I have seen the dead squirrels. They nest inside the transformers themselves. Outside some totally new design for how these are constructed I find it hard to blame the utility.

The more urban trees you have around the more problems you will see with the grid. Trees are the source of all kinds of grid problems

- When the weather causes damage to power lines, it is rarely direct damage but indirect damage caused by a nearby tree. Wind can blow branches into lines and transformers, shorting them out. And ice and snow can build up on tree branches causing them to bend into lines or snap.

- Trees attract squirrels and birds, who like to play around and nest in transformers and on poles and short them out. I have a squirrel related power outage at least once a year.

Ironically, at least in the north-east, the nicer the area you live in the more likely it is to have lots of urban trees. It's the price you pay. The only better system would be to bury all the lines but the cost for that is immense.

I can see that case.

I guess all I am saying is there is the expensive implementation like this, which makes sense in terms perhaps of Intel or aviation, but would not be feasible to scale to the consumer. Then you have a consumer level implementation that is a lot cheaper and simpler but doesn't meet the requirements needed if you're working on an airplane. No different than many other things.

There is nothing really novel here in that hotels have had this technology in their minibars for like 10 years - they know what you touched so they bill you even if you replace it. Basically this is moving that concept from the mini bar into a toolbox. I think it is quite impractical since it relys on tools all being in special spots, it would never work in a home environment. A better solution would involve small RFID tags affixed to each tool and an NFC lock on the toolbox. You unlock the toolbox with your badge, take what tools you want out, boom.

In Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, and select other high-tech hubs, there certainly is a shortage of skilled qualified workers. This is clearly illustrated by the salaries and perks at tech companies are driven to such extremes. Google and Facebook don't have a personal chef and free dry cleaning and egg freezing because they are your best buddy; they do it because they have to offer these kinds of perks to retain their people.

In non high-tech hubs, these shortages do not exist. There are lots of qualified workers.

The question is, why do tech companies focus so much on the hubs vs. growing a lot of smaller regional offices. This is something I have never understood. Especially if you subscribe to the model of Bezos and others who say the maximum size of a productive team is somewhere between 5 and 7 people, having huge amounts of people concentrated in one area has questionable benefits when you consider the huge salary they command due to the simple fact of geography.

It has less to do with ethics and more to do with being dangerous if this gets out of hand IMO. I have no qualms with the ethics of cloning a single mammoth. I have grave concerns with the idea of cloning and re-introducing an extinct species to the planet, regardless of if it is mammoths or sabre tooth tigers or anything else.

No one with a clue in their head thought this stuff was impossible 5-10 years ago. Everyone who had the slightest background knowledge in how things operate already knew and assumed it was happening. The movie Enemy of the State came out in 1998 for god's sake, and people still did not wake up as to what was possible. This stuff wasn't fiction then, and it isn't fiction now.

That doesn't change the fact that 99% of the interception the NSA does is trivial. Using Tor is still a very good idea and can save your bacon 99% of the time. Unless you're on a terrorist / insurgent watch list, or you are banging the NSA director's mom, you are probably safe on Tor. You will definitely be able to avoid domestic law enforcement.

You are still being paranoid.

Just because something is theoretically possible in lab conditions does not mean that anyone in the real world is actually doing it. The FBI doesn't even have the resources to do something trivial brute force an iPhone 4 digit pass-code, you think they or the NSA have the resources to do this on any kind of real scale?

Despite what urban myths are out there, the NSA uses relatively simple means to do 99% of their spying and traffic interception.

While this is a good point, in the end Wheeler's reporting chain ends at the executive branch.If Obama is backing this legislation then the FCC has to fall in line eventually.

"The abundances of specific types of microbes were found to be more similar in identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, than in non-identical twins, who share on average only half of the genes that vary between people. These findings demonstrate that genes influence the composition of gut microbes."

They make no mention at all as to if all of these twins were separated at birth, but I find that highly unlikely. If two people grow up in the same house, are raised by the same parents, and exposed to the same food, it would naturally follow that they would develop the same gut microbes, regardless of their DNA.

If they actually wanted to study if gut microbes were influenced by DNA, they should have ALSO done the same study on the same number of adopted siblings, and compared them to the twins.

All indications on this device is it is going to be tightly wound into Amazon's services. Unless it has an open API as well, it's going to be dead in the water, because me telling amazon to "Remind me to get milk tomorrow" is not very useful when it has no integration to my Google or Apple calendar.

The second barrier is, all this thing can do can already be done by Google Now. So you are competing with a device people already have in their pocket.

Anyway it will be interesting to see if it works out for Amazon.

The fact that a POTUS would even understand what a software vulnerability is speaks volumes.

I can't even imagine what this conversation would have sounded like with the two previous presidents.

Skydiving is not a risky thing to do. You should be comparing it to actual risky things people do for a thrill, like extreme motocross or Nascar. Hell the odds of dying just from riding a motorcycle are roughly 1 in 800. http://www.medhelp.org/general...

Your logic is flawed because the $59.99 price is what enables that AAA title with its 30 million dollar budget to be made in the first place, so that you can later on buy it for $10 when its old as dirt. The days of being able to make a AAA title on a million bucks are long gone. Sure there are some outliers but I bet the majority of those 40 games you bought cost more than 10 million to make.

I know there are some people who use Facebook pseudononymously but honestly I never saw the use case. The whole point of Facebook is to connect with friends and family to share things. If you are anonymous, you can't do that, so why are you on Facebook?

Anonymous Twitter accounts make a lot more sense than anonymous facebook accounts.