A little bias in the media? Nah.... never! Check this out. The title of the story is "Helping enemies in Iraq." Makes it sound like someone in our government, since it's about our government, is actively aiding the insurgency. Turns out that the real story is that the Department of Defense just cannot account for a lot of the weapons that it has turned over to the new government of Iraq. Big surprise there... How are they supposed to keep track of how a fledgling government does inventory, anyway?
Arstechnica has an interesting take on why Apple continues to avoid the "enterprise market." My own theory, which comes from being a young code monkey who's been doing "enterprise coding" for nearly two years, is this. Enterprise software is bureaucratic rubbish. Anyone who has done Java coding in a large, enterprise environment will see that while the vision behind Java 2 Enterprise Edition is good, the practical difference between coding in J2SE (standard) versus J2EE (enterprise) is like the difference between the iPhone and your average corporate crap phone.
(Businesses will frequently make you use bulky, unwieldy "enterprise software" when a custom-designed product would fit into the IT infrastructure more comfortably. I worked on one project where we had to use Enterprise Java Beans where we could have implemented the same functionality in our own really simple, stream-lined RMI-based product. Problem was, it had to be "enterprise," therefore we had no choice but to use EJBs where RMI provided the same functionality that we needed, but with less overhead.)
Instapundit linked to this post on nanotechnology being used in war. A while back I wrote a short story which had some nanotechnology used in it during battle. The application I conceived of (which we are far away from, admittedly) is a soldier carrying a series of vials of nanobots which can be broken or opened to activate. Once activated, the nanobots reassemble like cells into a full-fledged weapon system. The one I used as an example was one of the alien soldiers place a vial's opening up against a keyhole and activating it, turning the swarm of nanobots into a wasp-like killing machine that attacked the enemy combatants inside the locked room. Ahhh imagination!
Amazing. Attacking humans at a cellular level with robots is good and cool.
Doing it with an engineered virus or chemical is evil.
The difference is robots, of course. Artificial dysentery isn't cool. Very tiny chainsaws, on the other hand, are awesome.
As long as the nanobots cannot replicate, I don't see the issue. You support dropping bombs on enemy troops, right? Why not drop bombs on them that contain lethal nanobots instead of explosives? The advantage is that theoretically such an infestation would leave the countryside even less damaged by the ravages of war.