Not that I agree with much of your post (each to his own) but this product translates Java to the native platforms, there is no embedded VM. So this is Java the language and not Java the platform.

I should have included this link.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/27/mitt-romney-students-otterbein-university-borrow-money_n_1460097.html

Look at the OP's initials.

Bring in a new Star Trek so we can have a sense of adventure and hope with future technology.
Enough with the arrogant scientist tries to invent new source of power / robots / travel and causes mass explosions / killer robots / aliens to kill us all.
Various treks did have issues with casting, plot, time-travel/hollodeck episodes, but it still always made me feel good about tomorrow.

As an App developer I would love this!
I made an app once that was primarily a platform for subscription data, it gave away a few demo bits of data for free but not much. The idea was then the user purchases the data relevant to them.
There were many angry reviews saying "rip off - it says free but then you have to buy stuff". In my app description I made it very clear it was in-app purchase driven (even showing screenshots of the purchase screen) but at the end of the day it just said "Free" when you clicked to download it.

If I could have made it said "In App Purchase Driven - Avg Price $2" I think it would have gone down a lot better. You can see "most popular in-app purchases" from the iTunes screen, but the dev can't distinguish between - content platform, demo or full application with tiny dlc next to that all important "free" button.

I still say this movie will be TMNT3, i.e. suck no matter what age you're at. I don't think it'll quite be TMNT Live Action Christmas Special at least.

Personally I don't mind the aliens so much as the fact that Bay is directing it. Chances are he wants to go with aliens because he had an idea about aliens that he couldn't work into Transformers. It's not like if Bay kept them as mutants it would be a great movie, it would still be a Bay movie.
(though at least we can all still love The Rock)

When talking about the suit, Tesla said they were doing it as many people asked them if they've fixed the problems that Top Gear reported/embellished/etc.
So TG was indeed affecting potential buyer's minds.

You even HAD to kill chuckles (the annoying but innocent court Jester) to loot a key of his body to rescue a Princess. (Ultima 1 didn't quite have the plots of its successors).

Solr serves a different purpose to SQL. It is optimised for searching using text indexing with fancy ways of matching, weighting results when finding matches. Solr is actually a separate non-SQL database that you keep in sync with your real database. I've found it fits its purpose very well, and you rarely worry about the XML as library support handles it.
SQL is great if you already know exactly what you're looking for. Solr is great if a human is performing a search.

Well they are just replacing their VM servers, the databases are possibly elsewhere on the network so the writes to the SSD in that scenario should only occur when they update a VM. (Just guessing though).
Still, I take your point of a series of SSDs used for the same purpose are more likely to fail around the same time than ye olde HDDs.

I read articles with Funny adjusted to -5. Makes slashdot slightly more useful.

I've always wondered why they're so expensive, do you have any insight to that?
Taking a completely uneducated look at some of the stuff I would have guessed 1 grand to cover parts and maybe 5 grand to cover R&D per sale, which comes in as 1/10th of what you are unfortunately being charged.
So what does it come down to?

Lack of economies of scale, parts or research cost actually being relative to the price, liability, hope from the manufacturer that they can charge it to insurance companies, or just the manufacturers taking advantage of supply and demand?

Personally I thought the story was about the amount of corruption in businesses who did their best to hide all their dodgy practises.
Granted this isn't a tick for the watchdogs but don't make it out to be about poor business being attacked by greeny loonies.

What it looks like is unfortunately amazingly boring. Most of the game is the player holding the flipper up so the ball stops, releasing, then making a good shot.
The shots take skill, and there's always the trick of using the right amount of tilt etc, but I find it near unwatchable.

That's like saying the horse with the best odds didn't finish first, do the bookies really know what they're doing? There's these things called chance and statistics. Also it's not like Brazil did badly.
A friend and I wrote our own computer based predictor for FIFA, at last count it predicted 33 out of 58 games which I would say is pretty good given that games had 3 possible outcomes in earlier rounds: win/lose/draw (and yes we predicted Brazil I'm afraid).
If anyone's interested in a shameless plug here's our version for quite a few sports for the iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/sports-predictor/id340126905?mt=8# the model of a free download that gives you samples followed by purchases turned out to be extremely unpopular, but that's another discussion.