Nuts *might benefit* from better health care. But also, it would be best if nuts couldn't get easy access to guns.

If guns and ammos are available in supermarkets and if people can store any weapon they want at home, if a crazies snaps, he can immediatly grab the nearest weapon and go on a rampage.
An impulsive idea can immediately be but in action.

On the other hand, with gun control laws, the acquisition of weapon might require complex paperwork, and guns able to find big number of ammos might be required to be stored at the armoury. If a crazies snaps, he can't immediatly act his rage out. He first needs to jump through the necessary hoops in order to get access to his weapon (either going through all the steps required to buy one, or having to go get back the weapon from its storage while filling the necessary paperwork). This takes time, and this delay might be enough to unwind the crazy.
An impulse can't immediatly be put into action, and by the time the crazies finishes preparing his stuff, the anger could probably have gone down.

Gun control laws aren't here to stop criminal organising a robbery (determined criminals will always be able to get access to a gun).
Gun control are here to slow down/delay some nut going postal and give them time to think again about their actions.

http://youtube.com/html5
to manually enable/disable HTML5 video.
if you're logged in, this preference can even be saved.

Youtube automatically detects which codecs are supported (Chrome and Firefox both support WebM. Chrome also supports H.264. Older versions of Firefox don't (due to licensing restrictions), newer version of Firefox will tap into whatever system codecs is available for firefox to use: GStreamer on Linux, DirectShow in Windows, hardware codecs wherever supported).

Also, video ads require flash to play.

If we take your example of "fake windows":

- most Linux based embed systems with a Unix-like userland, would be the equivalent of taking Windows "XPe" keeping it almost as-is, disabling only the shell, and using firefox as a shell instead. Or taking a Windows Server. and installing it in "headless" mode, not running any graphical interface, but running in command-line mode.
It doesn't visually look at all like a regular Windows, but under the hood most of the pieces are here. It still uses Aero and/or DirectX for graphics and sound, CMD is there if you need it, etc.

99% of the files are the same, even if visually there's a lot of difference.

- Android, and the firmware of a few NASes and Media Players, would be the equivalent of only using a small subset of the ".SYS" files of Windows (the various peace of the kernel), only those for accessing hardware, filesystems, task switching, etc. Absolutely everything else is replaced by a huge custom .EXE (and its attached .DLLs) no trace of anything from the original Windows beyond the kernel (these NASes and media player usually take over from the INIT process it self and provide a huge custom monolithic stuff from this point onward. To keep the metaphor, this .EXE+few .DLL is entirely written in .NET because C# is popular (Android use massively Java because its popular). But instead of compiled to bytecode running on the classical .NET DLR virtual machine it runs uses Perl6's ParrotVM :-P (Android doesn't use the JVM, it use its own Dalvik).

Only a couple of .SYS files inside "system32" are shared is a regular Windows. Most of the rest is taken care of in this big weird .NET .EXE. It doesn't even have support for Win32 api.

I agree. But back in 2003 when the development started, the main constraints for anybody in this field was: there's no way to cram a full Unix environment in a mere phone, its a crazy idae and an awful waste of resource, no current phone hardware could sustain this. Let's instead implement everything we need in a light-weight userland that we're writing from scratch. (And lets use something similar to Java for it, because it's popular and enterprisy)

Not only is the terminal window missing (because as you say 99% of the users don't give a shit about it). But absolutely everything under the hood is missing.

Unlike other people rambling in this thread, I never accused Google of being anti-FOSS.

I just responded to the discussion: the parent was astonished that Android was considered limited by some. His argument being: you can run anything you want and this is all thank to Android "being Linux".
My counter argument are: unlike any other regular Linux distribution, Android doesn't share much in common beyond the kernel. What is usually done by the regular Unix-like stack in any random other distro, is handled by parts in the the Java-like userland.
You can run anything you want, but for most stuff you'll need to put back that regular Linux stack for this to function.

And this brings us back to what the parent posters were speaking about before I jump in:
Android is an appliance OS and indeed is designed with a completely different scope in mind. And in fact, "out-of-the-box" is designed to run a less vast gamut of software than what a Linux distro can.

That's what I've said, too.

Yes and no.

Your comment is correct regarding things like the C library. Currently Android uses google's own Bionic. Previously it had used components coming from the GNU ecosystem. Among the reason why google developed it, the license is indeed one of them: Bionic come from the BSD userland and is BSD licensed, thus giving more freedom to 3rd party to hack it without needing to publish their modifications. (But thus restricting the freedom to hack of the end users themselves). On the other hand, the predecessor inside android, glibc had several short comings too. (eglibc, which tries to adress several of these shortcomings, notably by being easier to port on embed architecture, and being easier to build a lightweight version by disabling features, only started to gain acceptance later).

But for the rest, that isn't exactly the case.

Android started being developed almost 10 years ago (2003).
As a reference, iOS got released officially in 2007. And even if it was the same usual BSD-derivative architecture under the hood (with only a different user interface and application layer slapped on it), the user-facing elements were designed with non-multi-tasking in mind.
As another reference, in the Palm/Handspring world, from 2002 until 2005, Treo were running PalmOS (a OS that I personally appreciate a lot, having own palm IIIc and T3) which is not even multi-tasking (Palm OS 5 did introduce some very limited forms of multi-tasking). Windows Mobile (as shitty as it is, at least is truely multitasking) was only introduced in 2006.

Back then, smartphones weren't that much popular yet. Most of the phone were simply feature phones. Most of the phones didn't have that much processing power anyway.
Putting a whole unix platform on a phone was considered insane: its a huge overkill of resource.
If you're doing a firmware for a phone, most likely you're making a big monolithic app. You're not trying to cram a whole workstation OS inside a phone (Nokia's Maemo/Meego got such a huge popularity among geeks when it was released in 2005 exactly because of that: Unlike everyone else back then, Nokia successfully managed to cram a whole Linux distribution with the whole stack into a pocket device. And this device still wasn't mainstream/typical even when it was released).
If a phone happened to "run Linux", it would most likely be only the kernel (to leverage its hackability and to use the capabilities of the kernel itself: resource management, filesystem access, etc.) and over it, instead of a whole linux workstation stack, you just found a big monolith. (Very often Java was popular in this bundle). Motorola's RAZR2 is a nice example of that. It uses a Linux kernel. It was released later (2007) so it contains much more pieces of actual Linux (they could afford more) but the biggest part is still a blob.

So back in 2003, when developer started working on Android, they did what everyone found logical in this field:
- They took the Linux kernel because its nice, customisable and contains lots of well tested parts (ressource management, file system, etc.)
- They made a big blob to run on it.
- Java being popular a lot, they created the java-like dalvik.

They didn't as much replace one by one the various part of the usual linux userland with inhouse stuff because of the license, as much as they simply refused to start using them in the first place, because back in 2003 cramming an actual linux stack inside a feature phone sounded like an impossible idea (due to the limited resource) and looked really stupid. Writing your phone firmware as a big single program or collection of programs runing on a bare kernel was the norm and what everybody was doing due to the limited capabilities of the hardware.

Interestingly Palm webOS started its life the same way:
as "Nova" a light-weight OS from Pixo. But for various reasons (development dragged. such custom lightweight OSes are difficult and cumbersome to program due to various tradeofs. you need to reinvent the wheel for everything) this was progressively scaled back (in the first released webOS device, Nova is reduced to a middle ware handling a few stuff. The rest of the OS is a pretty much a regular Linux stack, except for the UI. But this UI is based around webkit so even this use widespread parts, because of ease of development [the cited exemple is that centering text in the interface in Nova take 5 lignes of code. in the final webOS its just HTML getting centered by regular Webkit. Speak of an improvement]). By 2009 when the first Pre arrived, using as much regular linux component as possible (like, for exemple, using pulseaudio for audio routing/mixing) was realistically possible, and was a nice idea (re-use the usual proven modules, instead of reinventing the wheel poorly and inefficiently)

So to go back to Android: Android use a different userland than most distro. Not because google replaced each piece one by one to get rid of the GPL license (otherwise they would have replaced the kernel by now). But because of the unusual roots of Android: it started its life at a time when everyone rolled their own lightweight in-house system. Android started as such a in-house system, designed aroudn a Java-like Dalvik, which just happened to run above a linux kernel.

Under regular conditions, its in the range of minutes, maybe up to hours.
RNA isn't that stable. (In labs, it needs to be handled specially. You need to either freeze it a deep temperatures (you put your RNA samples in the -80C freezer) or copy/convert it to DNA (use a reverse-transcriptase to make much more stable DNA out of it).

...as in one birds poops into the water while another is drinking (= oro-fecal pathway I mentioned 2 levels higher in the thread). Not as in 2 birds which happen to drink from the same river a few apart. You need a time frame of a few minutes up to a couple of hours max.
(In birds, poop contains the biggest amount of virus, and as it moist and protects from light, viruses have the highest chance for surviving a longer time).

It's the bird's equivalent of humans sneezing on each other's face. (You can catch flu this way. Whereas, your risks of catching flu by walking in the same room as where someone sneeze the day before are bleak) (in humans that's aerosol/particulate transmission).

By the time the chicken reaches the kitchen, most of the virus will probably have died/become inactive. Chance of transmission at this point in the chain of the poultry production are low. But are much higher at the other side of the chain.
At some point of time the dead chicken in your dish (and in the kitchen of the restaurant where you're eating) used to be alive (I realise that I'm starting to sound like a Monthy Python's sketch).
This chicken has been slaughtered, de feathered, butchered and otherwise conditioned before being sent to the restaurant.
At that point of time, the chicken was alive not so long ago (so there should be still active virus in it), and the whole preparation is bound to release quite a lot of the virus in the air. People working at this point in the chain (very often the farmers themselves) are at a higher risk.

We're still speaking of only a dozen of people per year, though.

Now the problem is that this transmission (bird-to-human) is so rare, that we don't really have enough stats to support this kind of conclusion. All I can say is that all the bird-to-human transmission I've heard about in the past were in people handling the birds (farmers, and the like), none of them were people working in the kitchen of restaurants service poultry, nor people eating chicken.
But well, with such a small pool (a dozen of cases per year) nothing is really 100% sure. We definitely lack enough data to give the exact life-time of a virus, or the odds of infection at each precise stage of poultry preparation, between the farm all the way to your dish.

And any way, this is bio science, not hardcore-hard science. Anything can happen anyway (although we're slowly drifting into the kind of "anything" territory, as western people in big city catching malaria although they've never travelled abroad ever, but just happen to live near an airport, and managed to get bitten by a mosquito which travelled all the way from Africa while trapped on a plain. This kind of Rube Goldbergesque situation does happen, but we're speaking single-digit amount of cases in total)

Yup, a dozen of people caught the disease, out of whom 6 died.

Now to put things into perspective, according to WHO, each season, regular human flu infection gets *half a dozen millions* of individuals out of which *up to half a million* die.

The number of "bird flu in humans" is so small that it looks like a fluke. As I said before :

Life sciences are not hardcore-hard sciences. You can never say "never" nor "always". There will always be some weird exception. If you start digging literature for weird case reports you could probably even find single digit occurrences of probable infection by things for which we aren't even the normally taxonomic phylum (who knows that one single virus might have a just that critical mutation just right before jumping onto you). FFS, the human genome contains genes which originally come from life forms to which we aren't even evolutionarily related (if you're curious, it's called "Horizontal Gene Transfer", normally *bacteria* are the ones doing it a lot, but well, never say "never", apparently even the human genome stole a few genes this way).

If you're that much concerned about getting avian flu, go play the lottery instead. Your odds are better at winning cash than catching bird-cold.

Now to back to the poor schmucks who died of avian flu:
- They are people who get exposed to birds a lot (I mention farmers, DigiShaman mentions cock fighting handlers). They get exposed tu much more massive amount of virus. More viruses are playing the "let's try to hop to a human" game, odds of 1 of them winning this game are higher.
- As I mentioned before, these aren't rich westerner in a big modern rich city, they are poor guys in backwaters. Once these get sick, they don't have an as easy access to proper treatments as the former. And risks to get a complication (pneumonia) are higher for them.
(- And for the biologically inclined there might be a - though less important, but interesting - 3rd factor. As this is a bird disease, it looks a lot less like previous seasons' flu than the regular human flu, and thus the white blood cells have a lot less "prior knowledge" to leverage in fighting this peculiar disease. In biological term: chances are lower that one of the "memory B and T cells" have a receptor which more or less works a tiny bit with the newer virus. Same reasons why the last swine flu could more easily infect younger people than the previous flu: it didn't look like anything we've seen since in the last 60 years).

So even if you managed to win the lottery and catch avian flu:
- your personal odds at surviving it are much higher as you'll seek a doctor if you don't feel well and you do have access to proper medication.
- you will probably NOT be dangerous to people around you: the 1 virus who got you has had an enormous chance of managing to infect you across specie barrier. To infect another human, it would need to have the same luck twice in a row. *very-very-very* unlikely... but...
- ...if you happen to have a normal human flu virus inside you at the same time, due to the special way in which influenza genetics works, then there's a risk that both will mix and produce a hybrid which has the human flu's ability to bind to and infect human cells easily.
(Same logic as above also applies to pigs but with a much higher risk for them catching a bird flu)

So I stand by what I've said before:

Yup, I happen to have a medical degree, and an additional degree in bioinformatics, if that's of any interest for you.

This is one of the few cases where RMS's rambling about GNU and how distros should be called "GNU/Linux" actually makes sense.

LINUX is only a KERNEL.
As in the stuff that directly talks to your hardware and handles low-level stuff.

Above this kernel, you need a "userland" actual regular programs which are called.
And Android DOES NOT use the same GNU userland as most distributions.
Whereas regular distribution are "GNU/Linux" (i.e.: runs the Linux kernel and a bunch of userland program, lots from the GNU project [for low-level stuff like C library, shell, etc.], but quite a lots of other stuff [KDE, Firefox, LibreOffice.org]) and are fully POSIX compatible and can run almost any general purpose UNIX software out of the box (as long it was compiled for it), Android is Linux kernel + a very special userland made by Google (among which the most well known part is the Dalvik java-like environment. Even the C library is Google's own Bionic instead of the usual glibc, ulibc and other forks).
Out-of-the box, Android doesn't run most Unix software because several parts are missing.

(This is different from other mobile OS: Maemo/Meego/whatever-the-nom-du-jour-is, OpenMoko's SHR, Palm/HP WebOS, etc. all run a normal GNU/Linux stack, although in WebOS case, it uses a non standard gui instead of X.
Even router provide a unix like environment, only using more light-wieght embed-friendly components like Busyboy and ulibc or eglibc and without a graphic interface at all)

Again, the usual user-land, the "GNU/" part of "GNU/Linux" is missing.

That's what your compensating by running a Debian chroot. You provide the missing userland.

You share the same kernel (Linux), but run a different set of userland programs on it. You provied a C library (I think Debian moved to eglibc ?) a shell, and hundreds of other part that make the userland environment. You provide back the "GNU/" part of "GNU/Linux".
And now, thanks to all the pieces provided by your chroot, you can run any Unix code.

Now, indeed, this is possible because Android uses the Linux kernel as a foundation, and its opensource make it possible to port a Debian userland to Android and run it along the normal system. So in a way you're right.

But I insist, Android is unlike any other GNU/Linux distribution around. (And until recently, it needed some special kernel functions that weren't in stock kernels).

This is unlike other Linux based mobile device, which already are based mostly on these pieces. You don't need to provide them. You can already run most of what you want on Maemo/Meego, OpenMoko, webOS based device (except for the part of webOS lacking X out of the box).

Out of the box, an Android machine is designed to run the default apps packaged with it and to fetch special android-apps from a special app market.

Now, thank to the general openness of the platform, it is possible to repurpose it, but out of the box, this is not your regular Unix-like OS. You need to install a chroot, or at least a lot of userland components.

And that's what the parent was referring to:
- Android stick : runs android, designed to run a few android apps (but you can do more if you want).
- RPi : runs a GNU/Linux disto, designed to pretty much do anything you want out of the box.

Android makes the device limited to run only Android apps out-of-the-box, unless you go out of the way and install the missing userland bit to turn it into a full Unix-like box.
But thanks to the open nature of the Linux kernel, this is actually possible. (It's not a locked down device that needs to be hacked)

Android and the classic Unix-like userland (of debian) are completely orthogonal one to another.

NO. YOU. CAN'T.

First and fore most:
- Influenza is a virus.
- It doesn't have a biochemistry of its own, it must use its host's. outside of a cell it's just an inert object.
- It is produced by one infected cell in the sick individual. And needs to reach a fresh cell within its (short) life time.
(its a virus containing RNA, and not encapsulated in a protein shell but in a lipid membrance. This means it won't survive long without a host cell whose biochemistry to use).
In short: that means that it must be quickly sneezed onto someone else (aerosol and particulate transmission). IT CANNOT STAY LURKING FOR A LONG TIME OUTSIDE IT'S PREVIOUS HOST UNTIL IT MEETS A NEW ONE.
This a *virus* (and a fragile one). Not a *bacteria*, not a *bacteria's spore*. Not a parasite. Nor one of the few more durable viruses wich might, under the right condition, resist a longer time until finding a new host (HIV viruses hidden inside the needle of a used syringe can survive a few hours before finding a new host)

- That means you need a living host, with living cell secreting viruses to transmit it.
- A fried émicé in a nice curry sauce sevred along a side dish of rice *DEFINITELY FAILS* the "living cell" definition.

Also, if you're cooking impaired:
- poultry meat is ALWAYS served thoroughly cooked. chicken are rather filthy animals and if you don't cook their meat, you're at high risk of food poisoning due to parasites, bacteria, and other stuff. Influenza is the least of your problems. YOU CAN'T EAT CHICKEN RAW.
- cooking destroys and sterilise almost anything (the only exception are prions. prions could somewhat survive some amount of cooking and still be able to replicate afterward. mad cow disease CAN BE transmitted by cooked food, but that's an exception)
- viruses will be *COMPLETELY DESTROYED* during the cooking (along with all the other bad stuff. this make the food safe and edible. cooking was invented exactly for this purpose) the only usual risks that remain after cooking are non infectious but chemical (pollution, toxins, poison).

Last but not least:
- Avian flu (H5N1) is *A. BIRD. DISEASE*.
- It's got a Haemagglutinin 5 (H5) on its surface - that's were it's codename comes from.
- H5 binds to bird cell. It can easily infect birds.
- H1, H2 and H3 are the one binding to human cells. You would need on of these to infect humans.
- It can only *very very very rarely* enter a human host, only by sheer luck, almost *by error*. We're speaking about a few dozens of individuals each year during avian flu outbreaks, and this is mostly the poeple who are exposed to birds a lot (the farmers handling them working in the overcrowded farms with thousand of chicken cramed in a small place. not the guy eating a chicken wing).

So even if the virus was magically able to survive a long time outside a living host (it doesn't) AND even if the virus was able to magically survive cooking (it doesn't neither) chance for catching avian flu through eating are close to none.

On the other hand, if you're a poor farmer working daily on a farm with thousands of chickens packed together and if an avian flu epidemic spreads among your flock, there's a small chance for you to catch it to. (And sadly for you, because you're a poor farmer in the backland and not a wealthy citizen in the big city, you will let the disease evolve without treatment, hoping that it will end on its own, and you might have a complication, like a pneumonia).

In short:
- You can catch bird flu, if you're a living bird and another living bird sneeze on you.
(Among birds, the oro-fecal pathway works too. Don't peck neither on other birds' fresh shit)

- You can catch bird flu, if you're a (living) human and you got sneezed on by sick birds several thousand times a day in the tiny overcrowded farm where you work and you are not lucky.
If you're already sick and *really not lucky at all*, you could even father a human-spreading hybrid.
(- same as above, but higher risk rates, if you're a pig).

- You *CAN'T* catch bird flu, if you're a (healthy) human eating a deep fried chicken.

Thank you for repeating the second half of my post.
That explains why an epidemic of flu among chicken is problematic to humans.
Bird flu is not dangerous to humans per se. But if it spreads among birds, you increase the chance of making a hybrid which will be abble to spread among humans.
That's one of the reason will you want to avoid a bird flu epidemic among birds.

As I said, you don't want 1 virus managing to win the mutation/evolution lottery and gain capability to spread among humans.

Read your quote. The problem is not Android it self, the problems are BLOBs (binary large ojects) - big pieces of non-free software that is installed on some machine and is required to run them.

Android it self is open-source. You can get 3rd party modified builds (like CyanogenMod), a sure sign that the freedom to tinker (FSF's and RMS's goals in life) are respected. BUT...

Several ARM chipsets (including the one used in the TFA's motherboard) need a proprietary binary driver for the graphic core. (Some other components, like webcam, and radio interfaces, might need such modules too. Like the camera of HP's phones and tablets. At least for this laptop, TFA's author plan to USB webcams so it would be easy to select some standard UVC cams).

So the stuff installed on an Android phone might not be entirely opensource. You can get a 3rd party firmware, but you're not entirely free to tinker it: you might need non-free bits (mostly the openGL ES modules and drivers) to make it work.

FOR NOW.

People reading sources like Phoronix might have noticed that some mobile GPUs are either getting reverse engineered drivers (similar to Nouveau for Nvidia on the desktop) or even getting collaboration from the original manufacturer (like the opensource drivers for AMD on the desktop).
Lima for Mali, Freedno for Adreno, even Nvidia having released specs and code for the 2D part of Tegra, etc.

So, someday it should be possible to install a fully opensourced variant of Android on your phone/tablet/netbook. Although maybe not with all feature fully functional (it's going to take some time until the opensource drivers are on par with the current closed source BLOBs. And some other parts, like webcams, might still not be opensourced).

I addition to RMS's rant, I should add another problem: DRM/Tivoization. Some devices don't let you install your arbitrary firmware, and require you to jump through hoops in order to be able to run non-signed code. (like the whole story with "Gold-Cards" and replacing the booting firmware on some HTC phones).

As the author/copyright holder of the code of Android, they can do pretty much anything they like with their own code. (as any author holding copyright on any other piece of software can, too. Even Linus could make shit with the few parts of the Linux kernel he holds copyright on. Except that, as the copyright of Linux parts is distributed among lots of authors, the possibilities are much more limited).

In addition to that, the code is licensed under a BSD-like license. 3rd parties using it aren't require to release it either (the phone manufacturer aren't required to publish their modifictaions. Don't hope of HTC releasing their HTC Sense).

Now, the most critical part is the Linux kernel, and due to its GPL licensing, 3rd parties like Google and manufacturer ARE REQUIRED to publish their modifications, and they do.
So anything required to boot an android device (minus binary drivers and DRM as mentioned before) is available, even if you might be limited to use another users space (using stock opensource android, instead of HTC's sense).

As of google delaying releases (well beside the fact that as mentionned before, they have the right to do it being the authors and copyright holder) well:
- They have explained their reasons: Android 3.x was a quickly hacked/cobled together version to have it run on tablets. The code was a hackish mess, they didn't want to publish the code until having cleaned and stabilised it for Android 4.x.
- They have always kept their promise to release code (even if they weren't required to): Android 4x *IS* out.

And most importantly:
free software is above all about the freedom to tinker.
the current situation doesn't prevent these freedom.
even if the manufacturer and/or carrier are assholes and refuse to upgrade the firmware and you're stuck with a buggy Androird 3.x derivative on your device,
you can still get a 3rd party free alternative firmware, and boot your own custimozied linux kernel, with your own compiled andoird 4.x on the device. (like for example a firmware from Cyanogen).

Again, the only limits are availability of drivers as mentioned in your quote of RMS. And DRM making the installation of 3rd party more difficult.
The slowness of google release and a skipped version (again, skipped. as in "there's no public 3.x, wait for the 4.x version very soone". not as in "we'll definitely stop releasing code after 3.x forever") doesn't prevent your freedom, at worse it requires a little bit patience.

I still don't get it why such things are considered "security question".
The only thing they might protect against is a completely blind random automated probing.

And I can't understand why in 2012 anyone would still give actual answers to this question: it take a couple of seconds maximum to find the relevant info on facebook.
If you can't block such security holes, at least use some form of joke or pun: you mother's maiden name is "Chtulhu" or "this is none of your business" as First pet, etc.
If a celebrity use as security measure, an info that 99.9% of her fan know already, she almost deserve to get her nude pic uploaded.

(and that's ignoring the fact that some of them would probably enjoy the free publicity).

Influenza is a virus. It's a thing which spread from one living being to another. It has nothing to do with your food. *You* could eat sicked chicken without any risk as long as it's dead and cooked (and you have to cook poultry thoroughly if you don't want to have a big food poisoning problems anyway).

Also, birdflu is a *BIRD* disease, humans normally don't catch it under normal circumstances. (The 'H5' receptor on the virus only binds to chicken cells. You need H1 or H3 to bind to human cells easily if my memory serves me right) So even if you have a sick chicken in your house, chance are almost nothing would probably happen to you.

The problem is not *you*. The problem with is with the high density of birds in those farms and their massive (over-)population.
If one single chicken catches the bird flu, it can spread very quickly to the whole farm, then neighbouring farm, then the whole region (same as human flu at a workplace in a densely populated area).
If you don't stop the disease today, by killing the 150'000 chicken who were in direct contact with a sick chicken (and could catch it) today, then in a few days, you'll have a dozen of million of sick birds on your hands and a massive epidemiological problem. (Same with humans: If you don't stay at home when you're sick, you're going to make all your colleagues sick and before you know, the whole building housing your workplace is full of cick people).

In addition to that, if there's such a massive amount of virus spreading around, there's a tiny bit of risk that "by error" a virus infects a human who is a lot in contact with the chickens and the bird epidemic (and by "a lot" i really mean "a lot". As in "the farmer who work in the chicken farm everyday". Not as in "some random guy who happen to eat chicken").
For the human him-/her-self this isn't necessarily bad news (in a big city, in theory... sadly we're usually speaking about very poor farmers in remote area, so their accessibility to proper treatment is very likely to be sub-optimal). Nor is it a direct danger for other humans around (it was already a big amount of luck that the *bird* virus managed to infect a human. Jumping from that point onward to another human *again* is like winning a lottery 2 times in a row: *very* unlikely).
But due to the peculiarities of influenza genetics, inside the human the bird flu virus could get mixed with a human flu it the human has it too. (The bird flu stealing the gene for the correct receptor to be able to efficiently bind and infect human cells). The same could also happen inside an animal which could catch both flu at the same time (pigs can occasionally catch bird flu, and pigs can also catch human flu - this a pig could also serve this role of mixer).
And *this* mutant hybrid would be problematic because this new humanized bird flu could cause an epidemic among the human population.

In short, the sick chickens aren't dangerous for humans. They are not killed because of that. The reason they are killed is to stop the bird flu spreading and causing an epidemics among the birds. And also to lower the risk that 1 virus manage to win the lottery and become a human-infecting hybrid and in turn cause a human epidemic.

But the flesh is perfectly edible. You can safely eat chicken, and you can safely take advantage of the lower prices.

(It's a different situation than the mad cow disease.
Mad cow disease is due to a protein, which survives cooking.
Bird flu is due to a virus, which requires a living bird, and doesn't infect humans anyway).

VLC is already modularized. Most of the functionality resides inside a library, and this library has already been ported to ARM CPUs too.

The only thing needed is "just" yet another UI. Next to the classic windows, Mac OS X Quartz, Linux GTK, Linux QT, textmode and a few other less known, they now need to add a metro interface.
It's basically just making new menu/button that work nicely on a metro tile, and connecting them to the already existing portable VLC engine.

That will actually require only a couple of week-ends worth of time.

The rest of the time budget will probably be spent getting everything working together nicely, and ironing out bugs (which *WILL* take a lot more time, specially given the complexity of VLC).

First you have to know which compound of the venom are the active ingredient (a venom is not a single molecule, it's a big mix of lots of substances).

Maybe the important part are just small peptide (works also for small nucleic acid strands). In this case, yes: just slap the gene inside a bacteria or yeast and just harvest the thing in a huge brewery tank. This will cost a tiny fraction of the current method. (as in "a few bucks for a dozen of kilograms"). Washing industry thrives on this kind of process and has already made it fucking incredibly cheap (do you really think that the digestive enzyme in your washing powder where harvested from actual animals ?)

But maybe not. Maybe it can be a complex protein that requires some post processing (chaperone helping to fold it into an unusual shape, enzyme modifying some parts) - (but very unlikely. If the venom can cross the skin without injection, it needs to be something small). Or maybe it can be a small chemical molecule that is produced by a long and complex chain of chemical reaction necessitating a big collection of enzymes (very likely, given that it can easily cross the skin).
In this case you need to identify the candidate, understand the process that produce it (not impossible but it takes time), and then either put the whole machinery inside yeast (bacteria post-process a lot less their proteins) and go for the brewery-tank method, or replicate the synthesis in another way (produce the protein in bacteria and then do the modification in a lab. Or find a way to synthetise the small chemical compound by using a sequence of chemical reactions in a lab) and scale it up to industrial scale.
This *WILL* end up being incredibly cheap in the long term, but requires much more research and development.

There's a whole branch of science to study that, called "Venomics".

Until then, you're stuck at putting bee on a micro electric chair until they are so pissed of that they start stinging the glass.

(And I'm betting that perhaps, all the benefit come from the few traces of adrenalin-like substance that the bee end-up secreting after going through such predicament and of which a small part might end up in the venom itself).

But the fact that they extract only a gram from a whole hive, means that they are probably concentrating/extracting the product already, so they know already a few tips in which direction to look to find the interresting part.

The problem with this is the time that 1 generation takes.
- For bacteria, you can observe a lot interesting stuff happening, because a single generation has a time span between couple of dozens of minute and a hour. On a single day you can get near to 100 generations. Spend just 1 week observing them (a little bit less than a thousand generations), and you can see the effect of lots of generation reproducing and adapting and evolving. (That why bacteria are so problematic regarding antibiotic resistance: they evolve rapidly simply because they live at another time scale).
- All the animals you mention have generations that take a couple of years. To observe the effect of evolution (still aiming for a thousand+ generations), you need quite a lot of generations, over a couple of millennia (which is, *indded* the span of recorded history).
- Humans are among the slowest animals to reach maturity, they only start reproducing after a decade and a half, 10 time longer than the other animals you mention. Thus still keeping the time frame you give, this would require a 10 time longer time span to observe the same amount of evolution. We're not speaking a couple of millennia here, but a couple of dozens of millennia, which is much longer than recorded history (and coincidentally is around the age of the homo sapiens specie - so indeed we can expect to have evolution happening at this time scale. The diversifications of ethnicities, for example).

In short:
1000 generations of a bacteria != 1000 generations of cats != 1000 generations of humans != 1000 generation of even slower maturing living being (some trees for example).

And that's neglecting the whole question of evolutionary pressure.

Because (according to several sources of information, including Phoronix whose Micheal has interviewed Gabe at Valve) Valve is interested in keeping "Steam-on-*any*-Linux" in addition to "Steam-on-the-specific-Ubuntu-fork-running-on-Steambox", because that will be a nice dev platform for indie and other small studios. Currently alternatives from the other big players is still expensive for indie and amateurs.

Also, Valve has expressed interests in not locking down too much this future console, but keeping it hacker/mod friendly for those still interested.

And from a practical point of view, once you have a Steam running nicely on a linux-powered machine, having Steam run on any random linux distro (or even other unix-like OSes) doesn't require much more efforts, and the Linux community has already highly motivated people to put a huge part of the efforts (packaging, testing, patching bugs in system libraries, collaborating with valve to fix steam or source, etc - for example as soon as the Ubuntu DEBs were released in closed beta, several other distros got their own steam package with all the necessary libraries) so it's not like "maintaining their Linux port" is going to cost any more resources.