Because:

a) They'd have to pay to seed it

b) The data changes frequently (it is a web crawler after all)

c) Not everyone has servers necessary to process that much data, while anyone can use hadoop on amazon

I have sent Google reports in three times for my own address being located 2 blocks from where it actually was because someone decided to move the anchor of their business to their new address instead of update the address itself. I still can't get an Uber to arrive at my house without someone calling asking where my building is.

Google even sent me a response saying, yes they did make a mistake and they were going to fix it. Now I have two anchor points in front of my house for the same address.

You should be able to mail Amex cash just as you would mail them a check.

Web technologies change rapidly enough that any GUI editor you use today is going to generate code that will be considered sub-par in a few years. Heck, they generate code that is considered sub-par *now*.

That said, you probably are going to revamp the look and feel of your website every few years anyway, so why worry about the long haul? Get the best tool for the job right now and upgrade later.

What's weird is that Google appears to be more evil than Microsoft these days. Time to switch to Bing?

Spaces are awful for one simple reason - they allow numbers to break at the end of of the screen and wrap onto the next line. In fact, on my screen, your one million example looked like 1000 until I realized there were some more 0's on the next line.

Los Angeles to San Francisco is the busiest air corridor in the United States with an estimated 60 million passengers per year expected by 2020. It is one of the top 20 corridors in the world.

The airports can't handle much more traffic and it costs a substantial amount of money to build new ones (upwards of $20 billion), connect highways, etc.

So high speed rail makes real sense. There isn't even a place to put another airport in the bay area unless you stick it way out of the way.

The links to San Diego and Sacramento don't cost anywhere near the price of the main segment of LA to SF and are just there to complete the system. I don't even think they are part of the first stage and may never end up being built.

Supercomputing as a service is nearly as old as computers are. Granted they were called mainframes.

Frankly I'm amused at how we seem to be regressing 30 years. I expect any day to see dumb terminals and a prognostication that soon the world will need only a few [cloud] computers.

And why do you need more than process-level concurrency (or currency at all?) for a system as simple as Twitter's? They aren't exactly doing heavy calculations.

From the Scala website:

This change was driven by the companies need to reliably scale their operation to meet fast growing Tweet rates, already reaching 5000 per minute during the Obama Inauguration

In what parallel universe it is difficult to build a message queue capable of handling 83 messages per second? I built a fault-tolerant group message passing system 10 years ago that handled 30,000 messages per second on a dinky machine. Hell, Oracle's built in message queue system can handle more than 83 messages per second with ACID!

I will never, ever, ever understand the engineering choices of the Twitter team.