So Porsche, which sells about 80 000 cars annually, is "a fringe brand"? Seriously?

What makes F35 better or faster than F22?

Less than a half of "South Ossetia" was within joint Russo-Georgian peacekeeping forces mandate, so very kind of Russians to stop at the borders of entire "South Ossetia" a "country" with whopping 35 thousand population, which was offered wide autonomy and vice-president position with veto rights by Georgian authorities.

About 27 thousand Georgian internally displaced persons certainly appreciate the kindness of Russians.

I'm pretty sure they've also welcomed recent bulldozing their houses on "liberated" territory, it's certainly was done just to build new, more comfortable houses for them and not to cement ethnic cleansing.

Or, say, Abkhazia, with pre-war population 97 thousand Abkhazians and 246 thousand Georgians, no wonder Georgians wanted to flee the territory to let it become Russian protectorate.

No, it it doesn't necessarily end with "healthier content" unless you consider "dead" to be a healthy state.

Care to name all those "small countries" which are "broke anyway" dear friend?

Putin cannot use nukes in the Ukraine, even Russia's skilled propaganda machine won't be able to justify it.
He can't stop the West from arming Ukraine.
He can't prevail militarily in a county with 46 million people, which used to have 1 million men army back in USSR times, if it gets support from the West.

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...