That's my question exactly. TFA doesn't really answer it clearly. The only similarity mentioned is that the giant virus has a regular geometric shape, presumably due to capsid proteins as in other virus. In addition, other commenters, are saying that they are parasitic they just require much less of the host machinery to reproduce than a classical virus.

Also, the article mentions that there is some debates as to whether these giant viruses represent an new kingdom of life, which if it were true would imply that they aren't viruses, but members of some new classification.

They probably shouldn't anyway

Truecrypt has/had something like that. It allows you to have a secondary, hidden partition in the "free" space of the disk image. Alas, it appears to be dying without a good replacement that I know of.

It will if you program it to. Things like this are tools. As a relatively young doctor (resident) I welcome things like this. Every doctor I know uses reference material, some are printed on dead trees and some are electronic. Today, there's not much difference. But the point it is that there's too much medical knowledge for one person to keep it all in their head at one time. If something like this were to come to market it wouldn't be replacing doctors, it would be augmenting them. Machines do what we tell them to, always have and (hopefully) always will. False rivalries like this completely miss the point. I would love to have a computer algorithm that could correctly diagnose 99% of the time even if it were flagrently wrong the other 1%. That's why humans are in the loop.

My guess is that custom proteins are harder to synthesize on demand. Generally if you want a custom protein you synthesize the DNA coding it, then insert it into a cell and have it produce the protein. Plus, DNA can be duplicated in vitro through conventional PCR where it's not really viable to transcribe proteins outside of a living cell.

... that's better

Alas, there is now 1+ Ringworld Reference

Of course the brain is turing complete. You can prove it the same way you prove any other machine is turing complete: it has the ability to simulate a turing machine. I can simulate a tape driven turing machine pretty damn easily with a sheet of paper and a pencil. I think you're confused as to what "turing-complete" means. Solving the halting problem is not a requirement. In fact, you can prove that a turing machine cannot solve the halting problem. So the brain's inability to do so doesn't have any bearing on whether it's turing complete.