They opened with a price/earnings ratio of 92. (Closed around 88, as the stock price dropped from 42 to 38). A normal P/E ratio for a successful large company is between 10 and 20. (Google is at 18, Microsoft at 10, IBM at 15, Apple 13, News Corp. 16).
What this means is that Facebook has to increase their revenue by a factor of 6. They can't increase their user base by that much; there aren't enough people on the planet.. Their Alexa traffic peaked in mid-2011, so they're no longer growing. Their revenue per ad is dropping. General Motors just dumped Facebook as an ad medium because it was ineffective. Facebook has lately been increasing the page space devoted to ads. Myspace tried that before they tanked.
We've probably seen the peak of ad-supported businesses. There's only so much ad spending in the world to compete for. That industry is not the future. It's the past. Like the "house prices can only go up" crowd.
It's important to look at key ratios, like P/E and median house price / median income. Those tend to stay in a narrow range over decades, and when they get too high, it's a bubble.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer.Downside
That idea has been around for a while. Several snake and trunk like cable driven robots have been built. Some are a tube around discs, with three cables arranged to pull on each disc. Each disc is then a controllable joint. Combining this with pressure, vacuum, and a jamming medium is interesting, but it's not yet clear how useful.
And no, it's not cheap. You still have a servomotor on every cable, plus valves and an air compressor. Coffee grounds are probably a temporary choice. Something like glass or plastic beads, which won't absorb water, may last longer.
This is an old idea in the semiconductor industry. It comes from the fact that, on a typical IC, a few transistors will be marginal or defective. This causes rejects (or binning as a slower part) during final inspection. There's an existing market for DRAMs with a few bad bits. They go into telephone answering machines, and (I suspect) low-end TV sets.
Other schemes for dealing with this problem are to have some extra units on chip, and switch the bad ones out during final test. This is routinely done for DRAM, and for the Cell processor chips used in the PS3. (Only 7 of the 8 auxiliary CPUs in the Cell are live.) It's also possible to use error correction to fix up marginal RAM.
At the CPU level, architecting around errors is quite feasible. The UNIVAC I had that. So did many IBM mainframes, where everything was done twice and checked. But this was to catch rare errors, not frequent ones. The reaction to an error was a "machine check" interrupt, which generally meant killing a program or at least backing up to the last checkpoint.
Recovering from errors is complex. In theory, you could have something like multiple unreliable FPUs with checking, followed by a retirement unit that handled the discrepancies by backing up and redoing the computation. That would probably require about half an acre of additional grey cubicles at Intel in Santa Clara to get right.
The algorithm that picks the place names shown in Google Maps uses population as an input. So the prominent places in Rio de Janeiro are all the slums - Favela Moreira Pinto, Favela Pedra Lisa, Favela Rato ("Rat Town")... Compare this tourist-oriented map, which emphasizes the beaches, parks, and museums.
There's been some whining about this from the Rio tourism authorities, but Google didn't change anything.
Check out the DreamHammer site. It's all buzzwords and clip art. "DreamHammer is comprised of the most brilliant minds in the world." Yeah, right. There's absolutely no detail on what this is, or how it works, or what it interfaces to. Does it talk to ROS,or JAUS, or any of the other autonomous vehicle packages. They don't say.
The addresses don't check out, either. The one in Santa Monica (nice location, three blocks from the beach) appears to be a law firm. The address in Virginia is something called "International Research and
Development Solutions, LLC". The location in Hawaii (nice location, three blocks from the cruise ship docks) is in an office building mostly full of lawyers.
Try IGDA, the Independent Game Developers Association, and find a team with a track record of a game roughly similar to, or better than, the one you want. Give them participation in the deal, so they get paid a basic price plus some fraction of sales. This will encourage them to make it good, not do a half-assed job.
Rent-a-Coder and Freelance will not help. I've never been able to get good work from there for anything above the trivial level. (I once wanted screen scrapers written for state corporation registries. I'd written one for one state, and wanted someone to write the other 49, each state being different. No joy.)
The first thing I always recommend to anyone getting unsatisfactory speeds is rewire your telephone sockets and place the modem as close to the master socket as possible. Also use decent quality sockets.
And Monster Cable DSL cable. Right.
Most newer DSL modems have a built in web server, and you can look at the DSL link information. You can find out what rate the DSL line is running at, and its error rate. If those numbers are satisfactory, the ADSL portion of the link isn't the problem, and you can eliminate phone line and local cable quality as an issue. If the ADSL portion of the link is not good, get it fixed.
The DSL modem will downshift to a lower speed if the physical line quality is not good. So if the speed is low, that indicates a line problem.
Errors or low ADSL link speed are the telco's problem and can be addressed by normal repair techniques.
Mine, for example, is currently running at 6016 kbps up, 768 kbps down. ADSL transmit total error counts are 0 out of 9099204, and receive total error counts are 0 out of 6602998. So the ADSL link is in good shape. This reflects the fact that the local DSLAM is at the end of my driveway. (On the other hand, the local WLAN error rates are very high.)
Then run a DSL speed test program, one that reports packet loss rates. That will give you a sense of what's happening upstream. Then you know what to complain about. Ask how many people are on your DSLAM and how much upstream bandwidth it has. The telco will usually tell you this if you persist and have a clue.
:
I am not sure as to what the benefits are as compared to simply using an IR Laser
Hopefully, electrical beam steering. IR lasers still have to be steered with moving mirrors. On the receive side, you need a big moving mirror, because you need big collecting optics to get any significant range. If phased array techniques can be made to work in that band, scanning devices won't need moving parts. 3D LIDAR scanners are still expensive, clunky devices.
The real news here is that terahertz electronics is getting small, and potentially cheap. That has many uses. Most of them, though, do not involve data transmission. Terahertz radar will be useful for medical imaging, security, and driverless cars. There will probably be manufacturing applications, like quick 3D profiles of objects for inspection and measurement.
Point to point terahertz data transmission probably isn't that useful. Point to point laser links have never been very useful. At light and near-light frequencies, rain, snow, and fog will block the beam.
If you want one, outdoor laser links are commercially available.
Facebook is a mature business. Everyone who is likely to sign up for Facebook already has. The growth period is over. Facebook traffic peaked in Q3 2011, and has been down a little or flat since then. Revenue for 2011 was $3.1 billion.
As a mature business, they get valued on revenue. Price/earnings ratios for Internet companies are in the 10-20 range. (MSFT is at 10, IBM at 15, GOOG at 18.) Using 15 as an optimistic value, Facebook is valued at about $46 billion.
Facebook's IPO values the company at $100 billion. That's more than twice that the company is worth. And the public stock doesn't have significant voting rights, which makes it less valuable.
Worst case, Facebook tries to grow revenue after the IPO by showing more ads to each user. Myspace tried that.
a majority of our unplanned downtime was due to CouchDB issues
Nowhere on the CouchDB home page is reliability even mentioned.
And that's the real issue. Developing a reliable database system is a difficult design and programming task. It requires real software engineering. The hacks who write PHP and use JSON aren't up to a job like that. The "aw, we'll fix it in the next release" attitude doesn't cut it in databases.
Apple was once very proud of the
Apple Macintosh factory in Fremont, CA. Then they discovered the advantages of outsourcing to a low-cost labor area. Their manufacturing in the 1990s was much more automated than it is now.
Fremont CA is home of the failed Solyndra plant, the failed NUMMI auto plant, the failed Sun Microsystems campus, the failed Apple Macintosh factory...
More info: Robert Brumley, the CEO, is a lawyer and ex-Marine, and held various political-lawyer type jobs in the Reagan Administration. He was CEO of TerreStar, a satellite company, from 2005 to 2008. (TerreStar went bust in 2010, but that may not have been his fault.) His company, Pegasus Global LLC, has one (1) employee, him, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
I'm seeing the usual anti-patent rants here, and many of the usual mistakes. Some corrections:
Software patents are new. The first true software patent was for SyncSort, in 1971. This was the first large-data sorting algorithm to beat O(N log N), and was a huge win for data processing at the time.
The Internet is different because it moves on "Internet time". The Internet is old. The ARPANET was running in 1969, and the Internet, compatible with present packet formats, has been running since about 1980. The World Wide Web is more than 20 years old now, longer than the life of a patent. Something similar happened in the electrical industry from 1885, and in radio from 1910. There were many basic patents, and they're all expired now.
Software is "math" or a "mental process". Software is a process performed by a machine. Patent law covers processes performed by a machine. Purely mathematical computations have run into patent problems, but few programs are based on a simple mathematical formula.
The more I look at this, the worse it gets. The company isn't in Dun and Bradstreet. They have no significant completed projects. Another (real) company owns the trademark "Pegasus-Global". Resume checks on the published bios of the principals aren't looking good. There's no indication of where the financing will come from, or how the project makes money. Twenty minutes with a web browser will confirm everything above.
I've been sending notes to the AP and other press outlets. Either I'm totally wrong or the whole project collapses tomorrow.
This looks like some kind of scam or hoax. There's a web site for the project, but it's all clip art.
"Pegasus Global Holdings" is suspicious. The "Pegasus Global Holdings" behind this project is here. But there's also Pegasus-Global Holdings, with a dash. The one with a dash seems to be real. The one without the dash, the one behind this project, not so much.
Their "head office" is supposedly at 1875 "I" Street, NW, Suite 500
Washington, DC 20006. Many other companies have the same address, including a small law firm and a PR firm. It seems to be a mail drop of some kind. Their address in Reston, VA is a small furnished space currently for lease. Their "London office" is a is a "virtual office" package: "Executive Offices Group can provide a Virtual Office business address at any of our 34 highly sought after locations. "
"Pegasus Global Holdings" isn't listed in the SEC's EDGAR system, so they're not publicly held or doing anything big financially. They previously announced a "commercial spaceport" project; nothing came of that.
A friend of mine with an active social life used to be heavily into Facebook, and the way to reach her was to send to her Facebook account. Then she got an iPhone. After a month or so, she started checking Facebook only once a day, and told me to use SMS or email if I needed a quick response.
You can't pull out your smartphone for every Facebook update. Most of them are effectively spam.
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed.
More than that. The average shot length in movies has been decreasing over the years. There are up and down trends; 1971 had longer shots than 1974. But shot lengths today average around 2 seconds. The Bourne Ultimatum has a mean shot length of 800ms. This is the current record. MTV got people used to that rate of cuts.
Another thing that people have learned to tolerate is the demise of editorial geography. The best way to explain editorial geography is this (which I'm quoting from memory): "Bogart gets a phone call. He hangs up the phone. He puts on his coat, He opens his door and walks out. He walks down the front steps. He hails a cab. He gets in the cab and the cab drives away. We see a shot of him inside the cab. The cab stops in front of a building. Bogart gets out. He looks up at the tall building. We're shown the building. He walks into the lobby. He pushes the elevator button. He looks up at the elevator indicator. We're shown the elevator indicator moving down. The elevator doors open. Bogart gets in. We're shown the elevator indicator moving up. On another floor, we see the elevator doors open. Bogart gets out and walks down the hall. He knocks on a door, and Lauren Bacall opens the door. Bogart walks through the door into the apartment." Today, we'd see the phone call, and in the next scene, he'd be in the apartment.
Apparently you're supposed to put out small lithium fires with Halon (ok) and/or WATER, even though lithium metal burns in water.
The advice to first responders for Chevy Volts is The battery on fire will not explode. If battery cells reach high enough temperature, they vent and release
electrolyte. Battery electrolyte is flammable. Use copious amounts of water to cool the battery and extinguish
the fire. ABC dry chemical extinguisher will not extinguish a battery fire." What they mean by "copious amounts of water" is a fire hose. Some of the lithium may react with the water, but the water helps contain the fire until the lithium is used up.
Google is testing this on the Las Vegas Strip. I'd thought they'd be spending more time in the emptier parts of Nevada. Actually, though, automated driving in congested areas at moderate speeds may work out well. Automated vehicles can have sensor coverage in all directions at all times; humans are limited in that. Computers can react faster than humans, and don't get distracted.
Plane crashes caused by lithum batteries, last 10 years: 2.
Plane crashes caused by terrorism, last 10 years: 0.
And Fast Company is whining that the USPS is overreacting because they refuse to ship a product that randomly catches fire and blows up? And sets off other batteries in the same shipment?
The FAA has a whole site on aircraft fires. All their lithium battery documents appear there. Here are the current US battery rules for air transportation. Phone batteries usually aren't big enough to be a problem, but as battery sizes move up from "small" to "medium" (laptop batteries) the restrictions get tougher.
As a hobby, I repair old Teletype machines, from the 1920s and 1930s. These machines were designed for a long life of nearly continuous operation and to be repairable. I have 70 and 80 year old machines running. Everything unscrews (and every screw has a lock nut), everything is interchangeable, and all parts can be reached without dismantling too much. The detailed repair manuals still exist. If one of these machines hasn't been seriously damaged and has all the parts, it's usually repairable. This is as good as it gets in repairability.
The price of this is weight, bulk, and routine maintenance. The frame is cast steel. A printer weighs about 75 pounds, about twice the weight of an electric typewriter. There are over 500 oiling points to be oiled annually, plus about 50 points that require greasing. Every few years of operation, a full cleaning is required. This involves removing the two electrical parts, the motor and the selector electromagnet, and soaking the entire machine in solvent. Western Union did this to their machines routinely.
Then there are adjustments. There are spring tensions and clearances to be adjusted. A spring scale and a feather gauge are required. After any part replacement, there are adjustments to be performed according to the manual.
Nobody would put up with that bulk, weight, and maintenance today to get a machine capable of decades of operation. That is the price of repairability.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook stock is going to tank.
They opened with a price/earnings ratio of 92. (Closed around 88, as the stock price dropped from 42 to 38). A normal P/E ratio for a successful large company is between 10 and 20. (Google is at 18, Microsoft at 10, IBM at 15, Apple 13, News Corp. 16).
What this means is that Facebook has to increase their revenue by a factor of 6. They can't increase their user base by that much; there aren't enough people on the planet.. Their Alexa traffic peaked in mid-2011, so they're no longer growing. Their revenue per ad is dropping. General Motors just dumped Facebook as an ad medium because it was ineffective. Facebook has lately been increasing the page space devoted to ads. Myspace tried that before they tanked.
We've probably seen the peak of ad-supported businesses. There's only so much ad spending in the world to compete for. That industry is not the future. It's the past. Like the "house prices can only go up" crowd.
It's important to look at key ratios, like P/E and median house price / median income. Those tend to stay in a narrow range over decades, and when they get too high, it's a bubble.
We warned you. You didn't listen. Now suffer. Downside
That idea has been around for a while. Several snake and trunk like cable driven robots have been built. Some are a tube around discs, with three cables arranged to pull on each disc. Each disc is then a controllable joint. Combining this with pressure, vacuum, and a jamming medium is interesting, but it's not yet clear how useful.
And no, it's not cheap. You still have a servomotor on every cable, plus valves and an air compressor. Coffee grounds are probably a temporary choice. Something like glass or plastic beads, which won't absorb water, may last longer.
This is an old idea in the semiconductor industry. It comes from the fact that, on a typical IC, a few transistors will be marginal or defective. This causes rejects (or binning as a slower part) during final inspection. There's an existing market for DRAMs with a few bad bits. They go into telephone answering machines, and (I suspect) low-end TV sets.
Other schemes for dealing with this problem are to have some extra units on chip, and switch the bad ones out during final test. This is routinely done for DRAM, and for the Cell processor chips used in the PS3. (Only 7 of the 8 auxiliary CPUs in the Cell are live.) It's also possible to use error correction to fix up marginal RAM.
At the CPU level, architecting around errors is quite feasible. The UNIVAC I had that. So did many IBM mainframes, where everything was done twice and checked. But this was to catch rare errors, not frequent ones. The reaction to an error was a "machine check" interrupt, which generally meant killing a program or at least backing up to the last checkpoint.
Recovering from errors is complex. In theory, you could have something like multiple unreliable FPUs with checking, followed by a retirement unit that handled the discrepancies by backing up and redoing the computation. That would probably require about half an acre of additional grey cubicles at Intel in Santa Clara to get right.
The algorithm that picks the place names shown in Google Maps uses population as an input. So the prominent places in Rio de Janeiro are all the slums - Favela Moreira Pinto, Favela Pedra Lisa, Favela Rato ("Rat Town")... Compare this tourist-oriented map, which emphasizes the beaches, parks, and museums. There's been some whining about this from the Rio tourism authorities, but Google didn't change anything.
Check out the DreamHammer site. It's all buzzwords and clip art. "DreamHammer is comprised of the most brilliant minds in the world." Yeah, right. There's absolutely no detail on what this is, or how it works, or what it interfaces to. Does it talk to ROS,or JAUS, or any of the other autonomous vehicle packages. They don't say.
The addresses don't check out, either. The one in Santa Monica (nice location, three blocks from the beach) appears to be a law firm. The address in Virginia is something called "International Research and Development Solutions, LLC". The location in Hawaii (nice location, three blocks from the cruise ship docks) is in an office building mostly full of lawyers.
Facebook users joined Facebook by choice. Myspace users joined Myspace. AOL users had to pay to join AOL in the early days.
Google+ users were drafted. Google's idea of marketing is "we're making you an offer you can't refuse".
Try IGDA, the Independent Game Developers Association, and find a team with a track record of a game roughly similar to, or better than, the one you want. Give them participation in the deal, so they get paid a basic price plus some fraction of sales. This will encourage them to make it good, not do a half-assed job.
Rent-a-Coder and Freelance will not help. I've never been able to get good work from there for anything above the trivial level. (I once wanted screen scrapers written for state corporation registries. I'd written one for one state, and wanted someone to write the other 49, each state being different. No joy.)
The first thing I always recommend to anyone getting unsatisfactory speeds is rewire your telephone sockets and place the modem as close to the master socket as possible. Also use decent quality sockets.
And Monster Cable DSL cable. Right.
Most newer DSL modems have a built in web server, and you can look at the DSL link information. You can find out what rate the DSL line is running at, and its error rate. If those numbers are satisfactory, the ADSL portion of the link isn't the problem, and you can eliminate phone line and local cable quality as an issue. If the ADSL portion of the link is not good, get it fixed. The DSL modem will downshift to a lower speed if the physical line quality is not good. So if the speed is low, that indicates a line problem. Errors or low ADSL link speed are the telco's problem and can be addressed by normal repair techniques.
Mine, for example, is currently running at 6016 kbps up, 768 kbps down. ADSL transmit total error counts are 0 out of 9099204, and receive total error counts are 0 out of 6602998. So the ADSL link is in good shape. This reflects the fact that the local DSLAM is at the end of my driveway. (On the other hand, the local WLAN error rates are very high.)
Then run a DSL speed test program, one that reports packet loss rates. That will give you a sense of what's happening upstream. Then you know what to complain about. Ask how many people are on your DSLAM and how much upstream bandwidth it has. The telco will usually tell you this if you persist and have a clue. :
I am not sure as to what the benefits are as compared to simply using an IR Laser
Hopefully, electrical beam steering. IR lasers still have to be steered with moving mirrors. On the receive side, you need a big moving mirror, because you need big collecting optics to get any significant range. If phased array techniques can be made to work in that band, scanning devices won't need moving parts. 3D LIDAR scanners are still expensive, clunky devices.
The real news here is that terahertz electronics is getting small, and potentially cheap. That has many uses. Most of them, though, do not involve data transmission. Terahertz radar will be useful for medical imaging, security, and driverless cars. There will probably be manufacturing applications, like quick 3D profiles of objects for inspection and measurement.
Point to point terahertz data transmission probably isn't that useful. Point to point laser links have never been very useful. At light and near-light frequencies, rain, snow, and fog will block the beam. If you want one, outdoor laser links are commercially available.
Facebook is a mature business. Everyone who is likely to sign up for Facebook already has. The growth period is over. Facebook traffic peaked in Q3 2011, and has been down a little or flat since then. Revenue for 2011 was $3.1 billion.
As a mature business, they get valued on revenue. Price/earnings ratios for Internet companies are in the 10-20 range. (MSFT is at 10, IBM at 15, GOOG at 18.) Using 15 as an optimistic value, Facebook is valued at about $46 billion.
Facebook's IPO values the company at $100 billion. That's more than twice that the company is worth. And the public stock doesn't have significant voting rights, which makes it less valuable.
Worst case, Facebook tries to grow revenue after the IPO by showing more ads to each user. Myspace tried that.
a majority of our unplanned downtime was due to CouchDB issues
Nowhere on the CouchDB home page is reliability even mentioned. And that's the real issue. Developing a reliable database system is a difficult design and programming task. It requires real software engineering. The hacks who write PHP and use JSON aren't up to a job like that. The "aw, we'll fix it in the next release" attitude doesn't cut it in databases.
Don't know about the Mac factory...
Apple was once very proud of the Apple Macintosh factory in Fremont, CA. Then they discovered the advantages of outsourcing to a low-cost labor area. Their manufacturing in the 1990s was much more automated than it is now.
Fremont CA is home of the failed Solyndra plant, the failed NUMMI auto plant, the failed Sun Microsystems campus, the failed Apple Macintosh factory...
As far as I can find, Minnesota has never had an incident of terrorism. "Terrorism" in Minnesota seems to consist of throwing glitter at people.
More info: Robert Brumley, the CEO, is a lawyer and ex-Marine, and held various political-lawyer type jobs in the Reagan Administration. He was CEO of TerreStar, a satellite company, from 2005 to 2008. (TerreStar went bust in 2010, but that may not have been his fault.) His company, Pegasus Global LLC, has one (1) employee, him, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
This skeptical Santa Fe, New Mexico newspaper article from last October is probably the best one on the subject.
I'm seeing the usual anti-patent rants here, and many of the usual mistakes. Some corrections:
The more I look at this, the worse it gets. The company isn't in Dun and Bradstreet. They have no significant completed projects. Another (real) company owns the trademark "Pegasus-Global". Resume checks on the published bios of the principals aren't looking good. There's no indication of where the financing will come from, or how the project makes money. Twenty minutes with a web browser will confirm everything above.
I've been sending notes to the AP and other press outlets. Either I'm totally wrong or the whole project collapses tomorrow.
This looks like some kind of scam or hoax. There's a web site for the project, but it's all clip art. "Pegasus Global Holdings" is suspicious. The "Pegasus Global Holdings" behind this project is here. But there's also Pegasus-Global Holdings, with a dash. The one with a dash seems to be real. The one without the dash, the one behind this project, not so much.
Their "head office" is supposedly at 1875 "I" Street, NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20006. Many other companies have the same address, including a small law firm and a PR firm. It seems to be a mail drop of some kind. Their address in Reston, VA is a small furnished space currently for lease. Their "London office" is a is a "virtual office" package: "Executive Offices Group can provide a Virtual Office business address at any of our 34 highly sought after locations. "
"Pegasus Global Holdings" isn't listed in the SEC's EDGAR system, so they're not publicly held or doing anything big financially. They previously announced a "commercial spaceport" project; nothing came of that.
A friend of mine with an active social life used to be heavily into Facebook, and the way to reach her was to send to her Facebook account. Then she got an iPhone. After a month or so, she started checking Facebook only once a day, and told me to use SMS or email if I needed a quick response.
You can't pull out your smartphone for every Facebook update. Most of them are effectively spam.
But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed.
More than that. The average shot length in movies has been decreasing over the years. There are up and down trends; 1971 had longer shots than 1974. But shot lengths today average around 2 seconds. The Bourne Ultimatum has a mean shot length of 800ms. This is the current record. MTV got people used to that rate of cuts.
Another thing that people have learned to tolerate is the demise of editorial geography. The best way to explain editorial geography is this (which I'm quoting from memory): "Bogart gets a phone call. He hangs up the phone. He puts on his coat, He opens his door and walks out. He walks down the front steps. He hails a cab. He gets in the cab and the cab drives away. We see a shot of him inside the cab. The cab stops in front of a building. Bogart gets out. He looks up at the tall building. We're shown the building. He walks into the lobby. He pushes the elevator button. He looks up at the elevator indicator. We're shown the elevator indicator moving down. The elevator doors open. Bogart gets in. We're shown the elevator indicator moving up. On another floor, we see the elevator doors open. Bogart gets out and walks down the hall. He knocks on a door, and Lauren Bacall opens the door. Bogart walks through the door into the apartment." Today, we'd see the phone call, and in the next scene, he'd be in the apartment.
Apparently you're supposed to put out small lithium fires with Halon (ok) and/or WATER, even though lithium metal burns in water.
The advice to first responders for Chevy Volts is The battery on fire will not explode. If battery cells reach high enough temperature, they vent and release electrolyte. Battery electrolyte is flammable. Use copious amounts of water to cool the battery and extinguish the fire. ABC dry chemical extinguisher will not extinguish a battery fire." What they mean by "copious amounts of water" is a fire hose. Some of the lithium may react with the water, but the water helps contain the fire until the lithium is used up.
Google is testing this on the Las Vegas Strip. I'd thought they'd be spending more time in the emptier parts of Nevada. Actually, though, automated driving in congested areas at moderate speeds may work out well. Automated vehicles can have sensor coverage in all directions at all times; humans are limited in that. Computers can react faster than humans, and don't get distracted.
And Fast Company is whining that the USPS is overreacting because they refuse to ship a product that randomly catches fire and blows up? And sets off other batteries in the same shipment?
The FAA has a whole site on aircraft fires. All their lithium battery documents appear there. Here are the current US battery rules for air transportation. Phone batteries usually aren't big enough to be a problem, but as battery sizes move up from "small" to "medium" (laptop batteries) the restrictions get tougher.
As a hobby, I repair old Teletype machines, from the 1920s and 1930s. These machines were designed for a long life of nearly continuous operation and to be repairable. I have 70 and 80 year old machines running. Everything unscrews (and every screw has a lock nut), everything is interchangeable, and all parts can be reached without dismantling too much. The detailed repair manuals still exist. If one of these machines hasn't been seriously damaged and has all the parts, it's usually repairable. This is as good as it gets in repairability.
The price of this is weight, bulk, and routine maintenance. The frame is cast steel. A printer weighs about 75 pounds, about twice the weight of an electric typewriter. There are over 500 oiling points to be oiled annually, plus about 50 points that require greasing. Every few years of operation, a full cleaning is required. This involves removing the two electrical parts, the motor and the selector electromagnet, and soaking the entire machine in solvent. Western Union did this to their machines routinely.
Then there are adjustments. There are spring tensions and clearances to be adjusted. A spring scale and a feather gauge are required. After any part replacement, there are adjustments to be performed according to the manual.
Nobody would put up with that bulk, weight, and maintenance today to get a machine capable of decades of operation. That is the price of repairability.