You can blame Facebook for much of this green datacenter hype--some of which is arguably greenwashing.

Facebook was under the gun for opening its own data centers that were, and still somewhat are, powered by electricity generated by coal.

To answer this unwanted attention they bent over backwards to reduce power consumption at all costs, so much that they even designed their own "Open Data Center" servers to reduce power consumption at the cost of discarding nearly everything we already know works fine in conventional data centers.

And, to top it off, they greenwashed by buying carbon credits and energy that appears to come from non-coal sources.

Google and Microsoft are doing this the right way. Data centers should be in cold climates and supplied by truly renewable power.

I still have to differ with this comment. Amtrak does not run any commuter services. For some lines where applicable, like out of Washington DC, they offer "$10 step-up" fares for those trains that are inbound or outbound during rush hour but they can't really be called commuter services.

There are extensive commuter operations run by state transportation agencies. None are operated by Amtrak but a very small handful are operated by Amtrak crews under contract for the state agencies, like certain MARC lines.

It may not have been renovated in thirty years, but like most Amtrak rolling stock it has been overhauled and rebuilt several times in thirty years.

This is simply not true and I'm baffled trying to understand what you're referring to.

First, Amtrak is not and has never been a commuter service. It's a passenger rail service.

Second, please show us where the Amtrak "commuter rail car," as you put it, is accompanied by freight. Amtrak did have a mail and express freight business but it was stopped decades ago.

The NEC is not "the only part of the national rail system Amtrak actually owns."

Amtrak "actually owns" 224 miles of other lines in addition to the Northeast Corridor. Let's try to keep our facts straight.

1) Philadelphia to Harrisburg Main Line, approx. 104 miles.

2) Empire Corridor (portions a.k.a. Empire Connection) from New York Penn Station to Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 11 miles.

3) Michigan Line (a.k.a. Chicagoâ"Detroit Line), 98 miles.

4) Post Road Branch (upstate New York), 12 miles.

The simple solution is one that has clear benefits: leasing.

1) You refresh your hardware every three years.
2) You don't end up with eight-year-old legacy systems that threaten to die at any time.
3) You're forced to keep your software "fresh."
4) Each new generation uses far less energy for far more computing power.

A popular and unverifiable legend repeated by anti-IP folks states that a farmer was sued by a patent owner when the farmer's non-patented crops were cross-pollenated with the patented ones. It was claimed the farmer was aware and also unwilling to destroy the tainted crops.

By "Outwit" you mean he gets the laptop back, or, at least, the perpetrator is apprehended. Neither of these things has apparently happened yet as I write this so, other than the usual "Look what the thief is doing through my webcam" posts, this is not a story.

This is a media story engineered to generate goodwill. I would not go so far as to call it a gimmick, but it sounds and feels like one.

FTTH, as it's known, costs between $5,000 and $12,000 per home in the rural market and only exists through subsidy. By comparision, FTTH is between $1,500 and $3,000 in suburban markets which is recouped by annual customer commitments.

The only way these costs are made affordable is through government subsidies. Google is subsidizing these customers in a similar way. As with many subsidies, unless they are bonafide charity/goodwill missions, they are not sustainable. This is okay as long as Google has the goodwill of the overall financial markts, by, e.g., having such a huge P/E ratio that they enjoy enough excess money to spend on things like driverless cars, imaging satellites, and hot tub airplaines.

Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.

Bad move. Opera should have stuck with Presto. Their recent and now fatal decision completely removes the whole point of using Opera at all.

In case you didn't already know, Newark element14 is a USA vendor owned by Premier Farnel and based in Indiana. This so-called "news" story is a waste of everyone's time.

Sheesh.

What, Newark element14 is not easy enough to order from? Does it really matter? My two Raspberry Pi units arrived almost instantly from Newark element14 the moment they became available.

Why is this news? Just cut it out, already.

There were severe satellite gaps in the 1980s. GOES East had to be moved to a more central location to observe both coasts when GOES West failed and its replacement suffered a launch failure.

We'll get through this.