I'd like to see a breakdancing porpoise. Sounds novel.

Really? I just enjoy watching the inevitable mechanical carnage from something they missed in their design or build process.

Or is that Thorem simply incomplete?

Ion engines push with the amount of force of a piece of paper on one's hand. They still achieve stupendous speeds through doing this indefinitely. If this thing can match that performance over that timescale then it's still useful.

Ion thrusters still consume raw materials, so there's a finite fuel supply. If this does literally turn electricity into thrust without consuming anything then running out of reaction-mass is no longer an issue, and some probes could even be entirely solar powered.

Additive technologies have some rather important limitations, they can't produce anything that needs incredible strength achieved through pressure. Admittedly a lot of products are produced at STP, but if you need forged metal parts for their strength you're not going to get that inexpensively through an additive technology like a 3d printer. Subtractive technolgies, where that pre-hardened lump of material is machined down to the part that one wants is the only way currently to practically achieve that kind of result.

There's a Goodwill next to one of the hardware stores that I shop at regularly, so I'm in there fairly often. There's always lots of otherwise-obsolete computer stuff in there. Never had a problem finding something useful.

Factor college-admissions as a trailing economic indicator too, where people chase what's encouraged as the hot career path, and it's not exactly a surprise to see cyclical enrollments correlating with business.

After watching the doctom and housing bubbles, by the time the average person hears about it, it's too late to enter that trend and come out ahead. I suspect one of the next bubbles will be in health care. We see a lot of discussion of Nursing and careers below nursing on the pecking-order, and I suspect relatively soon there will be a lot of medical grads that can't find work.

It's kind of amusing to read a complaint about poor use of English that contains a typo.

Slashdot's editors typically don't do much to user submissions. I'm not surprised that an otherwise language-poor summary is published.

SPARC != commodity either. Can't go to the local store and pick up an ATX-form-factor SPARC motherboard and processor off-the-shelf.

Granted, SPARC isn't completely discontinued, but if Debian can't find enough developers to work on the platform then that shows them there isn't enough interest in order to be able to keep it alive.

I was referring to a particular User Friendly comic from fifteen years ago. The AI (Irwin? Erwin?) was talking with Windows NT servers, and they were replying back with just, "I am in my Happy Place. I am in my Happy Place. Reboot! Reboot!" or something like that.

Ah, but there's still a lot of old 32-bit x86 stuff out there, so the barrier to entry is extremely low. We still have 32-bit machines in-production, albeit they're the oldest ones still being used, but there are probably several thousand still running.

Dropping Sparc unfortunately makes sense. Hardware was already exotic and somewhat uncommon when it was new and still supported, and is now even more rare and given its proprietary nature, more likely to simply be permanently removed if it breaks. It's also no entry-level friendly; a kid wanting to play with Linux 'just to see' can go to the Goodwill and buy an old x86 box for $20 and friends can help make things work.

"I am in my Happy Place. I am in my Happy Place. Reboot! Reboot!"

I don't think that you and I have the same definition of, "performance." For me, "performance," is where the act meets the audience as much as where the act is carried-out. One could even ask if there even was a performance if the actor had no audience to see it; if it's in a studio with only those associated with producing the act present then it might not even constitute a performance until the recorded act is displayed for the audience.

I'm a little surprised with the commentary on Slashdot. I see a lot of people getting very passionate when they're probably not terribly knowledgeable about the situation. I don't know what the man's warrants are for, though given the culture surrounding rap and hip-hop I'm guessing that they're not for the same kinds of things that Edward Snowden is wanted for. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not going to stake my argument on the freedom of speech and abuse versus surpression under these circumstances. There are plenty of examples where someone isn't continuing to remain a fugitive to defend.

...if they can collect enough physical information on the subject to make a virtual dressing-room possible without crossing the line into an unacceptable amount of information being collected on the subject. After all, people were very upset by the data collected by the TSA using the Rapiscan machines that essentially saw through clothes to the skin layer, and in order to make a virtual-try-on actually provide meaningful feedback beyond just hanging a picture of clothes in front of a picture of a subject it'd have to have fairly detailed information on the subject.

I also wonder if enough consumers would actually like this, there are a lot of people that enjoy trying on clothes and this would remove that aspect. For the rest of us that don't like trying on clothes there's a trend toward re-buying the same clothing lines anyway, so we'd almost have to try-on clothes to know how they truly fit if we buy something from a new product line.