Article summary: "For example, the Surface Pro 2 made great strides over the original Surface Pro, increasing web-browsing battery life by 42%, but it still lags far behind Android and iOS tablets" Surface Pro (I have one) is a full Intel netbook running full Windows 8 or 8.1 in a tablet package. The valid comparison is the Surface RT to iOS and Android OS devices not the Surface Pro.

Comparing Android or iOS on ARM to Windows (or OSX or Linux) on a full i386 platform is simply meaningless. Why do it?

(former HMO IT guy) That 30% administrative cost is driven primarily by the hideous complexity of health care billing brought on by the mutli-payor insurance setup we have today. Every single line item on a hospital bill must be evaluated for who pays for it. That takes a lot of skilled labor in classification of each individual item. Then throw various mixtures into the mix of who allows what to be done, various contractual pricing schemes not seen by the individual consumer, etc. etc. etc. It's a God awful mess in there. THAT is where the administrative costs come from. Not from corporate profits. and seriously, do you think a government operated bureaucracy would have LESS overhead in its' operation? What planet do you live on if you think that?

Means you have days to respond, not minutes. And a backup kicked in quickly, accompanied (I presume) with a lot of alarms and a very strong reprimand from management for "testing an interlock" Why is this news?

and despite that, rigging the lottery has been done. The person most directly responsible got busted, but we can be certain that a lot of "side bet" money was made that went outside of law enforcement's view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Pennsylvania_Lottery_scandal

So I guess government agencies will be responsible for the accidents when they send Amber/weather/disaster alerts to the entire population of a region simultaneously? Yeah, right. If you're sending an alert to as many as ten million people simultaneously (NYC mobile phone users?) there is definitely a reasonable assumption that at least some portion of them are driving when they receive it. And on my handset at least those things are LOUD (I've since disabled most of them) This ruling is stupid beyond description.

a couple thousand pounds of radioactive waste over the life of the plant is a hell of a lot easier than the 800 TONS A DAY of flyash you need to dispose of from a similarly sized coal station.

As long as the self driving car only slavishly follows the ridiculously low speed limits in most of the northeast it will be more hazard to other drivers than benefit, and it will also be slower.

An increase or boom in tower work results in a higher number of incidents during that work, no surprise. If the RATE of incidents per given amount of work changes then we have something to talk about.

Why is the gender choice or alignment or preference or whatever of Manning even relevant to any of the current discussions, and why of all things it it relevant here? Sigh....

"There are explicit paths required to report something covered by the MILITARY whistle-blower protection act [wikipedia.org] complaints. Releasing classified information directly to the press or anyone public is simply not protected whistle-blower activity, particularly in military circles" And every single person that has followed the official defined path has been shut down, fired, marginalized, harassed, etc. etc. etc. rather than their concerns or reports being vetted and addressed. Perhaps THAT's why Snowden chose the path that he did? If he's going to be a martyr anyway, at least make sure that the information goes public!

Commercial fossil power stations already drive their stack gas temperature about as low as practical via various heat capture methods, reheat systems, etc. The limiting factor generally is not recovering more energy from stack gasses but the desire to never drive the stack gas temperature below the dew point in that exhaust gas, doing so causes all sorts of negative chemical consequences for the stack itself, pollution control equipment, etc., increasing maintenance cost and reducing equipment life due to aggressive corrosion of stack components and structure. Plants I operated were strictly kept from dropping below dewpoint on the exhaust for this reason, not to mention temperature input constraints for effective operation of some pollution control equipment, you CAN recover more energy from stack gasses, but doing so hits a cost negative and reliability wall. Always remember that waste heat/energy for a utility station equates to large $$$, if there's a practical way to extract more energy from a given amount of fuel, they are likely there as quickly as they can implement it. But the carnot cycle and other less heat cycle related limitation put up a pretty tough barrier to going further, Perhaps this is useful for more "pure" exhaust gas or waste heat streams, but I don't see it happening for commercial fossil power stations

I fail to see how this is terribly new or revolutionary from a tech standpoint. I was stationed aboard a carrier in 1985 when the first fully hands off automated landings of F-18's were tested. Seems to me that if we were able to do that in '85, how is this revolutionary. The only new feature is that the computer intercepted the landing system signals itself before landing, hardly a task that hasn't been in every autopilot for over e generation now.

Perhaps the organizer wish to avoid apolitical and protest maelstrom that could appear? Preferring to keep the conference at least somewhat apolitical?

Sounds like a sound marketing move by MS that also provides some capability to the OS via builtin drivers (avoiding the mess of hundreds or thousands of bad drivers from years past). Why is this news here?