Google Plus is only incidentally a social network. It was designed to merge and centrally manage the YouTube, Picasa, GMail, et al accounts. It's been quite effective. The stream was an easy add-on goal and an additional selling point for consumers. Circles offer a nice benefit and are being used now not just for the Plus stream but to notify people about one another's activities on the other sites like YouTube.

Clearly you work for Trane since your freelancer.com profile says Fort Smith. There, that's out of the way now.

It allows others to borrow the code into their GPLv2 projects. It also allows others to make modifications which are not proven, but potentially those could be audited and proven, too.

"Is" or "Will be if it ever gets off the ground"? According to the neo900 web site the estimated ship date isn't for months yet.

On top of it all, the candy bar phone has Bluetooth and Bluetooth keyboards can be had separately or built into a phone case in the $20 to $70 range. This allows people willing to pay extra for a keyboard to pick the one they want and replace it separately from the phone if they need to replace it.

The link appears to be made in TFA (the first one):

Intel's new Xeon E7-8895 v2 processor is pretty much identical to the top-of-the-line E7-8890 v2, except it has the ability to put its cores into ultra-low power states and then bring them back up as needed, according to Intel.

Intel introduced the 8890 v2 model this past February. It is the absolute top of the Xeon line, the only one with RAS capabilities and other high-end functions found in the Itanium and other RISC processors. The 8890 has 15 cores running at 2.8 GHz and more importantly, a massive 37.5 MB of cache per core for high performance analytics or in-memory databases.

So the chip is great for things like in-memory databases and it's from Oracle. So the warning about that combination might be a bit over-the-top but not totally out of the blue.

There's no autoloading from a gravity-fed hopper. This is an interesting thing with the multiple barrels that rotate and it's a cool homage to Gatling. There's no quick reload with this thing, though. One of the neatest things about a Gatling gun is the feed.

changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects
changing your routes changes the interconnects

Seriously, folks, changing your routes changes the interconnects.

His VPN provider probably has a much better route back to Verizon. Yes, Verizon is being somewhat dickish to not acknowledge that Netflix is a big driver for their higher speed plans and giving Netflix's bandwidth carriers a bit of a price break for that reason. No, this is no proof at all of throttling.

Is it evidence suggesting throttling? Well, yeah. Proof? Not even close. It's entirely consistent with what Verizon already said about an imbalanced interconnect that needs more hardware.

"it appears that the word wrack ... have been replaced by the word rack"

Just think of it as a jobs program/economic stimulus/enrichment of a random company on the public dole. It makes perfect sense if you buy into the economic value of the government scaling big bureaucracies that depend on a competent contractor to help them scale so big being beneficial to the economy. Just think about how much more beneficial it is, then, to have it done three or four times to get it right.

On the other hand, consumers could have spent that money rather than paying the government to pay those extra contractor costs. But then again, consumers tend to over-spend anyway and corrode the economy. Sometimes that's to the point that the government has to choose between bailing out the banks and bailing out the consumers. Then again, the government encourages that, too. And of course rather than bailing out the consumers they bail out the banks so they can create more consumer debt and start all over.

The main difference between big government folks and small government folks, you see, isn't that one thinks the government is well intentioned and the other thinks it is evil and needs to be kept in check. That's certainly a factor, but it's not the main one. The main difference is that big government people have an idealized concept of the government as a doer of good. Small government people are skeptical that anything too big and too detached from the lives of real people can reasonably accomplish good things for the majority of people on a regular basis.

Two words: hamster ball