Line of sight communications means you need relays somewhere to go around the curve of the earth. We already cut huge latencies off intercontinental links by going from satellite links to fiber optics.

Hmmm...Time to take a weather balloon and a big sheet of aluminized mylar on a frame and let them out right in the line of sight and do something that makes money when their communications slow down.

You ask:

If the calculation is 2 + 2 I'd says the odds are pretty good you're going to get 4. I assume you're actually doing some difficult calculations that may push some of the edge cases in the floating point system. What I would do is make some test routines that stress the areas that you're interested in and run and check the results of those before doing any serious calculations. For the most part, you're going to have to assume that the basic functions work and there aren't simply specific combos like 17454423.2 + 99921234.1 that always gives the wrong answer since you can't check for those really but the usual concern is around the edge case handling and you should be able to define what you think is normal and make sure that your environment conforms to your definition of normal.

Too true, though there is a difference between Facebook buying Instagram and MS spending $100M to create a controller. Acquisitions are often paid for in stock, which is inflated funny money. MS paid real money to develop that controller.

If you have nothing to hide you shouldn't mind if you're being watched, now should you?

If this really happened, it's a German security FAIL. A nation like Germany should be able to secure the communications of the head of state. If the NSA isn't trying to tap her phone you can be assured that the Chinese and the Russians are trying.

I've got no issue with the NSA going after foreign governments. My issue with the NSA is that they are turning this nation-level spying apparatus on regular citizens.

Well, Windows was the biggest security hole for the longest time but you didn't see FF refusing to run on it.

You would be surprised. I heard an excellent talk back in the mid-90's by a DEC engineer, one of the Alpha architects, about how they had instrumented Windows NT to do some performance analysis. Even though DEC was working very closely with MS they did not have access to the source code. They developed instrumentation that didn't require the source and they had this great analysis of how locking was working inside the Windows NT kernel.

One of the issues they found (at that time) was that Windows did not scale well on multi-processors. If I remember right, the practical limit was something like 4, but it could have been lower. They did a lot of the benchmarking using SQL Server and then took the results back to MS and presented them to both the SQL Server team and the NT team (together, in the same room).

According to their instrumentation, the bottleneck was a single lock, that the kernel would grab all the time for some reason. He said the SQL Server guys and NT guys started yelling at each other about the pros and cons of this lock, which was known internally to MS as "Dave's Lock" (Dave Cutler).

So, anyhow, the point is that you can reverse engineer to discover what is going on in the system and you don't need the source code. Of course, it's a lot of work.

I thought they sold ink, or at least that's where all the profits come from.

Unfortunately the government is not responsible for telling you the wrong thing. I think this should be changed but it's probably not going to happen. What it does mean is that you need to consult a lawyer when you do anything complex. The government can still do whatever the hell they feel like but you at least have a lawyer who may be able to sue on your behalf because their opinion of the law differs from that of the customs (or other official) and (real long shot here) you might be able to sue the lawyer for giving you bad advice.

My wife came to the US on a K-1 fiance visa and we got married in the US and we had to go through all of the immigration nonsense. We hired a lawyer to guide us through it and that made it a lot easier.

As long as the government is largely run by lawyers we probably won't see any change that reduces the utility of lawyers.

I hadn't thought about it, but batteries don't need a cooling system. This fuel cell would, which adds to the weight.

If it really made sense in a vehicle, these guys would have a bunch of images up showing it. It's not, not yet. It would be cool if it were, though.

With a dish-washer sized fuel cell in it? I don't know how much it weighs, but a gasoline engine for something like a SMART car or a motorcycle you can put in your lap. You're onto diminishing returns. When it's down to about a quarter of the size it starts to get interesting.

That was my first thought. However, 25KW is only 33 horsepower. You could make a hybrid, I suppose with a battery pack for acceleration and one of these to top it off and as a "range extender" ala the Volt. The Volt has a 75KW (100 HP) internal combustion engine so it's within reason.

From the article: "...today web browsers are capable of supporting sites that are getting close to the look and feel of apps we run directly on our phones and computers."

Great. So with a lot of work we're almost BACK TO WHERE WE WERE! How about some innovation and making better, more usable UI's rather than just trying to catch up with what we already have?

This is the same problem I have with Linux - constantly reimplementing things we already had. At least Linux is replacing closed software with open software. What's your excuse with webapps? Is MS Word in a browser inherently better or just different?

Once upon a time you could buy an electric motor and move it around between different appliances. I think the concept of moving your phone around and plugging it in various places will fade away as well.