New rule for Science Journalism: If your article can be summarized as "No.", don't write it.

You say "millions of ... daily hits". For simplicity, let's say that you get about 1 million hits per day; that's about 10 hits per second, and that's if they're spread out evenly throughout the day. If it's fairly business-centric and USA-centric, then let's say that you get about 90% of those hits during a period of about 10 hours; that's more like 25 hits per second. Now how long will it take your server, on average, to process one hit (taking multiple processes/threads/etc. into account)? The difference between 0.02 seconds and 0.12 seconds now determines whether it gets swamped or not.

If you do run this type of volume on your own kit, then you'll need to pay serious attention to (1) optimizing for processing speed (including volume of data sent back and forth between your site and the user) and (2) using multiple web servers and/or database servers with load balancing.

Project Xanadu: Original 17 rules

6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies ("transclusions") to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.

Youtube demo (the actual demo starts at about 3:15)

Just this past weekend, I moved some stuff off an old Windows 98 workstation at a client. I'm pretty sure the user hadn't been performing percussive maintenance... Also upgraded the primary application software (for the first time since 2005 or so) and a few custom reports (dating back to the pre-Crystal Reports era).

This turns out to be about 200 miles west of Seattle. Hmm...

(nt)

TFA is slashdotted right now, so this is necessarily a guess, but maybe they're talking about e.g. 1,000 CPUs each doing one operation in 330ns as basically equivalent (in terms of net work done) to 1 CPU doing all 1,000 of those operations in 330ps apiece?

To the Wikipedia-mobile, Geek Wonder!

• Option, e.g. "I pay you $100 and you agree to (sell to me / buy from me) 1,000 shares of XYZ at a locked-in price of $50 apiece whenever I decide to exercise my option" (I may decide not to exercise it at all, and I may have a time limit)
• Binomial options pricing model, a formula for how valuable an option is in practice
• Closed-form expression, pertaining to a method that gets values out of a formula without resorting to brute-force approximation or other such PITA methods
• Gosper's algorithm, pertaining to proving that there ain't no such method for this model

...an anti-laser capable of emitting a beam of pure anti-anti-matter.

Source

"Confession: A Roman Catholic App" sells for $1.99 on iTunes. It is designed to guide Catholics to confession by allowing users to check whether their behavior conforms with the church.

The Indiana-based development company called Little iApps said the app was designed to be used in the confessional and not a replacement for confession with a priest.

Father Kevin Regan of St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. told FOX 5 News he not only thinks the app is a good idea, he downloaded it himself.

"It's an aid and I was thinking about this much like Yelp. It doesn't change the personal relationship it just helps you get there a little quicker. It gives you the menu of the place, but you still have to go there to eat the food. In the same way in confession, you still have to be there to have that personal encounter," Father Regan said.

Looking at the picture from TFA, it doesn't look that much bigger than a typical smartphone while folded. Personally, short of smart contacts, I'm holding out for an expanding virtual display like the multiverse cops in The One had.

Map

"Outrage 8" is itself a misnomer. Here's how TFA is actually structured:

1. 1. Overall theme of the speech
2. 2. Innovation and education (and outrage over implicit concession of manufacturing)
3. 3. Clean energy
4. 4. Oil subsidies
5. 5. Health care
6. 6. Immigration
7. 7. Deficit
8. 8. Outrages
   1. a. #2, as mentioned
   2. b. TSA security theater
   3. c. Net neutrality
   4. d. One thing from #3 being too far in the future to be politically meaningful)
9. 9. Opposition response (and fluff about who sat where)
10. 10. Fluff about Boehner's clothes

"I believe that is what I said."

Consider the following (which is itself a simplification, but at least gives some idea of the range):

1. "he was trying to uphold DBE, drawing undeserved criticism and unhappy about that"
2. "he was trying to uphold DBE, not very well, drawing deserved criticism and unhappy about that"
3. "he was unhappy about DBE itself and was trying to undermine it"

The article basically says "the China searches were argued, DBE was tarnished, some other stuff happened, he considered bailing", which taken by itself points somewhere in this range - but to get more specific than that, you have to draw on outside knowledge and read between the lines. The original submission made it out like the article was directly stating #3.

Note that the write-up has since been fixed (to quote basically the same part I did, plus a bit extra). See the original submission to see how it looked before.