"....Patriotism has no place in science."

Patriotism may have no place in science, but science unquestionably has a place in patriotism.
I'm proud that my country built and operates the Tevatron which discovered the top quark, I'm proud we built the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility which is on the verge of demonstrating controlled thermonuclear fusion in a laboratory, I'm proud we were the first to decipher the 3 billion letter sequence of the human genome, I'm proud we invented the transistor, the laser, the nuclear reactor and the Polio vaccine that is on the verge of wiping that disease from the face of the Earth forever, I'm proud we engineered the microcomputer revolution and invented the internet those machines operate on, I'm proud we were the first to robotically explore every planet in the solar system with the exception of Venus and sent probes into interstellar space, and I'm proud of a thousand other things my country did to push back the darkness of ignorance about the physical world, thereby elevating the human condition to previously unimagined heights. And I hope that someday, instead of being proud of something as stupid as military might, or the number of gold medals we win in the Olympics, that my countrymen can join me in the more nuanced and altruistic flavor of patriotism that I am proudly guilty of indulging in. My style of patriotism is anything but the last refuge of scoundrels, and scientific achievement plays a central role in its maintenance.

If you look at how Pixar fit into Disney creatively and politically, it was a takeover in everything but name. Pixar execs were immediately moved into high-ranking Disney positions- John Lasseter is now in charge of the entire animation studio. Tons of soulless projects were axed and the overall creative direction of the company shifted significantly.

It implies that Apple ever condoned or deliberately enabled this. They are strengthening their protection against an activity that they never intended to be possible. You might as well post "Apple Stops Jailbreaking".

Well, I'm from liberal about-to-legalize-gay-marriage (wo0t!) New York and I think it's a ridiculous waste of money too. 2 Billion dollars for a 500 megawatt generating plant? Please. This is some kind of sick joke.

The 500 MW is obviously peak power output, meaning that average power is going to be 200 MW, TOPS. 2 BILLION dollars for a 150 MW generating station. That's beyond pathetic. A natural gas fired station that provided that kind of power output could be built for 5% of that kind of money. The argument for this being a good investment into the technology is even more absurd. It's just a solar thermal plant using hot oil /molten salt. We've been doing this stone-age level crap since the early 70's.

Do I really need to explain what kind of advancements the nuclear fusion community could do with 2 billion dollars? We're right on the edge (like, this year) of demonstrating fusion ignition in the laboratory at the National Ignition Facility, a lab that houses the most powerful laser in the world and the largest, most complicated optical system ever constructed, at a cost barely more than 50% of this useless, make-work, feelgood project. $2 billion could go a long way toward building a gigawatt level power plant demonstration reactor after NIF achieves ignition, instead of wasting it on this nonsense that produces laughably insignificant amounts of energy.

WebKit.

Then the guy on the ground says "You must be a manager!" The guy in the balloon asks how he knows this. He says "You ask dumb questions while having no idea where you are, where you're going, or how you got there, but now somehow it is my fault."

It could easily be done but I got a headache just from trying to imagine this.

Games, film, and TV are covered by consoles and STBs. Coding counts as a specialized field, and not one that mass-produced consumer desktops (as opposed to workstations) need to be appropriate for.

From the description in the article, especially the phrase "sneak in", it sounds like he deliberately obfuscated the functionality of the app. It's happened a few times before- an app is submitted with a questionable feature disabled, then once it's in the wild a switch is thrown on a server and suddenly it's capable of more than was ever shown to Apple. The vetting process being susceptible to targeted attempts to circumvent it does not mean that a "total breakdown" occurred.

Apple is not trying to coexist with cable TV, they are trying to destroy it. Once they get you to cancel your cable, DVR functionality will just be dead weight.

Wow, Lubos Motl posts on /. too?

Yeah, I guess that's why he just co-authored "Unification of gravity, gauge fields, and Higgs bosons" with Perimeter Institute physicist Lee Smolin then, huh.....'cause he's just such a joke.

Nice use of ridiculous hyperbole to claim things I never said and simultaneously ignore my points about the paper's poor, and largely absent data. This is Slashdot though, so I'm sure scientific skepticism plays second fiddle to your desire to believe in the latest cold fusion/room temp superconductor/martian microbe/supercapacitor/infinite capacity data storage scheme claptrap that comes down the pike, so please carry on as I'm sure you will regardless. Judging from the way this thread is being moderated, you're apparently in good, like-minded company.

Actually, everything I said was relevant and it's called considering the source. Something Slashdot editors, and apparently yourself, care little for. Single author papers in the twenty-first century are the hundred decibel alarm bells of pseudoscience and there is NO WAY in a million years that a paper with a substantial result about something as earth-shattering as room temperature superconductivity is going to be single author (and it sure as hell isn't going to first appear on the freakin' ArXiv).

Your claim that the paper itself is somehow mischaracterized in this story's post is a joke. The title of the paper is "Indications of room-temperature superconductivity at a metal-PZT interface", it's practically identical to what the story here claims. I read the paper and the author is clearly claiming RTSC effects in a PZT transducer, an extraordinary claim if there ever was one. Furthermore, he pompously refers to himself as "we" throughout the paper, even though he's the only author. Credible physicists who are NOT CRACKPOTS, do not put the phrase "room temperature superconductivity" in the title of a paper without making sure the rest of that fucker is filled to the brim with the most spectacularly extraordinary evidence that anyone in the field has seen in years, in order to support such a wildly sensationalistic claim. This paper has exactly none of that kind of evidence and because of it, the author deserves to have his name now associated with a certain Pons and a certain Fleischmann. It doesn't even have a plot showing K vs. ohms at the Tc, the paper is a joke, it's not even fit for burning.

Lisi's E8 paper has been cited like 17 times. I'd say that's pretty good and hardly constitutes "no scientists commenting on it in 3 years". It's usually a good bet, but overhyped media publicity doesn't ALWAYS automatically mean someone's work is shit. Lisi's theory makes concrete falsifiable predictions for new particles that will either be confirmed or ruled out using the LHC's dataset.