Sounds like botnet owners read Ender's Game.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why Apache would be targeted like this?

From an email I received from Apache 20 minutes ago (emphasis mine):

We are assuming that the attackers have a copy of the JIRA database, which includes a hash (SHA-512 unsalted) of the password
you set when signing up as 'edmazur' to JIRA. If the password you set was not of great quality (eg. based on a dictionary word), it
should be assumed that the attackers can guess your password from the password hash via brute force.

The upshot is that someone malicious may know both your email address and a password of yours.

This is a problem because many people reuse passwords across online services. If you reuse passwords across systems, we urge you to change
your passwords on ALL SYSTEMS that might be using the compromised JIRA password. Prime examples might be gmail or hotmail accounts, online
banking sites, or sites known to be related to your email's domain, cs.umass.edu.

I don't know what's worse - that you made that list or that I took the time to read through it all.

Oh well, it probably has someth-[28].

the threats have been demonstrated in the lab by a fella named Kevin Fu

It should also be mentioned that Prof. Kevin Fu was recently named Technology Review's 2009 Innovator of the Year for this work.

Watch out Thottbot...

</comic book guy voice>

It's really impressive to see a child prodigy, but do they go on to achieve more in life than the "average" smart crowd that goes through a more normal progression?

Malcolm Gladwell addresses this question in his book Outliers. The short answer to your question is no.

He claims that while intelligence is important, being a child prodigy alone won't buy you success. He instead says one need be only sufficiently intelligent, but also be presented the right opportunities and have the drive to put enough hours into practicing their craft. He calls that last part the 10,000 hour rule. In all the successful people he researched/interviewed, he found they went through a period in their lives where they were "made". The Beatles performed over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964 in Hamburg, Germany. Bill Gates spent his nights and weekends as a teenager messing around in the University of Washington computer lab, an opportunity most did not have at the time. There are other examples given in the book. On the other end of the spectrum, he presented the case of Christopher Langan, "the smartest man in America", who Gladwell says did not achieve the level of success seen in other cases because he did not have the same sort of opportunities growing up.

I imagine you could bend the idea of traditional "success" though and see that last case in other ways.

Rubbish

emacs is clearly superior

Excuse me, but real programmers use butterflies.

People apparently have to feel the heat themselves in order to see the wrong in the MAFIAA's ways.

People apparently have to feel the heat themselves in order to see the wrong in the (insert group) ways.

Richard Clarke spoke at my campus about a month ago and addressed this question. His claim was that United States needs to put forth some doctrine of cyberwarfare deterrence for the same reasons it did with nuclear warfare. His argument was that because of how dependent on computers the world is, cyberwarfare, a relatively unknown beast, has the same potential for the mutually assured destruction that nuclear weapons are capable of.

Is there any evidence of the author trying tougher challenges like union square or handling traffic lights?

Don't know about this particular project, but you might be interested the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge...autonomous navigation including obeying traffic laws.

Because it couldn't possibly be that Apple users like the products, is that the thinking?

The messages are all identical.

Image FTA: Apple tweets

He was using TiVo.

Unless you're using Dvorak.