A Cessna 172 is 27 feet long, and carries 4 people, including one or two pilots. This thing claims to be 10 to 15 feet long, and carry 10 passengers + a pilot or two? How's that gonna work?

You are totally missing the point. The goal is to get $1B in funding to start a service called "nothing at all like a lawyer", were you get other suckers who are not lawyers to represent even bigger suckers in court, and you sit back and take a percentage of all transactions. If the not-lawyers get in trouble with the local courts, hey, that was their decision, and not really your fault. Profit!

Who is buying new SPARC machines in 2015?

In 2009, the Register quoted z systems Linux mainframe pricing at $323,204 for a machine with five cpu cores, and no memory or disk: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

I notice TFA has no mention of what the hardware will cost, or what IBM will charge for Linux on a mainframe, or even the model numbers of these two mainframes which are Linux only. And MongoDB on an IBM mainframe? Talk about a culture clash.

I think car manufacturers are less worried about the death of their navigation cash cow than they are terrified about not owning the magic google self-driving autopilot. Having your own map data is one component to the self-driving, or assisted-driving cars.

The drive's media wear indicator ran out shortly after 700TB, signaling that the NAND's write tolerance had been exceeded. Intel doesn't have confidence in the drive at that point, so the 335 Series is designed to shift into read-only mode and then to brick itself when the power is cycled. Despite suffering just one reallocated sector, our sample dutifully followed the script. Data was accessible until a reboot prompted the drive to swallow its virtual cyanide pill.

Who thought this was a good idea? If the drive thinks future writes are unstable, good for it to go into read only mode. But to then commit suicide on the next reboot? What if I want to take one final backup, and I lose power?

CFLs, of all brands, have not lasted nearly as long as advertised at my house. I don't think I've had any last more than a year. However, the power at my house is terrible -- lights flicker and dim several times a day, and I completely lose power several times a year. All the computers are on UPSes, but it would be prohibitive to put all the lights on one. Old fashioned, incandescent light bulbs seem much more robust than at least CFLs, and I'm not too excited to test LEDs. So, do any of these lab tests which promise CFLs and LED that last for year test with real-world power sources?

How am I supposed to know, when calling a 1-800 number, where the call center is? It _might_ be in my state, in which case a different set of laws applies.

I don't know how accurate the laser would be for general purpose rangefinding, but if this device were available to apps in general, not just the camera, I could imagine all kind of interesting new apps one could develop.

Was she surprised by this outcome? What percentage of the previous, say, 20 history PhD students at her institution now have tenure track jobs? In the past 10 years, how many history PhDs has her institution matriculated? And how many tenure-track faculty have they hired? If the institution has graduated 50 PhDs in the last 10 years, and hired 5, you don't have to be a statistics major to see that there's a looming problem.

As a software engineer, I'm very curious about where this $400 million went. In all the articles about this project, I've never seen a breakdown of where the money was spent, at least at the granularity of people/hardware/software. Typically software projects spent most of their budgets on people, but a $400 M project that is basically a year old implies on the order of thousands of employees. That can't be right? Did they get dinged by ridiculous licensing fees from the usual suspects? Where did the money go?

There's a huge difference in the job market for pure scientists (the "S" in STEM), and IT folks. The job market for someone with a PhD in, say Astronomy is terrible. Lumping these folks together with the legions of code hackers is ridiculous.

Yes, but is that a Postgres problem or a MySQL problem?

Bandwidth is nice and all, but for many uses latency matters more -- any numbers on what that will look like?