The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs.

The cost of solar panels, or solar hardware, used to represent two-thirds of the overall price to install solar power. Over the past five years, however, that has flipped to where "soft costs," which include labor, permitting and advertising, now represent the majority of the cost.

Plans by Apple and Google to do more to protect customers' privacy have made the FBI "very concerned".

"What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law," he said.

HDPP says Blu-ray stores can last up to 50 years, with M-DISC taking life out to 1,000 years.

The Naval Air Warfare Weapons Division (NAWCD) wants to permanently store and access what it calls irreplaceable information. It's tested the M-DISC, which can be read in DVD-style drives, in harsh conditions and found: "None of the Millenniata media suffered any data degradation at all."

Facebook is now experimenting with a storage prototype that uses racks of Blu-ray discs instead of hard drives. The discs are held in groups of 12 in locked cartridges and are extracted by a robotic arm whenever they're needed.

For one thing, the discs are more resilient: they're water- and dust-resistant, and better able to withstand temperature swings.

Because the Blu-ray system doesn't need to be powered when the discs aren't in use, it uses 80% less power than the hard-drive arrangement, cutting overall costs in half.

In an unclassified but restricted report obtained by the Guardian under a public records request, the FBI predicts that autonomous cars “will have a high impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its adversaries can operationally do with a car.”

One nightmare scenario could be suspects shooting at pursuers from getaway cars that are driving themselves.

This presumably reflects fears that criminals might override safety features to ignore traffic lights and speed limits, or that terrorists might program explosive-packed cars to become self-driving bombs.

LG's third iteration of their popular "G" line of flagship smartphones, simply dubbed the LG G3, is the culmination of all of the innovation the company has developed in previous devices to date, including its signature rear button layout, and a cutting-edge 5.5-inch QHD display that drives a resolution of 2560X1440 with a pixel density of 538 PPI.

However, it's questionable how much of that super high res 2560 display you can make use of on a 5.5-inch device.

Google and Nest have taken two big steps toward this vision of the smart home. Late Friday, Nest—the home automation company Google acquired for $3.2 billion in January—announced its acquisition of Dropcam, a startup that sells internet-connected security cameras.

The prospect of the web giant tapping into your home devices—which could provide an even broader window into your personal life—doesn’t sit well with many who know this world.

You can never be sure how Google will use your personal data. As Meiri points out, Google has already said, in a letter to SEC, that it plans on delivering ads to thermostats and other connected devices.

Apple has announced that it will spoof the MAC addresses emitted by its wireless devices as an anti-tracking measure.

One notable and sad irony here is that MAC spoofing was held up as evidence of criminality in the indictment of Aaron Swartz: the US prosecutors characterized changing your MAC address as the sort of thing that only criminals do.

Basically, more than half the cost of making a smartphone these days is in paying off patent holders.

And, of course, many of these fees are going to pure trolls, who have contributed nothing to making actual smartphones. The paper highlights the explosion of troll lawsuits in the past few years.

Rather than going towards innovation and better, more affordable products for the pubic, money is going to lawyers and patent trolls who have contributed nothing to society. It's a massive dead weight loss to the economy.

Adrienne LaFrance reports at the Atlantic that if you've tried listening to any of the old CDs lately from your carefully assembled collection from the 1980's or 1990's you may have noticed that many of them won't play. 'While most of the studio-manufactured albums I bought still play, there's really no telling how much longer they will. My once-treasured CD collection — so carefully assembled over the course of about a decade beginning in 1994 — isn't just aging; it's dying. And so is yours.'

'The ubiquity of a once dominant media is again receding. Like most of the technology we leave behind, CDs are are being forgotten slowly,' concludes LaFrance. 'We stop using old formats little by little. They stop working. We stop replacing them. And, before long, they're gone.'