overtake the USA power and begin a real massacre of white Alaskans

Yes, an actual massacre (like this) might be a good enough justification for foreign intervention — though not for an annexation.

But no massacre has happened — not in Crimea, not in Kharkiv, not Lviv, not Zaporizhya, not in even in Mariupol and Slovyansk (the two towns that fell under Russia's control briefly but were retaken).

Entire national guard battalions are formed in the East from people, for whom the first language is Russian — if they are willing to die for their country, maybe, the allegations of the country's plans to "hang them" over their language-preference aren't entirely truthful, huh?

Your fears might've been justifiable for a victim of massive state-propaganda a year ago, but by now — with Ukrainian "junta" in power for over 12 months and yet not one concentration camp, gas chamber, nor even a one-time mass-execution of Russian-speakers in evidence — the excuse is no more.

If you continue to believe — and even parrot — this crap, there must be something seriously wrong with you. Either you are brain-dead stupid, or a (paid) Putin's troll...

There are afaik no Ukrainian schools in Crimea

Not any more, that's for sure — because Russia shut them down.

All of your justifications are repeatedly demonstrated as non-sense and, even if they were valid, they would've justified only a wrong-righting invasion, but not a permanent annexation of any land.

Vatnik much?

You are not required to speak Kenyan or Hawaiian, to serve in army where commands are given in Kenyan, to write official letters in Havaiian, to meet schoolchildren from schools where they are told that their Kenyan-Havaiian ancestors dug the Pacific, and so on (You understand).

So, if Alaskans were facing all (or any?) of those evils, you feel, Russian invasion into Alaska would've been justified?

BTW, do you think, Russian invasion into Crimea solved the problems you allude to? Can Crimean Tatars, who will now be drafted into Russian army now have an option of having commanders issuing commands in their language? Of course, not. Can ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea send children to a Ukrainian school? (No, they can not). In other words, the problems you are alluding to — if they are problems to begin with — are not solved by Russian occupation and your attempt to justify it in case of Crimea failed (miserably).

Occupation and annexation of Crimea already a staggering success, Russia must be looking into organizing a referendum in Alaska.

Peace-loving Americans will not be objecting — a referendum conducted under occupation going in favor of the occupying power? What "conflict of interest"?

The knuckle-dragging haters will be neutralized by polite men with Russian accents wearing indiscernible uniforms...

Java and Python versions of the code were written and then run on Windows and Linux systems for comparison. The total time of all writes for disk-only version was compared to total time of in-memory operations plus the disk write of the in-memory approach were then compared.

I fear, this article will be referred to for years to come as "evidence", that in-memory work is slower, while the truth is, Java and Python programs are slower, than the properly-compiled (to machine code) programs. TFA says so too:

these higher level languages are doing a lot of work behind the scenes to handle the concatenation, such as creating new objects and copying the strings in order to accommodate the extra bytes of data.

but few people will read that far down...

It is just "too easy" to write code, that will cause the useless object-creation and destruction in these "higher level" languages — and a human mind can not distinguish between a microsecond and a millisecond, so it all seems to work fine — until you need to do it a million times...

India is one of the countries where tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet, making Wikipedia a potential gatekeeper.

Awesome... Meanwhile, Heaven forbid Facebook or any other KKKorporation sponsors some poors' Internet-access. No, better they have no Internet-access at all!

After analyzing this data with a custom-built visualization tool

...these data...

The publishers are (slowly) moving from simply copying plain-text, which they used to print (on dead trees), to web-sites, where hyper-linking is possible.

That's all you need — usually there is no reason to corral the links into a separate "info-box".

As the print-magazines wane and digital ones rise, this realization will come to the (still) technically-illiterate journalists and even their editors.

Meanwhile here on Slashdot (and other forums, where links are allowed), there is simply no excuse for making a claim without a clickable citation behind it... See the paragraph above for an example.

That picture shows, how unpleasant it is to have cable running on poles instead of burying them underground. It is not about the ugliness of competition.

To stop the over crowding, power companies were forced to merge and de-clutter the streets.

Nonsense. Where there is one cable (whether on a pole or underground), there may as well be four or five — from competing companies.

I'd go further and suggest, gas- and water-pipes can compete too. If Tokyo has competing subway lines certainly NYC (or LA or other large cities) can have competing utilities...

So you're proposing having two sets of wires running to each house and business?

Why not? When I signed up for FiOS, a Verizon technician came over and ran a fiber-cable to my house from the pole nearby. Comcast's coax cables are running from the same pole to my neighbors.

Why can't the same be done with power cables?

Distribution is generally a monopoly, generation is not.

If a campus — of multiple buildings — can be interconnected, why can't multiple adjacent campuses be connected to each other?

In a reasonably thickly-settled area the distance between multiple homes is less than that between buildings of university or corporate campus. So TFA would seem to suggest, distribution does not have to be a monopoly either.

most solar companies I work with

Heh, if the distribution suddenly does not have to be a monopoly, it does not matter, whether the generation is solar or what have you.

SolarCity claims its GridLogic program can provide electricity to communities and businesses for less than they pay for utility power

For decades we were told over and over, how the utility power is a "natural monopoly" and how, therefor, it can not be subject to competition...

and the facilities can still be connected to their area's utility power grid as an added backup.

This nod does not seem like anything more than a fig-leaf. Because, if I my campus or block or town can connect to a utility's grid, it can also connect to another town's grid — or simply that of a different commercial power-generation provider (solar or otherwise).

Either way, the myth of natural monopoly is crumbling.