If you discover you're dating a vengeful psycho bitch, don't ever break up with her.
Well, that, or at least make sure there's a hidden camera in the bedroom at strategic times, so that you have something to make her think long and hard before doing something dumb online after the breakup.
Even a completely headless organization does have people who direct the masses. Even the simplest and most spontaneous mobs have their provocateurs - the 'leaders', so to speak. I'm thinking the media simply got all breathless about how they were labelled.
Also, technical skill is not uniformly high across the group (perhaps a ratio of 10k script kiddies for every 20 actual hackers, etc).
It wouldn't be unreasonable to have major organizers being caught (CnC and direction has to come from *somewhere*, after all), or perhaps (but less likely) catching the more technically-minded members.
Even if they didn't catch 'em all, taking out a large percentage of the technical leads* or Command/Control leads* would be sufficient to do some serious damage.
* note that I have zero idea what to actually call them, but the terms should suffice.
One should *always* stick with a company based in one's own nation. I'll have to get on my T-Mobile phone and send the news to my buddies on Facebook right aw...
Slight pedancy... they were copyright trolls. Nothing really to do with patents (if they were squabbling over patents, they might have had half a chance).
But yeah - they (as sibling pointed out) used to have some halfway decent products. I think it was around the time they sued a couple of their biggest customers (Chrysler and AutoZone) that their other customers began phasing out (with extreme prejudice) UnixWare, OpenLinux/OpenServer, and damned near everything else that SCO owned and/or sold.
By 2006 or so, about the only folks left giving any money to SCO was Microsoft (by proxy, and directly) and I think Sun Microsystems (licensing SysV bits for Solaris), though I think Sun did that last back in 2004 and pretty much stopped after that.
Remember back when we all believed Linux would rule the world through netbooks? and how, only a year later, we were complaining about how pretty much every new model came with Windows 7 instead?
Yes, but there is a big difference: Microsoft had Windows XP to throw into the breach. In the cases of mobile and tablets, they don't really have much of anything: Windows Phone 7 is a move in that direction, but apparently isn't appealing all that well. In tablets, Microsoft insists on using a pen/stylus centric Windows 7 - that's not going to get them very far...
I sincerely hope Android fares better than good ol' Ubuntu did, but you can't blame me for having my doubts about it.
Understood, to a degree. But again, netbooks, which look like laptops (only smaller) already had Windows XP right there.
On the consumer side? It's already eaten heavily into netbooks, where Microsoft had finally managed to gain some sort of majority.
In the tablet market, which Microsoft had pretty much all to itself for the past *10* years? Microsoft will be lucky to even become relevant in tablets again, what with Android coming into the picture there (nearly the rest of the tablet market belongs to Android-powered tablets). This is in spite of the fact that you can buy an HP Slate 500 right now with Windows 7 on it.
Six months is too early to proclaim the death of anybody, but if the iPod and iPhone are any indication, Microsoft is going to remain toast in the tablet realm for a very long time. It may even have one hell of a fight on its hands just to keep hold of consumer PCs and laptops as time passes and tablets make even deeper inroads.
Incidentally, the big hopes that the pro-Microsoft crowd have pinned on WP7 are beginning to fade. The Kinect is even shaping up to become a passing fad (so far, the only data on Kinect we have is during the past Christmas shopping season - a perfect time to sell toys, you know... and the Wii is *still* out-selling the thing by almost a factor of two).
Is Microsoft going to die or go broke? Probably not in this decade. However, I can very easily see Microsoft being slowly forced to cede the entire consumer market, (save for maybe the XBox) to the competition. Microsoft will likely end up being a corporate/enterprise software house, and probably spin off or sell the whole XBox side of things (after all, they have yet to realize ROI on it, and the next gen is likely due in 2-3 years). They're probably going to lose the mobile realm to Apple and Google. They've already (IMHO) lost the tablet market to Apple and Google. After that, the rest starts moving inward, as people realize that they really don't need Windows for much at home anymore.
Apparently Jersey Shore is cool to pay attention to, but being a geek is not.
One of the two features morally loose women with over-developed mammary glands and tight clothing. The other involves using one's mind in some fashion or another, at sustained levels above that spent by most ordinary human beings.
You're seriously not perplexed at what the masses tend to choose, are you?
I think you nailed it, though it doesn't just apply to geeks. Lots of stuff starts out in fringe groups and eventually gains publicity and popularity:)
There is one thing that most geeks think (well, I think) would have been hella cool to see go mainstream, but it's the one thing we still pretty much still have all to ourselves:
It's easy to observe, though it leads to some annoying behaviour.. like wars, and sport.
...and SyFy.
(Yes, I'm still bitter. No, I do NOT want to talk about it. If it wasn't for the Science/HI/NatGeo and similar channels, I'd have kicked Comcast to the frickin' curb long ago.)
The employer usually kicks in for half of the employee's Social Security payments (7.some percent of the income, I think?), and pay for some, most, or all of the health/dental/vision insurance premium payments, which can vary. There are employers (quite a few, actually) who pay no insurance, but it is often done as a benefit to attract talent, so most usually pay for at least some of it. Employers will often also pay a percentage towards an employee's 401k (personal retirement fund) up to a set percentage (it's usually a 1:1 match of the employee's contribution, up to anywhere from 2-8% of the employee's total salary, maximum). For many companies, there are also bonuses to figure out as well. To top all of that off, companies have to pay a Workman's Compensation (long-term disability) insurance premium for each employee, which varies from state to state, and can even vary between industries (for instance, office workers are probably cheaper to insure w/ the state's WC board than ironworkers would be).
It would be almost to give a set percentage that would strictly apply across all companies, but usually it comes to around 30% above salary (or hourly rate) as a rough estimate.
Seriously, that's one hell of a coherent argument.
I find it kind of funny - since around 1950 or so, Catholicism has officially had zero problems with evolution as science (and said nothing on the matter until then), and you'll find the same story with most of the mainstream denominations.
IMHO, the ID vs. Evolution crap (seriously - the whole controversy and ensuing politics are pure crap) has come about exactly as you've described... and came from two general sources:
* reactionary fundamentalists who found common cause with right-leaning commentators and politicians * arrogant elitists who found common cause with hard-left politicians and commentators.
* In nearly any school district, a primary or secondary teacher can lose his/her job by bucking curriculum "recommendations" from the district, period.
* Trying to enact change by yourself, and especially without public knowledge or support, is an exercise in pure frustration. I lucked out when getting Linux put in to replace UNIX (and to displace a good share of Windows coursework). Why? Because Novell was headquartered in Utah at the time and was a HUGE donation source for the schools, and because the school districts were still fairly agnostic about OS preferences (Microsoft hadn't really gone out of their way at the time to lavish 'gifts' on Utah schools). In spite of all these factors, I still had to explain to a number of school districts *why* Linux (and not, say, AIX, Tru64, Solaris, BSD etc... you know, the "useful UNIX versions"). Hell, I even spent a summer week on and off the phone (and fax) with the Utah state Attorney General's office trying to explain the frickin' GPL to them! There are nooks and crannies of influence who must be satisfied, and all of them will amaze, astound, and make you tear your hair out. Now if it's that much of a pain in the ass to do this for a technical subject, imagine what kind of roadblocks have to be knocked down to get something political pushed through....and if you think I'm kidding, Google for the Scopes Trial... it seems rather relevant, no?
Sorry man, but seeing what most teachers get paid, and what they have to put up with? I wouldn't blame them, especially in this economy, for not wanting to "man-up" about it. Hell, most of them are, sadly, too busy counting the days until retirement anyway.
Now if you want to cultivate a vigorous group of folks who will push the boundaries of their craft and actually enlighten kids? First you're going to have to pay them what they're worth, and then you're going to have to take a machete to the unholy bureaucracy that public education has become. Good luck convincing taxpayers to help with the former, and doubly so when it comes to trying at the latter. Oh, and then you get to weed out the dead wood and the Unions. On those fronts, you'd have an easier time accomplishing World Peace.:/
I agree to an extent on the tablet front, except for one small bit:
HP currently offers Slate 500's with Windows 7 on it, and has been doing so since October. The specs are roughly that of an HP Mini netbook in a tablet form factor. Mind you, it costs $800 a pop, and has a smaller screen. OTOH, it has everything that folks assert businesses are gagging for, since it has Windows 7 on it. Given that Microsoft hasn't exactly been bragging on it, I'm thinking it probably isn't selling all too well.
In the face of that, I'm not so sure that Outlook (especially now that competitors like iOS and Android can connect to it too) is the biggie anymore. iOS has Office-like apps that are apparently more than sufficient for the platform - after all, it's not like you're going to type a novel on a tablet...)
It has a presence, yes... but doing "just fine"? The iPhone and Androids each have more units in the channel than WP7 has in-channel and activated *combined*. This is in spite of the fact that WinMo (in various incarnations) have been for sale for (almost) a decade.
I don't know about you, but if I had a product that was universally panned for nearly a decade, and my latest, greatest attempt at rectifying that issue was met with a universal "meh"? I wouldn't exactly call it "doing just fine".
They could go somewhere else (e.g. Farmville already has farmville.com, IIRC), but I doubt they'd get nearly the same amount of marketing. I'm not even sure they could get nearly as many existing customers to move.
There's also the social mechanisms, and the unholy ease with which players can spam the crap out of their Facebook friends with game messages.
Facebook has, IMHO, reached a stage now where they can dictate terms. The question is, how many new game developers will instead say "fuck that" and decide to write an iPhone app instead? Zynga may be stuck (and who knows? Maybe they will get an under-the-table discount?) OTOH, new and outside game developers (e.g. Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds) certainly aren't stuck at all.
You may want to look up Thomas Edison. He made bank by selling electric-powered stuff - and considered electric power generation to be a necessary evil in his business plan.
If he were smart enough to embrace Westinghouse's AC distribution scheme (and were as much of a businessman as an inventor), he would have made even more than the massive pile he made anyway.
The real problem with Cold Fusion is the implication that Tesla was right: energy is abundant and free to anyone who knows how to harness it.
...well, at long as the Sun and all entities like it keep going, anyway.:)
As for the cites, I asked some bits about them w/ your sibling poster, and covered them there.:)
Before you think I'm trying to refute everything you wrote, I just want to say that yeah, Plank was right then, and is still right today. Also, I'm not saying it's impossible... just that some proof and provable reproducibility would be nice.
As for JP Morgan? I suspect that he knew he could make more money selling electric-powered tools and toys than by selling electricity. After all, Edison was already doing just that (the only real diff is, Edison stupidly kept clinging to DC as the means to distribute it).
1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?
2) From your 2009 "significant results" cite:
Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.
...err, I said pretty much the same thing, and it refutes your own assertion that what I said wasn't true. Que?
3) As for ascribing motives to me, let me help out a bit: Personally, initial skepticism in the face of discovery is always warranted until proven otherwise - it's how science is supposed to work. I think it's cool that the Italian team got something, but until/unless others can do the same thing at least halfway reliably, it'll remain not much more than an academic chemical curiosity.
I remember (vaguely) some similar claim being made in Utah back in the 1980's (or was 1990s? I forget).
Anyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.
Last I checked, Mr. Newton still has the last laugh. There was a bit of 'cold fusion' research awhile back that involved chasing bubble cavitation as a source of energy, but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.
Now if a third party can replicate the results, then maybe it's worth looking into, but until then, I think it can be safely filed under "yeah, right - now pull the other one".
Judaism waited to return to Jerusalem for just over 1900 years after the ROMANS kicked them out the first time. Patience is something Judaism has - in frickin' spades.
With Islam, you'd have to nuke Mekah, Madinah, Jerusalem (whoops - you already got that one), Qom, and at least two dozen other 2nd-string Muslim holy sites spread across the Mideast and Asia.
Christianity and all its various sects? You get to nuke Rome, Salt Lake City, the entire Southern United States, at least four dozen Catholic holy sites (Lourdes, Guadalupe, Fatima, etc), Bethlehem, well - the entire frickin' Galilee region, in both Israel and Syria...
Oh, and you forgot a few religions: Hindus revere damned near anywhere in India, but nuking the entire Ganges river from headwaters to delta should do it. Buddhists have major sites spread throughout Asia... somewhere in the hundreds, if not thousands.
I think you'd run out of nukes before you got to Shinto, Wicca, Sikh, Druze, and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
SEOs are kinda slimy anyway, even when they're normal human beings... a *good* SEO who happens to be vindictive and psycho?
What are you, high!?
If you discover you're dating a vengeful psycho bitch, don't ever break up with her.
Well, that, or at least make sure there's a hidden camera in the bedroom at strategic times, so that you have something to make her think long and hard before doing something dumb online after the breakup.
Kids get stupid. Pics at 11.
Even a completely headless organization does have people who direct the masses. Even the simplest and most spontaneous mobs have their provocateurs - the 'leaders', so to speak. I'm thinking the media simply got all breathless about how they were labelled.
Also, technical skill is not uniformly high across the group (perhaps a ratio of 10k script kiddies for every 20 actual hackers, etc).
It wouldn't be unreasonable to have major organizers being caught (CnC and direction has to come from *somewhere*, after all), or perhaps (but less likely) catching the more technically-minded members.
Even if they didn't catch 'em all, taking out a large percentage of the technical leads* or Command/Control leads* would be sufficient to do some serious damage.
* note that I have zero idea what to actually call them, but the terms should suffice.
One should *always* stick with a company based in one's own nation. I'll have to get on my T-Mobile phone and send the news to my buddies on Facebook right aw...
(I kid, I kid...)
Slight pedancy... they were copyright trolls. Nothing really to do with patents (if they were squabbling over patents, they might have had half a chance).
But yeah - they (as sibling pointed out) used to have some halfway decent products. I think it was around the time they sued a couple of their biggest customers (Chrysler and AutoZone) that their other customers began phasing out (with extreme prejudice) UnixWare, OpenLinux/OpenServer, and damned near everything else that SCO owned and/or sold.
By 2006 or so, about the only folks left giving any money to SCO was Microsoft (by proxy, and directly) and I think Sun Microsystems (licensing SysV bits for Solaris), though I think Sun did that last back in 2004 and pretty much stopped after that.
Remember back when we all believed Linux would rule the world through netbooks? and how, only a year later, we were complaining about how pretty much every new model came with Windows 7 instead?
Yes, but there is a big difference: Microsoft had Windows XP to throw into the breach. In the cases of mobile and tablets, they don't really have much of anything: Windows Phone 7 is a move in that direction, but apparently isn't appealing all that well. In tablets, Microsoft insists on using a pen/stylus centric Windows 7 - that's not going to get them very far...
I sincerely hope Android fares better than good ol' Ubuntu did, but you can't blame me for having my doubts about it.
Understood, to a degree. But again, netbooks, which look like laptops (only smaller) already had Windows XP right there.
No, the iPad Is Not Killing Microsoft's Business
On the corporate side, probably not... yet.
On the consumer side? It's already eaten heavily into netbooks, where Microsoft had finally managed to gain some sort of majority.
In the tablet market, which Microsoft had pretty much all to itself for the past *10* years? Microsoft will be lucky to even become relevant in tablets again, what with Android coming into the picture there (nearly the rest of the tablet market belongs to Android-powered tablets). This is in spite of the fact that you can buy an HP Slate 500 right now with Windows 7 on it.
Six months is too early to proclaim the death of anybody, but if the iPod and iPhone are any indication, Microsoft is going to remain toast in the tablet realm for a very long time. It may even have one hell of a fight on its hands just to keep hold of consumer PCs and laptops as time passes and tablets make even deeper inroads.
Incidentally, the big hopes that the pro-Microsoft crowd have pinned on WP7 are beginning to fade. The Kinect is even shaping up to become a passing fad (so far, the only data on Kinect we have is during the past Christmas shopping season - a perfect time to sell toys, you know... and the Wii is *still* out-selling the thing by almost a factor of two).
Is Microsoft going to die or go broke? Probably not in this decade. However, I can very easily see Microsoft being slowly forced to cede the entire consumer market, (save for maybe the XBox) to the competition. Microsoft will likely end up being a corporate/enterprise software house, and probably spin off or sell the whole XBox side of things (after all, they have yet to realize ROI on it, and the next gen is likely due in 2-3 years). They're probably going to lose the mobile realm to Apple and Google. They've already (IMHO) lost the tablet market to Apple and Google. After that, the rest starts moving inward, as people realize that they really don't need Windows for much at home anymore.
... and Pac-Man, whose every AI quirk is likewise documented in English.
It's documented.
Err, well, you have Captain Kirk*, You have Luke Skywalker*, and you have Buck Rogers (err, NetBSD).
All of 'em cool, all of 'em worthy of youthful adoration as space heroes... but one of 'em just isn't as popular.
* Note that I'd rather eat live coals than to assign either of these two guys to Linux or FreeBSD.
Apparently Jersey Shore is cool to pay attention to, but being a geek is not.
One of the two features morally loose women with over-developed mammary glands and tight clothing. The other involves using one's mind in some fashion or another, at sustained levels above that spent by most ordinary human beings.
You're seriously not perplexed at what the masses tend to choose, are you?
I think you nailed it, though it doesn't just apply to geeks. Lots of stuff starts out in fringe groups and eventually gains publicity and popularity :)
There is one thing that most geeks think (well, I think) would have been hella cool to see go mainstream, but it's the one thing we still pretty much still have all to ourselves:
Desktop Linux.
(and Free/OpenBSD).
It's easy to observe, though it leads to some annoying behaviour.. like wars, and sport.
...and SyFy.
(Yes, I'm still bitter. No, I do NOT want to talk about it. If it wasn't for the Science/HI/NatGeo and similar channels, I'd have kicked Comcast to the frickin' curb long ago.)
The employer usually kicks in for half of the employee's Social Security payments (7.some percent of the income, I think?), and pay for some, most, or all of the health/dental/vision insurance premium payments, which can vary. There are employers (quite a few, actually) who pay no insurance, but it is often done as a benefit to attract talent, so most usually pay for at least some of it. Employers will often also pay a percentage towards an employee's 401k (personal retirement fund) up to a set percentage (it's usually a 1:1 match of the employee's contribution, up to anywhere from 2-8% of the employee's total salary, maximum). For many companies, there are also bonuses to figure out as well. To top all of that off, companies have to pay a Workman's Compensation (long-term disability) insurance premium for each employee, which varies from state to state, and can even vary between industries (for instance, office workers are probably cheaper to insure w/ the state's WC board than ironworkers would be).
It would be almost to give a set percentage that would strictly apply across all companies, but usually it comes to around 30% above salary (or hourly rate) as a rough estimate.
Seriously, that's one hell of a coherent argument.
I find it kind of funny - since around 1950 or so, Catholicism has officially had zero problems with evolution as science (and said nothing on the matter until then), and you'll find the same story with most of the mainstream denominations.
IMHO, the ID vs. Evolution crap (seriously - the whole controversy and ensuing politics are pure crap) has come about exactly as you've described... and came from two general sources:
* reactionary fundamentalists who found common cause with right-leaning commentators and politicians
* arrogant elitists who found common cause with hard-left politicians and commentators.
A pox on all their houses. :(
As a former teacher (and one who has done his fair share of fighting to get the right thing done ), I can tell you that it ain't fun to buck trends, even if you're not messing with political hot potatoes. I say this for two reasons:
* In nearly any school district, a primary or secondary teacher can lose his/her job by bucking curriculum "recommendations" from the district, period.
* Trying to enact change by yourself, and especially without public knowledge or support, is an exercise in pure frustration. I lucked out when getting Linux put in to replace UNIX (and to displace a good share of Windows coursework). Why? Because Novell was headquartered in Utah at the time and was a HUGE donation source for the schools, and because the school districts were still fairly agnostic about OS preferences (Microsoft hadn't really gone out of their way at the time to lavish 'gifts' on Utah schools). In spite of all these factors, I still had to explain to a number of school districts *why* Linux (and not, say, AIX, Tru64, Solaris, BSD etc... you know, the "useful UNIX versions"). Hell, I even spent a summer week on and off the phone (and fax) with the Utah state Attorney General's office trying to explain the frickin' GPL to them! There are nooks and crannies of influence who must be satisfied, and all of them will amaze, astound, and make you tear your hair out. Now if it's that much of a pain in the ass to do this for a technical subject, imagine what kind of roadblocks have to be knocked down to get something political pushed through. ...and if you think I'm kidding, Google for the Scopes Trial... it seems rather relevant, no?
Sorry man, but seeing what most teachers get paid, and what they have to put up with? I wouldn't blame them, especially in this economy, for not wanting to "man-up" about it. Hell, most of them are, sadly, too busy counting the days until retirement anyway.
Now if you want to cultivate a vigorous group of folks who will push the boundaries of their craft and actually enlighten kids? First you're going to have to pay them what they're worth, and then you're going to have to take a machete to the unholy bureaucracy that public education has become. Good luck convincing taxpayers to help with the former, and doubly so when it comes to trying at the latter. Oh, and then you get to weed out the dead wood and the Unions. On those fronts, you'd have an easier time accomplishing World Peace. :/
I agree to an extent on the tablet front, except for one small bit:
HP currently offers Slate 500's with Windows 7 on it, and has been doing so since October. The specs are roughly that of an HP Mini netbook in a tablet form factor. Mind you, it costs $800 a pop, and has a smaller screen. OTOH, it has everything that folks assert businesses are gagging for, since it has Windows 7 on it. Given that Microsoft hasn't exactly been bragging on it, I'm thinking it probably isn't selling all too well.
Meanwhile, stories abound of companies buying up iPads like the product was made of solidified cocaine. (mind you, they were quoting Apple as one of their sources, but when they're naming names, and those names are those of some pretty big corporations...)
In the face of that, I'm not so sure that Outlook (especially now that competitors like iOS and Android can connect to it too) is the biggie anymore. iOS has Office-like apps that are apparently more than sufficient for the platform - after all, it's not like you're going to type a novel on a tablet...)
It has a presence, yes... but doing "just fine"? The iPhone and Androids each have more units in the channel than WP7 has in-channel and activated *combined*. This is in spite of the fact that WinMo (in various incarnations) have been for sale for (almost) a decade.
I don't know about you, but if I had a product that was universally panned for nearly a decade, and my latest, greatest attempt at rectifying that issue was met with a universal "meh"? I wouldn't exactly call it "doing just fine".
They could go somewhere else (e.g. Farmville already has farmville.com, IIRC), but I doubt they'd get nearly the same amount of marketing. I'm not even sure they could get nearly as many existing customers to move.
There's also the social mechanisms, and the unholy ease with which players can spam the crap out of their Facebook friends with game messages.
Facebook has, IMHO, reached a stage now where they can dictate terms. The question is, how many new game developers will instead say "fuck that" and decide to write an iPhone app instead? Zynga may be stuck (and who knows? Maybe they will get an under-the-table discount?) OTOH, new and outside game developers (e.g. Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds) certainly aren't stuck at all.
You may want to look up Thomas Edison. He made bank by selling electric-powered stuff - and considered electric power generation to be a necessary evil in his business plan.
If he were smart enough to embrace Westinghouse's AC distribution scheme (and were as much of a businessman as an inventor), he would have made even more than the massive pile he made anyway.
Bits and bobs:
The real problem with Cold Fusion is the implication that Tesla was right: energy is abundant and free to anyone who knows how to harness it.
...well, at long as the Sun and all entities like it keep going, anyway. :)
As for the cites, I asked some bits about them w/ your sibling poster, and covered them there. :)
Before you think I'm trying to refute everything you wrote, I just want to say that yeah, Plank was right then, and is still right today. Also, I'm not saying it's impossible... just that some proof and provable reproducibility would be nice.
As for JP Morgan? I suspect that he knew he could make more money selling electric-powered tools and toys than by selling electricity. After all, Edison was already doing just that (the only real diff is, Edison stupidly kept clinging to DC as the means to distribute it).
Couple of questions and bits:
1) Why would a *biology* journal publish physics work?
2) From your 2009 "significant results" cite:
Despite their claim to cold fusion discovery, the Fleishmann-Pons study soon fell into discredit after other researchers were unable to reproduce the results.
...err, I said pretty much the same thing, and it refutes your own assertion that what I said wasn't true. Que?
3) As for ascribing motives to me, let me help out a bit: Personally, initial skepticism in the face of discovery is always warranted until proven otherwise - it's how science is supposed to work. I think it's cool that the Italian team got something, but until/unless others can do the same thing at least halfway reliably, it'll remain not much more than an academic chemical curiosity.
At least they're honest about it, which means that if it can be replicated, it's worth looking into.
I give 'em props for being honest enough to say 'nope - we don't know why it works either.'
I remember (vaguely) some similar claim being made in Utah back in the 1980's (or was 1990s? I forget).
Anyrate, it was hailed with a big amount of hoopla... until no one else could replicate the results. Then the questions came, and the original scientists couldn't provide a single answer.
Last I checked, Mr. Newton still has the last laugh. There was a bit of 'cold fusion' research awhile back that involved chasing bubble cavitation as a source of energy, but otherwise no one seriously (or rather, no serious scientist) chases that particular dream anymore.
Now if a third party can replicate the results, then maybe it's worth looking into, but until then, I think it can be safely filed under "yeah, right - now pull the other one".
Some problems with your theory...
Judaism waited to return to Jerusalem for just over 1900 years after the ROMANS kicked them out the first time. Patience is something Judaism has - in frickin' spades.
With Islam, you'd have to nuke Mekah, Madinah, Jerusalem (whoops - you already got that one), Qom, and at least two dozen other 2nd-string Muslim holy sites spread across the Mideast and Asia.
Christianity and all its various sects? You get to nuke Rome, Salt Lake City, the entire Southern United States, at least four dozen Catholic holy sites (Lourdes, Guadalupe, Fatima, etc), Bethlehem, well - the entire frickin' Galilee region, in both Israel and Syria...
Oh, and you forgot a few religions: Hindus revere damned near anywhere in India, but nuking the entire Ganges river from headwaters to delta should do it. Buddhists have major sites spread throughout Asia... somewhere in the hundreds, if not thousands.
I think you'd run out of nukes before you got to Shinto, Wicca, Sikh, Druze, and the like.