Not sure where the uncertainty is. Says right there - January 1, 2015.

Not that having the elections matter about implementation. Obama isn't going to let a veto go through, and even if the Senate flips, there's going to be no way that there's enough votes to override a veto. Obamacare is here, get used to it.

You want tin foil? How's this:

Go read James Bamford's "Body of Secrets". Near the end, he mentions the things that the NSA needs to get right in order to stay ahead in the intelligence business:

Distributed data so that the loss of one data center doesn't impact data
Ability to import and index a massive amount of information continuously (while keeping it available)
Accurate speech to text
Accurate language translation
Ability to search massive amounts of data very quickly, ranking results
Search through different media formats (video, audio, text, etc.)

Now go look at what Google is good at and known for.

Yes. The award is a statue wrapped in tin foil.

If by cheapest you mean "cheapest now that they discontinued the model that was $30 cheaper" then, yeah.

How much have they saved now? Probably not much, and probably spent more.

It costs money to find the location, arrange the contracts, hire new people/lay off or move staff, and move equipment between rooms. Even then, many organizations may say it's cheaper to buy new hardware than it is to move 5+ year old servers.

However, the efficiency once many of those data centers is closed will become apparent. Space/power/cooling/networking/staff isn't cheap. Consolidating will give you some amazing savings a few years in.

Nah, only Sagan could do it. There's nobody around these days that could possibly....

Uhm..nevermind.

Yeah, I play with friends and we're all over the place for levels (I'm 68, one is 80, another 60, and the other two are in the teens). While I'm doing much of the same running around and questing with the lower level people, I'm still able to gain XP at a pretty good rate, and there's plenty of other things to do while they're off getting hearts.

Last I saw, FMLA says unpaid leave. Yahoo(!) is offering paid leave. Dads can still take 12 weeks, but the last 4 have to come out of vacation or unpaid time.

My GS3 has better battery life than the HTC Thunderbolt which had somewhat better battery live than my OG Droid. Your assumption of worsening battery life doesn't live up to what I've seen.

This is what they were able to build. Rev 2. (probably when they get to mass producing it) will have better battery life

Go read some of the comments about the Boston Marathon bombing on Yahoo and tell me you didn't lose a few brain cells in the process.

Why would Netflix build a separate infrastructure for the few sets of original content they distribute? Do you really want to have two Netlix apps, log in twice to a web site? Figure out which site has which content? Any money they'd earn in new subscriptions for HoC would be pretty much wiped out by the development and maintenance costs.

The permissions in NTFS far more granular than standard POSIX (though xattr does address this a bit, it's not in common use).

Hackers could abuse ______ to _____ a/the ____.

I'm serious that this was reported here. I'm also serious that not a single person here believed it.

Ah, found it:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/01/11/17/204207/message-from-kabul