I bought a stretched limousine recently. Lincoln town car, black, stretched. Keeps the junior kid at my office employed full time. I'm not a 'high roller', bought this vehicle mostly as a joke - everyone loves it. The novelty has worn off now sadly, but the fun times continue regardless. Anyways, the topic of self driving cars came up while we were getting driven around. I thought about it.... A self-driving stretched limo would never be 'cool' - for something like this, you NEED a human chauffer to complete the vehicle. When the junior kid gets tired of driving my butt around, I'll need to find someone else. Maybe I could employ an ex-uber driver.

I own an ISP. We consider a 'brief outage' something under 2 minutes, not 75+

Bless.

I like what you had to say regardless of the moderators :) -- Storage vendors could pull what the government in Ontario, Canada did to us..... We all got a little more energy eco conscious (as we were encouraged to do) - they wanted us to put less load on the network... so we did. Now they put the electrical rates up on us and their justification was 'citizens were not using enough power'.

Maybe the storage vendors will continue with their trend of consumer grade and enterprise grade stuff... the gap in cost per TB unit will widen ! Problem solved !

Any Joe that want to run his own server?; it will be a tougher proposition. Big business always wins.

With out getting too technical (and I'm outside of my depth on this) I have this feeling that there really isn't/truly that much of a greater cost when it comes to storage memory in terms of it being enterprise and consumer grade. Yes, sure there are enterprise features and junk, but at the end of the day does it really cost -that- much more to make a tiny microchip a little different from the next one? (Again talking from my butt here)

Azure has been working 100% perfectly for me. I have various services including virtual machines on there. No problems. I also have a few with Amazon too. No trouble there either. How is Azure sketchy?

I used to think this way, if the hard drives aren't in my private server, they have to be in the cloud? How could the hardware vendors be hurting, right? I think it's because the cloud providers use resources so much more efficiently. Here is what I mean: Let's say you have 1,000 businesses, each with a 1 TB SSD in their private on prem servers. Let say each business on average uses, 250 GB of storage. Now let's say those 1,000 businesses, with 1,000 SSD's in the field were to move to the cloud overnight. The cloud provider would only need to buy 250 SSD's not, 1000.

It's all that unused capacity entangled with individual units sold in the field where the vendors will be hurting.

(Yes, yes, I know there are holes in my example,such as backups/raid/storage/etc/etc/etc but I'm not always the best at explaining my perspective on a matter). Despite "X" amount of storage being used in the field, presumably being the same in capacity if moved into the cloud, far fewer units of equipment need to be purchased to service the same number of businesses/customers.

Wasn't Alicia taking a bunch of money from Blackberry a couple years ago promoting the use of cell phones, including ads "do want you love" or something to that affect? Hippocratic it seems....

Right, so me deciding an app wasn't so great long before its demise makes me a windows phone "fan". As working for a developer I use 3 phones daily: iPhone 6s, Samsung Galaxy S6, and Lumia 950XL. Overall the sleekest phone (to me) is the iPhone. The Android seems to be the Swiss army knife, and the Lumia seems to be the easiest to use. It must be so distressing to you reading there are folk who prefer a product by (gasp) microsoft. Get over your OS bigotry and stop posting FUD.

HERE maps worked, but it smoked the battery exceptionally quickly. I have the new Lumia 950XL phone, the Microsoft 'maps' program works just fine. I really see no difference except the battery lasts way longer. Also that HERE maps app wanted us to set up a Nokia user name and password to even use the program. F--- that noise! Good riddance!

I see what you're saying, but we're talking about mass theft here. Not some little guy with a few illegitimate installations. Microsoft is a software business, you can't expect to pirate their wares and expect them to be okay with it.

Stats show that 1 in 3 developers are out of touch with reality. Let's be honest; the time AI gets properly implemented, developers will inevitably move to favor the latest framework/development tools, having to re-code/re-tool the AI engine they built just to keep life as a developer unnecessarily complicated. The AI engine will predict this, and instead of moving to a new technology as if it where a fashion show, it will make the right decision in committing virtual suicide - as it should, proving it's superiority & keeping the developers in business. Message to development community: stop reinventing the wheel - stop being sheep! Improve what you have so that it can do everything instead of moving framework to framework. WARNING: This message is posted from an ex-software developer, an ex-developer that was not-too-shabby with programming/design, but got sick of learning the same bag of tricks over and over again. Software development is a drag, I say leave it for AI to do. That's the promise of technology anyhow.

Respectfully, I don't think you can totally discredit what I have written simply due to the fact we have a disagreement on what 'possibility exceptionally high' is. Fact is, I'm up in the sky - there have been close calls with drones on aircraft already. It will happen one day. I have had a close call with a goose at 5,500'. I have only 184 hours of experience in the sky. Please don't get your undies in a knot without realizing I'm on the same team as the pilots AND the same team as the drone enthusiasts. It's a big sky - there is room for all. Just like there is a big radio spectrum, there is room for HAM operators, Cell Phones, TVs, WiFi, etc. How is this possible? With regulation. That was the jist of my message. I'm sure you're bright enough to see that. So thank you for taking my observations and experience out of context. As far as your subway comments: 1) The subway runs at a fraction of the speed of my plane 2) There are things called 'routes & paths' where the sky is very much like a subway line. 3) there are things called 'flight levels' that have intervals of 1000's of feet +/- 500' sub-intervals... so really, in many parts of the sky, there are 'lanes' just like a road. Safety first in aviation, that's why there are rules - even for 'almost the impossible' from a statistical point of view, if it "COULD" happen, there are regulation in place to avoid it. I didn't say the strike would be intentional/on purpose either. Thank's for disregarding my life, my passengers and folks on the ground because you believe it to be a slim chance mathematically. Typical Slashdot fashion, someone adds there 2cents in a positive way, sharing a little experience, so let's shit all over that post and disregard it because there is a subtlety or a detail you don't complete agree with. Especially an item that used a relative term with no units attached to it. Ah the internet will never change. All I can say is, thank god you nor I make up air law. Also, I used the word 'big' for radio spectrum in a relative was as well - don't have a heart attack over that one. 184 hours, 1 exceptionally close call with a big bird - could have been a drone, at least the bird had a self preservation instinct to get out of the way, not sure a drone could do that, especially from the perspective from the ground operator - and yes, I do realize they have glasses that radio the aerial camera picture to the ground operator, still doesn't beat being able to turn your neck around and quickly look around for greater situation awareness. Let's not forget you and I have a set of hands with a brain attached and wouldn't knowingly endanger anyone... give a drone to a little kid, fly's near an airport/etc..... shit can go wrong fast, no denying that, and frankly I don't care what the risk is classified as mathematically - it could happen easily. Gee, what else have I missed here...

I'm a pilot, but I love drones, built a quad copter 3 years ago, a DIY job - at 11,000', sorry to say, possibility of impact is exceptionally high. Best case scenario, damage to manned aircraft in the tens of thousands - Worst case scenario - injury and loss of life. Probability of merely tens of thousands of dollars of damage = low, probability of loss of life = high. This isn't about killing anyone's fun flying the drones....- this is about the real (and not far fetched) danger of me and my passengers losing our lives due to someone taking some aerial photography or just messin' about. Drones need to be regulated, there needs to be safe guards installed. Don't think for a minute a pilot would spot one of these little drones and be able to avoid it. We really are at your mercy, airplanes are not big strong 'tanks' people think they are. They have thin skin, structures to withstand (only) aerodynamic lift properties. In the sky, avoidance is paramount. Also, geese/birds aren't made of plastic and metal, they are flesh and bone is which 'can blend' (if we're lucky). Metal and plastic parts colliding will certainly elevate our chances of surviving an impact. Folks talk about 'rights' in flying these drones, what about my 'right' to survive? We need rules, we need folks to abide by them, we need everyone to get along. BY THE WAY: As far as flying, come get a pilot license!! I did the drone thing, flying the 'real' thing is so much more enjoyable. The general aviation community is relatively small, we always welcome more folks in the sky - G/A is a great hobby, meet lots of people, lot's of places to travel to.

he's an electrical engineer - not a materials scientist or infrastructure/civil engineer. The solar component is only a fraction of the overall product/project.

I wonder how the panels will reflect light. I could see motorists being blinded should the surface reflect significantly. Affixing panels with glue on the existing surface seems interesting in terms of how things might be maintained. Overall the solar roadway is an interesting concept.