Yes, most of the services are not available here either - and I'm less than a mile from Philly, so it isn't about being out in the boondocks.

Ooops. I'm not a contractor - that was meant to say "ASK a contractor...".

It's better at extortion than at unbiased advice.

As a contractor for the Angie's List literature that they send professionals. It is really slimy.

But I think it addresses MadChicken's concern.

I (well, my wife) has Prime so I get it for free.

The 5GB is still there:

+5 GB to Store Videos and Files
As part of the Unlimited Photos plan, you'll also get 5 GB of space free to store non-photo files (like videos).

If by "abruptly" you mean "with plenty of notice and a straightforward way to download all of your old data".

Not my angle - it's just that mental illness overrides whatever ideology the larger society holds. Because, you know, their brain doesn't work so good.

Yes, there truly has been a rash of pilots deliberately crashing into mountains. We should make sweeping statements about the present state of humanity based on a single incident.

And, by the way, I strongly suspect that if this theory pans out, we'll find out that the co-pilot was mentally ill and so "moral relativism" or any other ideology would matter very little.

"Was" a she? So the person was trans-gender and trying to fake their death to live as the opposite sex. It's all becoming so clear now. Ladies, beware of effeminate short French men with a funny accent.

This is why those of us in the packaging industry would really like to get their contract :)

Android? IOS?

Yeah, it sucks. That's why I said we've gone backwards.

I don't know... we've gone backwards. We started out with competing and non-compatible IM clients - AIM being the biggest. For a while we were trending toward a bunch of competing but compatible IM clients. Then everyone abandoned IM for SMS. Now they are abandoning SMS for a bunch of competing non-compatible IM clients... just on the phone this time.

I currently have WhatsApp installed for a single friend who insists on using it. It's pretty good - give that one a shot. Sometimes people invite me to a Google Hangout - and that also lets you talk or video chat for free. Viber is another one that works pretty well and gives you free calling. The desktop version does video. I have exactly one friend on that.

The worst is that they DO know, and yet still wrote a whole paper on it. They are concatenating strings in Java and Python - which is slow. Surprise, surprise, it is faster to write strings to a pre-allocated buffer, in this case the disk cache. That is the whole paper.

Germany is really struggling with exactly the problem you dismiss. It is relatively simple to take one isolated pocket and only draw from the grid when the batteries start to run low. If you can give the utility an hour's notice, they can start spooling up generators. Give them notice again when you are going to disconnect and they can orderly shut generation down.

Requiring the smooth two-way transfer of power is a more complicated problem to solve, even if it eliminates the bank of batteries. It also requires that the entire system be set up to handle distributed generation, whereas the Musk solution makes no such demand. In practical terms, this might make solar more viable in places where it is politically difficult to make infrastructure changes.