That's pretty much what happened to the colosseum. Stone and marble was torn out. A chunk of it ended to make the vatican.

The US has way more generation facilities that it really needs. The issue is entirely political with the 500 or so companies that make of the "grid". You're unlikely to see a solution to that because it would put a number of facilities out of business.

I'd also point out that Germany's accelerated decommissioning of nuclear power plants (all shutdown in 8 years) has a lot more to do with the coal plants than the increase in renewables.

To be fair the two largest HVAC providers in the US already offer predictive modeling services for regulating power consumption. Many times having complex interactions with market based supply/demand power pricing that's common in the commercial applications and buildings. We have models and systems already in the market place that take into account a number of these issues.

Currently in the HVAC arena all the predictive models are predicated on still storing the energy in the form of chilled water. The systems figure out demand for the next day and determine the optimal time at night to chill down thousands of gallons of water based on the market (or predicted market) off peak power prices.

Be that as it may we have off peak facilities for a reason. As you pointed out getting the grid to handle this would be no easy task. The grid is made of 500 or so different companies, most of which are only obligated to serve in the interest of the community it serves. As such we have way more generation capability than we have transmission capability. Good luck getting a majority of the companies to agree. Previous attempts by the feds to use it's power (2005 during the Bush administration) was thwarted by congress. So, I guess my main point is it's not a technology issue, we already do a lot of the stuff he's proposing in the off-peak market. What we have a political problem with transmission.

One of the problems with the historical sites in Greece is so many of the large ones have been stolen from over the centuries. Want to see the full Parthenon? Better book a trip to the Vatican, Louvre in Paris and the British Museum what's still left for public viewing. Various conquers and rulers have been selling off bits and pieces of greek history for as long as Europeans have been collecting art.

We're seeing more and more solar units down as leases. Many companies specialize in the financing behind it and it includes management and maintenance. What does this mean to renters? If solar were to become economical it's not inconceivable that the renters would buy electricity from the management company and give the landlord a cut.

If it was a review copy most likely it contains a uniquie hidden watermark. There are several firms in Hollywood that specialize in pressing watermarked screening DVDs. I would guess they would have already been questioned.

These countries were under the thumb of Soviet Russia not all that long ago. It's pretty common to find people that are still a bit bitter about Russians. They usually like the Germans much more than Russians. One of my Czech friends put it like this, if someone came up to them in the street and asked them for directions in Russian they'd talk to them in English instead.

The biggest issue is even if you had footage showing Russia firing an shell and it landing across the border it doesn't matter. Putin clearly doesn't care. NATO states aren't going to risk blood and treasure on Ukraine. They need Russian energy for the Winter. The French are still going to complete the sale of some Warships to Russia.

Meanwhile, back in America we've launched a bunch of sanctions. What Russian imports will disappear off the shelves? Guns and Vodka. I think they'll survive.

The FTC needs to set up Honey pots with actual SS7 ANI feeds. Real time query the calling number and provider. The dirty secret here is the telemarketers need VOIP providers to work. Usually ones that are willing to turn a blind eye and willing to let them advertise the outgoing number as anything they want. The FTC needs to put the pressure on them and their upstream connection into the phone system (most likely a CLEC of some sort).

I think you are putting too much value in Russia actually caring what the rest of the world thinks. The EU and US have zero treaty obligations to the Ukraine. It was never going to be a Military altercation with the West. It was always going to be a series of trade and diplomatic sanctions. All Russia has to do is weather the sanctions until the Winter and then bend over Western Europe who needs Russian Natural Gas to survive.

Worst case, 5 years down the road North American liquified Nat gas might be able to replace Russian pipeline shipments... Maybe.

I would recommend R. It's the language college grads are getting trained in. The reason for that is simple. There's no licensing costs for a simple R dev environment. However, I wouldn't use the free stuff for anything that ad hoc. If you have a production big data job I would look at something like Vertica (purchases by HP a couple years ago.) Extremely fast big data DB engine. Not only will it run R, but it has the ability to break the R up into smaller chunks at execution time and distribute the execution across the DB cluster.

Stuff like that just isn't possible in SAS yet. SAS is built upon some very old skool constructs that make it very brittle and very difficult to meet the performance expectations of todays big data world. SAS may end up there, they are privately held and have a very large R&D budget, but I think they would have to do a total rewrite for it to compete. Not that SAS is going away, there's just so much of it in the business world. Be that as it may, in 15-20 years SAS could be a Foxpro of it's age.

I'm going to second Groovy on Rails. AKA Grails. It's very mature and is one of the languages that compiles down to Java Opt code. You have a large eco-system of production apps that run in the container. The language is fairly approachable (saying this as someone who came originally from a Perl Web App background in the late 90s). You can also use Java Libraries if there's something you want to get out of box such as one of the many Open Source Apache Libraries or Google Guava Libraries.

Before making such bold statements I'd do a little more research on the hopper and how it functions. There's no cloud storage here. All the functionality is on the customers DVR and iPad.

For the most reasonable rates I'd go with Straight Talk (WalMart) for GSM or Ting for CDMA service. Not sure if you can get away with not giving a name, but neither need any form of contract. I would skip the airport Kiosk and go right to a WalMart of Target for the pre-paid cards.

I have a different tact. I typically am brought in with a Coterie of other senior developers at mid-cap companies. Ten of us will usually replace a mix of 30+ onshore H1-B and offshore developers. Basically on-shoring work for companies that have gotten sick of sub-par code that can't perform under load. At my current contract 18 months ago their problem was a back log of issues and enhancements with a 2 year wait time and a web site that crashed under peek loads. Performance is radically better, bugs and defects are a fraction of what they were and the back log is empty.

We work with the customer on better development processes as well as the importance of having a hiring pipeline.

This became possible because most of the H1-Bs are contractors and their corporate sponsors have steadily increased rates. Basic supply and demand. With those kinds of rates there's no reason to put up with sub-par deliverables.

What it's done is placed a carrot out there to bring on H1-B programmers instead of college hires.

With an H1-B the employer has a lot of power over the employee. They can't move jobs with out sponsorship. It's very easy to knock them out of the country. You can easily classify them in a lower pay band because they have very little recourse. These employees usually get little to know employee development (i.e. money).

With a college hire the employee can change jobs at will. You as the employer are expected to put money into employee development. And in the end they are likely to leave after a couple years to seek greener pastures.

So yes, the H1-B program has done tremendous harm to our country. I consult with many large companies and I haven't seen a intern in a programming department in half a decade. College hires are few and far between. It's a radical change from how things were when I started in the 90s. Simply put business have put their money into short term H1-B and Offshore workers. They stopped putting money into college hires. Now they whine they can't find qualifies workers because they stopped investing in Junior programmers a decade ago.