As everyone knows, the way to make a computer do the job we want (word-processing, say) is simply to locate the appropriate program in memory and start it running.
Forty percent indicated that they used them frequently for word processing, 46percentt said they used them to play games, 80percentt said they searched the Internet and 70percentt reported using e-mail.
"You can't get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program," said Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado.
"Our IT training used to focus on keyboarding and word processing," she said.
But the company and researchers at Indiana University School of Infomatics (a fancy word for the science of information processing) say it's only a matter of time before drive-by pharming becomes common.
"I have clients time and again coming back to us and saying, 'We want this to be the Minority Report of health care; the Minority Report of word processing,'" Noessel said.
They are more than adequate for office tasks like e-mail and word processing, Mr. Heller said.
The ostensible reason is that if Microsoft lowers the price of, say, word processing software, it stimulates demand both for the software and for the operating systems that run it, increasing revenue for both businesses.
And although data can simply be copied and pasted from one file to another, as paragraphs are moved in word processing documents, Mr. Schmidt said that the files in question are too large to make such operations practical.
In principle, a thermal computer could be used for the same tasks as a normal computer, such as word processing or surfing the Internet, says Jiping Huang, a physicist at Fudan University in Shanghai, China.
