Because he made a company that's richer than most sovereign nations.

True, if he were born today he'd just be a cocky asshole with little or no future. But he WAS born in the right time with the right skills, and did something notable. Which is true for all billionaires.

I can see that side of the argument. However, movies cost about the same or more to make, and a blu-ray doesn't go for more than $30 USD.

Personally I never pay more than that for games. Unless it's Portal or Half Life, otherwise I wait for the sales.

The U-2 is a fascinating aircraft. Its wingspan is so large that it can't take of or land the way normal jets do. When it takes of it has little "training wheels" that fall away when it lifts off, and landing it needs two chase vehicles to guide the pilot down. After which it sort of tips over and skits on its wings (on specially designed replaceable skid plates.)

Try having VOIP with 600ms of latency, or just a video chat. It is incredibly annoying.

I hate this because it means Apple wants to start selling consumable fuel cartridges.

I love this because it means I won't have to play retard roundup with power outlets and adapters when traveling.

A hybrid drive would be great in my laptop. It doesn't have room for "storage" drives and a 600GB SSD would be heinously expensive. You could also put one in a USB 3.0 external enclosure (I assume they can work like that.) That would give you a nice trade off between speed, capacity and, most importantly, portability.

That seems to be what Seagate is thinking too. Since the drive is in the 2.5" form factor.

Yes, but Sony stored customer data as PLAIN TEXT. Their security was a joke and they deserved all the bad press they got.

Valve on the other hand had all sensitive data encrypted. Which means that the hackers likely got nothing but useless gobbledygook.

Rename it to The Federal Bereau of Investigation. Because it's their fucking job anyway.

Gosh, thunderbolt sounds just super fine. I'll go out and buy a Thunderbolt expansion card today! Oh, yeah, I CAN'T.

The only thing I don't like about Windows is how scatter-brained it is. It is very clearly corporate designed by committee with no final "vision" in mind like Mac OS X. Other than that, what's so torturous about it? The fact that pretty much all software and hardware run on it with no issue?

As for Chromium, we'll see. iOS and Android have proven that new OSes can take off pretty quick as long as there's good app support (Angry Birds.) Whether or not that model will work on a big, clunky laptop is very questionable. Especially when it ventures into the spooky, dark forest of hardware support. Which from what I've read so far, is going to be absolutely pathetic. To the point of being practically unusable.

Shouldn't we... I dunno... invent sustainable fusion first? It's kinda like buying the cart before the horse. If the cart was three hundred thousand kilometers in space.

USB was driven by the entire industry to be a standard. Apple had nothing to do with it. Firewire was sort of a success, but it's higher licensing fees meant USB was more desirable by 3rd part manufacturers. Just try to go to any electronics store and find an external Firewire hard drive. They hardly exist anymore.

I'm a filmmaker so I definitely want Thunderbolt to succeed. But I was burned by the failed promises of Firewire and eSata. Now I see the exact same mistakes being made with Thunderbolt. Apple may be a driver of some standards, but unless this thing appears on a $300 notebook at Best Buy, it's going nowhere.

The only thing that exclusivity deals accomplish is to limit consumer choice and allow competitors the opportunity to get ahead (see: the iPhone.) From a marketing standpoint limiting Thunderbolt to Apple increases the value of the Mac, when in reality it chokes off the 3rd party ecosystem, and makes the port into a mostly useless esoteric novelty. Like Firewire-800.

Oop, it wasn't published 2 years ago, it was last February. Damn European date format. Oh, well, argument still holds. The press release from Oak Ridge is deliberately misleading.

Let's get the facts straight:

"With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency of conventional planar structure of the same materials."

3.2% is pathetic. A quick Google search reveals some polycrystalline Cadmium Telluride cells developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that achieved 15% efficiency. It was published TWO YEARS AGO.

For once, FOR ONCE I'd like to see a genuine solar cell breakthrough that changes the industry. Not some BS press release that's only a thinly veiled attempt to generate some capital investment. I understand that science usually progresses in baby steps (especially in chemistry) but there's got to be a higher standard for informing the public about your research.