True, but a bit of selfish wishing can't hurt.

Diplomatic discussion on Stuxnet wasn't top secret and would show up in the WikiLeaks cables.

This is one event that we could use secret info being leaked to the public on. (At least for geeks)

Is shipping free?

We've been complaining for years about the Internet killing privacy. Now secrecy will die with it.

With regard to the sociological note. It's a half truth. H.G. Wells wrote about something similar to atomic bombs in a 1914 novel (The World Set Free) when there was no understanding of how an atomic bomb would actually work. In fact, there are newspaper articles from the 30's reporting about the wondrous possibilities of nuclear energy. Strangely enough, Leo Szilard, the man who hypothesized the chain reaction as the real basis of a nuclear weapon, read that book a year before his discovery. This was 1933. Mainstream acceptance of the possibility of a bomb was not until after the first fission was actually achieved: 1938. The bomb project began in 1940. Around this time, Niels Bohr (that Niels Bohr) estimated that building a bomb was a practical impossibility as it would require the industrialized output of most of a nation to get sufficient amounts of enriched uranium. He concluded it could be done but only in far future (much like an antimatter bomb). When he joined the project and saw the shear amount of resources the American's were devoting to the project and the advances being made, he changed his mind.

For instance, after spending roughly the cost of the LHC on the first uranium separation facilities at Oak Ridge, (fun fact: a significant portion of the USA's silver coinage reserve was melted into calutron's for magnetic separation) the facility, which consumed about 15% of United State's electrical output, was producing about a pound of U-235 a day, enough for a bomb every 6 months.

The LHC or ALPHA is like a mass spectrometer. It's a scientific tool. Technically, you can also use a mass spectrometer to enrich the uranium to make an atomic bomb, but it would take about a million years to make enough. See the similarities?

It is a bit disingenuous for CERN to say "we" can't make antimatter bombs. If "we" means CERN then it's absolutely true, but to comment in an overall sense of "we" would be yet another foolish misunderstanding of the abilities of an industrialized nation to accomplish something when incredibly dedicated to it.

The real reason we won't see anti-matter bombs is in CERN's quote though. A hydrogen bomb is plenty "good enough".

To be fair, atmospheric pressure at 19 miles is just a little under 1% of what is at sea level and about equivalent to the atmosphere of Mars.

But we've seen these kinds of cheap high altitude balloons cover by Slashdot for about a year now and every time it happens, it seems to be picked up as a "new" event.

The thing that is really annoying though is that they all are doing the same thing without any improvement. Next time I have to read this story, please say someone floated a model rocket with an M engine up to 20 miles and got it the golden suborbital height.

In Capitalist America, buisness games you!

Isn't belief in the goodness of reason also a dogmatic faith? Shouldn't we also be questioning reason?

I agree with you to a degree, but it begs the question.

The motion control tech behind Kinect was acquired when Microsoft purchased an Israeli company a few years ago. The tech (an IR grid is projected and an IR camera examines and analyzes for deformations of that grid to calculate position) has hardly changed since then. There were demos of this back in 2007 I believe where you could shoot virtual hoops. All this time has been Microsoft developing software, because, to be honest, it took awhile to figure out what you could do with this thing.

Why do articles (the summary included) talking about power-generation always mention oil and it's coming scarcity or price.?

Practically, no one uses oil for power and if they do it's almost rarely more than a sliver of the pie. In the United States it's about 3.25% and in most countries it's far lower.

Sure if you're talking about energy usage in general it makes a lot of sense to mention oil, but for power-generation, not really.

Just walk in, open up Safari, and load the latest iPhone warning piece on Slashdot. Nothing "illegal" and it still gives the next chump something to think about before they buy it. :)

Seeing is believing: http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:45683.asx?bkup=45684 Odds are the feed will cut out after a few seconds with how swamped it is now. Oh and if you're really interested here's one of the bottom of the BOP which is being watched so it doesn't explode. http://mfile.akamai.com/97892/live/reflector:31499.asx?bkup=31500

Skytruth is a great organization that has been buying Satellite time to survey the area. Turns out that while surveying the oil spill from DWH they found another leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The story was confirmed this morning. Makes you wonder how many leaks have occurred that have been "small enough" that they are simply forgotten about for years.