Also, which major software company doesn't upgrade often?
If you're talking about core infrastructure (operating systems, servers, etc.) used by serious businesses then the answer is pretty much all of them are much slower-paced. Look at how often Microsoft releases a service pack or new version of Windows, or Debian changes stable, or Postgres bumps the minor version. These things happen every year or two, not every month or two. Even Android, to the extent that it has any meaningful version numbering or naming at all, only tends to push out a major release or two per year, and in practice people's mobile devices don't get updated that often by their networks and many phones never get a major update within their normal lifetime.
Of course many developers issue point releases with security patches and important bug fixes more frequently, but changing functionality every few weeks in infrastructure software just seems crazy to me. It doesn't work well in Firefox-the-browser, so why would we expect it to work any better in Firefox-the-operating-system?
Printrbot was a disaster on kickstarter, hopefully they are getting better at on-time deliveries (the guy on the first picture of this article is the founder of that company)... they were almost 1 year late if I remember correctly
I thought that the NSA was grabbing all data going through the cables at large ISPs so that they don't need to send requests at individual companies? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Finding something as stable or dependable as gmail isn't the problem (try live.com), but some of it's features is a different story (although not an email feature, live.com's calendar doesn't even have a search feature as far as I know).
Also, Obama said that he won't abuse it but he didn't say when... maybe he won't abuse it yesterday. And I bet that his description of abuse is very different then ours.
If it works like Google-Search, results are not an estimate, or not even random, it looks like it is inflated .... for example, if you navigate to https://www.google.com/search?q=zzzfgh , it tells you 5,900 results until you reach a page where there is no more results and it tells you 484 results (for example, I never seen an estimate that was lower then the real count)
Duplicate removal generally happens after the initial count is received. That's why you can get major variations in the count and the actual number of results.
