Ed "Tinkerer" Felten went to a conference in DC and heard a Hill-rat characterize the current technology law climate like so: "The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future." Felten understands that to eliminate the general-purpose computer is to eliminate the engine that moves our world:
If I could take just one concept from computer science and magically implant it into the heads of everybody in Washington — I mean really implant it, so that they understood the idea and its importance in the same way that computer scientists do — it would be the role of the general-purpose computer. I would want them to understand, most of all, why there is no such thing as an almost-general-purpose computer.
If you're designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There's no in-between
(via Seth)
