Office Space had a long message board thread in which people shared their depressing work experiences, with unlikable coworkers and terrible bosses, and it was really funny, but it's been deleted. It's the only thing I would have missed, but since it's already gone, who cares?

Gravity Light is cheaper. It won't charge phones but doesn't require a battery to provide LED light.

Why aren't OSes in ROM? Why do they have to be in read-write memory? If it's so expensive to suffer breaches, why trust any rewritable core? (I guess because OSes are never released as finished products, without built in security holes.)

Then too, there are savants like Alonzo Clemons, whose sculptures are strikingly realistic but made entirely without tools, just his two bare hands. We know this because we have film of him doing it. Was Vermeer a savant? He certainly could have been. Finding a way to fake the work of a master using mechanical means does not prove the master used the same techniques, even if he could have. Penn Jillette, ever the blowhard, is merely hyping the documentary he helped finance. Unless someone finds Vermeer's camera obscura in an old barn, nothing has been proven so far.

Best Buy used to have a warranty where the paid you back exactly what you paid for the device. So if your brand new original XBox that you paid $300 +tax for broke after 23 months they would give you $300 +tax and you could turn around and buy a brand new one for $200 +tax - since the price dropped by $100 after 2 years. Warranty return was no questions asked return for any reason and get handed a Best Buy gift card right there. How is this not a good deal?

From the supplemental material: "The energy densities of the microbatteries are initially superior to the supercapcitors, but lose an average 5% total energy density after each cycle."

Bit Coin works even if there are no "firms" to issue or exchange. Therefore, there is no one to regulate.

Everyone has overly complex ideas on how to reform the patent system. Why not simply leave it alone and reform the system that allows people to sue when someone violates their patent.
In step 1 of the defense, the defendant provides prior art, claims of obviousness... to the Patent Office who then determines if the patent is still valid. The Patent Office (who are the experts, not the courts) judge if the patent is still valid based on all evidence.
After that if it still goes to court then loser pays attorney fees. No fees are paid before step 1 - so both sides get to hear the arguments before going to court. Plaintiff doesn't get punished with paying legal fees for simply not being aware of prior art. Defendant doesn't pay legal fees until they lose their appeal with the Patent Office and still decide to continue to fight. If the Patent is stuck down in step 1, then the Patent is void. It does not just apply to this single case.

Not all software patents cover a couple lines of code. Some represent man-decades of effort. Am I expected to first come up with my idea, then write the software, then apply for a patent and then wait 18 months (time from application to publication) to determine if someone else filed before me and that everything I have done is wasted. Do you really expect me to file the patent when the code is complete - giving someone else who does a half-assed implementation a couple year head start? Or let someone else get the patent when they came up with the same idea the same time as me (5 years ago) but filed 1 day before me. I'm not talking rounded buttons here. Think video compression algorithms, advanced image processing, recognition algorithms...

Send it around the sun one time, really close, before placing it in lunar orbit, and you'd have a thermal energy source of great usefulness.

Biographies of Isaac Newton do not show Robert Hooke in a good light. He was a pretender to genius and laid claim to ideas that Newton developed in full, whereas Hooke had the most rudimentary sense of them. He was in science what we'd call a patent troll in the field of business. Just because he has a name one might have heard before is no reason to accord to him the profound dignity of scholarship this article purports to bestow. He looked through a microscope. Wow! Newton invented the theory of optics. (And many other things that Hooke very presumptuously claimed to be his own discoveries.)

The site displays the source and destination IP of each attack. Doesn't this give the attackers the list of IPs of the Security VMs they should avoid? Maybe they change the IPs regularly?

Or maybe find a non 20-something that can program Java. They do exist and are more likely to stick around. They might even require less training. From TFA, it sounds like the CIO created his own problems by treating the web/java development team differently:

No doubt, this prediction will soon be added to The iPad Death Watch

Wrong. A conflict with Iran would not profit even defense contractors. The war in Iraq was different - it was profitable because there was no threat to international security. A conflict with Iran, which would be presumptively nuclear, would be an armageddon scenario, and markets would crash. Weapons builders would not fare better in such a conflict than if there had been no conflict. I don't think it's clear to people that private enterprises have more to lose than governments in such a scenario. They have more to gain from Stuxnet than governments do.