Mentioned in the original article, a problematic, potentially fatal time-lag for transplants involving any but living donors:

"We took normal, healthy mice, injected them for three consecutive days with the complex, then transplanted insulin-producing cells on the fourth day..."

Vital organs like hearts are 'harvested' from the dying, often people who are terminally brain-injured in motor vehicle accidents. Medical policies and procedures involving keeping such traumatically injured people 'alive' on 'life support' for four days hold complex layers of ethical issues for doctors and excruciatingly painful emotional issues for families of those donors fatally injured.

That isn't a 'nay' to improving pancreatic islet transplantation (which, in my understanding, does not generally kill the donor), but rather an urgent 'caution' and plea to biomedical researchers: proceed honestly, transparently, and with as much public awareness as humanly possible of unintended consequences.

Seems to me that, in general, re-envisioning our lifestyles, diets, and relationships with our planet, seeking healthier ways of being, is a far more viable long-term cure for many degenerative diseases, than heroic and often inaccessibly expensive treatments.

Faced with a big project that my XP system (built in 2004) wouldn't handle, I bought a new HP machine that came with Vista, factory-installed. I cursed it vigorously for two weeks, and then returned it.

I'm self-employed: research and writing, digital photography, audio production, website design.

Seemed to me that the user interface in Vista manifested something like arrogant, paranoid corporate culture at Microsoft. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to work around the idiot-proofing built into Vista, reinventing things that had worked seamlessly in XP. Also spent a lot of time pondering the bloated CPU and Memory usage in the "processes" window, as Vista chugged oh-so-VERY-slowly through some big graphics files (using Adobe Photoshop CS3).

There is a lot of memory-hogging *&#@!%! running in the background in Vista. It crashed repeatedly. It changed itself around when it was supposed to be 'sleeping,' doing bizarre things like switching my dual monitors (and trapping the mouse cursor on the second monitor, so I couldn't even access the controls without turning off the second monitor and rebooting). The drivers for my NEW scanner and NEW monitor wouldn't work with Vista, nor would other software that I use frequently and like.

Vista spent LOTS of time sending data - what??? - to Microsoft.

I spent an inordinate amount of time uninstalling factory-installed resource-hogging JUNK.

Because of the limitations of my old computer, I had been using several other computers; when I tried to consolidate the several copies of my working files, it indexed everything, including the files I had deleted as I consolidated, so finding the actual files was tortuous.

Etc., etc., etc.

Some people probably want to look at resource-hogging pretty OS details, like those cutesy semi-transparent window frames. Some people might even like a computer that sends all sorts of info to Microsoft, and reconfigures itself while you sleep. Some people might like buying all-new software (and some new hardware) whenever they get a new computer.

Me, I would just like a smart, fast, SANE OS: one that works cleanly, efficiently, and with a 'good working relationship' in human-machine interface.

If Adobe and ProTools worked with Linux, I would abandon Windows.

The more 'compact' a data storage format, the more likely that just a little bit of 'aging' will degrade it beyond intelligibility.

If it's REALLY important, rewrite it so that it's interesting to more than 'just you,' and publish it on archival-quality paper. If there are several thousand copies around, the odds are that a few will survive for a couple of centuries. Decay that would render any digital media format unreadable, just makes archival paper smell a bit musty.

Beyond the 'clay tablets' mentioned above, the most enduring long-term storage I've found is 'oral tradition' in a cultural context that values both integrity and history. Assuming that whatever you want to save long-term is interesting and important to anyone besides you, tell it in a memorable format to your grandchildren's generation.

A couple of decades ago, I worked on a history project involving both oral tradition and archival material: the elders' memories of events retold through the generations were, in some instances, MORE accurate than archival documents. But, of course, most of the younger generations in that community are paying more attention to TV and the Internet than to their elders.

My dad was a maniac about data preservation: made multiple copies of everything, indexed it meticulously, etc., etc. My sister threw it all away after he died.