One could also interpret the data as saying that since 2011, 8% of data center operators have looked into improving their energy efficiency and have done as much as they think feasible. That 50% consider energy efficiency very important in the latest survey suggests that it is still is. Data centers use about 2% of the electricity consumed in the United States.

The longer you keep you kid off computers the better. Computers are highly addictive and you won't have the will power to limit it's use in any effective way. You've got important stuff to do, kid is being a pest, it's just too easy to bring up a game and put him in front of it. Let the kid learn about the real world, enjoy physical activity and interact with people fact to face.

It seems to me Apple has a strategic choice: it can license its patents on basic technology, like pinch zoom and edge bounce, to Samsung and others, or keep suing. Licensing keeps Google Android as its main rival, while Apple gets a tidy tax on every smartphone sold. Not licensing puts Microsoft and Nokia, two hungry giants, back in the game and brings Apple nothing. Sometimes it's best to quit while you're ahead.

Accident statistics in the U.S. do not seem to support the supposed danger of driving while talking on cell phones. During the period when cell phones became wildly popular here, the automobile accident rate has dropped sharply. According to the Centers for Disease Control http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/mmwr_achievements.html/ "From 2000 to 2009, while the number of vehicle miles traveled on the nation's roads increased by 8.5%, the death rate related to that travel declined from 14.9 per 100,000 population to 11.0 and the injury rate declined from 1,130 to 722." Yes, there were other factors, like seat belt laws, but if cell phones were such a major danger, it's hard to believe deaths could have fallen that much at the exact same time they became ubiquitous.

I attended the World Wide Developers' conference when the Mac II was introduced. Rumors insisted it was to be the first color Macintosh. When the exhibit hall doors opened, there was a Mac II with its big (for the time) monitor, but the image was the original Mac's crisp black and white. It was only when I got closer that I noticed the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen--it alone displayed in bright rainbow color. That was Job's showmanship.

Right, but the South switched to 4 foot 9 inches in 1886 to match the gauge used by the Pennsylvania RR. The last 1/2 inch came later. But that was good enough.

The Epic Fail, exposing Sony's private key, had nothing to do with the IBM Cell processor. In fact the flaw was not in any of the PS3 software. It was a mistake in the program used to sign software approved to run on the PS3. That program presumably runs only on some highly guarded server in the bowels of Sony. It could have been fixed by adding one line of code, a call to random number generator to generate a new random value for each signature. Even a crappy random number generator would probably have resisted attack. All that was needed was keeping attackers from finding two different signatures that used the same "random" number. You have to go back to the Venona NSA exploit in the Cold War to find an example of a large organization screwing up what should have been an unbreakable cipher system.

Uhh no. We have some trade issues with China, but they hardly rise to the level of Cold War.

One thing in the NYT article that did not make sense was the claim the large amounts of capital are needed to make this happen. If local people can afford the solar units and they pay for themselves in a few months, what's holding the wide scale deployment up?

By law, the US government publishes a report each year on all lawful wiretaps, Federal and state. Here is an excerpt from the latest report: "Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should refect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2009, one instance was reported of encryption encountered during a state wiretap; however, this did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications." In other words, there was just one lawful wiretap last year where communications were encrypted and even that did not stymie law enforcement. The proposed law is not about aiding law enforcement, it's about perfecting the surveillance society, where all communications are filtered for suspicious content.

Very informative, but for the record, cars and trucks don't use GPS in a safety-critical role and railroads don't use it at all.