Maybe you need a Slashdot License. They come from the Ministry of Housinge.

There is no theoretical reason that a room-temperature superconductor cannot exist.

Room-temperature superconductors would be really cool. It's not clear that electromagnetic propulsion gets you to orbit, though. Once there, sure it works.

Multiple-Tesla fields that are changing their orientation rapidly in time aren't particularly healthy to be around. Induced currents in your nerves, heating, etc. That MRI field is acceptable because it's DC. That is, if you don't have any ferromagnetic objects on you.

No, the superconductors are not simple magnets.

What's on the tele then?

Rockets being the only solution does not automatically mean rockets are a viable solution. Please quit ignoring the real challenges presented.

Unfortunately, this can't be approached as an engineering problem and get the result you would like. It needs to be approached as a problem in fundamental research of the physics underlying our world.

There were lots of efforts to miniaturize the vacuum tube. They only resulted in smaller tubes. It took new insights in fundamental physics before people could understand how to make a transistor. There were many experiments with germanium (a natural semiconductor) that could have led to the transistor before 1947 if anyone had understood what was happening.

Some steel. Not all of them. That's why the refrigerator magnet doesn't stick to that silver door.

A field strong enough to work on water would kill you first.

Look at the amount of money made on oscillococcinum, and you might agree it's a successful hack to make money from the stupidity of others.

This would be cool if it was more than a stage trick. The superconductor needed to do this used to be mail-ordered from Edmund Scientific. So lots of hackers were doing levitation demonstrations in the 90's. People think it's cool because they've not lived through that, or have forgotten it.

It works on the principle of superconductors excluding a magnetic field. When they are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. Steel is low in ferromagnetism and isn't as good a conductor as copper so it's not as good for making electromagnets.

Well, I did that once with a bottle of liquid nitrogen from Airco and a superconductor I bought from Edmund Scientific. This was before there was a Slashdot. So, no, not impressive.

Before someone makes a working hoverboard, we will first hear about the principle that makes it possible. Because one that's practical is almost guaranteed to get someone a Nobel Prize. And certainly Lexus would go for that if they could.

No new principles lately. There is an existing principle of magnetic repulsion that would work only in an extreme condition. One requiring really special stuff buried in the street, and probably including liquid nitrogen to keep it working for even a short time and a few feet.

So, it's a gimmick.

....and not a word about TrueCrypt? is there any commonly used alternative or people just don't care?

I migrated to FreeOTFE right around the time that the TrueCrypt developers said people should stop using it, about a year ago. I haven't had much reason to migrate back (though TrueCrypt's hidden volume feature was nice to have).

Why does my Slashdot look exactly the same as it looked six months ago? I've been reading the outraged comments and I still see comments under the summary as always.

I don't know. Only my front page looks different, in the same ways people are complaining about

I almost never go to the homepage. I monitor /.'s RSS feed (used to use Google Reader, switched to TTRSS when Google Reader went bye-bye) and go directly to articles that sound interesting. A bunch of other sites are also configured in there, so I can quickly see what's new there as well.

As I've seen things, /. Beta fscked up page formatting for a while, but the "?nobeta" hack took care of that. Then at some point, it no longer became necessary when article pages started looking more or less like they previously did without manual intervention.

That's only if they were sealed correctly and stored right. There was an article a few years ago about how a lot of discs were coming up unusable after only 6-12.

My oldest CDs are somewhere on the other side of 20 years old now, and not one of them has gone bad. I reripped them all a few months ago as part of a transition from AAC to FLAC. They've spent most of their time on a shelf indoors, though they've been in a box in the garage (dry, but subject to the temperature fluctuations typical for Las Vegas) for the past four years.

I suspect that as long as your CD collection never spent time in a flooded basement, it'll be good to go for decades to come.

What API would you use?

WebRTC, IIRC. I recently rolled out a webapp at work that case workers can use to help determine eligibility for potential clients. One minor capability within it is photo capture. Along with a slew of questions about demographics, disabilities, and such, it'll also take a picture and stash it in the database. If someone is then accepted as a client, that photo is then available so that (for instance) our delivery drivers can compare the photo on file to whoever answers the door to make sure the client's at home to accept delivery. We could've just had the user take a picture with the phone's camera app and then upload into our webapp from there, but this is a seamless approach that's easier to use.

There's not much to it, either. The page that handles the capture is 28 lines of HTML and 114 lines of JavaScript, a fair bit of which was cribbed from examples I found with a few seconds' googling. It provides a live view of what the camera sees, lets you switch between front and back cameras, and lets you preview the capture before it's sent to the server.