Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territori... https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/switzerland-p...

The biggest threat I see to this though is Apple Pay (for mobile web). When sites integrate with this properly, it enables them to match the Amazon experience. No need to register or enter any details, just one fingerprint, and all done.

Source: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/saving/article-7647253/M...

Google reports an average PUE[1] of 1.11 over the past year, 1.09 over the past quarter, and the latest/best data centers are at 1.06 [2]. In simple terms this means that the total power overhead for cooling etc is just 6% of that to power the machines in them.

Google (and others) have gone to great lengths using AI, and radical new ideas for cooling.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but not in Datacenters. All info public domain

[1] Definition of PUE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_usage_effectiveness

[2] Source: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

As the spending power of the average Internet user decreases, then CPC/CPM naturally falls with it.

Why does Amazon want it? - Amazon has a lot of customers who want EC2/ELB instances with their own IP addresses. IPv4 addresses are a scarce resource.

Why did GE have it? When the IPv4 address space was formed, various big US companies managed to get the initial IP address allocations. You can see more on these allocations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Why so many upvotes? It's relatively rare to see what is 1/255th of the IPv4 address space sold.

From: https://fsfe.org/campaigns/swpat/swpat.en.html "The European Patent Convention states that software is not patentable. But laws are always interpreted by courts, and in this case interpretations of the law differ. So the European Patents Office (EPO) grants software patents by declaring them as "computer implemented inventions". "

There's 20,000 hits for a Google patent search for patents assigned to SAP (https://patents.google.com/?assignee=SAP+SE+)

The Nasdaq-100 total returns have been 32% last year and 155% over the past five years. This is a average of just over 20% a year.

Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/indices/nasdaq-total-returns....

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

  http://www.google.co.uk/finance?cid=662445

With AWS Lambda/API Gateway (and arguably with Google App Engine before it) you take away the toil of having to:

  * Manage/deploy servers
  * Monitor/maintain/upgrade servers
  * Figuring out tools to deploy your app to your server
  * Scaling an app globally.
  * Coping with outages in a data-centre/availability
  * Worry about load-balancing & scaling infrastructure 

I think this is more than just a marketing gimmick. It is part of a big change in application architectures.

At one end as a small developer of of web/mobile app this can considerably reduce the amount of code/maintenance you need.

At the opposite end of the spectrum the likes of Google (Borg) and Facebook (Tupperware) have developed their own in-house solutions where by servers are largely abstracted out as an entity that developers need to worry about.

Managed docker services (e.g. Google Container Platform, Docker Cloud) are another approach of achieving a largely 'serverless' goal.

(edits for formatting)

"Eurostar, the high-speed passenger rail service between the UK and mainland Europe, today reported the highest ever number of passengers transported on Eurostar in one quarter with over 2.8m customers travelling between the UK and the continent in Q2 2015. This represents a year-on-year increase of 3% in passengers compared with the same period last year (2.8m 2015: 2.7m 2014)."

2.8m in a quarter = 31,000 a day. Given the trains only run for just over 14 hours a day (London departure board for tomorrow) - then that's a mean passengers per hour over the quarter during operating hours over all days in the quarter of 2,214. Note this actual passengers not capacity. If you assumed say an average load ration of perhaps 70% (over all times of day all over the quarter) then the mean capacity per hour would be 3,100. Then at some times there are more trains than others, so the peak capacity per hour is probably at least 4,000.