That's Wellington's secondary wind farm. The primary wind farm is called The Beehive.

"No! Shut them *all* down, hurry! Listen to them, they're dying R2! Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough, it's all my fault!"

From TFA:

Actually it's very like Mozilla, at least the Mozilla from the last five years or so. You sit there, you take what we give you, and you LIKE IT, dammit!

Well yeah, that one's simple, but what about the unicorn farts mentioned by a previous poster? Just the torque converters for that alone would be enormous, not to mention the extra whangle drums and sliding paff gongbudgers.

Nowadays we do it with drones and remote cameras.

I've seen the exact opposite, most openers are built using shitty Princeton 2262s, which sounds like what this guy hacked. Oh, and if you've been sold a fancy "rolling-code remote", open it up and look at the hardware, if it says 2262 on the chip (or one of the many derivatives) then you've been had (many so-called rolling-code remotes aren't, the vendors just claim they are).

In practice it's even worse than the article points out, the switches are tri-state not binary but most vendors of remotes forget that so you go from 3^n to 2^n, and then they only use 8 of the 12 pins you can toggle on because they're on one side of the chip and they forget there's more around the other side. So you go from 3^12 to 2^8 combinations, meaning you'll hit the right one after 128 tries on average. The receivers have no rate-limiting, so you can run them far faster than the vendor specifies and scan the code space in seconds. The novel thing in this case is the use of de Bruijn sequences, and the fact that he scans the entire code space in the same time a standard scanner takes for the (admittedly far too common) badly-designed ones.

Hey, forcing a mobile-phone interface onto an inherently desktop system worked so well for Microsoft in Windows 8 that I guess Google had to give it a go too,

More seriously, this is beyond braindamaged. Our product is mainframe middleware. Exactly zero percent of our users access our site from a phone or tablet. However, Google now wants us to optimise it for a platform that none of our users will ever use, just because, hey, Google says so. Cretins.

Across two totally different (Lenovo and Toshiba) laptops, and that's only ever triggered by Skype and nothing else? Sounds a bit unlikely...

I'll say. Skype fairly consistently blue-screens my laptops after about an hour of voice chat with it, first the whole system freezes, then after about half a minute it bluescreens, and that's on two different laptops. That's pretty impressive amount of fail for a fscking Internet phone app.

That's a pretty desperate plan, I realise that single event upsets in space are a non-uncommon event, but man, this is really last-resort stuff, the terrestrial equivalent of which would be "there may be a lightning strike in the vicinity which would glitch the electronics and cause a reboot". Sure, or there may not, in which case you're screwed. As the OP said, how was this not caught in testing?

Cities like Denver, Munich, Tokyo and Belfast have known about this for years. By cleverly putting miles and miles of landscape between the airport and the city, sound levels over the city have been significantly reduced. When it comes to cutting down on noise, nothing beats huge... tracts of land.

The technical term you're looking for there is from German, "entartete Kunst".

Not really, they (or at least the GUI as a whole) look more like a pre-alpha release of Motif before they added the styling. Dear Ghod, what are they smoking in Redmond to think I'd want my desktop to look like something drawn by a 10-year-old? Looks like Stardock will have another profitable few years ahead of them.

I think this may be release 2.0 of the Microsoft-aided business plan. It used to be:

1. Found startup doing something Microsoft doesn't do.
2. Wait to be bought out by Microsoft.
3. Profit!

Now it's:

1. Wait till your cellphone company is in its death throes.
2. Wait to be bought... well, you know the rest.

If you work for a cellphone vendor I guess you know it's time to dust off your resume when you hear rumours that you're being bought by Microsoft.

That's what I thought too, and then there's the "smaller than a Word document", which is a bit like saying "shorter than a piece of string". I've seen embedded "OSes" that fit into less than 10K, but they're more like task switchers than any kind of OS, and certainly don't have auto-config and who knows what else they're claiming. I suspect this announcement may end up, on closer investigation, to be a badly mistranslated statement about toilet paper production in the next five-year plan.