Phones should be modular enough that you can swap in radio hardware, allowing you to upgrade your phone to next generation spectrum without replacing the entire phone. This should have happened in the 2G -> 3G transition, in my opinion

In Theodore X. Nelson's great book, "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" is a statement (perhaps a quote, I don't own a copy now) that I've always loved: "No matter how good the hardware guys get, the software guys piss it away"

When you pocket computer that also makes phone calls already does everything you want it to do, adequately, why not allocate your money to improve some other aspect of your life?

Mass numbers of computations are used in numerical weather prediction for one thing - and NWP is what allows forecasters to be come more accurate about severe storms, hurricane track and intensification, etcetera. The models already operate on massively parallel machines - but faster machines or less latency will allow them to forecast for smaller grids, improving accuracy, and if they run faster, they can be run more times per day which also helps forecasts adjust to changing conditions.

Yes, I believe you _can_ get a lot of the raw data via NOAA's site, it is I believe free for US citizens since we already paid for it through funding NOAA. Maybe you can use Google's new algorithm for detecting 100,000 features in an image on a single computer to make the model run on you desktop in usable time - remember, as one of the NOAA sites quotes a scientist: if your model doesn't run in faster than real time, you might as well just swivel your chair to look out the window (assuming I'm not being an insensitive clod who doesn't pay attention to the fact that you don't have a window).

Once upon a time we were all going to have a 'user agent' that was local to our computer that performed all sorts of mediation for us, sort of an Arthur Treacher (look it up you young whippersnappers) role; this is one instance of that idea.

See this page; the Campanile movie is from SIGGRAPH 97. How is Disney's tech different?

Existing in one form or another since CP67 in, yes, 1967, IBM's z/VM virtual machine hypervisor is arguably one of the most debugged VM implementations around.

How do you store the instructions for using this thing?

Once saw a FORTRAN compiler change cause _slightly_ different numerical results in a bridge engineering program. They did some work to verify that bridges built using the program compiled under the previous version of the compiler were structurally sound but that was the most fearful thing I could think of, that numerical inaccuracies in what the compiler generates could cause an engineering failure that could cause loss of life.

COBOL, which is compiled, doesn't need another language to run. It does, in many implementations, require a run-time library to supply common functions which are called by the compiled code - for example, the DISPLAY verb may be implemented as a common subroutine. On IBM mainframes, the run-time library support for many languages is provided by the Language Environment product.

Rexx is still one of the best procedural-style scripting languages... I use it in Unix (well, Unix Systems Services, the Posix-compliant interface component of z/OS)

Maybe it's just my mainframe background, and maybe I haven't searched hard enough, but I don't see in the laptop/desktop/server enviroment a lot of detailed presentations of performance issues, how they were diagnosed, and how they were solved. I see them very occasionally. Is there a lack of good performance recording (and I mean recording for analysis after the fact, not real-time monitoring) tools, or is it just that purchasing faster hardware components has probably become cheaper than spending time diagnosing the issues?

Ala carte channels would be governed by the law of supply and demand; so if you and five of your friends are the only ones who want to watch "The Channel That Shows Video from Alt.Plan9.OS.Demos" the price is going to be pretty high. None of the ala carte proposals I've ever seen say that the channel provider has to make those channels cheap.

I'm at 42 but I'm in the US - does that mean I'm not legal? ICMP reform now!