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The Apple docs use the word "fused" so I think they're using the same technique as PROM circuits, except they're not directly readable. Essentially every bit is wired to a circuit breaker, you start with all 1s and intentionally trip some to burn in a fixed patterns of zeros and ones the first time you power it up. If they use the on-chip RNG to initialize it it's possible that not even the manufacturing facility knows what value it has encoded, only the chip itself. Looks like a real tin foil hatter designed this system and did it well.

Quite - the scenarios described barely seem to hang together.

"[Tech that] slows down your speech or turns up the volume for an elderly person with hearing loss"
One of these problems we already resolve using wearable devices called 'hearing aids'. As for slowing down speech, there's a PhD thesis on this, see p177 for the technical details.

"That enables a stroke victim to use the clarity of speech he had previously?"
OK, that one is faintly interesting but has it much to do with machine translation? As with transformation into a preferred accent it presumably has two basic problems, input of desired communication into device by whatever mechanism is most convenient, perhaps speech recognition, and output of desired communication in preferred format, which is to say speech synthesis. By and large the original utterance remains intact.

"One implication might be a technology that can translate from one generation to another. That can convert academic jargon to local slang"
Oversimplification (silly oversimplification in the case of the 'generation gap' cliche). First build a machine that understands either (a good way of approaching this would be to come up with an impressive automatic document summarisation function that does anything more fundamental than sentence extraction). Then prove that there's even a pathway to mapping between them since academic jargon and local slang are specific to different domains.

"It's transformative."
This line of research will certainly produce some interesting outputs, but primarily it will transform money into less money. That said, Google can afford it, so in point of fact -- why not?

Got nothing more to do with a time machine than your average lump of matter

Yeah, it has a lot more to do with the 555 timer, which was called "The IC Time Machine" when first sold, than it does with hot tub Eloi and hot tub Morlocks.

block dropping mini-game

Mr. Rogers is coming to get you.

...They obviously did not see Swordfish or Hackers as they would understand what REAL hackers are.

And you obviously didn't see the list of films. they studied.

There's plenty more of this kind of stuff to be found, but here are a couple of quick links related to Steorn. The Steorn video can be seen on Google, where it's filed under hoax, snake oil and scam. Wikipedia already has an article on them. Oddly, the site makes mention of the "Bolton Trust, DIT, Steorn Student Enterprise Competition 2006, which I actually found record of on the Dublin Institute of Technology website. Here is Steorn ad. I don't think the DIT competition adds any credibility, though. I'm done even wondering if there's a chance this is real.

Check out the "news" page : http://www.steorn.net/en/news.aspx?p=2 Posted on 17th of August 2006 http://www.steorn.net/en/news.aspx?p=2&id=31 "The winning team will be presented with a cheque for 5000 on the night of the final - March 29th 2006 - by DIT President Professor Brian Norton." and on the 17th of August 2006 "Congratulations to Blackhawk, winners of the 2006 Steorn/Bolton Trust/DIT Student Enterprise Competition. 17 August 2006" But from http://www.dit.ie/studententerprise "Results: 1st Prize: Nighthawk 2nd Prize: Snacks on Tracks" Just a typo, I suppose

1. Open Darwin's Thread UFS vs HFS+
2. Brigging UFS up to date
3. Meta Data in Mac Filesystems