So, for example, Flash as a browser plugin is a failed experiment? I think not. There's reality and then there's idealism. Nothing wrong with the latter, but the former is pretty much unaffected by it. If you believe in it strongly enough, you can attempt to change the reality. Build something and see if enough others find it worthwhile. Kind of like what these guys are trying to do with WebVision. Even if the project you reference was hugely successful, there's nothing wrong with competition.

While it's an accomplishment (overlooking the obvious health concerns), this is a good example of applying technology to solving the wrong problem. Why do we type, why do we use letters? To communicate. If we no longer need to type (the mechanical equivalent of writing with a pen), we might not need to use letters anymore. To better visualize this, say you have the above system installed .. er, onto your brain (ouch!). Why not just save the raw outputs and allow the data to be processed in other ways? It would be one step closer to saving and communicating thoughts directly. A legacy interface to the data would be to spit out letters/words/sentences.

Making humans think about letters is a huge waste of potential, it's like trying to kill a fly with a bomb.

Outsourcing pollution = smart.

Since you're both human, you both express the view of.. us.

'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'

Linux has much more basic problems it needs addressed before "widespread" adoption can happen. The fact that the development community is so broken also doesn't bode well for its adoption on the desktop - you have to "get it" that it doesn't matter what it does under the hood as long as it works. As long as the current crop of geeks that cling onto every little technical detail continue to be in charge, the bigger picture will continue to be missed and desktop Linux will continue to be an impossibility for your average user.

You can wait until the average user is savvy enough to be able to fix the various technical problems Linux has on the desktop, but me thinks that by that time the whole issue will be irrelevant, and people who can put up with all the crap will refuse to do so, simply because they don't have to and it's a big waste of time.

"Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status?"

When I started running 7 years ago, I invested in all sorts of gadgets such as a heart rate monitor (HRM). I wore a chest strap that sent a signal to my watch which displayed my heart rate in real-time, as well as log it for further analysis/graphing on a PC post-run.

That was all fine & dandy, and fun, and somewhat of a motivator to keep on running during that early stage, which is a good thing. But once I got serious about it, I simply stopped caring about the gadgets. I got extremely healthy and now know my body well enough to judge how I'm doing w/o electronics.

I think the key is to live healthy. This is hard. Eating potato chips on the couch while watching TV and having a robot monitor your vital signs for imminent organ failure is not. Unfortunately, the majority will fall into the latter category. Natural selection?

This is to address the older ppl here who disagree.

Let me post "my specs" first: I'm 30 although I feel older in thought. I am not afraid of change. I think older generations are at least somewhat wiser than today's generations, including my own, and I think that's due mostly to technology and how it's changed the average person's life to be more about quantity/instant gratification. I think that my generation and those younger than mine are extremely narrow-sighted and are more likely to be easily controlled as a herd than, for example, my parents' generation. To use a cliche, today's generations are ever more faithful to the Matrix societal model.

However, just because I think there is a better way, that we could do better, we could live better, we can more fully develop as humans, it does not change reality one bit. Reality is only one way and it is brutally honest. The ones dreaming about paper making a comeback are living in fantasy land. Nobody's going to use paper in a short while. That may be a good or a bad thing, but it's irrelevant to reality. People are no longer learning cursive writing. Good or bad? Doesn't matter to reality.

To address the OP, the only reason datacenters are not deprecated right now it's because there isn't a better solution. That's reality. People are not spending money on data centers because they like the idea, or because they fancy the term "data center." They are doing it because it is a solution to a practical problem they are faced with. Until "drill bits" and these "so small" computers can provide a reliable service with an SLA (and remember, this would all have to happen over these magical wireless networks we keep hearing about, which we all know are rock-solid, and should be your transport of choice for your credit-card-collecting e-commerce website), data centers won't be deprecated. This is reality. As cool and new-age and web20 and ajaxy and lofty this idea may sound, it's not here and it's nowhere near. I don't see it ever happening, not because I like data centers but because I think some other method of delivery will become king when data centers will be deprecated. What that method is, I dunno, or I do know but I'm not telling because I want to be rich (and that's reality).