The Linux kernel would have bought it a beer, but it hasn't turned 21 yet.

Iit's irrelevant, Google is all about cloud computing, all the gruntwork would be happening elsewhere on a heavily compressed/uploaded copy of your data, much like their speech recognition on even the latest smartphones.

Wifi is just microwave radiation. We already 'see' microwave radiation, it is called 'radar'.

As a Brit, the stuff I read about the cops in the USA freaks me out, maybe because of the relative lack-of-guns here.
  I read articles saying even your tax collectors are doing armed raids on houses, is this right? It seems like something from a Terry Gilliam film, nightmare-ish.

FTFA:
We should not have to tell organisations to think twice, before outsourcing vital services to companies who offer to work for free.

Relevant Dilbert

Nonsense. The Nokia 3310 is notoriously resilient, but its Achilles' Heel is that it's obsolete. Same applies to every other phone ever released, Gorilla Glass or not.

"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

Possibly so, but that mirrors Japan with it's low immigration.

If I had mod points you'd get them. This is the kind of interesting stuff that keep me visiting /.

Karl Pilkington is up for it.

Given that data centers are basically big electric heaters doing some number crunching along the way, might be sensible to put them in cold climates rather than hot, so a) it's easier to dump all the heat generated and b) that heat has some practical uses.

Clearly they were working on a fishing vessel to go out trolling for engineers. (And quite successfully too it seems)

Classic Rube Goldberg machine. "You know that story about how NASA spent millions designing a pen that could write in space?..."

I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.

If you want to understand how houses in general work though, it's better to study those blueprints than the color of the counter-tops in the kitchen.