They go farther than Apple in a number of areas. The primary one is Apple's dev tools are free. Microsoft's developer tool set ranges from $600 to over $13,000 per seat.

To clarify, when I say run I'm talking about as HTML/CSS/JS, not using the Java web plugin.

I think that's a pretty dated view of Java. If I'm writing a web service endpoint most of the heavy lifting happens with some very simple method/class @Annotations. My controller classes tend to be in the tens of lines, not hundreds of lines.

The days of writing a some inordinately overthought out factory pattern are long gone for a lot of stuff and the JVM does all sorts of optimizations to make the performance gap between VM and Native pretty small.

There almost needs to be two separate considerations. From a language standpoint Java is a bit middle of the road. It has some well known pain factors, but more or less it's one of the easier OO languages to master. It's used in a lot of high profile web site.

The VM on the other hand does a lot of interesting things under the covers that make the language quite fast. When JRuby hit the scene it was faster than the core ruby project at quite a few things because the VM was doing all sorts of optimizations behind the scenes. Also, because the Java OP code is so stable with relatively few changes per major release you have a bit of a boom in languages you can run inside the Java VM. You get all the benefits of the R&D Sun and Oracle put into JIT, while retaining the ability to do interesting and contemporary things with your language.

Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Python being the primary languages with another 16 that can compile to Java Op code.

Were Java fails mostly is as a client application, running with some sort of Windows GUI. Sure, you can do it, but it realistically people who do Java Swing apps are writing some sort of thick client that could almost always could run inside a contemporary browser without any plugins.

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.