Given that data centers are basically big electric heaters doing some number crunching along the way, might be sensible to put them in cold climates rather than hot, so a) it's easier to dump all the heat generated and b) that heat has some practical uses.

Clearly they were working on a fishing vessel to go out trolling for engineers. (And quite successfully too it seems)

Classic Rube Goldberg machine. "You know that story about how NASA spent millions designing a pen that could write in space?..."

I don't understand why efficiency is so important - $/W seems a much more important measure, given that arid land area is cheap and sunlight is free.

If you want to understand how houses in general work though, it's better to study those blueprints than the color of the counter-tops in the kitchen.

10 terabytes? The entropy for the entire human body is about 700 megabytes as per DNA, surely there must be a lower order of complexity than that in the brain?

Makes sense. If it flies, floats or flux, always rent it.

Are they trying to win the 2013 Ig Nobel prize or something?

Not at all, but it turns out the solution is not just providing food aid either. Something is very wrong somewhere. And sorry for swears in OP, but overpopulation is my hot button.

Looks like Live Aid is proving to be a fucking disaster over the long term.

Bismuth is very slightly radioactive, not sure I'd trust memory that is generating it's own bit-rot via alpha decay.

Well, half right. FLAC is basically lossless CELP, i.e. a LPC based first-pass at modelling a whitened version of the signal in the time domain, then a second pass in the frequency domain to mop up the residual errors left behind. With CELP (Speex etc) this second stage is incomplete/lossy, with FLAC it is lossless.

According to Wikipedia at least, the Haswell architecture will include a die-shrink in the PCH (Northbridge) chipset from 65nm to 32nm, so this issue is avoided I think.

"supercapacitor, a gizmo that can pack a lot of energy into a tiny space, charges quickly and holds its charge for a long time"

Ah, Not really, no. Supercapacitor=1Mj/KG, pretty weak sauce relatively speaking.

Personally, I'm, holding out for a 'Doug Stanhope' phone with an ethanol fuel cell than 'runs on booze'.

You're missing the point. The summary describes it as a 'Software Defined Network Network', a true innovation.