Purchased by who? Vendors of new PCs and residents of asylums around the world? No one cares! Maybe, just maybe, more machines will be running Windows 7 than Windows XP shortly. Since no one is running it, no one is looking for vulnerabilities, ergo no malware.

But you'll probably have to. Especially if get the wife-kids-house going. I took a difficult comp sci class and got a B. A year later I ran into someone who was also in the class. She got an A. I could remember everything and she could remember nothing. College is to many people a sort of intellectual bulemia. Cram and puke. Get a good grade, remember nothing and don't care. You can always teach yourself later if you need it. Pursue what you like - whether it's math, comp sci, physics, carpentry, or anything else. You can't go wrong. If you pursue money, degrees, academic status, etc. then you have a problem with your perception of yourself. You see yourself as needing something to improve your self-worth. Self-esteem problems. But the world generally doesn't see it that way. Tony Robbins is making a lot of money feeding the pathology of neurotics. I like people who just crave knowledge and suck up as much as they can. Usually they have some general focus areas but they go after everything they come across. They're usually seen as crazy in some way but of course everyone's nuts, it's just a matter of taste. My girlfriend and I have a house where she teaches piano and violin (Juilliard, doctorate, etc.), I'm off consulting where I'm at a large corporation doing database work but not kissing anyone's ass and at night I have a condo full of computers in some stage of design, build, modification and programming. I'm gonzo, batshit crazy but holding down a full-time job. I tell people my long-term goal is galactic domination (actually I've always wanted to be the sadistic warden of a women's prison) and that I'm doing research on time travel or building an anti-gravity device. I could say that I can calculate the distance to the nearest exact duplicate of earth and everything on it or I could engineer a rabbit with a jellyfish gene that makes it glow purple in the dark. But that's all been done before.

Other names for commercial products are as bad or worse. Except perhaps the "Total Bitch" line of hair products. It would be great to work in marketing, coming up with names. Like working for the Onion or the National Enquirer. You go in a room with a box of botanical matter just shipped in from the Amazon and try to think up the weirdest stuff you can. "Pickup Truck Found on Moon". Name everything using the latin names of insect body parts. Quechua names for medicinal plants. Papiamentu words for female body parts. Those would be consistent.

I miss just holding it.

Runs on an interpreter = raw speed? You have lost your mind. You really ought to look into how computers work. At least C++ is compiled. Java sucks. Java promised code reuse - not only is there no code reuse but changes to Java mean that 30% of Java programmer time is spent maintaining legacy code. Infrastructure, how many different infrastructure components have you gone through? Is it more than 10? Bjarne Stroustrup said "C lets you shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder but if you do it blows your whole leg off." There is a clue in there. C++, Java and OOP in general were created to keep mediocre programmers from screwing up too much. Carnegie Mellon has dropped OOP as a requirement for Comp Sci saying that it's outdated and will no longer be useful with modern hardware. Done any heterogeneous parallel programming? Are you comfortable with non-deterministic code? I'm 63 and you young turks remind me of the COBOL programmers at the home for ossifying techies. Gotta keep movin' son.

"C++ is a horrible language." - Linus Torvalds

Snake pits, punji stakes, tar traps....no need to go high tech after millennia of innovative approaches.

I say that first we give him a fair trial and then we hang him. Gives 'em time to build a solid scaffold too.

It's as quaint as a sextant.

A safe, clean, reliable, inexpensive source of energy many orders of magnitude greater than anything we have is (or could be) a solution to many of our problems, economic and environmental. Lowering costs of everything means, well, a lot. Better world standard of living, health care, food supply....it goes on. The future of manned space exploration depends on this. Without a new, very powerful source of energy, we aren't going anywhere. Is fusion the answer? Is it the answer? Is it at least a step in the right direction?

Read about how a quantum computer works in the literature and then look at what this machine does. Two totally different things. Interesting, promising, a worthy endeavor - yes. Maybe a new use for the word, a new type of quantum computer. But not what you probably think.

Me being chased by a rabid Wolverine.

Bjorne Stroustrup: "A single-threaded, nonvectorized, non-GPU-utilizing application has access to roughly 0.4% of the compute power available on the device."

Disable cloaking device too.