I just clicked again on a small project just to see the load time. I'm not bullsh*ting but it was up and ready in ~3 seconds.Quadcore 2.5Ghz on some 3 years old Asus MB with 4Gb RAM and a brand new SSD (Crucial m4 i can recommend).
I have freebox too but I still use a linksys wrt54g router with Tomato behind their router (which can be disabled btw) and I have great results. No resets, no slowdowns, uptime is very high and the wireless works well enough for my needs. There might be a little bottleneck in the wifi cause the chip is a bit older but it compensates with the fact that is very reliable. So I would recommend Tomato and Linksys over any ISP provided router.
Is it a high quality PC or some overrated super hyped Apple workstation ? Cause on my 3 years old PC with a new SSD I just blink and I can start typing code. If it has no SSD .. it's not high enough :D.
Ugly, bloated ??? Omg, youtube.com/watch?v=G1iaVD-B2IA
You see, my feeling is that trying to guess the progress of genetics by extrapolating the complexity and insecurity of the computation chemistry is wrong. As far as I understood, genetics today is a lot about (but not only) identifying which genes (portions of DNA) are responsible of which phenotype (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype).Therefore a lot of resources are and were allocated to create a dictionary with genes as keys and phenotype as values. This dictionary is being populated at a quite fast pace and this combined with the possibility to take genes from some organisms and implant them in the DNA of a cell of other organisms and see the resulting phenotype is already a great achievement (imagine undergrads cutting and pasting DNA daily). They are not inventing new proteins and worry that they will not "bind" enough. They just take the DNA known to produce proteins in some organisms and place it in other organisms and suddenly proteins which have a known effect in different organisms, appear in a new organism. Yes, there is a long way from here to engineering genes that will produce and deliver a medicine inside an organism but I wouldn't call this primitive at all. Sorry for the simplification and possible errors.
"our understanding of the natural world is still sadly primitive" You are talking for yourself ? For humanity ? For scientists you never met ? I honestly don't know who you are and how well suited are you (you're a specialist in bioengineering ?) to tell us how much "we" know or we don't. I'm just a software engineer with some basic understanding of genetic engineering, but my wife is a genetic technician in a lab, and it's amazing what operations they performed on a daily basis as part of their university classes and recently in research projects in real labs (and this didn't start yesterday or only with my wife's generation). So I'm very tempted to believe that you just woke up speaking about some limitations you don't personally know and it's not even in your area of expertise. This does not mean that today "everything" is possible or that we achieved the grand mastery of DNA. It's just that for the "right people" the understanding of the natural world is more advanced than you have ever dreamed (unless you are one of the "right people").