off topic P.S. Being curious myself about how one might create an electron beam from the Van de Graaff, I consulted google and clicked on the first relevant looking link....

http://www.intelligentdesigntheory.info/electron-beam-van-de-graff-generator.html

As a result of unconventional thinking about intelligent design, I coupled thermionic emission with a Van de Graff generator in a vacuum tube for electron beam high voltage alternative energy sources to produce electricity that was rejected by the scientific community.

The links from there are absolutely rich with incoherent babble... really good looking diagram photo. I like that all these crackpot inventions include a random magnet. You know its the real deal if it has magnets.

Heh depending on your definitions my parents bought one for me when I was in 7th grade. Ordered it right out of a catalog. The company still sells them: http://www.scientificsonline.com/motor-driven-van-de-graff.html

Price has gone up, a bit, and the look redesigned, but, still is what it is:

Amusing bit from wikipedia:

One of Van de Graaff's accelerators used two charged domes of sufficient size that each of the domes had laboratories inside - one to provide the source of the accelerated beam, and the other to analyze the actual experiment. The power for the equipment inside the domes came from generators that ran off the belt, and several sessions came to a rather gruesome end when a pigeon would try to fly between the two domes, causing them to discharge. (The accelerator was set up in an airplane hangar.)[5]

The newer designs seem more...enclosed...

What is your point? If we wanted something back from the system, we should have made it a system that wasn't so terribly abusive and in need of complete dismantling.

I may pay more taxes than most, I also have people in my own household who live off that money. It would hit me hard as I suddenly get to fully take on supporting disabled family members.

So what? That income isn't worth the very lives of people around the world, and its certainly not worth supporting this sort of blanket surveillance. End it now, and lets move on.

Android has 75% of the device shipments, but Apple has 74% of app revenue. Fragmentation may not affect device shipments, but it certainly seems to be affecting other things.

Look at it another way. Android has 75% device shipment marketshare. Apple has 18%. This means Google ships 4.17x as many devices. But (not knowing the Android app store marketshare), Apple has a minimum of 2.85x the overall app store revenue.

This means that Apple devices, on average, produce roughly 12x the app revenue. Is this because of platform fragmentation? Is this because of Apple's demograhics? I don't know, but dismissing fragmentation based purely on device shipment market share is shortsighted.

> Simplistic edicts like yours will not suddenly fix everything.

And this is what you are missing....I never said they would suddenly fix everything. Simply that they would be a step in the right direction. I don't care if it fixes everything suddenly or it takes a long hard climb back up from the bottom.

It doesn't matter to me. We all deserve the pain it would cause for supporting the system we have now for so many decades. This terrible plight would simply be, what we brought on ourselves. Now the sooner we start, the sooner we can start climbing back out.

Quite simply, if our economy requires us to maintain a war machinje, then we should let it tank, because we don't deserve a good, first world, economy.

The women certainly are...

Have you considered that it might be your application crashing or freezing up that is causing the 503 errors? You'd better rule out that possibility before you look elsewhere, because if your company's lousy code is to blame then you'll likely have the same problems wherever you go.

And what's your budget? You can throw some money at Linode to get a managed VPS, and that'll scale up or down very easily, so long as your needs don't exceed what you can do with a single node (it's not hard to throw more RAM and CPU at a problem, but if you need to scale to multiple boxes, that's more complicated). If you have more time than money, you can do the same thing yourself and just spend a few hours a month keeping things up to date and maintained. $140-180 per month is probably going to cover you, or $40-80 if you DIY.

If you really want to have this as close to zero-effort as possible, throw some money at somebody like rackspace who does cloud hosting, where your site is sitting on top of their cloud so they're already handling scaling stuff for you, and you never have to worry even a little about the infrastructure. They start at $150/mth and go up from there, so they'd probably end up more expensive than a managed VPS, but at that point they're doing pretty much everything for you, including scaling to multiple servers transparently.

If your hosts don't know enough about webserver tuning, then you need to look into tuning the content --

• What can you do to reduce file size?
• Can you reduce the number of images, CSS files, JavaScript, etc. that are called from each page?
• Can you segregate static & dynamic content to different servers? (even without shutting off all of the bloated extra on the static server, it allows it to cache things better)
• Can you reduce the number of *different* CSS and JavaScript files on each server?
• If you're using a javascript framework, is there a CDN that you can call it from, rather than hosting it yourself?
• Are your images and such being directly linked to from any other sites?

I'm not going to say that you haven't outgrown your current host ... but odds are your website could be trimmed down unless it was made 10 years ago.

If you have access to configure the webserver, you can squeeze even more performance out -- cache control headers can do wonders, as can properly tuning the database if you're serving dynamic content.

As far as I can tell, Netscape didn't include an e-mail client until 1997, which is still after the patent was filed. While I'm not sure it makes it patentable, a browser rendering HTML markup on a web-page isn't the same thing as an e-mail client replacing URLs with content in plain-text messages.

Mosaic did not, to my knowledge, support sending and receiving e-mail messages, nor did it support displaying images inline plain (non-html) text.

As I said, they use grid storage. My estimate is that the 6-bay supercharger station on their home page has somewhere between 135 m^2 and 240 m^2 of photovoltaics. I suspect that they anticipate a rather low load factor for their superchargers. So perhaps you might need 6 bays to handle labour day weekend, but a regular Wednesday might have barely any traffic at all. Any time they're not charging cars, they're "storing" the power (in the grid), and while I find Elon Musk's claims that the superchargers will be net producers of energy a bit hard to believe, I don't find the idea to be absurd either.

It looks like 5 kWh per square meter per day is a reasonable figure for the best parts of the US (for solar), and solar panels at 20% are available, so you'd get about a kilowatt per square metre per day. So they're producing 240 kilowatt hours per day at that 6-bay station, and if we assume the average charge is half an hour (people don't necessarily charge from empty), that's enough to charge 5 cars a day. Is it possible that a station would get less than that number? Sure, maybe the less popular ones, and especially if you say "net positive" is for the entire supercharger network as a whole (including those ones that almost never get used but need to be there to be able to say you've covered the area).

... hundreds of years.... so long as you don't let sun light hit it.

... agreed upon meaning by those using it.

For example what I just wrote could have a definition of blowing up the moon.
The proof of this fact of abstract languiage is political double and tripple speak.

So what this really all amounts to is spys are trying to justify their pay check, like law makers try to justify their job but creating new laws regardless of the validity or constitutionality of them.

And to think, we tax payers really need the paper work telling government how to spend our taxes, rather than giving the politicians who have proven to0 be liars a blank check.

*shrug*

Even with the way-above-average driving I do daily, I still average 160mpg in mine. And, unlike a "high mileage hybrid", its smooth, quiet, powerful and quick.

Before my current gig, I was going almost 2000 miles on an 8 gallon tank. I averaged about 250mpg for the first 6000 miles for the cost equivalent of about 40 gallons of gas. (150mpg cost-equivalent) And those figures were only because of taking it on a few road trips.

When I bought mine, it and the CT200h were the only "green" cars on my list of things I was considering -- and it was by a long shot the cheapest on my list. Still bought it, not because of the savings, but because it was the best of the cars I drove. The "green" was just a perk. YMMV.