Hit the nail on the head. Why in the world would anyone decide the future of a language based on its ability to write GUIs in today's web world is a mystery.

DomainKeys does similar things for e-mail.

First, I might not want all this integrated into my e-mail inbox. Second, Facebook (and probably OpenSocial, Google's other thing) does this - integrating forums, discussions, comments, likes into posts, which are arguably wave-like.

I'll argue it's much easier to scan through an e-mail thread than do a playback on a wave. Real-time playback is cute but I don't have time for it. And reading the wave linearly doesn't help since people can modify things in between.

Google couldn't even integrate GMail with wave. One of the main reasons I gave up Wave was having to keep track of two Google inboxes.

I don't think people dismissed it out of hand. When it first came out, people lined up for accounts. It just didn't offer anything much in addition to what we had.

Maybe nothing of value was lost precisely because everything has been opened up anyway? Anyone who wants another shot at convincing people that this is a Good Thing(tm), can quite easily do so. I agree that there was phenomenal engineering involved and that may well be used in many scenarios.

Ahem. My Nokia E71 supports Flash.

This isn't about thought crime, this isn't about proclaiming anyone guilty. From TFA (the Yahoo news one):

selected IBM predictive analytics software to reduce recidivism by determining which juveniles are likely to reoffend. Identified at-risk youth can then be placed in programs specific to the best course of treatment to ensure offenders do not re-enter the juvenile justice system.

So this is about treatment and rehab, not about proclaiming guilt. The persons in question have already been determined guilty, and whats being done here is determine the best course of action.

With the new analytics system in place, Florida Department of Juvenile Justice will analyze key predictors such as past offense history, home life environment, gang affiliation and peer associations to better understand and predict which youths have a higher likelihood to reoffend.

This is totally scientific. Basically, this is the same principle as let's punish a serial killer differently from a person convicted of second degree murder.

Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality.

So this isn't some brand new evil that IBM is committing. They were already using simplistic modeling, IBM is just providing more powerful modeling.

Google's been pushing offline support pretty strongly on a number of devices. It would be a real waste if my computer were inoperable if the network were down. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to play chess, or write a document or take notes when I'm on a plane or far away from civilization. Even phones have airplane modes these days. I wonder if there is any sort of a file system at all on the Chrome OS. If not, it will be raise the bar for writing apps (even with offline mode support) since you simply have to write code to sync data as well.

I completely agree. Besides, from what I remember from high-school physics, how we "see" *anything* is when light falls on an atom/molecule, these electronics get excited into higher than natural states. When they go back to their natural states, they emit a photon that is characteristic of the material (color etc.). Given this, I don't see (pun intended) how it's possible for such a photograph to be taken.

That needs a much bigger computer, IIRC. Roughly the size and complexity of Earth, its ecosystem and its organisms.

Scientists are always looking for ways to falsify their theories. That is the very essence of science.

It's not the essence, but the method of science. The essence of science is that the universe *is* governed by laws; a statement that most scientists would not accept as falsifiable. As scientists, we are happy to accept that a particular theory is falsifiable, but the conclusion from that is always that "we have to look for another theory", not "maybe there is nothing that explains this phenomena".

Of course, the laws discovered so far have stood up to some pretty heavy scrutiny. I'm just pointing out that it is true that science simply assumes the existence of natural law.