The typically used comparison between Electric and ICE cars is well to wheel. This means you take into account all the factors from mining the energy to delivering it to the road in the form of torque on a wheel. This includes: drilling, pumping, shipping, refining, shipping, and burning. The efficiency gains between shipping to your gas station vs. generating electricity and delivering it to your home is enough to blow away whatever argument there might be, let alone trying to describe how terribly inefficient the internal combustion engine is. Besides all that, if you get your power from solar, wind, or hydro, then your electric vehicle's emissions are effectively zero. And you can't possibly try and compare electric to corn based ethanol, the amount of water, power, and food used to generate ethanol is absolutely staggering. You'd be better off delivering the corn to your own personal horse to ride on your commute. Nor can you really complain about the cost or effort involved in the batteries or other electric vehicle components either. Those are easily offset by the amount of material involved in making and maintaining a comparable petroleum based car, and the lithium based batteries are just as recyclable as lead acid batteries.

I had to take a second read at the article, "will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud". That means there's a lot of unused or underused hardware in the cloud while most of the consoles are in boxes at the stores, or are offline while people are asleep, or at work, or otherwise not gaming. I wonder if those enterprising people who build super computers out of gaming consoles will then demand their provision of processor time from Microsoft in order to quadruple their investment in hardware for no additional cost.

Going to have to agree with FuzzNugget here. Seems like a good time to finally bite the bullet and move myself upstream.

I'm okay with the subscription, but at $50/month, that's about 3 times more expensive than I'll be willing to pay for.

Realistically, I'm more worried about my own government getting into my data than I am about the Chinese or Iranians trying to bother understanding what's in my email.

This assertion is fuckin' offensive. If any member of Congress was caught using this method, it'd be a top story and the first bill said Congress person would next file.

I bet your company ends up with a noticeably higher electricity bill, more so than you'd recover in bitcoins. I ran Seti@Home for a month on a single gaming grade system and my electricity bill jumped a staggering amount. But, I'd love to hear if I was wrong.

They should really call it what it is, "austerity". Then maybe the idea of it will be more obvious when compared to similar measures around the world. Really, this is the USA, we can do better.

I guess the Mall will have to shutdown. And all the storefronts in hotels and at the airports... That makes me wonder, what does everyone have that no one's trademarked yet. I'm going to get a trademark for an elongated and storable organ for use in reproductive situations, and make everyone pay me a few bucks for getting a woodie.

Out of all the contenders, (Open WebOS, BlackBerry, Windows, Mozilla, Ubuntu) I don't think any of them have a chance, Not unless lawsuits end up shutting down Android or making it entirely unsuable. I think the business model Google has setup shields them from the fray as a monopoly, especially with Amazon offering up their own Android Appstore in direct competition. Google and the manufacturers have more people and more resources and can iterate faster than Apple ever can, and none of the other upstarts can even hope to invest enough on their own to make a catchup play. I don't think Windows Phone with it's somewhat integrated position with Windows 8 even stands a realistic chance.

Getting Ubuntu to run and be usable on a 7 inch touch screen does not advance a solution to Ubuntu Bug #1. There is still significant work to be done on advancing Ubuntu on the desktop, and moving to mobile is not going to fix that.

Unplugged my office telephone a few months ago, as a developer, getting calls from end users and investors was completely an obstruction to my day. Since voicemail automatically ends up as a .wav file in my inbox, I just unplugged it and everyone who feels the need to call can leave a message. It's a lot easier to forward a .wav file with a message to the right department, than it is for me to try and navigate the options on a phone system to send a voicemail, or transfer an actual caller to someone who's not at their desk. And having a phone is a good way of having responsibilities that just need to be randomly memorized instead of written down and trackable in some way. In all effects, the phone is a much less efficient and effective way of interoffice communication than mail or chat.

Must be a JPL project, those guys are really cost effective.

I would get a replacement for drywall thats handily removable for future upgrades. I was thinking that stainless steel would make good wall paneling held up with magnets, then when you need to upgrade or move wiring later you could easily pull it off the wall.

Makes me glad I don't have kids who will grow up having to fight the war against the machines.