Over here at Univ. of Michigan, the engineering computer support team has justed released it's first version of "Blue Hat", a Red Hat derived Linux distrubtion with additionaly functionality for some of the networking features here on this campus (AFS, Kerberos, etc).
AFAIK, there is a fixed point as set by the FCC when the broadcast signals are to be turned off. I want to say 2006, but I might be wrong. Of course, given such findings as these, and the fact that digital TVs are still $3000 or more, the FCC may delay it until the tech catches up appropriately.
Re:Don't call me an old fuddy-duddy, but...
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That wasn't the specific one that I was talking about. The "Pulp Simspons" one, for example....
Don't call me an old fuddy-duddy, but...
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I'm not suggesting that/. needs to censor, but at least two of the items in this block of quickies are ones you definitely don't want your boss to see at work (unless he's a geek too).
Might I suggest that whomever posts the quickies place an obvious warning label as to objectionable content so that users don't click where they shouldn't while at work (but are free to do so at home?)
Anyone remember "Out of this World"
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I remember this game on the Amiga, later ported to other systems, but not with the same quality. In any case, the initial sequence of the movie showed a guy using a '3D desktop', which was done using a holographic cube.
This looks very cool. But I do agree, the current computer paradime is very hard to put into a '3d mode' for nearly all applications.
"Eyes Wide Shut" was censored as to bring the rating from an NA-17 (hard porn) to an R (soft porn) rating, due to the studio wanting to attract more people to the film. No gov't agency was involved here.
I only causally follow the markets, but everyone knows that the market is riding high, and everyone's waiting for the IT bubble to burst, where people will realize that stocks like Amazon and such will bottom out to their 'true' value, and we'll hit a so-called recession across the board. (extreme, yes, but sometimes you have to be).
Last week, MS was added to the Dow Jones, the leading indicator of the stock market.
I know that these findings took time, and such, but I also see that this was written at the beginning of Oct, and that the info was also sent to the appropriate gov't finance offices. I wonder if those offices even saw them.
If MS stock were to deflate to it's normal value, I'd strongly worry about a deflation of stocks across the board, as the start of the pending 'diaster' that may hit the market. Of course, other stocks, such as Apple's, IBM, and so forth, which have much more tangible qualities, may be able to hold their own, and the IT bubble won't pop as badly.
One thing I did like was that MS tried to claim that everyone was overvaluing their stock, but Bill retorted that MS is a market leader, and thus should be setting the example, and not trying to succum to such tactics. Very good point here.
One example provided is the "If Microsoft Built Cars" joke. There is something significantly different about IT from any other major industry out there today or 100 yrs ago. It's the one area where you can do the least physical labor to obtain the most 'reward' from it.
Sure, IT people face long hours and underpaid salaries, but most of this time is spent in front of a computer typing in code and compiling and testing. Beyond this effort and the chance of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that ain't a lot of work. Add a radio or CD player nearby, a fridge full of food, and the like, and you'll have someone that could work nearly indefinitely if the salary was right, and they wouldn't have to move from the desk.
This can and has invoked laziness in the IT industry. Something goes wrong? You don't have to rebuilt it, or take it apart to find the troubled part; you can just modify the code and find the error. Since it's so easy to do so, coders generally can let bugs go until release time, and because it's easier to release a patch than do a recall (and much cheaper too), it's easier to let users find bugs and report them , and.. and... Well, it's basically a viscious cycle between the ease of the computer user and human nature to do as little work as possible.
I'm not belittling IT. There's a lot of mental energy that is supplied to get the computer world working as it is. And I respect a lot of programmers and other sysadmins; I know that my excursions into IT can be mind wracking.
Now, let's go back to Rob's idea. Would IT professionals be doing something else if there were no computers or internet? I would shout a resounding "NO" to this. I think that even though the people would have high quality ideas and intelligence, the fact that there would be more physical work involved would deter many from following those ideas. Additionally, because it's physical, people would be less tendful to let errors exist in the final designs or models, and there would be less buggy output. "If Microsoft Made Cars" I think would not really hold up in such a situation.
Is this beneficial? It's a double-edged sword; I would think people like ESR and Linus and others would not necessariy be a big name if there were no computers, and those that have the mental capacity but the lack of physical proweless to get the job done would be unable to succeed as well as they have. On the other hand, we've gotten an attitude from the IT industry that is spreading to other industries on laziness and lack of checking for bugs and problems, and it has allowed people that don't necessarily have great ideas to succeed with sufficient monetary infusions. IMO, it's an overall beneficially effort: Linux and the Open Source movement of thousands of people collaborating across the world would never happen without the internet, and this is also spreading to other businesses.
I feel that Insurrection broke the odd-number trek film curse, though it certainly wasn't the greatest trek film. Half the problem was that the movie, in terms of it's expanse and the influence that the plot had on current and future Trek history, was not very large.. if anything, this movie would have made a better episode, or two part episode even. But transferring something that would have made a good episode to the big screen requires the incorporation of lots of special effects. While these aren't absent in Insurrection, they stand out too much (Data's invisibility at the beginning, the invisible ship, and the space battle). They all feel forced. Most everything else about the movie feels about right and is pretty close to the original Trek series (notice that Picard got the girl this time:-).
Now, Voyager on the other hand, is suffering from being in prime time and thus forcing ratings. If you think 7 of 9 is there to build personality, think again:-). It's not that Voyager's episodes aren't necessarily bad (There's a few that really stand out as stinkburgers however), but in 9 out of 10 times, it's been done in the trek universe before. This is one of the reasons the Doctor is getting a lot of favored reviews.. he's the only character (or type of character) that really hasn't been developed in any other trek series, and many of the plots revolving around him are new. Many of the Seven of Nine plots are too Borg-intensive, as opposed to moving her away from Borg. But every other character on Voyager is bland, and I've yet seen any really good exploration of one particular character that hasn't been done before.
I agree that what Paramount should do is hold off on another series.. put at least a year between Voyager and whatever this new one is called (and since there's no B5 to compete against, there's no rush here). Plan the new Trek movie to premiere the same year as this series comes out; if possible revolve the movie around the new series (Although I've heard the new movie will be strongly Klingon in nature.. yeeesh).
I remember back in the Mosaic days that as the web was developing, people were suggesting that users would not have to memorize addresses, but would only be there for the power users. Instead, the average user would use bookmarks or search engines to get the page they wanted. Then e-commerce started that and perverted the whole thing.
You know, putting two and two together, I wonder if all this legal crap of late regarding the web is due to the bitterness that e-commerce has on not sucking up the web before.
You're not squatting; the definition the bill is going by is that you are holding the rights to that domain name to strictly only make money off selling it. Additionally, this doesn't sound like a trademarked name that the battle is over. And you said you also are using said site purposefully and thus aren't 'squatting' on it. You should be in the clear (Of course, IMNAL).
ZPG, aka Zero Population Growth. It may seem to be very dark and morbid, but it's a solution that we as beings of the planet Earth should start taking into consideration. We're rapidly approaching the maximum limit of this planet (estimated to be somewhere between 8 and 10 billion, IIRC), at which point, unless we've obtained signifiacntly new technologies, we'll exhaust the available land for farming and use it instead for human residences.
Surprisingly, many Sci-Fi authors have forseen this, and give a good (and rather dark) picture of an overpopulated world: Ender's Game by OSC, the "Red Mars" series, Neuromancer to some extent...
Right now, implementing ZPG does not need to be drastic, but there are ways to do it so that the growth is minimized further: tax/charge the parents for having a 3rd child, a certain snip snip after the 2nd child, and education in the thrid world countries. Some of these are dark and forbidding, and some go against my own personal ideals, but we're nowhere close to colonization of other planets, and thus it's time to think about slowing the rate down on this one until we can.
Ok, I know that line is cliche, but there is something to be said about obtaining without the consent of the parent personal info about a child, much less being able to sell that info across a number of other companies. There are pedophiles on the net and in real life. There are people that have very low morals that will stalk children and harm/kill them because they get a thrill from being able to take advantage of a situation where they control everything. It is perverted, which is why pedophiles are generally considered as bad as murderers.
Of course, there's a big difference between someone that wants to kidnap children, and a web site aimed at kids. But there's still the same possibility that things could happen. Example: If a web site aimed at kids asks an 'innocent' question such as "Do you go home to an empty house after school?" and the answers were matched up with the address and name, that could lead to robbery and maybe kidnapping if the right person got a hold of the info. There's also the idea that many kids might inadvertantly answer "yes" to something that they should say no to , which can open a number of doors either being advertizing or personal or property threat, which might have been stated in a way most children would not understand.
This bill basically seems like a natural extention of what most media does with stories that revovle around children: the names are protected to prevent further harm.
Given the recent 'news' articles (*front page* in my local paper!) about bogus or weird Ebay auctions within the last two months, and the recent judgements that selling body parts over the web is illegal, selling drugs over the web is illegal, and scalping tickets over the web is illegal, I think the SEC put 2 and 2 together, and said "hey, we're next!".
I see nothing fishy about SEC's actions. (IMO, they are one of the few least-internet savvy government braches, if they've basically taken action against Ebay just now).
Sun recently gave up on producing it's own IDE (Java Workshop as reported here previously), but the IDE market is still hot (95% of all Java programmers, I'd speculate, want to program visual, and Java Beans does help). As long as NetBeans remains free, I see no problems with this - Sun still wins in the long run because it *is* Java that you develop for, which is all the more power to Sun. I think we do need to watch Sun as their actions are similar to MS, but I believe there's some good at Sun that will continue to improve for free/open source software
It's a Java IDE written entirely in Java such that as long as you had a 100% compat JRE 1.1, you could use it. It was also a free download (forget the original licence, but you didn't get source code with it). Had lots of 'visual' elements to it, and was generally looked on as one of the better low-cost IDEs out there. I used it for a bit, and while I didn't like it, it was good for the state of the technology today. (why oh why must nearly all windoze dev build with the MDI interface: one application window with multiple sub windows, instead of one window per file?!)
Last I heard about this, the idea was that by 2001, at least 50% of the broadcasts were to be in digital format, and then by 2006, all analog television signals were to be discontinued. The problem is is that the 4 networks have yet to agree on what aspect ratio and res to use, and some of the current digitial/widescreen TVs will not support all of them. Mind you, this was back in March when I last heard, but it's still an issue.
Additionally, the sets still cost $3000+ to get. And the costs have not come down drastically from when they were first released. If, in 2005, these sets still cost in excess of $1000, I suspect you're going to see some major lawmaking either pushing the cost of sets way lower, or pushing back the transition date.
While I don't take the blame personally:-), I think a lot of the problem with the metric conversion is the chemical industry, and specifically the petroleum one. Chemical engineering students still need to learn both systems, as *MODERN* textbooks still teach both and give problems in both. Since much of the rest of the industry in the US is dependant on chemicals, this is probably a result from that.
We've tried to switch, but it's realllly hard. Too many of the empirical equations that we use are based on english units, and while not impossible to switch, no one wants to rework these out.
It begs the question: if someone like Gibson, ESR, Linus, or any of the other names commonly associated with geek culture dies, will someone arrange an internet wake/funeral? (and I'm not speaking from the aspect of being the first to have such an event -- death is far above the tactiness of being the first to have a net-broadcast event). The net has brough ppl closer together than at any other time in the past -- I predict that we'll see something like this if someone 'big' does pass away.
I've never read this author's books, but anyone's untimely death is unfortunate. Best wishes to her family and friends.
However, on a somewhat related matter, as the people that have defined the geek community, whether by being computer leaders, authors, musicans, etc, being to age and pass on, it will be interesting to see how we, the geek community, handle it. Unlike previous generations, where the connection between the common people and the celebs was distant, ours is one where you might be email buddies with a huge celebrity, in terms of the geek community.
I'm not necessarily speaking about midair crashes. What if the airplane gas tanks are y2k-deficient, such that while flying over the date change, they suddenly purge any gas in the systems, and the plane plumits?
Basically, two systems at work here: the FAA, and the airlines themselves. It seems like a double hazard, but I think both are sufficiently ahead or out of the game that neither should be as probable as power outages or bank failures.
They give 1000:1 to a bank failure, and a 300:1 for a airline going down on Y2K. Correct me if I'm wrong but:
The FAA traffic monitor system runs on a different clock than the typical mm/dd/yy, or the unix 32-bit clock (and I though that it's turnover was due before the end of this year, or about this time next year), such that Y2K should not affect these.
Most airlines are requiring their Y2K-readiness exec to fly on Jan 1, 2000, prompting these execs to make absolutely sure that they're ready.
Sure, ther will bound to be problems with the air*PORT* system, with schedules going bonkers, lost luggage, and that stuff, but I doubt this will cause the loss of life. If anything, I'd give an airplane crash 10,000:1 odds, and move the bank failure to about 10:1 odds. The banks don't directly have anyone lives in their hands, and many of the smaller bank chains have been slow to implement Y2K as 'it's not that big a problem'.
I'll still be getting a written proof of my account status in early Dec, though my bank has promised Y2K complience.
Coming from the academica background, my understanding is that the findings in this article, while published in SciAm, are from an article in either Science or Nature. Both of these journal are not generally available to the public, although, most university libraries will carry them. The common form of articles that go into these journal are generally the first major breakthrough findings on some topic; the reported results are sufficient to back up the writers' theories and postulates, but are usually not enough to build a full picture of what's going on.
Thus, I suspect that the details in this SciAm are about as deep as they are in the Nature or Science article, just rewritten to a slightly lower reader level (not too low, mind you, just low enough for the scientific layman to understand). Yes, you should expect contriversy about it. If I remember correctly, the Cold Fusion project of years back underwent a similar treatment. And if you look at the Nobel prizes in Chemistry or Physics and note where the first reported mention of the work occured, I'd expect that you'd also find contrivesry as the idea was tossed around the scientific community.
Now, there is one last point: both Science and Nature are what are known as peer-reviewed journals: before you can publish in those, your article is subjected to critism from at least 3 experts in the field (these experts are anonymous). If they find something fishy or questionable, they'll ask you to fix it , or not approve the article for publication. The fact that it DID get published means that at least 3 experts agree with the results and how the researchers got to them. However, another cavaet - from a chemistry standpoint, this result makes me want to shout horray, as it proves something that's only been shown to work in theory. It's rather easy to ignore possible problems in the mechanics of the experiment for a result like this.
However, now that the technique is out there and reported, you'll see others trying to repeat this, and within 6 months, we'll know if we have the next cold fusion, or the next Nobel-prize winning award.
...And then if you talk to chemists, they'll say physics is a specialization of chemistry:-).
To be truthful, probably 99% of the physists out there are either doing the work at the quantum level (and thus can be called physical chemists), or work at the extreme macroscale (that is, universal scale), and thus can be called astrophysists.
Almost everything in between was solved by Newton way back when, and Einstein in the early part of this century, except for the connection between a 'small' number of molecules (on the order of 1 to 10^10) and the quautum theory level. And that's the job of chemistry:-)
I heard this story elsewhere, and someone commented that the law firm that is representing these kids has also filed similar suits against Magic and other CCG (collectable card games), and in the case of the Pokemon CCG, they found two likely kids among several 'applicants'.
I compare this to the suit that the woman that sued her credit card companies because she lost $75,000 on her cards because she was gambling illegally on the net, and they (the credit card companies) didn't stop her. Law suits are not supposed to make up for human stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Over here at Univ. of Michigan, the engineering computer support team has justed released it's first version of "Blue Hat", a Red Hat derived Linux distrubtion with additionaly functionality for some of the networking features here on this campus (AFS, Kerberos, etc).
AFAIK, there is a fixed point as set by the FCC when the broadcast signals are to be turned off. I want to say 2006, but I might be wrong. Of course, given such findings as these, and the fact that digital TVs are still $3000 or more, the FCC may delay it until the tech catches up appropriately.
That wasn't the specific one that I was talking about. The "Pulp Simspons" one, for example....
Might I suggest that whomever posts the quickies place an obvious warning label as to objectionable content so that users don't click where they shouldn't while at work (but are free to do so at home?)
This looks very cool. But I do agree, the current computer paradime is very hard to put into a '3d mode' for nearly all applications.
"Eyes Wide Shut" was censored as to bring the rating from an NA-17 (hard porn) to an R (soft porn) rating, due to the studio wanting to attract more people to the film. No gov't agency was involved here.
Last week, MS was added to the Dow Jones, the leading indicator of the stock market.
I know that these findings took time, and such, but I also see that this was written at the beginning of Oct, and that the info was also sent to the appropriate gov't finance offices. I wonder if those offices even saw them.
If MS stock were to deflate to it's normal value, I'd strongly worry about a deflation of stocks across the board, as the start of the pending 'diaster' that may hit the market. Of course, other stocks, such as Apple's, IBM, and so forth, which have much more tangible qualities, may be able to hold their own, and the IT bubble won't pop as badly.
One thing I did like was that MS tried to claim that everyone was overvaluing their stock, but Bill retorted that MS is a market leader, and thus should be setting the example, and not trying to succum to such tactics. Very good point here.
Sure, IT people face long hours and underpaid salaries, but most of this time is spent in front of a computer typing in code and compiling and testing. Beyond this effort and the chance of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that ain't a lot of work. Add a radio or CD player nearby, a fridge full of food, and the like, and you'll have someone that could work nearly indefinitely if the salary was right, and they wouldn't have to move from the desk.
This can and has invoked laziness in the IT industry. Something goes wrong? You don't have to rebuilt it, or take it apart to find the troubled part; you can just modify the code and find the error. Since it's so easy to do so, coders generally can let bugs go until release time, and because it's easier to release a patch than do a recall (and much cheaper too), it's easier to let users find bugs and report them , and .. and... Well, it's basically a viscious cycle between the ease of the computer user and human nature to do as little work as possible.
I'm not belittling IT. There's a lot of mental energy that is supplied to get the computer world working as it is. And I respect a lot of programmers and other sysadmins; I know that my excursions into IT can be mind wracking.
Now, let's go back to Rob's idea. Would IT professionals be doing something else if there were no computers or internet? I would shout a resounding "NO" to this. I think that even though the people would have high quality ideas and intelligence, the fact that there would be more physical work involved would deter many from following those ideas. Additionally, because it's physical, people would be less tendful to let errors exist in the final designs or models, and there would be less buggy output. "If Microsoft Made Cars" I think would not really hold up in such a situation.
Is this beneficial? It's a double-edged sword; I would think people like ESR and Linus and others would not necessariy be a big name if there were no computers, and those that have the mental capacity but the lack of physical proweless to get the job done would be unable to succeed as well as they have. On the other hand, we've gotten an attitude from the IT industry that is spreading to other industries on laziness and lack of checking for bugs and problems, and it has allowed people that don't necessarily have great ideas to succeed with sufficient monetary infusions. IMO, it's an overall beneficially effort: Linux and the Open Source movement of thousands of people collaborating across the world would never happen without the internet, and this is also spreading to other businesses.
Now, Voyager on the other hand, is suffering from being in prime time and thus forcing ratings. If you think 7 of 9 is there to build personality, think again :-). It's not that Voyager's episodes aren't necessarily bad (There's a few that really stand out as stinkburgers however), but in 9 out of 10 times, it's been done in the trek universe before. This is one of the reasons the Doctor is getting a lot of favored reviews.. he's the only character (or type of character) that really hasn't been developed in any other trek series, and many of the plots revolving around him are new. Many of the Seven of Nine plots are too Borg-intensive, as opposed to moving her away from Borg. But every other character on Voyager is bland, and I've yet seen any really good exploration of one particular character that hasn't been done before.
I agree that what Paramount should do is hold off on another series.. put at least a year between Voyager and whatever this new one is called (and since there's no B5 to compete against, there's no rush here). Plan the new Trek movie to premiere the same year as this series comes out; if possible revolve the movie around the new series (Although I've heard the new movie will be strongly Klingon in nature.. yeeesh).
You know, putting two and two together, I wonder if all this legal crap of late regarding the web is due to the bitterness that e-commerce has on not sucking up the web before.
You're not squatting; the definition the bill is going by is that you are holding the rights to that domain name to strictly only make money off selling it. Additionally, this doesn't sound like a trademarked name that the battle is over. And you said you also are using said site purposefully and thus aren't 'squatting' on it. You should be in the clear (Of course, IMNAL).
Surprisingly, many Sci-Fi authors have forseen this, and give a good (and rather dark) picture of an overpopulated world: Ender's Game by OSC, the "Red Mars" series, Neuromancer to some extent...
Right now, implementing ZPG does not need to be drastic, but there are ways to do it so that the growth is minimized further: tax/charge the parents for having a 3rd child, a certain snip snip after the 2nd child, and education in the thrid world countries. Some of these are dark and forbidding, and some go against my own personal ideals, but we're nowhere close to colonization of other planets, and thus it's time to think about slowing the rate down on this one until we can.
Of course, there's a big difference between someone that wants to kidnap children, and a web site aimed at kids. But there's still the same possibility that things could happen. Example: If a web site aimed at kids asks an 'innocent' question such as "Do you go home to an empty house after school?" and the answers were matched up with the address and name, that could lead to robbery and maybe kidnapping if the right person got a hold of the info. There's also the idea that many kids might inadvertantly answer "yes" to something that they should say no to , which can open a number of doors either being advertizing or personal or property threat, which might have been stated in a way most children would not understand.
This bill basically seems like a natural extention of what most media does with stories that revovle around children: the names are protected to prevent further harm.
I see nothing fishy about SEC's actions. (IMO, they are one of the few least-internet savvy government braches, if they've basically taken action against Ebay just now).
Sun recently gave up on producing it's own IDE (Java Workshop as reported here previously), but the IDE market is still hot (95% of all Java programmers, I'd speculate, want to program visual, and Java Beans does help). As long as NetBeans remains free, I see no problems with this - Sun still wins in the long run because it *is* Java that you develop for, which is all the more power to Sun. I think we do need to watch Sun as their actions are similar to MS, but I believe there's some good at Sun that will continue to improve for free/open source software
It's a Java IDE written entirely in Java such that as long as you had a 100% compat JRE 1.1, you could use it. It was also a free download (forget the original licence, but you didn't get source code with it). Had lots of 'visual' elements to it, and was generally looked on as one of the better low-cost IDEs out there. I used it for a bit, and while I didn't like it, it was good for the state of the technology today. (why oh why must nearly all windoze dev build with the MDI interface: one application window with multiple sub windows, instead of one window per file?!)
Additionally, the sets still cost $3000+ to get. And the costs have not come down drastically from when they were first released. If, in 2005, these sets still cost in excess of $1000, I suspect you're going to see some major lawmaking either pushing the cost of sets way lower, or pushing back the transition date.
We've tried to switch, but it's realllly hard. Too many of the empirical equations that we use are based on english units, and while not impossible to switch, no one wants to rework these out.
It begs the question: if someone like Gibson, ESR, Linus, or any of the other names commonly associated with geek culture dies, will someone arrange an internet wake/funeral? (and I'm not speaking from the aspect of being the first to have such an event -- death is far above the tactiness of being the first to have a net-broadcast event). The net has brough ppl closer together than at any other time in the past -- I predict that we'll see something like this if someone 'big' does pass away.
However, on a somewhat related matter, as the people that have defined the geek community, whether by being computer leaders, authors, musicans, etc, being to age and pass on, it will be interesting to see how we, the geek community, handle it. Unlike previous generations, where the connection between the common people and the celebs was distant, ours is one where you might be email buddies with a huge celebrity, in terms of the geek community.
Basically, two systems at work here: the FAA, and the airlines themselves. It seems like a double hazard, but I think both are sufficiently ahead or out of the game that neither should be as probable as power outages or bank failures.
- The FAA traffic monitor system runs on a different clock than the typical mm/dd/yy, or the unix 32-bit clock (and I though that it's turnover was due before the end of this year, or about this time next year), such that Y2K should not affect these.
- Most airlines are requiring their Y2K-readiness exec to fly on Jan 1, 2000, prompting these execs to make absolutely sure that they're ready.
Sure, ther will bound to be problems with the air*PORT* system, with schedules going bonkers, lost luggage, and that stuff, but I doubt this will cause the loss of life. If anything, I'd give an airplane crash 10,000:1 odds, and move the bank failure to about 10:1 odds. The banks don't directly have anyone lives in their hands, and many of the smaller bank chains have been slow to implement Y2K as 'it's not that big a problem'.I'll still be getting a written proof of my account status in early Dec, though my bank has promised Y2K complience.
Thus, I suspect that the details in this SciAm are about as deep as they are in the Nature or Science article, just rewritten to a slightly lower reader level (not too low, mind you, just low enough for the scientific layman to understand). Yes, you should expect contriversy about it. If I remember correctly, the Cold Fusion project of years back underwent a similar treatment. And if you look at the Nobel prizes in Chemistry or Physics and note where the first reported mention of the work occured, I'd expect that you'd also find contrivesry as the idea was tossed around the scientific community.
Now, there is one last point: both Science and Nature are what are known as peer-reviewed journals: before you can publish in those, your article is subjected to critism from at least 3 experts in the field (these experts are anonymous). If they find something fishy or questionable, they'll ask you to fix it , or not approve the article for publication. The fact that it DID get published means that at least 3 experts agree with the results and how the researchers got to them. However, another cavaet - from a chemistry standpoint, this result makes me want to shout horray, as it proves something that's only been shown to work in theory. It's rather easy to ignore possible problems in the mechanics of the experiment for a result like this.
However, now that the technique is out there and reported, you'll see others trying to repeat this, and within 6 months, we'll know if we have the next cold fusion, or the next Nobel-prize winning award.
To be truthful, probably 99% of the physists out there are either doing the work at the quantum level (and thus can be called physical chemists), or work at the extreme macroscale (that is, universal scale), and thus can be called astrophysists.
Almost everything in between was solved by Newton way back when, and Einstein in the early part of this century, except for the connection between a 'small' number of molecules (on the order of 1 to 10^10) and the quautum theory level. And that's the job of chemistry :-)
these kids has also filed similar suits against
Magic and other CCG (collectable card games),
and in the case of the Pokemon CCG, they found
two likely kids among several 'applicants'.
I compare this to the suit that the woman that
sued her credit card companies because she
lost $75,000 on her cards because she was
gambling illegally on the net, and they (the
credit card companies) didn't stop her.
Law suits are not supposed to make up for
human stupidity.