Except that there are services nowadays SPECIFICALLY built for this type of scaling, like AWS. You can spin up extra servers for temporary high traffic - especially high traffic that was absolutely foreseen. Funny how Amazon's website can handle the traffic on black Friday just fine.

Sorry, but I've been doing web development for 15 years and have worked on large projects. I can't see the cost for this project being more than $20-30M for up-front development (that includes planning, documentation, meetings, coding and testing - all without outsourcing) and at most $20-30M per year for software licensing, hosting, bandwidth and maintenance. And I'm talking top-dollar.

For $634M, they could have gone down the wrong path (the one you mention) and committed to long term-contracts for those unnecessary idle servers and still have $300M leftover.

I'd need to see videos of this working before it means anything to me. No mention in the article how you get a firing pin and springs made out of polymer to work.

Firearms account for approximately 18,000 suicides annually in the US and approximately 10,000 homicides.

So, even if we lump in homicides with your suicides AND assume homicides are committed by legal gun owners (which most times they are not): 28,000 is 0.035% of 80 million gun owners in the US, which means it is NOT the "primary purpose of owning a gun". It in fact accounts for a MINISCULE use of firearms.

The primary purposes for owning a gun - BY FAR - NOT EVEN CLOSE - are self defense and sport (including competitive shooting, recreational shooting and hunting).

Also, I suspect that you are misinformed on what an "assault rifle" is which is not your fault since the media spreads so much hysteria and disinformation...

An assault rifle is a marketing term. These rifles function EXACTLY THE SAME as semiautomatic hunting rifles. The only differences are: they look more menacing, have accessory rails and a different grip. You can buy a wooden rifle - not considered an "assault rifle" - which fires the EXACT same caliber bullets, at EXACTLY the same rate with EXACTLY the same capacity.

Also, while you did not mention it here, let me also bring up "high capacity magazines" since a lot of "anti-gun wackos" (as I'll call them) bring these up for argument. The difference between shooting a 30 round magazine and three 10 round magazines is about 4 seconds. With just a small amount of practice, anyone can reload in under 2 seconds.

Eight on the Break is pretty good. They usually have about 10 pins that rotate.
thebreak.net

Called CaptureLive HD. It is a combination of room hardware and server software.
http://www.crestron.com/resources/product_and_programming_resources/catalogs_and_brochures/online_catalog/default.asp?cat=1058&subcat=1505&id=2321

According to the article, an alternative test called Sweet 16 was produced and was subsequently killed by the MMSE copyright owners' legal action. It sounded like the Sweet 16 used completely new copy but similar logic. Can you copyright logic if all the words are completely different? I'd love to see a comparison of those two tests.

On a side note, I hope no one owns the copyright on the eye chart. I like getting my eyes checked every year or two.

• First, their streaming selection is pitiful at best
• Second, ISP bandwidth caps
• Third, bandwidth is still not even close to transmitting DTS-HD audio with high quality HD video at 40Mbps like some Blu-rays. There will always be people, such as myself, who want high quality and can tell the difference,

I'm actually dropping the streaming portion of my subscription and keeping the discs.

There have been many unbiased studies done which have concluded that having a large differential in speeds between vehicles is far more dangerous and responsible for far more accidents than the actual speed itself. Also, studies have found that increasing the speed limit does not cause drivers to exceed the new limit and in fact sometimes actually reduced the average speed of drivers.

Unfortunately, legislators set rules and regulation based upon unfounded hysteria, gut feelings and revenue purposes instead of facts and figures.

If you are interested, there are many resources at motorists.org.

I'm sure legislation will fix the problem... after all, inmates are in jail because they FOLLOW laws! Politicians are morons.

Only 2% of slashdot readers drive "under the speed limit" yet well over 50% of the time I am stuck behind someone driving under the limit. Either there are not too many slashdot readers in my area or I'm just unlucky.

Unless you work in one of the many states with "at-will" employment where they can let you go for no reason.

The article is not clear what search terms produced 22% malicious URLs. That seems like a high number to me. If you search for "photoshop crack" or "keygen" you're going to get WAY more malware than searching for "fuzzy bunnies".

While I agree that more spam and malware sites have gotten into Google listings, I don't think the problem is quite as dire as the article makes it seem for the typical Google user.