If that was the case, they probably wouldn't come out of their spaceship. Our atmosphere is filled with water.

That is absolutely fantastic news. Could you point me at a place where I could buy one?

The reality is that the derivative technologies are not always things like "we need to invent a solar panel", they're not even "we need to invent light composites", they're "we need to figure out a way of quickly producing these exotic materials on a large enough skill to fill the demand that the military is going to have for these.".

Isn't it frustrating that the military never encourages the development of new technology?

I cannot think of a single civilian use for something like this, and definitely not a use for any of the derivative technologies. /sarcasm...because, well, nerdgasm

I've flown out of Sky Harbor international airport, Dallas Ft-Worth international airport and tons of smaller regional aiports privately and never ever had my bags checked or had anybody even say anything to me other than "Do you want a cookie?"

I once even had the flight crew of a Gulfstream V invite me on board to check it out when they saw me oggling it.

The point is: at least in the US (which is where Jobs does most of his flying, I would imagine) having any type of airport security *at all* is not normal for private flights.

I just want to clarify that this is absolutely *not* how things work in the United States.

In the US, if you're flying privately, you walk through the lobby of whatever FBO (Which is a company that provides fuel, a pilot lounge, catering, etc.) your plane is parked at, smile at the person behind the desk, get on your plane, and leave.

Jobs was right to think that he could get on the plane with his stars because, usually, he would be able to.

What you're saying is absolutely insane, I'm sorry.

The sensor in my copier costs, what, $10? Maybe?

You're talking about replacing that with something that would likely cost over $100,000 as well as well as the optics to support it.

The sensor in a fax machine and the sensor in a camera are *totally* different things.

They do this to prevent people from going there, taking pictures, and selling a "BURNERS GONE WILD!" calendar or something like it.

They're preventing *others* from profiting off of photos of burners, not profiting off of them themselves.

This is generally considered a good thing.

Ubiquiti XR2 (600mw) laughs at your shenanigans.

(I have a stack of these in my house...but nothing to really use them for. I feel like I should lose nerd cred for this).

Facebook has 1 server per about 10,000 users. (Although the majority of these are probably part of storage arrays)

You give the public way, way, way too much credibility. I'm sitting in a coffee shop right now surrounded by about 20 people, if you had to guess, how many of them do you think know who Julian Assange is? Know what wikileaks is even? Know that Sweden incorrectly accused him of rape at the behest of the Obama Administration as an attempt to discredit him?

None? 1, maybe?

All it's going to take is a "raid" on his home where they find child pornography on one of his computers. He will go to jail for the rest of his life and, from that point forward, everything that comes from wikileaks will be something that came from "that organization that distributes kiddie porn".

Yes, the Swedes messed this up, badly, but the overwhelming majority of people don't even know that it happened, and even the majority of them don't realize that wikileaks is a lot more than Julian Assange. Despite this, he will be discredited and, with him, wikileaks will go away. /sad

Keep in mind that Christopher Hitchens, who I think is absolutely brilliant, is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a pop culture magazine.

Facebook invented Cassandra, as well as Haystack

Here is their engineering page.

Facebook *has* to be a culture of hackers as they really are pushing the limits of scaling (in the same way that google is)

Predators do not have automatic takeoff and landing capabilities.

I think a lot of the people who used to use linux are now using mac.

This is sad to me :(. Some of what I consider the most important lessons I learned I learned by trying to get gentoo running properly (with ACPI support, mind you) on my laptop.

I wouldn't be so sure about that... The thing is made from very low-weight foam and brushless motors are getting to the point where this is a reality. Those little toy Air Hogs things, for instance, can do this (albeit on a much smaller scale). /Sidebar: wtf has happened to those things? 2 years ago, they were all over the place, now the only thing I ever see are those god-awful 2-axis helicopters.