The legend of the code ninja and rockstar programmer is ruining this field. There is still a role for the genuine master craftsman but most roles can be satisfied by less than this. Stop believing the mythology; much of engineering has always been cut and paste. Silicon Valley is no different.

Well there goes my caps lock key. ;-)

Hasn't tesla made its technology open to the public? What are they hoping to learn that Tesla hasn't published?

But if you look at the tenuous supply of water that is needed by the enormous population, the threat of climate change to India's stability is hard to overstate.

If my math is correct, that's over 10 megs/second average for the whole day. ...how!?

Huh, didn't realize that Skype stopped working on linux. Probably because I've pretty much exclusively used google hangouts for the last few years.

You say this as though they're being found "not guilty" due to an error. Instead they're being sentenced and serving time, just not as much time as originally prescribed. The question is whether it's worth the cost (time, effort, familial disruption, credibility of the system) to make these people serve the objective duration of their subjective sentence. Given that the time issued for a given charge is quite varied from case to case, I'm not sure it is.

The original "hacktivists"

Agreed. When it comes to winning an acute war, I'm open to compromising on civil liberties, as is written in our constitution. The argument here is that the NSA leak seems more the culmination of paranoia and low personal standards.

I suspect it will be a tradeoff in which the act of making an image will become much more processor-heavy. But the act of rendering and storing it will be much lighter. At the risk of going over the top, I'd say that this new technology might be a decent parable of caution to the true-believers in the predictive abilities of mathematical instruments: just because you can trace a set of data with a Fourier Series, doesn't necessarily mean you understand anything about the governing dynamics responsible for the phenomenon in the first place... but maybe I'm overextending myself. ;)

Did we really need a computer model to make this prediction? I've heard sociologists and apocalypse junkies saying this for a while.

Usually I would be on the side of "Damn police state, wtf" but I have a hard time getting worked up about this. Because, you know, whenever I buy 5000 rounds of waterproof ammunition, night vision goggles and a gas mask, it's always for something positive.

I'm reading Steve Jobs' biography right now and the man's legacy seems to be one of perfectionism and profound hypocrisy, especially in light of the article above. Steve Jobs was an orphan whose biological parents demanded that he be adopted by a college educated family. When the educated family backed out on him, he was picked up by a blue collar machinist with only a high school education; but he had a steady job and was involved in a working community where jobs received the stability he needed to work hard and make something of himself. The man was an orphan, used the social safety net of 1950s America to its full capacity, did his early work at Atari (not manufacturing overseas) with only a high school diploma, got Atari to pay part of his way to "find himself" in India, and now his multi-billion dollar company says it doesn't owe the United States employment? Disgraceful but what do you expect from a man who got into computers by playing around with hardware, only to create a computer company that forbids the user from customizing the hardware on their machine. Steve Jobs was remarkable in many good ways...but his legacy is very mixed.