Kurzweil's future, iPhone love, NHS IT, ID card insecurity

It may have been dark, wet and very, very cold indeed outdoors but November still had its highlights on silicon.com - from futuristic visions to shiny smartphones.

Still, it was hard to avoid the fact there were plenty of gloomy stories making headlines too.

On the positive side, silicon.com readers lapped up the words of futurist, inventor and 2008 silicon.com Agenda Setter Ray Kurzweil who took some time out to talk to reporter Natasha Lomas about his vision of a man-plus-machine future.

Expect the Turing Test to be passed by 2029 - when computers will apparently have mastered human, intelligence, emotional intelligence and the whole gamut of manmade comedy, from slapstick to sarcasm. Being funny is no joke, according to Kurzweil.

Stories of the month - November 2008

Click on the links below to read the stories everyone is talking about...

Kurzweil: "Technology is a double-edged sword"

The 10 projects at the heart of NHS IT

ID card costs rise - but is the security weakening?

BT to axe 10,000 staff

BlackBerry twice as likely to fail as an iPhone

Apple storms past RIM in smartphone race

Minority Report: Mac clones doomed?

"A fraud ring or social networking - it's the same thing"

Bye bye BlackBerry, hello Moto in £1m deal

How CIOs learned to stop worrying and love the iPhone

"Human emotion is not some sideshow," he told silicon.com. "What humans do well is both pattern recognition and our emotional thinking - which is a form of recognising patterns that we find in situations. Getting the joke, being funny, expressing a loving sentiment - these are actually the most complicated things we do, the cutting edge of human intelligence."

Click here to read the full Q&A with Kurzweil - including more of his views on artificial intelligence, gene therapy and the dangers posed by advanced technologies.

Also proving popular with readers this month was senior reporter Nick Heath's round-up of where we're at with the 10 projects that make up the £12.7bn NHS IT upgrade programme - including the Choose and Book electronic booking service, and The Spine storage facility for summary care records.

Progress, unsurprisingly, has been mixed. Click here for the full update.

Another big government IT-reliant project that made a popular headline this month was ID cards - as opponents of the scheme piped up to warn security is being watered down. What are your views on ID card security? Likely to be safe as houses or leaky as a sieve? Let us know by posting a Reader Comment below.

Elsewhere economic storm clouds darkened BT's doorstep as the telco joined the raft of tech companies announcing a swathe of job cuts.

But elsewhere - in the smartphone world - there was cause for cheer, though certain mobile vendors - namely Apple - were more likely to be cracking out the cigars and making merry than others.

3G iPhone shipments helped Apple steal second place in the worldwide vendor ranking, usurping BlackBerry maker RIM. While Lazaridis and chums may still have had an "excellent quarter", according to the analyst report, playing second fiddle to the new kid on the block has gotta hurt.

But there was more pain in store for BlackBerry and BlackBerry lovers as silicon.com eyeballs were also drawn to a report claiming CrackBerrys are twice as likely to give up the ghost than iPhones. Ouch.

No, November really wasn't RIM's month. Another popular story - pretty sexy stuff as contract wins go - explained why maintenance services company GSH Group had decided to ditch BlackBerrys for its field service workforce and use ruggedised Motorola handsets and a managed services offering instead.

The company's director of innovation told silicon.com BlackBerrys just weren't up to the job. "It doesn't have touchscreen, doesn't have barcoding, doesn't have signature capture," he lamented.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves and pronounce the BlackBerry's time of death, is the shiny iPhone really ready to storm the enterprise citadel?

Well, silicon.com readers fell over themselves to read this enticingly titled piece of analysis: How CIOs learned to stop worrying and love the iPhone. Needless to say, the true picture of iPhone adoption in the enterprise remains a much more textured and complex beast.

Safe to say, the iPhone isn't going to put RIM out of business this month - or next. The Waterloo crowd can sleep easy for now.