It isn't intended to be your primary source. Just as with other pumped systems, it's a supplement which stores during periods of excess and supplements during periods of shortage (or higher expense... some systems are now charging more for peak-period usage).

Pumped storage wasn't available UNTIL a couple of decades ago. I worked for an engineering company designing one and it was groundbreaking for its day.

Spoken like someone who truly doesn't understand history, or even the recent past, for that matter.

30 years ago, if you told someone that gay marriage would be legal in many states, as likely as not they'd have looked at you like you were completely crazy.

I really have no choice but to say WHOOSH!

First off, they were products of their day. They weren't born today, and it is unrealistic to expect them to live like someone born today.

But second, and more important: they realized the political reality of their day. If they wanted a Constitution that states would ratify, they had to bow to the realities of their day. It's that simple.

And third, even more important than the first two: they created a country in which slavery could be abolished. They laid the groundwork.

If you read your history, you will learn that Jefferson abhorred slavery, but he thought that trying to free them all at once would lead to economic upheaval and disaster. While you may not like the fact that he kept them, he did have reason for thinking that way, and he may even have been right.

Look, let's not get ridiculous. Google's primary ranking is through visits and links to a site. That's all fine... I *do* want my search results ranked by general popularity in that manner.

But those are pretty much objective measures. Now Google is ranking sites according not to what others think, but to what GOOGLE thinks about the content of the site.

That's a completely different animal, and I am completely NOT interested.

I should have added:

For a small-scale pumped-storage system, you should also have a catch tank downstream from your generating turbine. No sense letting all that water go to waste. You just pump it back up high when you have excess generating capacity.

There are other -- probably cheaper -- solutions for local storage than batteries.

A couple of off-the-cuff examples: lifting a very large weight with your excess electricity, then running a generator with it during peak loads or periods. (Did I say VERY large weight?)

Another would be pumped hydro storage. Build a -- yet again very large -- tank at a height. During excess generation periods, use the electricity to pump water into the tank. During peak periods, use the water to turn a generator and reclaim the electricity.

All such systems have inefficiencies, even batteries. But pumped storage and other such solutions are used on a very large scale today... and should be quite workable for the small scale as well. Another advantage of pumped storage is that you now have a nice, big, full water tank with gravity feed in case of zombie apocalypse or whatever.

I've started moving away from their search, too, now that they decide for me what constitutes "mobile friendly" and what doesn't. Fact is, some "desktop" work better on my phone than a lot of the "mobile" sites do.

I don't want a nanny-search moving the things I'm looking for down the page. Just give me what I searched for, nothing more, nothing less, no "judgment" about what I want to see.

FWIW, I think it was the "single real name policy" that actually killed Google+. At that point I stopped commenting on YouTube, stopped using Google+, and in fact just stopped "signing in" to anything at all Google.

Of course. But when you don't have competition anyway, nor any good way to create any, regulation is a better-then-the-alternative last resort.

No... more like 480 BC. It seems reasonable to think that "Spartan" refers to "Sparta" which in turn implies (with deference to Slashdot's notably horrible character handling): "Molon labe"... which would mean in this context: "Come and get it." The reply to Xerces when he demanded they lay down their weapons was "come and get them".

The historical reference hit me right away, and if Microsoft didn't really intend it, they screwed up bigtime. Because the name of their browser is historically a challenge to "try to go through me". So...

Let's go try it. I kind of doubt if seriously attacked it would stand as they did.

And I repeat: that's where Net Neutrality comes in. It serves to keep those barriers low, in a "market" (ISP) that is not competitive. Otherwise you'd get "tiered" service which keeps those small players small.

Of course. Did you not see in my sample calculation "$3.5M given 1M users"?

However, the economies do not scale linearly. You make an investment in infrastructure, and it's good up to X users. Then you make another investment, it's good up to X times 10 users. Etc. In practice it's mostly a step function, not a straight line.

The GURPS_NPC Law: Sooner or later every difficult problem in physics is attributed to Gremlins.

Mod up.

Because your original statement

Can be interpreted at least two ways:

"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."

or

"part of the gender which is a minority in positions of power like government, CEO's, etc."

I admit, I read it pretty fast, but it struck me the second way. I could have thought about it more. I did wonder why you were saying I was in a position of power. :)

But just FYI, I didn't claim to be any particular gender, or belong to a minority, or be in a position of power.

I repeat: my Tungsten at 320x480 was very nice, pretty fast, and the graphics were pretty impressive for their day. As I mentioned before, Bejeweled (for one example) played and looked great.

My point -- which you still seem to be not getting -- is that if they'd simply stuck a phone in it, we'd have CLOSE TO what we have today, years before it actually happened. No, the screen was not AS big. No, it did not have AS HIGH a pixel size. But neither did anything else. It would have been a phone that decently ran apps, AND had pretty good (again for its day) handwriting recognition.