If you think it's easy to read wind speed, direction, and grid demand (from potentially dozens of different sensors) and come up with blade pitch, turbine heading, and generator engagement on the fly to optimize efficiency and still work in concert with 500 similar and dissimilar devices on the grid and in your nearby airspace, AND have the wherewithal to manage 1 to 100mph wind conditions without falling over or spinning apart, you fucking try it. Until then get over how fancy you think cars are, they are just gas burning stereos with recliners crammed inside.

Even more specifically, it seems ideal for someone working in/on the hull of a Navy ship where heavy welding, cutting/grinding, and riveting equipment is common. They tend not to build navy ships in conflict areas, and it seems like a very impractical device for combat zone use unless the weight it was intended for was body armor, making the sniper point moot yet again.

Nidal Hasan and Ivan Lopez were not snipers, so, sure go ahead and count Fort Hood...

9 alphas in lower case counts as sufficiently complex? That's like 42 bits. How about "r^3ybgdts,m^4libad". Still a nursery rhyme, eh?

Apple was doing something pretty stupid; the first six digits of a credit card number are assigned to the issuing bank so it would be pretty easy to guess ANYONEs first 4 digits if you have on hand a few big bank CC prefixes.

*note to pedants, I said "square acre" to indicate that the acre was laid out with equal lengths on each side, not to suggest that an acre is not already a unit of area.

This is a bit of a ridiculous assumption. A square acre is 208 feet on each side... a 213 foot tip-tip wind turbine could RUN INTO the one next to it for fucks sake. Placing a wind turbine close to another one (even if they don't touch) results in very little output since wind gets slowed dramatically by a large turbine generating power. Actual projects spread them at about 60 acres EACH to maintain effectiveness. So going back to the math, 10 windmills per square mile means 8,000 square miles to power Germany, or an area 90mi x 90mi. Germany does have 137,000 sq miles in its borders, but it would probably rather not use them all (or even 6% of them) for windmills.

This is patently false and a bit ridiculous. A single wind turbine costs over a million dollars to buy and install, not because it costs a lot to rent a crane (it does) but because it is a seriously fucking complicated device. 3 giant blades, a hub that can synchronously pitch the blades between 0 and 90 degrees, a shaft that not only holds up 3 huge, heavy blades but also transfers up to 2,000,000W of power (that's 2,600 horsepower, how much does a fucking BMW have?) I could go on and on. Wind turbines are so hard to design and build, most of them are imported (only a handful of firms can do it well). The IP surrounding wind turbine design is coveted as closely as military secrets (and stolen like military secrets, via state/state espionage and other clandestine acts.)

You mean you don't have the option to use a "Promotions" folder in Gmail where commercial email will go automatically? What are you using, the free version? Chuckle.

Exactly. Even without much training, my gmail inbox is as clean as clean can be. Soliciting emails that I want to see (stores I frequent, etc) are properly shunted into "promotions". It has been at least a year or two since I have seen anything resembling a 419 email. I would posit one of two things is going on; either the submitter has done a good job of confusing the filter by moving/marking the wrong items out of the spam folder, or there really is a Nigerian prince looking to strike a deal to get his vast fortune out of Africa.

The problem is that thieves will be thieves. If your pile of cash is well hidden they will just keep looking until they find someone else's (maybe it's even yours, if your neighbors happen to be all better at securing their valuables than you are). Look at what's happened to the world of car theft (a very well studied phenomenon.) Cars for a decade have generally all come equipped with simple ignition lockouts that make hot-wiring impossible. Thieves now prowl exclusively for cars with keys in them. What was once a relatively safe act (idling a car unattended to warm it up/cool it off) is now the most probable way to have it stolen, since thieves know that cars are worthless without keys. One group gets safer (those who never idle their cars unattended) and the other gets much less safe. It's zero sum unless you come up with a way to actually DE-incentivize the act of theft.

Indeed, go big or go home. Impressing the likes of Amazon would mean millions of dollars in contracts (even just for the IP surrounding advanced robotic processes) so if the reward isn't big enough to counter the risk (i.e. you think you won't do well) then by all means move along.

Given the increasing visibility of the negative externalities of human pickers at Amazon's third party fulfillment locations, they are going to be increasingly eager to do anything they can to reduce the number of humans involved in order fulfillment.

It doesn't mention anything about intellectual property, patents, etc except this bland remark: "Participants will be encouraged to share and disseminate their approach to improve future challenge results and industrial implementations."

So, it is doubtful that entry into the contest or acceptance of the prize would compromise intellectual property (trade secrets, patents, copyrights, etc) of the creators. Much as the X prize, Grand Challenge, etc did not require contestants or winners to forfeit any IP. From the look of it, Amazon is staging a contest, paying travel expenses, and offering a prize, all in lieu of executing a RFP and performing testing themselves. Still probably a win for them in the end, if one or more of the contestants is in fact a commercial robotics vendor.

Torrenting over SSH? That's all kinds of wrong. Why not just run a bt client on the host you are SSHing to and then download it via scp once it's done?