Oh boy, brace yourself for thousands more comments like this objecting to the idea that there is one single "ideal human" and finding 'his' exact DNA sequence, even though nobody has stated such intent and there is no reason to do it.

From the Tesla Motors website: "As we at Tesla reach for our goal of producing a mass market electric car in approximately three years, we have an opportunity to leverage our projected demand for lithium ion batteries to reduce their cost faster than previously thought possible.... By the end of the first year of volume production of our mass market vehicle, we expect the Gigafactory will have driven down the per kWh cost of our battery pack by more than 30 percent."

Surely you have heard of the Tesla Gigafactory? It is a $5BN investment that does nothing but address your exact concern. It doesn't address range. It doesn't address recharge time. It addresses COST.

I would like to understand this. The article says that losses for the next quarter are expected to be larger: "Mr. Szkutak listed some of the reasons: Amazon Web Services is in a price-cutting war with Google and others. Six new warehouses have opened. And the company will spend $100 million on new content to put on those phones and Kindles."

The warehouses, at least, are quintessential infrastructure investment. You are saying Szkutak is incorrect in asserting they cut into short-term profits?

Amazon's revenue grew 23% over the same quarter last year. If the company were not growing AND not profiting, that would be bad. But as large as Amazon's revenues now are, to still be growing that fast is very impressive, and proves they could start taking profits at any moment simply by pocketing more revenue instead of re-investing.

Then I suggest you not enter any races in which the loser will die.

I'm told that the F35 is the largest, heaviest fighter with an airframe that produces the most drag, that the US has ever produced...

And where did you hear it? According to wikipedia:

Wingspan:
F35: 35'
F14: 64' / 38' (swept)
F15: 42'
F16: 32'
F18 C/D: 40'

Empty Weight
F35: 29,000 lb
F14: 43,700 lb
F15: 28,000 lb
F16: 18,900 lb
F18: 23,000 lb

Combat radius (internal stores)
F35: 600 nm
F14: 500 nm
F15: 1000 nm
F16: 340 nm
F18: 400 nm

Of what can be verified, none of what you heard is correct...

Is this the release that adds support for HiDPI on external displays? I was pretty disappointed when I got a 4k display to find that it was unusable under OS X 10.9.3. (You can drive it at 4k, but cannot scale the interface).

Yeah, the first thing I thought of was: how many people who graduate with any 4-year degree stay in their field of study? Without having anything to compare this to, how do we know that the numbers for STEM graduates are abnormal?

But everybody knows that people with degrees in Communications and Political Science aren't going to work in those fields (if they even exist). But to get a job that requires "a degree" (of any type), going through an EE or physics program is hardly the most efficient route.

I've long said that the computing field is one where you can make decent money without a degree.

That also used to be more true of the economy as a whole, but I think that would be a super-risky plan for a young person starting out today. An ever-higher percentage of applicants have a degree, raising the bar.

Unifying the UI is less important and desirable than unifying the underlying OS. I can understand having to re-write a more restricted UI for small displays - but the core of the application? In a different language even? That should not be necessary. Granted it was justified in the past, but mobile devices are powerful enough to run a real operating system now.

"Pollution" is by definition a bit of spin on top of the science, since it is a socially-defined term. (Just as a botanist would never hope to find a gene that is found in all weeds, and only in weeds). But expanding the list of compositions that are best explained by the existence of life is still a useful exercise.

That the parent was most likely right in surmising the intended use as a laser weapon.

And you will note at the end of the paper:

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the National Science Foundation.

Adding memory to this equation means you can store data on the paper until the transaction is complete. I can't come up with a reason for this on the spot but I can imagine there are processes that could benefit from it.

But once you can uniquely identify each object (with a simple bar code or RFID), it's easy to associate any amount of information with it, in a database somewhere. The more ubiquitous network connectivity becomes, the more location transparency you have, and the less need to store information directly in a specific place.

In short, this is a floppy disk, but on a paper backing.