I suspect that the name is also a bit of an homage to Back to the Future, but given that Musk is of South African origin and didn't move to North America until three years after the movie came out, I'd like to hear it from the horse's mouth to be sure.

It would also make sense that since SI prefixes are fairly well known and since Giga- is the largest that most consumers are familiar with and associate as being large, it's a way for them to name a plant so that it has obvious technological associations, while still allowing for growth (Terafactory, Petafactory) as both the need for manufacturing capacity and the public's understanding of bigger SI prefixes change.

Yup. It's one thing to offload a bunch of the processing and systems to a third-party, but one should always keep one's finger in the pie, at least in the form of backups or DB mirrors. One might not be able to go operational instantly if the cloud provider goes down, but if one's data is intact then one can either spin-up with some capital investment or can migrate to another cloud provider. If one doesn't have one's data, one can't do that.

Uh, the airlines are well aware of the geopolitical situation, they could have chosen to alter their flightpath if they wanted.

The fiber optic cables carrying the data had no problems being immersed

For the immediate emergency, no, they didn't.

Long-term, fiber is susceptible to water damage. I had a site that needed fiber replaced because the Christy vault was placed too low in the ground and got inundated with irrigation water. The fiber didn't even splice in the vault; it was just a pull-point where the conduit stubbed up into the vault and a new conduit dropped back down, but the conduits filled up and the fiber degraded fairly quickly despite being gel-filled OSP. For awhile we kept testing and moving to different strands as the ones we were on failed, but it didn't take long before it had to be replaced. Fortunately the contractor was able to eliminate that particular vault entirely, splicing the conduits together after getting the moisture out, and we haven't had a problem since.

Are you saying that Khan wouldn't, himself, look to continue to apply the same projects to others that created him? With his support for eugenics he'd want to replace the entire human population with engineered individuals.

Bandwidth is perhaps cheaper than you suspect.

I worked for a regional ISP that serves about 50.000 subscribers. We had multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to various peering points, one of which happens to be where Netflix peered with us. Total cost for that peerage: the cost of the extra fiber capacity, plus engineering the peer.

As opposed to housing Netflix servers at our data center. First off, to service that many potential streams might require a few boxes and a not insignificant storage array. We actually did have a similar arrangement with another very large content provider: their stuff took about a half-rack. It then needs to be added to network monitoring, and you need to train your NOC staff what to do when that little red light comes on. And the equipment will fail: the "other content providers" equipment had a MTBF of a couple of months. The hard drives will take a pounding.

And we were small enough that when we asked Netflix to co-locate in our data center for free they actually said "Not interested."

I was saddened when he died. He could no longer autogragh the owners' manual for my Cordoba...

Friend of mine did that with a shotgun when he was ten, outermost joint of his index finger one one hand. Several years later when he was in shop class he knicked the nub with the table saw and it started bleeding. The nurse came to the room and passed out when she saw what she thought was a freshly amputated finger...

So the results can be highly entertaining, even if only from time to time.

...the initiative, led by Khan Noonien Singh, looks to improve the quality of life and longevity, strength, and memory for all humans, over the entire planet. On the goals of his project, Khan replied, "Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold."

Well, if you look at Africa, which probably has the largest population living in rough conditions, and there's a lot of habitat destruction for firewood for cooking fires and generally any animal that can be caught goes into the pot. Sure, there's poaching for precious material like ivory, but there's also poaching simply to not starve.

This is something to consider with the widespread ranching of cattle- we want our meat, so it's either a matter of raising it ourselves with a few sets of monolithic species where we manage to use the bulk of the carcass for something, or catching wild animals where we don't fully utilize the animal and leave a lot of waste. Right now, by mass, Beef if the dominant life form on the planet.

Never saw Titanic (I think I'm one of three people on the planet over the age of eighteen that can claim this) but I liked how that New York police chase scene in The Fifth Element turned out. I've heard it argued that it's how that Stallone version of Judge Dredd should have looked, had they actually put the urban density in to Mega City 1 that it should have gotten.

Alas, I never got past using 3d Studio R4 in a very rudimentary way. Probably didn't help that my computer at the time lacked the horsepower to render anything meaningful quickly enough to be usable for any other function, so it just wasn't feasible to get into it. Oh well.

Unfortunately cool stuff like the Video Toaster...never made it to Europe (AFAIK, I never saw one except in promos on American TV)

Yeah, you had a thing for Kiki Stockhammer didn't you?

Last I saw her was in 2004 or 2005, she was the female lead for Warp 11, a Star Trek themed punk band out of San Francisco. The band was headlining at Enigma Con at UCLA, which greatly expanded after the Boxing Day Tsunami as probably 60 actors came out to support the con for its charity fundraiser for the relief efforts.

It's kind if amazing to think that Babylon 5 was created in large part on this era of Amiga and that while a little dated, has held up pretty well compared to some of its contemporaries. Foundation Imaging went on to work on Star Trek DS9 and Voyager, likely using Amigas at least for some of DS9 at least.

Obviously at this point the computer is probably worth more as a teaching tool and curio than as a production machine, but it definitely paved the way.

Then I'm glad that you were here to take one for the team!

Yeah, I remember a movement several years ago to try to swamp them with too much information. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't account for ever-increasing storage density combined with a need to replace end-of-life equipment periodically, essentially guaranteeing that they'll never run out of space.

I usually use ibm.com actually, since it's much less likely to be cached. No idea what the IP is.

Or I use google's 8.8.8.8 since it's not DHCP-assigned and is also less likely to be cached.