As if people follow the links to the actual articles. You should be an old enough user to know that Slashdot is not the kind of news aggregator where you go to follow the links, it's the site where you go to listen to what other people have to say. It's more like: here's the topic; discuss.

User snydeq is a paid shill? Absolutely!
The status of java is an interesting topic for the community? Yes it is!

Disclaimer: I always enjoy a good argument.
BTW: The above is the reason why if the Slashdot comment mechanism ever breaks (Beta, I'm looking at you), it will mean the doom of this community.

Their laurels? Come on...

Java was made what it is by Sun. Oracle just bought them and expected everything they touch to turn to gold. That is a hell of a rotten bed of laurels they are resting on...

Why are you calling him a WHO? I thought he was just "the doctor".

I beg to differ. While constructing a model there are often unknown relationships and parameters between variables for which you have to make assumptions. Like, for example, you suspect that two variables are related, but instead of digging in deeper and deeper in order to exactly resolve the relation you assume an e.g. linear relation, you fit the parameters to some data and move on. As long as you clearly present your methodology, I don't think there is anything wrong with this. The next guy can look closer and walk the extra mile, figure out a more rigorous relationship between the variables and improve your model. This methodology is not only common, it's also necessary: often the relationships between variables is so complex that being more rigorous does not improve the model because you add physical parameters/constants that you know little of and cannot measure with enough accuracy (or at all), so you're better off fitting them anyway (inverse problem). As to the usefulness, scientists "tamper" with the models all the time: Kepler tampered with the model of Copernicus, and Newton tampered with the model of Kepler. "Tampering" Newton's law for improving the result accuracy led to general relativity.

Your comparison to the Turk is just wrong. That was a straight-out hoax. An algorithm "trained" to represent some data still has value in representing these data, no matter how simple/non-rigorous it is. If the model is good, then it might even have some value in predicting the behavior of the system (in our case, the supreme court) even under different conditions (the "future"). In the model there are certainly correlations that the maker figured out by examining some data. Thus, the model can only be as good as the data that it is based upon. There is nothing wrong with improving the model as more data become available. Stubbornly sticking to the initial (wrong) estimates would be like saying that we should have dumped Newton's law of gravitation at birth because we didn't have a good value for G, instead of measuring G with higher accuracy.

Was there any innovation in the camera equipment involved in the filming? Are there any special considerations that one has to make for filming at such depths?

I beg your pardon, but from your very comment I draw the conclusion that the credit card companies spoiled the development of true micro-transactions by demanding a very large amount for each transaction. If they had realized the size of the economies of scale we're talking about here they would have settled for much less than a cent per transaction, but I think that their short-sightedness and greed got in the way.

He probably wasn't speaking for himself, but (sadly) for the majority of the public. For those of us that like the print, magazines are specialized enough to at least offer a higher density of interesting material.

Plus some Fortran[year] for numerical applications.

[ ] a planet
[ ] a plutoid
[ ] a bitch

Say "what" one more goddamned time...

Mars is a chocolate bar, Pluto is Mickey Mouse's dog. On Jupiter, Wikipedia has a lengthy disambiguation list. Take your pic.

On top of these points I would like to add scale-up. Being able to produce an improved button-sized battery won't cut it. You'll need tons and tons of the new material, which means a stable and efficient production line is needed. And, of course, you'll need to develop and build said production line, which is something that the lab-rats often just wave their hands over, dismissing it as engineering "details".

You might want to check out Stanislaw Lem's "His master's voice". He writes about the futile attempts of humanity in decoding an alien signal sent to earth, not only because of the difficulty of the encoding itself, but also due to the chasm between the two civilizations, mindsets etc. It is very dark and pessimistic, but definitely a good read.

If this isn't the insult of the week, I don't know what is!

You'll have to acknowledge though that in the rest of the "western" world religion and science are kept nice and separate. For example, debates on whether kids at school should learn about the genesis or evolution are very, very seldom. They are both taught at school, one at religion class and the other at biology class. People do go to church, pray etc. but they also know that this has nothing to do with science.