Argh...

Now the bulbs are more expensive than the lamp....

I couldn't imagine outfitting a chandelier with $300 worth of bulbs...

So now I've got a bulb that when i turn it off at the switch it stops drawing electricity, they want lightbulbs all over my house that are not off but in "standby" mode. Sucking on power throughout the day...

I remember when lightbulbs were not $15 but $.50.

who cares, if you've got an idea and a way of making people rich, who the F cares.

Silicon Valley is full of assh*les...

Jobs.
Ellison.
McNeely.
Jayshree Ullal (CEO of Arista)
Zuckerberg
Sergey Brinn (cheated on wife)

These people lead companies and make people filthy rich. Why do they need a lesson from Miss Manners?

Silicon Valley is based on the premise of making investors huge sums of money, plain and simple. I don't mean the people investing on the NASDAQ, but those that work on Sand Hill Blvd. That is the Real Silicon Valley. Take a look at what Marc Andreesen has done since he sold Netscape. IPO and sold company after company for billions of dollars.

The people on the outside complain. Well you know, not having charisma like George Clooney works perfectly fine here. There's plenty of 80hr/wk engineers in the world that would have jumped at the chance to work at FB, Google, Oracle and their 'lack of charisma' CEOs pre-IPO.

In many video games, going back to some of the oldest, there's almost always been multiple races. Heck even Space Invaders had two races. WoW has over a dozen.

If you're going to make a game that involves humans. Which race do you pick? Someone's going to get offended no matter which race you pick.

I play SC2, Terran. There's Zergs and Protoss. Three races right there. Is someone offended that the Terrans appear to be primarily Caucasian? Sure there's a few bit characters that aren't. Why isn't Reynor hispanic, or Jewish or Chinese or Native American or whatever...

The most smug, pompous and expensive place to live....

It's the land of the have and have nots.

Want you kids to go to good schools in the area? Get ready to either send them to private school or fork out $1m plus for a 1600 sqft home with no land that was built in the early 60s.

If you didn't make in a killing in the previous dotcom bubble or the one we're in (Snapchat, i'm looking at you), enjoy mediocre housing and schools.

There's talk here about charging stations vs. using local fuel. Well convoy that shows up along with the president brings its' own fuel. They don't trust the local gas in foreign countries because there's no guarantee as to the quality or any foreign additives. I believe the engine in The Beast is a diesel which gives it such torque to move this "tank but looks like a limo" down the street with sufficient speed and acceleration to get away from trouble.

How much battery would you need to accelerate what could be 5tons away from trouble? The model-S "performance" Telsa has 425ftlbs of torque. This is less than most mid size trucks and my 4yr old BMW diesel sedan. There's quite a few off the shelf pickup truck diesels (Cummings, Duramax, Powerstroke) that can put out 700ftlbs or more of torque and you could easily put in more than enough fuel for the president to drive to/from wherever he needed to go (50 gal?)

According to the US Energy Administration...

  In 2012, the United States generated about 4,054 billion kilowatthours of electricity. About 68% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuel (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), with 37% attributed from coal.

Energy sources and percent share of total electricity generation in 2012 were:

        Coal 37%
        Natural Gas 30%
        Nuclear 19%
        Hydropower 7%
        Other Renewable 5%
                Biomass 1.42%
                Geothermal 0.41%
                Solar 0.11%
                Wind 3.46%
        Petroleum 1%
        Other Gases 1%

Even without the $25m owed in the contract, Oracle is probably still profitable on the deal.

I bet they maintain 60-70% margins... and that's on the services side...

WinXP: It's good enough.

My retired parents use their computer for the exact same things today as when they bought it ages ago. They surf the web, do email, occasionally skype and keep track of things in excel, word and a bit of time on FB. It sits in their home office and each morning one of them turns it on uses it and then at night when the last one is done using it, (s)he powers it off for the night. They've got some ext HD that backs up their computer every day in case something happens.

It works. Sure they have kindles to read books, but there's no need to fork over $500+ for a new system and then the hassle of migrating all of their apps/data/settings to a new platform.

What else do they have that "just works"? A toaster oven, a microwave and other appliances. They see the computer as an appliance, it works, it has an interface and a set of expected behaviors. Nice and simple.

These guys aren't banks, and your deposits with them aren't FDIC insured. This is why where there's some bank robbery, I'm not concerned how much money they tank. The bank's customers' money is safe.

If a real bank stored my bitcoins, then it's not a problem if they're stolen since the deposits are insured. However, with these fly by night operations, you're no better off then using a safe in your basement (or in someone else's).

Until these crypto currencies are insured, I'm not touching them.

you could get companies to build peripherals for them... Google doesn't make the addons, someone else does...

A set of Carl Zeiss lenses for your smart phone?

I do remember upgrading CPUs from 486sx to dx to adding in a 66mhz overclocking chip etc...

However, it wasn't very long before upgrading a cpu meant buying a new motherboard.

A phone on the other hand... if you want it to be small and lightweight with no bulky connectors... it won't be field upgradable. Look at ultrabooks with their soldered on ram and SSD modules vs a W series Lenovo with dual expansion bays...

I also seem to recall at the S5 launch that the audience applauded the phone being dust and waterproof. Not sure how you can do this with all sorts of connectors.

Though I do applaud them for trying and maybe something good will come out of it.

I work in an area that has a high number of large companies with big parking lots. Nearby there's plenty of places to eat, and all employers warn their employees never to leave laptops in their car, in sight, when they go to lunch. As it's a common occurrence for people to walk the restaurant parking lots and "smash n grab" a laptop bag.

So now you're providing the opportunity for someone to sit in a parking lot, wait for a UPS/FedEx truck to drive around, identify a vehicle, deliver a package and drive away. Then the thief would go up to the car, and pry open the trunk and in 2minutes drive off with the package.

I'm also surprised that Volvo would suggest this since they sell quite a few cars that do not have sealed trunks but are open in the back like a station wagon/SUV/crossover.

If it's OTA and my car gets bricked, is the manufacturer going to send a tow truck to my house and take it to be repaired? This would be a major unplanned inconvenience for me.

If i have to take it into the dealership anyhow, and it gets bricked, it's already there and in capable hands of being fixed. If I time the update with other maintenance like oil changes, then it's all done at the same time.

The Tesla model could work perfectly well, just like i've never had my home router brick when doing upgrades, but if my router did brick, I'm not stuck somewhere.

UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...

Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?

Doubt it.

This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.