Los Angeles (i.e. Hollywood) could be a strategic move given Amazon's massive push in original series and programming via Amazon Studios. Also, shares a coast with Seattle.
They would also have a monopoly on CS grads in the LA area ([0] among the highest number of grads in the country) which is experiencing a serious brain drain of talent to the Bay Area, NYC, and Seattle.
My gut tells me the job market is worst for junior devs in SoCal. Junior level openings aren't growing nearly as fast as the number of students trying to break into the workforce. A total of 0 of my friends at USC who were CS grads stayed in LA.
Theres several reasons why LA is a good choice. As you mentioned Hollywood and Amazon's push into original content. Amazon is also pushing heavily into gaming, and So Cal is one the best areas for this. Amazon's biggest fulfillment centers is in So Cal. Access to ports along the coast. LA is dumping billions into public infrastructure with the Olympics and measure M. LA has a lot of good schools in the area, USC, UCLA, Cal tech. LA is very forward in terms of govt policy, look at Elon's Boring Company as an example. If Amazon ever wants to get serious about Drone delivery I imagine LA would be perfect for this. On top of the other reasons of its proximity to Seattle and Asia.
El Segundo would probably make the most sense....exact proximity to LAX, friendly business climate, lot's of warehouse space being converted into offices already.
This is fascinating, especially whether the hole was created from a top impact or from the bottom such as volcanic eruption.
On another note, why are we discovering this just now? I was under the amateur impression that the entire surface of Mars was scanned and imaged by NASA at some point. But again, I may have interpreted that incorrectly.
> why are we discovering this just now? I was under the amateur impression that the entire surface of Mars was scanned and imaged by NASA at some point.
It's easy to forget just how large Mars is, as a comparison, if we scaled Mars up to the size of Earth, the hole would only end up being about 120 meters, or about %30 larger than an American football field. And when it's a feature that we pretty much need human eyes on to determine it's significance, it's easy to imagine how we've missed it. Just imagine trying to find a random football field sized thing in Google Earth, somewhere on the planet.
And to make the comparison even more valid, Mars isn't covered in water, and has a very comparable amount of land surface area as Earth does. in that case, it makes the hole only about 36 meters when scaled up to the surface are of Earth, which is likely what you'd be searching for in Google Earth.
Not to mention that I have no idea to what resolution Mars was scanned and imaged at, considering imagery I see of Earth often, the mentioned scans could easily have pixels larger then the entire size of that feature.
Hence it's easy to imagine that many more interesting features of similar size exist on the martian surface, sitting there in plain view, waiting to be discovered.
I don't have the tools on this CPU to get good numbers, but if that hole is about 35 Meters, I'd estimate to resolution to be about 20 CM/Pixel. I know it's often difficult to find civilian access to Imagery at a better resolution than 5 M/Pixel for some places on Earth.
It's probably safe to assume we don't have imagery this good for the entire surface of Mars.
Macro-level features have been mapped for a while, but even from earth orbit (Hubble) it's not possible to resolve features at high resolution. I'm not sure what the precise limits are, but according to one photo (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_HST_Mollweide_ma...), Hubble's imaging of Mars is at a resolution of approximately 20 km/pixel, which is several orders of magnitude too low to resolve the "hole" here, which is <100m.
Since 2006, there's been a high-resolution camera platform orbiting Mars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiRISE), and it's doing this high-res imaging, at up to 30cm/pixel (!), for the first time. Though Wikipedia says that as of 2010, it's only mapped 1% of Mars's surface to that degree.
I don't think they are trying to hide anything per se, the company grew from envolve.com. Seems to be pretty open here http://www.firebase.com/about.html
They'll probably remove the whois protection once they fully launch.
Finally! This class was supposed to start in January 2012, hopefully all the technical kinks are worked out. Does anyone know what the issue was? I believe all the Stanford online learning classes were affected.
I believe the issues were administrative and legal rather than technical. My impression was that once the Stanford administrative bureaucracy got wind of what was happening with these courses, what started as a fun and entrepreneurial "let's change education" turned into much paper work and long meetings. I've found this is the typical academic response to anything truly innovative ;) (I also think this is partly why Thrun walked away from his tenure, to simply be able to work on changing the world without having to worry about all of the rest of it)
It's great to see these tools available on a cloud computing basis. Just make sure you read the ToS:
1.2. From Customer to Google. By submitting, posting or displaying any Customer Data on or through the Service, Customer gives Google a worldwide, non-sublicensable, non-transferable, non-exclusive, terminable, limited license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Customer Data for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide Customer with the Service in accordance with the Agreement.
Isn't that the standard lawyerspeak to actually run the service? If I understood correctly, when reading those you just need to check that it is limited to the service provided ("for the sole purpose of enabling Google to provide Customer with the Service").
If MSFT are backing them they $=infinity money to buy content.
MSFT is a little scared that Apple and Google will own all online content.
If MSFT can persuade Hollywood that Google is an evil monopolist and they are better helping a young MSFT upstart then they may get more content more easily.
