Government borrowed lots of money to save fucked up financial system, but what does that have to do with public investment? Public investment does NOT have to be a new debt, mind you.

ICEs existed well before Merkel came into power, not sure why you are bringing this.

In Fermi times Anandtech was comparing cherry picked OCed nVidia GPUs to stock AMDs.
"Trustworthy", give me a break.

How long did it take Apple to allow custom keyboards?
Widgets, does Apple (finally) support them?
What about widgets on the lock screen?
Did Apple stop using rectangular icons with rounded corners?

And well, it sure goes both ways:
When will Android ask me about an App trying to access my contact list?
Did Google start always asking for a password when buying/installing things like Apple does?

So we need to quickly respond to demand changes, somehow.
Truth is, that this need exists even if you don't go renewable, even in good old conventional power plants (although you need more of it, with renewables, indeed) and especially if you go nuclear power plants, which are supposed to run at near maximum capacity all the time:.

E.g. Dinorwig Power Station in UK:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Beaglebone Black does not cost 4 times more (anymore?), last time I've checked it was about 2 times more expensive.(about 60 Euro for BB vs 30 Euro for RPI)

I recall there were alternative chipsets for both Intel and AMD CPUs coming from companies like VIA and nVidia.

What about conservation of energy???

Actually, twelve:

"Mark Hamill has stated that Lucas told him in 1976, while filming the first film in Tunisia, that four Star Wars trilogies were planned. Lucas suggested Hamill could have a cameo role in Episode IX, which might be filmed in 2011.[1][4] A Time magazine story in March 1978, quoting Lucas, also contained the assertion there would be 10 further Star Wars films after The Empire Strikes Back.[5] Gary Kurtz was also aware of proposed story elements for Episode VII to IX before 1980."
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

To elaborate (I'm neither gay, nor gay hater, nor Russian, nor iPhone lover, please spare me and don't try reading between the lines as there is nothing in there, really)

Russia has a law that basically forbids "as Good As You" approach. (that's where word "gay" comes from, to my knowledge)
That is, by claiming being gay is as good as being heterosexual, or that gay sex is as normal as heterosexual sex, you break the law.
The theory of Russian parliament is that such claims are effectively gay propaganda.

Now, Cook not only said that he was gay (which, frankly, could also have been interpreted same way), but also claimed it to be "a gift" from God. This, apparently, breaks the above mentioned law.

I'm pretty sure overloards are, in fact, fead.

Stealing (e.g. learning / copying what others did, legally or not) is a great way to develop industry from scratch.
Note that many things they do go far beyond stealing. E.g.:
1) Moon probe returning back to earth
2) High speed trains (this one started with importing technology from all countries with major know how)
3) Longest bridge in the world
4) Biggest dam in the world

My point is, the steal at times, but they are not limited to it.

Well, no, not really.
It started with George Hotz's dumps, which was a combination of hardware glitching + program running in OtherOS.
If not the OtherOS, it wouldn't even be possible!!!

Before that PS3 system was very obscure, hence next to nothing was happening.

More to it, dumps, once analyzed, revealed epic mistakes in the encryption scheme (they used a static, instead of random number in crypto), which lead to Sony's private keys becoming public which lead to PS3 being hacked wide open.

However I wouldn't count with this happening again. It could well be that current gen consoles won't be hacked even in 10 years.

Witcher 3 (was released on gog.com), Dreamfall released a couple of weeks ago.
How well they'll do remains to be seen, though.

Actually, no, it wasn't Stalin's.
In Stalin's era USSR was developing faster (actually, like 4+ times faster) than the West. He started with retrograde agricultural country and ended up with a nuclear superpower.
Hitler's economy was insanely good too.
And hell, yeah, we know about the price for both cases, no need to remind.

As far as USSR's economic growth goes, in Khruschev times it was still more than healthy, twice faster than the West.
However , in Brezhnev's era at some point in 70th it simply stopped growing. Let alone that most of the grows was done at the cost of the quality (higher number of lower quality machines). In 1978 Soviet Union didn't grow even according to the official statistics.