Actually, depending on how many clams were examined (and other things), odds of 1000s of similar age clams still out there might not be all that good.

There is a cool statistical result known as German tank problem

Actually, thin sheets of gorilla glass are fairly flexible.

It should be better at surviving drops. Part of impact energy will go into bending and not into shuttering stuff.

Are you refering to that stunt when Russians claimed that a bunch of BBC's senior staff members were on MI6 payroll? For that case, current consensus is that it was actually true.

That's not what I was talking about. Full discharge is a bad and, well, extreme case. No, when people talk about cycles, they mean how many times battery supplied it's rated amount of energy. For example, if you drive to work 5 times a week and each time discharge 20% of your battery, you do 1 cycle a week (regardless if you plug it in every night or not).

This does not apply to Teslas for very simple reason: their battery is HUGE. So for the same daily routine, they will accrue 1 cycle not in a week but in a month (same amount of energy is now only 5% of the capacity)! Thus they burn through li-ion cycles at a much, much slower pace (and that's why, again, your Volt's battery is bigger than needed for spec'd performance - to slow down cycling degradation - just re-read my previous comment)

That the battery's calendar life that is a problem that affects everybody.

Actually it's not "as good as new".

What's happening is that degradation is being hidden from you. Volt's battery is much bigger than needed for the purpose - they over-provisioned it because cycling of a smaller battery kills it really fast.

So as the battery degrades, cycles start to grow at faster and faster rate (even when you're keeping the exact same driving routine). So when that point comes that the car can no longer hide the overall state of the battery, your electric range will start dropping like a rock.

And my point was that when everybody will try to buy them, they would become either oversold or become really-really expensive.

Actually, regardless, money becomes an issue really fast anyway - few days ago Wired run a story that for many types of loads AWS does not make much financial sense anymore and people started to add two and two together. In other words - people are prepared to pay only so much (in a pinch a little bit extra) - ask a little bit more and they'll start to roll their own.

Saying that it's not a problem does not make it so. Besides, as soon as people learn to failover gracefully guess what would start to happen: other regions would begin buckling under load.

If you care that much about availability, you should do it yourself anyway.

The first rule of diversification: don't put your eggs into correlating baskets.

In this context it means that if your primary is on AWS, then your secondary must be on Rackspace or whatever - NOT other AWS.

Apparently that Guardian journalist's partner was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow airport. That's a reason enough.

Wouldn't it incentivize Russians to disappear Snowden just to get to those juicy NSA files?

Actually, it's a rather common practice. Assumption is that with the exception of rare cases (i.e. Chechens), KGB (a.k.a. FSB) does not talk to FBI. So they are played against each other: Don't want NSA reading your stuff - tunnel to mail.ru (or such), don't want FSB - tunnel to gmail. Don't like both reading the same message - try Asians (and btw, you have some serious problems my friend.) I would not go with Europeans though - there were some nasty scandals in the past (even with Swiss of all nations)

Do those who defend these programs understand that they're crippling the country's immune system? The tools they deploy are extremely efficient at subverting, nipping in the bud 'undesirable' popular movements (indispensable tool for keeping US democratic). Given well documented (COINTELPRO) things FBI tried to pull against civil rights and untiwar movements, argument that they are not doing it now does not wash - they did it before and they WILL do it again.

BMW says that panels designed for quick replacement. Like snap on/ snap off. And considering that those are not carbon fiber but cf reinforced plastic, they shouldn't be that expensive (relative to labor costs of traditional body work.)

Just a reminder - Boeing 787 is a very advanced aircraft not only because of that carbon fiber thingy, but also because they've swapped almost all actuators from hydraulic to electrical ones - that's new (first?) for civilian aircraft. Electric generators are sitting right on engines shafts (so no bleeding == more fuel efficient design).

As a result Boeing is still chasing all the electrical (and tightly tied to them computer) bugs. Not very surprising that is.