San Francisco is undoubtedly cooler than the south bay, but it's also way more expensive. Not everyone can afford rent or the space they want in SF when compared to many of those south bay cities. That goes both for companies and people. Some companies will move or start there, but I think it's reaching to say we're at a tipping point.

And most importantly, people aren't raising kids in SF:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/13/san-francisco-moms-reflect_n_1508072.html

So that talent that young is going to have to commute the other way when they get married and have kids.

You don't want them to know what sites you log into, but you are fine sharing everything else they collect?? Site logins are trivial compared to everything else they keep. Off the top of my head:

Search History
Email contacts
Actual content of emails (!!!!)
Friends lists
Click-out tracking

GP's comment about bridging unrelated accounts is still valid, though. I can see how people would trust Google/FB, but not Gawker.

What this group should get credit for is open sourcing a cheap design.

The chemistry and circuit design involved are well-established and taught at the undergraduate level. You can easily find schematics for potentiostats online. It's reaching to say that they've built an $80 chemical analyzer, because a lot of prep work and specialized electrodes (platinum!) are needed to run some of these analyses. This is a cheap lab instrument, not something you take out in the field to make measurements. Ruggedizing and standardizing reagent solutions are what would make a field instrument much more expensive.

I'd bet the group didn't make an exaggerated claim, it's the unfortunate nature of science reporting.

I don't understand how everyone always compares Diesel MPG to Gasoline MPG. They aren't the same thing!

From: ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency )
Regular gasoline/petrol - 34.8 megajoules/L
Diesel - 38.6 megajoules/L
Diesel has almost 11% more energy per liter than gasoline. To get to mileage you have to factor in the efficiency of the engine and the rest of the car, but even then the difference should be acknowledged. Whether the energy difference makes it 'better' is also a separate question.

You can't compare the two MPG directly with any meaning. If you said it was cheaper per mile (accounting for the relative price of the two fuels) then you would at least have some practical benchmark, but who cares about the actual volume of fuel you use??? They need to be compared on a sensible basis, and volume of fuel makes no sense at all.

How does this compare to people who travel one time zone over, let alone multiple time zones? Aren't these people (millions) in worse shape?

Replying to my own post, but I just found this Ken Jennings quote about this match, which relates to what I said above:
http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html?hpid=talkbox1

On last night's show, I noticed you buzzing in even when you didn't know the answer right away, taking a second after Alex called on you to finish reading the question and give an answer. In your opinion, is this the only way to beat Watson?

A. Ken Jennings :
Good human players do this all the time: you buzz when you see something that trips some "This looks familiar!" switch in your brain and count on dredging it out in the five seconds after Alex calls on you.
Watson can't do this: it only buzzes once it has an answer in mind and a sufficiently high confidence interval. As weird as it sounds, yes, the human brain still has a speed advantage over a 2,880-processor-core computer.

This is a HUGE assumption. We don't know how long it took for Watson to come up with an answer, and we don't know for the humans either. Jeopardy rules are such that you *cannot* buzz before the end of the question. The speed aspect was removed from the equation.

If you took out the buzzer limitation it would have been a much more interesting (but less fun to watch) competition. Imagine the category is state capitals, and the words "pelican state" are in the clue. That's all a good human would need to buzz, just the word pelican. If the human was anticipating a state nickname (and knew them all), the human could buzz before the moderator even said the word, hear the word as the buzzer is going off, then give the answer. What would it take to build Watson to do that? What if the computer had to listen to the words (and understand them) instead of being fed them electronically? That sort of timing, anticipation, and processing is a much greater challenge than what we saw and would also be immensely useful. If you wanted to build a robot that could listen to someone and respond, that is the sort of intelligence and speed you'd need.

The engineers who worked on the project did a great job...I'm just hoping there's more coming along the same lines.

All the platters I ever taken out of drives oxidize over time if exposed to enough moisture. Hard to imagine shaving with one unless you polished it frequently.

Doesn't this consume copper like lemon batteries? Doesn't that have to be replaced too? No mention in the article.

I think it has more to do with the fact that the bends are caused by nitrogen coming out of solution in your blood, and doesn't really have to do with the oxygen. The point of the pure oxygen is that it doesn't have any nitrogen. You will immediately lower the nitrogen concentration in your blood that way.

Don't the newer specs of HDMI exceed 1920x1200?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdmi#Version_Comparison

And according to the same article (maybe I should read more before posting) DP is actually royalty free whereas HDMI isn't...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdmi#Relationship_with_DisplayPort

What happened to HDMI? Lots of monitors and computers already have it, it supports audio over the connection (Mini-DP doesn't), and it can support the resolutions the article mentions. There's even already a mini version of it in use. It's a standard in home video and had plenty of adoption with computers. Is there something that Mini-DP does that HDMI doesn't?

I was thinking about redundancy and I realized that if one pigeon is unsuccessful it is more likely that another pigeon released under the same conditions would also be unsuccessful. Not that it would necessarily fail, but if weather was the problem any pigeon leaving in that time frame would have the same problem.

I think the copy the memory card is a easy backup plan. Just bring a laptop or something to copy the memory card and you'll still have pictures even if the pigeon goes AWOL.

Not sure why this is so awesome, because PVA isn't really the problem with LCD disposal. It's metals (mercury) and other semiconductor associated contaminants. It's like recycling the steel lid of a hazardous waste container...

That and PVA is pretty cheap (see elmer's glue). Also it might be a while before recycled materials are acceptable for pharmaceutical uses.