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.

Uhhhm no, you don't have to wait for replication. All you have to do is move on to the next story and ignore this stupidity. It's a SINGLE AUTHOR PAPER from some dude at the University of North Bengal, which was reported by a laughably sensationalistic pseudoscience mongering blog and regurgitated here by perhaps the dumbest, most credulous editor on /.'s staff: kdawson (who posts trumpet-blaring room temperature superconductivity stories with such regularity that you could probably set your watch by it). Hang your head in shame /.

I don't know why the post above responding to you is at +3 insightful. It is not. Because if you "multiply that by the number of all other people doing such experiments / fun and telling themselves that they don't have an impact" as Sznupi says, you still only end up with a trivial fraction of He use overall, since only 7% of all He production is used in "fill" applications for buoyancy etc. I'm pretty sure the majority of that 7% is going to fill weather balloons and blimps and the like as you note, and the overwhelming majority ISN'T being used as kid's party decoration.

So don't worry, go out, get your kid one of those small $40 tanks and have fun. Better still, use your imagination and take the opportunity to teach your kids about some physics / chemistry. Start with the phenomenon of buoyancy and how that works (look at how a He filled balloon weirdly behaves in a car), show how helium is non-flammable and explain where its inertness comes from (electron valency - It's already "happy" with the number of e- it has), pick up a cheapo $10 vacuum thermos from Wal-mart or wherever and have your local welding supply shop fill it with liquid nitrogen ($5) so you can demonstrate how gasses expand/contract with temperature changes (the air in a balloon that has been manually blown full will liquefy in LN2, but a He filled balloon won't - explain WHY!), show them some videos about liquid helium on youtube and how much colder it is than LN2, explain how breathing it shifts the speed of sound - thereby shifting the pitch of your voice, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Is some of this well beyond the level of your 8yr old? Hell yes, and that's why you should do it! It doesn't matter if kids "get it" 100% all the time as so many stultifying grammar school teachers stupidly seem to believe. It matters much more that they are exposed to new things that make them think about familiar phenomena in new ways. They'll remember how fun and interesting the experience was, and the curiosity bred from that will stick with them forever. [/tangent]

what happened to the heady days of the internet when a standard popped onto the scene and quickly matured to give way for the next one?

They didn't last beyond the days when the net was only used by a small group of experts and highly technical users. The state of the web in the late 90s and the early zeroes (remember that?) was a direct result of following this sort of philosophy on an unworkably large scale, with multiple competing platforms with inconsistent feature sets (sometimes deliberately so).

You can't just throw something together when it will be used by literally billions of people, many of which will never update their software unless forced to, and implemented by dozens of entities with differing agendas, technical constraints, and visions of progress, that just leads to madness, browser wars, and the biggest installed base winning.

Ya still around, stopped editing wikipedia a while ago though. Seemed like a futile waste of time with all the vandals. Maybe I'll start again after ignition on NIF. Sad to see you have seemingly gone to the dark side of wind/solar advocacy though ;))

truly, you've shattered through the final boundaries of what humans have heretofore known as the limits of megadouche pedantry.