60Ghz is very directional.

Combined with phased arrays you could get ~10Gbit to any machine you can see directly (opposite side, perhaps 1 or 2 rows up and down) without restriction to the number of pairs.

It actually sounds extremely useful for something like Hadoop because it doesn't require extremely fast switches since communication can be made through a less centralized means.

It's made infinitely easier by being asynchronous and 99% reads. There are no timing issues. If a post is delayed to someones screen by a minute or two, nobody dies.

It's not terribly difficult to make numerous (near infinite) read-only replica's of a database which are within tens of milliseconds of the primary; so that takes care of 99% of their problems.

Handling their write load is harder but keep in mind the vast majority of their accounts are idle; and again asynchronous writes make it much much easier. They can shove everything through a message queue and put heavy-weight sharding of the data behind that.

I think handling 100 Million banking customers in 2000 was infinitely harder than Facebook has it from a technical standpoint.

Not all data is equal. Some is time sensitive (voice) and some isn't (facebook). It seems reasonable to pay extra for routing priority of time sensitive data.

Yup. Recently spent nearly $50k for a new machine (512GB ram, 64 CPU, etc.). Seems many people are using low end hardware at the client end and expecting the cloud (which for some applications is not easily distributed) to do the real work.

5. It's possible that scientists which include spin and get good news coverage receive additional funding the next year. Those who don't may not, and eventually end up an assistant to someone who does spin.

No idea if the above is true but if our carrot/stick system is setup this way but if it is then spin is guaranteed.

It does particularly on the 2.x series.

Heck, Google Maps (the web based version) didn't run on the browser shipped with Gingerbread. Thankfully FireFox mobile with the UserAgent faker (Googles map servers provided invalid javascript for the default mobile UserAgent) made it work.

Jelly Bean seems to be fine but it will be a several years before Gingerbread disappears.

I don't see why not.

You had the IO to create those 17 trillion tuples in the first place; so vacuum will use that same IO capacity to maintain it.

The low billions of tuples isn't much of an issue despite being on spinning disk with very little in memory.

It only needs to be as good as Adsense is at blocking fake ad clicks and views.

Google already has everything necessary for this; or they're already in trouble.

It's micropayment but not by the user viewing the content.

The company performing the survey is making a small payment to the website so a random 3rd party (you) may view the content. The customer of the website is the company performing the surveys.

If 32GB of storage is enough then you're all set. It's included.

Woody Guthrie said that if you're using more than three or four chords in a song you're just showing off. And a lot of the garage bands of the 50s-70s started off only knowing four chords, and that was really enough; you could always transpose if you didn't know the chords.

Limiting the number of chords per song makes perfect sense. Limiting your entire lifes knowledge to 3 or 4 chords is entirely different.

Bands, particularly different bands, are allowed to have more variation between songs than within a single song and this is about variation between songs.

Quite the opposite.

If each ad display has less value, maintaining revenue means being more agressive with advertisments.

How is offering a software update with backward compatible APIs to an 18 month old phone increasing fragmentation?

The issue is that not enough manufacturers offer the upgrades.

I don't buy the service at the moment. If they want me as a client those are my terms.

I'm willing to pay $15/month for HBO, SyFy, and the Food Network.

If it comes with extra, that's fine, but I'm not going over that amount (adjust for inflation).