research in a few forms of the disease.

Immortality would get tedious after a while. What you really want is a method to transcribe the contents of the brain plus the original genome of the body, altered to include a flesh-eating component that is normally inactive. When the body inevitably wears out, you make a few adjustments to the genome to prevent that cause of death killing you again. You then make the stem cell "carnivorous", using the raw material of your old body to create a new one, re-inserting "you" into the new brain in the process.

I call this technique "regeneration" and think that, in the interests of population control, people should be limited to 12 of them.

On the other hand, Shakyamuni Buddha lived into his 80s, Jean Manual Fangio only gave up professional motor racing in his 90s, and the Queen Mother was conducting human experiments on the effects of gin past the century mark.

Yeah, but that's how you can regulate anything.

Agreed. Who has the patent on Soylent Green?

There are good reasons and bad reasons for hiring inexperienced programmers. The bad reason is that they're cheap and willing to put up with a lot of crap. The good reason is that they haven't picked up very many bad habits yet. It's usually easier to teach someone good habits than it is to persuade someone to unlearn bad ones. If you're willing to put in effort in terms of mentorship and training, and then make sure that your work environment encourages them to stick around so you reap the rewards, then hiring inexperienced programmer can be a good idea. I can think of a very small number of companies that do this, but they tend to do well. Of course, this requires that you also hire some good, experienced programmers to bootstrap the process...

NT 4 ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha. The Alpha version included FX32!, which allowed you to run x86 binaries, in many cases faster than on any shipping x86 chip at the time. Very few places, however, actually needed 64-bit CPUs at the time, and so there wasn't much native code available. If there had been a demand for 64-bit Windows and no x86-64, I am certain Microsoft would have delivered something. Remember, .NET was originally conceived as a contingency plan for making Windows applications architecture-agnostic in case Intel failed to deliver with Itanium...

It also helped that the (region 2, at least) DVDs of Babylon 5 were cheap. At launch, play.com had each series for about £20. £100 for the whole set, spread over a few years (I think they released one series every 9 months) was a simple choice for anyone who enjoyed the series. They now sell the entire series (5 seasons) for £42 - £1/disk. In contrast, the original series of Star Trek is £41 (for 3 seasons, 23 disks) for £42, and TNG is £111 (7 seasons, 49 disks), although you can get them for about £70 if you buy one season at a time. I was actually quite surprised by the TNG prices, as they were about £35/season last time I looked - at launch they were almost twice the price of B5. The BBC seemed to be having a laugh when they released Blake's 7 on DVD - something like £2.50/episode (I remember paying about £6/episode to get about half of them on VHS as a teenager, but it still felt overpriced).