In the Einstein case, he said "The theory predicts gravitational waves, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect."
In the EM dive case, what's going on is "Here's a theory for radical behavior that we cannot yet reliably detect."

If you're going to blow off Newton, it's more important that you get pretty airtight experimental results that are significantly better than "might not be noise" than you have a theory to explain them.

The natural progression of "web as platform" is to (safely) expose your hardware to web-based applications, for your benefit. Vendors who currently enjoy being the gatekeepers of various walled gardens (I'm lookin' at you, AppleSoft) are going to try to stall this progression as long as they possibly can, as it threatens their cash-cow businesses. I very much doubt the handful of web platform vendors integrating WebGL right now are going to allow it to run amok in the same way that ActiveX and Flash have over the last decade.

She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful – even fervently so – for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ...

Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.

Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form.

A more reasoned explanation about what's going on here, from one of the dojo toolkit founders:

http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2009/05/a-quick-word-on-dojo-and-patents/

I was in film school with John Knoll, who was really into special effects even then. At the time, there was no CGI, so many of PhotoShop's metaphors originated with the optical and photographic techniques used to perform, say, blue-screen traveling mattes. I remember seeing "this cool software my brother and I are working on" on a Mac II at ILM, doing a feathered, alpha-blended photo composite (giving a third eye to a photo of a baby) in the late 80s. At the time, the software was used to do background blending and stitching for CGI sequences in "The Abyss".

I have written on professional computer graphics software in the last few years, use the GIMP regularly in my applications-development work, and think PhotoShop still kicks it all 'round the block for fit and finish as well as raw capability. I agree with the earlier comments on Clayton Christensen, but don't think a product that tries to duplicate the market leader is the important one. I'd say perhaps that Picasa would be a better example there, quietly chomping away at the low end of PhotoShop's features for crop, scale, rotate, color-correct etc.