You missed a few digits there. Google is getting 1.8 million (with an m) per year. They paid 12.5 billion (with a b) for Motorola. That puts the payback period at 7,000 years, which methinks is a little long.

Am I the only one who thought this was an article about tiny testicles?

It drives me crazy- my kids have several java-based websites they are required to use for school. I'm not too worried if their laptops get borked- there's nothing of value on them. When the nasties spread across the network to my PC and my server, I've got real problems. What do I do besides complain to the school?

"'Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 4 billion light years to cross"

...

In a press release from The Royal Astronomical Society??? facepalm...

I wish your step-mother would talk to my wife. She consistently buys me the worst possible tools.

Am I the only one that thought this article was about a new wrench for repairing fiber optic cables?

According to some more recent reviews, they have stopped using the blue azo pigments in these CDs. They are now the basic silver-blue phthalocyanine.

No, actually the summary says "the shield is destroying 90 percent of missiles and rockets IT AIMS AT." The system is not aiming at rockets headed toward unpopulated areas. I think what they are claming is that 90% of the interceptors hit their intended target. If true, this is quite impressive.

What happens when that master key gets out in the wild? It's bound to happen eventually...

Price on the iPad mini is too high relative to competitors at $329 for 16gb and $429 for 32gb. AAPL stock price dropped $10 the moment they announced pricing. And for cripes sake, in what world (other than Steve's reality distortion field) does 16gb of flash memory cost $100? You can get a 16gb micro SD card for under $15. Oh, that's right, Apple doesn't think it's sheeple have the brain power to use an SD card.

They should have called this the Zune tablet. At this price-point it is going to fail miserably. I had high hopes that Microsoft might get aggressive to get a toe-hold in the market. I'll give 10 to 1 odds that this thing is a total bust, with the primary blame on pricing.

Or maybe they defied, denied, descried, freeze-dried, hogtied, misguide, pied, plied, popeyed, refried, or just plain tried. We may never know, you insensitive clods!

Who'd have guessed that this is the only page on all of the intertubes that has the word 'blertify'. Better go ahead and copyright that one!

Wow. Everyone on /. is now dumber for having read that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3JzbWVDzac

What I'm saying is that the US spends more per student than any other developed country, yet we consistently score in the bottom quartile in science and math. The entire system is broken, and spending more days per year doing the same dumb crap isn't going to make the system better. http://mat.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/