Oh, like the Chinese government hasn't already stolen this technology to disseminate to their companies.

Pffft... $400? We're looking for CHEAP here guys.... How about $12? You can drive that down an extra 20% if you use a coupon in the second link. Be sure to get your free flashlight!

http://www.harborfreight.com/ultra-ear-sound-amplifier-66577.html

http://www.harborfreight.com/digitalsavings.html

As for quality issues, Sony's been outsourcing lots of their lower end products. What people are likely complaining about are the lower end products that aren't really Sony products anyway.

I'm in here just to put in props for Sennheiser. Keep in mind that you can replace parts like earcups and cords on anything but the very bottom tier Sennheisers so picking up a used pair is certainly not out of the question. $50 of used Sennheiser will likely beat $50 of new anything that's suggested here today.

This happens with air conditioning efficiency increases. When people get a more efficient air conditioner or do some other efficiency upgrade (tinted windows, radient barrier...) they still run the system as hard as they did prior, they just enjoy a lower summer temperature in the house.

Versus all the other factors you can throw in there for anything involving heavy lifting for an enterprise app, raw price point of the DB engine is pretty close to the bottom of the list.

No, rather it's amazing what happens when you architect the DB such that the entire thing is forcibly held in memory.

MySQL choked an on "...and (condition or condition)" doing a seq scan instead of filtering even though there was an index on the table that those conditions were on. I changed it to an "where in (...)" and I got the same result. I had to move the or conditional into being a derived table joined in.

For the same type of query Informix does a dynamic hash join with no SQL thuggery necessary.

Wire centers have huge ass diesel generators and enough fuel to run for days. Those batteries are really there just last until the generator is up and humming, plus a bunch of leeway should there be issues with the generator.

Also, that cell tower at some point feeds into a wire center anyway, so if the wire center is down, your cell tower is dead in the water.

Your VoiP phone? It goes back to a wire center somehow. Cable system? Take a guess. Wouldn't it be better to connect directly to the wire center with a regular POTS line than slip several points of failure in between?