What's weird is that Google appears to be more evil than Microsoft these days. Time to switch to Bing?

Spaces are awful for one simple reason - they allow numbers to break at the end of of the screen and wrap onto the next line. In fact, on my screen, your one million example looked like 1000 until I realized there were some more 0's on the next line.

Los Angeles to San Francisco is the busiest air corridor in the United States with an estimated 60 million passengers per year expected by 2020. It is one of the top 20 corridors in the world.

The airports can't handle much more traffic and it costs a substantial amount of money to build new ones (upwards of $20 billion), connect highways, etc.

So high speed rail makes real sense. There isn't even a place to put another airport in the bay area unless you stick it way out of the way.

The links to San Diego and Sacramento don't cost anywhere near the price of the main segment of LA to SF and are just there to complete the system. I don't even think they are part of the first stage and may never end up being built.

Supercomputing as a service is nearly as old as computers are. Granted they were called mainframes.

Frankly I'm amused at how we seem to be regressing 30 years. I expect any day to see dumb terminals and a prognostication that soon the world will need only a few [cloud] computers.

And why do you need more than process-level concurrency (or currency at all?) for a system as simple as Twitter's? They aren't exactly doing heavy calculations.

From the Scala website:

This change was driven by the companies need to reliably scale their operation to meet fast growing Tweet rates, already reaching 5000 per minute during the Obama Inauguration

In what parallel universe it is difficult to build a message queue capable of handling 83 messages per second? I built a fault-tolerant group message passing system 10 years ago that handled 30,000 messages per second on a dinky machine. Hell, Oracle's built in message queue system can handle more than 83 messages per second with ACID!

I will never, ever, ever understand the engineering choices of the Twitter team.

What, they don't sell HP printers at Fry's? New HP Jetdirect print servers are IPv6 capable.

The tool wasn't found on top of the soil. It was embedded deep within layers upon layers of earth. Each layer has very specific characteristics caused by events that happened on the planet (say a big volcano eruption).

You can tell if the layers have been disturbed (say someone 100,000 years ago decided to dig really deep).

So while you might be able to find a very old rock, you'd also have to find it in a layer of earth that corresponds to the same age.

Fiber! That's what I want and I want it from a real service provider darn it!

I live in San Francisco. It is shocking that there aren't any around. I mean, there are huge amounts of dark fiber under the streets (and they seem to put more in every day).

I'd take 10 Mbps symmetric. I'd pay $100/mo for it and if they were going to do video on demand, I'd go to $140.