I hadn't spotted that polar red had used the IPO amount rather than the full "value" of Facebook. I agree that Facebook users are not worth anything like the amounts quoted, though.

One thing we're ignoring is that present-day Facebook has offices and datacentres worldwide to handle their 800m users, and those would have an intrinsic value of their own. Even so, I can't see Facebook assets coming to significantly more than $1bn, never mind $10bn+.

It's an improvement on about $30 per Instagram user...

In terms of energy per photon, teraherz radiation (with wavelength ~300um - microwave to far-infrared?) is far less energetic than visible light. The issue here is power at this specific freqency. The wiring of the integrated circuits in the pump is probably around the same as the radiation wavelength, so you have a reasonably well-tuned antenna receiving lots of power...

I wondered about this as well. We have a perfectly good mod/meta-mod system on traditional Slashdot that is a lot more flexible than Facebook-style "Like". Why not use it? A "+n likes" button tells you a lot less about why a comment is good or bad than "4, Informative" or "-1, Redundant", too, which you would think would be essential for SlashBI to work well.

I may be odd though, since I miss being able to mod Facebook posts Troll, Funny or Insightful, too...

The reality is that he probably had little choice in the matter. Not investing in Apple would risk having Microsoft as pretty much the only operating system company in existence (OS/2, Solaris and others had virtually no market share, and Linux was not really a competitor on the desktop back then). With the IE antitrust suits just starting around that time, killing off Windows' biggest competitor was a bad idea. So, you could argue that keeping Apple alive was necessary for MS, even if it might cause future problems, and those could be minimised via network effects (people needing Windows to run their applications).

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ seems to work fine.

It's probably as much effort to rewrite the management side to segment/double-NAT the network as it is to switch to v6. The cheaper/easier route is to just burn public address space like Comcast, but requires available space. Double-NAT for end-users would avoid that, but then you're buying new routers for CGN. At that point, there's no reason not to add v6 support while they're at it.

(My personal opinion is that we'll see a lot of dual v6/CGN deployment in the next few years, thanks to management issues and the need for v4 access.)

I didn't know Virgin Media had that problem yet, but it is the reason Comcast are doing their transition work, despite ARIN having a lot less pressure on their address pool compared to RIPE. If Virgin are getting close to the limit of a /8 (modems+TV boxes+head end?), they have more incentives to start switching soon. I wonder if this is part of the reason for the planned speed doubling - replacing the modems for extra speed is easier to explain to the public (via DOCSIS 3, I expect), but getting IPv6 support as a nice "side-effect". Plus, as long as no one advertises it, there's less pressure if it doesn't work, too!