Mine's ~$300/year, when I hassle my landlord into reading the meter, and I don't buy natural gas.

Couldn't the giant utility have a giant flywheel into which they dump any excess power during peak times? Then customer overproduction isn't such an issue, and the entire community benefits from having one large energy storage instead of thousands of small ones. If Japan can magnetically levitate their trains, surely Hawaii could manage to lift a big flywheel.

what about a massive, hazardous flywheel?

http://www.google.com/loon/where/

Also, filter out all the pages-of-links search spam
If you want to charge a fee, you could include a link to someone who is better at searching for stuff than I am, or maybe Watson.
Finally, include all the internet that Google hasn't indexed.

Have you seen this list of some of the few alternatives?

I did a little looking around to find out how much atmospheric moisture there is at 20km altitude, and it doesn't look like there's very much, especially away from the tropics.

I don't think Tim O'Reilly cares.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but Cheney's ties to Halliburton make a difference. Even as an adult understands the reason why a stove element glows red, anyone experienced in politics knows there needs to be a bidding process that will stand up to an ethics audit if you're thinking of giving a contract to an outfit that used to employ you in a management position. If they didn't have time for the bidding, one of the other two or three companies should have been picked.

I have it on good authority that a monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. Google does not have a monopoly. Title Seven, Article 102 of the Lisbon Treaty addresses "a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it." A company doesn't have to have a monopoly to be subject to special extra regulation by the EU, just the largest percentage of market share.

That wouldn't be the way to go. Rather, CyanogenMMod would be a parallel product with extended features and a faster update cycle. After a year and a half of the two running in parallel, they release the message "We've regretfully decided to stop future development of the original flavor CyanogenMod after the next update as the vast majority of our users prefer CyanogenMMod, so we're concentrating our efforts there. We have the greatest regard for our original flavor CyanogenMod users and will leave the last update available for download until it is utterly obsolete."

Valve might be better off aiming their Linux gaming resources in the Iris Pro direction. Intel is nicer to Linux, and the rate at which their graphics hardware is improving is fast enough (and getting enough synergy in the thermal and power requirements) that they'll be overbearing Nvidia's revenue stream at the bottom end before long and quickly catching up from there.

and the only advertisement was for adwords. Then, I searched for 'adwords competitors' and found competitors to adwords among the search results, but still no advertisements from competitors to adwords. This seems like the sort of thing they're complaining about. But, while I use Google search as if it were a utility, I don't think search is considered to be a public utility at this time. When I think about an analogy other than common carrier requirements, what comes to mind is requiring the Parcelforce logo and phone number be painted onto a corner of DHL vehicles so that people might consider the alternative service.

I agree. I'd much rather see a large drone release a little drone that homes in on one guy and shoots him than I would see that same drone release an explosive missile that blows up the guy and the seven people standing next to him. If we're going to kill people with drones (and, I'm not saying we should, but it sure looks like that's going to be happening), we should use all the technology we can to reduce collateral damage as much as possible.

A drone that only carries a camera can weigh a lot less than a package delivery drone, so the FAA may be a little bit less concerned about what happens if one falls on you (until someone gets seriously injured by that, at least).

9.3% state income tax + 7.5% sales tax + drought might have something to do with that.