So when is disruptive innovation good? I feel that it has become all too convenient to choose when it is socially acceptable and when it is the worst thing ever.

It seems like we think that when it comes out as new shiny thing that looks like Davey v. Goliath that is a good thing. But when Davey becomes the new Goliath, that is bad.

I have worked with a large company that had a lot of Lotus Notes applications that caused all kinds of migration issues. Lots of pain, suffering, angst and failure moving to another platform if they found one.

The craziest part of the whole story is they chose to move to Sharepoint for a lot of their migrations.

Once again Microsoft has found a way to rebrand Lotus technology / software and claim it new.

I have managed Linux servers in a professional environment for 20 years and for "production" environments I highly recommend paying for support.

I have had the good fortune of getting a tech on the phone to handle issues that were solved by the people that know the software the best. Red Hat and SUSE both employ top notch support folks. I have not experienced any others, I would expect they are also quite good. Talking to another tech on the phone that you can trust is totally worth it to you and the business that you are working for.

Contrast that with hoping that someone has had the problem you are trying to solve and has solved it and has posted to a forum you search is just not the route to go. In my opinion, you should not allow a business to make this choice. It is insurance and not a guarantee of success but that is why the business pays for it and other types of insurance.

Also these paid support contracts help fund the open source world and are, again in my opinion, the responsibility of a business using open source software.

Or floating point operations / watt?

If this could be applied to my checking account I might be able to pay for my kids education before they graduate!

If it was applied to my weight I would loose the weight of the snack before it hit my stomach!

Hair loss could be a thing of the past?

If your resume cannot be formated in anything other than MS Office, your resume might need some more work that formatting.

Yep that is one cool tiny gizmo. I know that it is an over used meme but what if you did have a Beowulf cluster of these? Strip away the packaging and fill a rack with these tiny machines and set up a cluster. Or for that matter a room full of them, how would these scale?

Except building a house is a one time endeavor. A better analogy would be to build a house on the foundation of another house and then remodel it a dozen times and then add on a few additions. Soon there after divorce your spouse and find another to guide the new additions and find another site upon which you can move that house to and hopefully not have to deal with that awful foundation.

So you can choose which mail server or java vm you use but not which syslog daemon you want to use?

How many people are just using a browser to do whatever they do on a PC? Whatever else they do there is an icon on the Desktop for launching the program. A business user might have some special apps but average users have a very small selection. Except of course gamers and even those are starting die off.

So lets say that you have this super secret network smartphone and you had a super secret topic that you wanted to talk about with another super secret person. Where could you have this discussion and should you even be talking out loud? Wouldn't you need to be in a building somewhere that has sound insulation, or some other mechanism to keep your voice from being picked up from some other microphone than the one on your super secret smart phone? Or is it a fancy camera phone and not meant for voice? I hope that the camera is better than the one on my smartphone.....

World renown philosopher who wrote many well received books on his thoughts, changed whole countries and inspired uncounted multitudes, MAY have had a point? Here we are staring at the very brink of capitalism collapsing and I am guessing that he is laughing in his grave.
Sure communism has not worked out in the end, which I believe is a failing of humanity not the ideal, however it is completely condescending to sum up in such a title.

To say that these things can not make anything useful is very far from correct. Checkout RepRap which is a very similar device to makerbot. Its firmware has the code built in to print the parts it is made from and is one of the tenants of the project. The video on the RepRap home page explaining the project is brilliant. These projects are indeed very worthy of getting funded.

The problem that needs to be solved is the reason for the spark. The reason for the spark is the need for the ignition of fuel. Switching to laser beam driven electron motors would be crazy cool (or whatever other cool use there is for a laser in an electric motor if there is one). "Fixing" something that is not broke with a gadget that needs to bought (and thus sold) seems like a great idea for an infomercial, not a solution to the worlds problems.