No, NATO didn't.
USA, Great Britain and... cough... Russia did.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Isn't Kiev still a pre-dominantly Russian speaking city?
Exactly what makes Poroshenko a "nazi"?

'Cause this very statement, which will piss off even its European allies like Germany/France/Italy isn't irrational enough...
A couple of days ago he insulted Kazakhstan ("it was never a state"), the only former USSR republic he never had tensions with.

Putin is simply trying to re-create Soviet Union (according to him, its collapse was "the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of XX" you know), which isn't possible if Ukraine "goes West".

He's just yet another war veteran, who suffered mentally from the lost war syndrome and managed to come into power. We have seen them about 85 years ago. His actions are as "Machiavellian" as those of Adolf Aloisovich back then.. Aloisovich didn't have nuclear weapons though, so let's see, how this turns out.

It's called "hydro power plant" and it is already used as "battery" e.g. in UK.
(they literally pump water up, in non peak hours)

If gog.com (DRM free forever,, offline install) DOES support refund, why can't Valve?

In 1939 the west thought Hitler would stop in Czech Republic...
In 2008 the West thought Putin would stop in Georgia...

Note that there is nothing that makes JIT compilers generate slower code.
On the opposite: JIT compiler can gather profiling data, and improve code over time. (e.g. knowing which branch would be taken most of the time) what static compiler can not.

Inherent "slowness" and "memory hungriness" comes from the automatic memory management (garbage collection) and additional runtime type/boundary checks. Also a bit because of "write once run everywhere" (e.g. sin/cos functions are like 100 times slower than in C/C++, because CPU's features aren't used, to get exactly the same result on all platforms)

From my personal experience, Java's speed was on par with C/C++ code, while having much bigger mem footprint.

Reality: in EU copiright on Elvis Presley's work was about to expire. (original term was 50 years)
Viola, it's 95 years now.Justifications:

1) Not a guaranteed lifetime income (yikes): "McCreevy said that, with longer life expectancy, 50 years of copyright protection did not give artists a guaranteed lifetime income."
2) Poor european performers would suffer: "'If nothing is done, thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next 10 years', McCreevy said. "
3) Why are composers better than performers: "'I have not seen or heard a convincing reason why a composer of music should benefit from a term of copyright that extends to the composer's life and 70 years beyond, while the performer should enjoy 50 years, often not even covering his lifetime', McCreevy said."

And last, but not least: "The proposals (to increase copiright from 50 to 95 years) were widely welcomed by the music industry."
From: http://www.elvis.com.au/presle...

My point is: NONE of the arguments are in line with the original intent.
None of the big players wants the system to drastically change either. Unless serious part of electorate starts to care, things are not going to change.

US Patent Office Grants Massively More Patents Than Ever Before (2011)
  https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

The world envies US Patent system (according to USPTO head):
  http://beta.slashdot.org/story...

Most of the points you've mentioned aren't really relevant.
PDF created for A4/Letter page format was hard to read on a 6" screen? That's hardly surprising is it?

As far as "re-flow" of PDFs goes (PDF is more of a set of instructions for the printer, than book format), Sony had the most advanced viewer, actually developed by Adobe.

Notes/bookmarks - T1,T2,T3 are Android based, so choose your poison, for older versions there were various projects improving things.

It's simply that hw manufacturer cannot compete vs subsidized hardware.
Build quality might be subjective, but Sony's readers are also so much less restrictive that Kindle's in terms of features/formats.

Name dual core CPU running at half frequency that outperforms one of the new quad core AMD CPUs at mulit-threaded tasks, pretty please.

People keep pretending single thread performance matters, even though there is hardly any practical use for it for the avg consumer.

It is especially bad once you are after notebooks. Most notebooks sold are i3-5-7 with Intel's poor iGPU.

The only tasks that put some load on my PCs are:
a) games
b) video encoding

AMD does both better than intel, thanks to:
a) VASTLY superior GPU (besides performance, there is also quality / problems with games)
b) more cores

I'm not buying your "publishers do a lot", sorry.
Formatting "just a block of text" is still such a bid deal today?
And... spelling mistakes... seriously?

Marketing might be expensive, but I doubt majority of the authors will get any of it.
Without marketing, what you've described is a service worth 10-50$ a page.

No, it's because other grammars reform frequently, while English is very conservative.