Vasectomies have potentially serious side effects, both in the short term, and in the long term (hormone issues), plus as others have pointed out they're more or less permanent (reversals are expensive and nowhere near 100% successful) .

The published dates for the tests were less than 5 months apart, and the reason they used SQL 2014 is that it's what their customers are actually using, fewer shops are picking Oracle due to their licensing stupidity.

Yup, my great headphones cost less than my first mediocre center channel (Sennheiser HD598 vs Infinity Primus center), the quality difference between those two is so huge it's hard to describe. If you just want to listen to music by yourself then headphone provide a huge, huge advantage in bang for buck over loudspeakers.

I love the ESL's, but the amps that can drive them are ungodly expensive, and if you want to listen to modern sources you have to step up to a receiver with pre-outs which further increases the system cost. I still might buy a pair after the kids are done with school =)

I have to disagree, my original hifi system for the living room was close to as good as you could get for $1k at the time, Infinity Primus 360 fronts, Infinity OWS for surrounds, the Primus center channel, and a midrange Onkyo receiver. I replaced the fronts with Vandersteen 2CE Signature 2's for $1400 (retail is over $2500, I bought mine from a soldier who was going on long term deployment not long after buying them so they were like new), they're worlds better and just about anyone who's heard both systems can hear and appreciate the difference. The Infinity's weren't bad (in fact I moved them to my bedroom), it's just that I enjoy listening to music as a way of relaxing on the weekends and it was worth the qualitative difference to do the upgrade despite the somewhat high cost (my only other hobbies are cheap). I still want to upgrade the surrounds to Vandersteens to match the fronts, but they're nearly as much as I paid for the fronts and there are very, very few on the used market so no deals to be had, for now it's "good enough" but I am sure that I'd get an upgrade even without changing the room layout.

60 physical cores + 60 hyperthreading units, kind of like how all the current gen SPARC processors have 8 thread pipelines but two execution units per core. The T5-4 has 64 cores and 128 execution units and the performance is actually pretty close to the DL580 Gen8 so it's not a horrible way to compare systems. Oracle systems go a bit bigger with the T5-8, but my point is that you can go nearly as big with x64, and VMWare allows you to create essentially arbitrary sized containers from the hardware, just like LPARs on SPARC (VMWare 6 supports 128 vcpu's and 4TB of ram per VM so you can use as much of the machine for each guest as you want). The number of workloads that won't fit into a VM on x64 are vanishingly small, so your quip about "That has nothing to do with running a debian VM with 4 x86 cores and 2GB RAM on a Suse Linux or Windows host." is unjustified.

Then you suck at tuning, it's trivial to get 90% throughput VM versus physical, and with a bit of effort you can achieve 95+% (VMWare actually managed to get over 100% on some Java tests due to scaling issues with the JVM, running lots of clustered smaller instances on multiple machines was faster than running bigger instances or lots of small instances on one machine).

Uh, DL580 G8, 120 threads and 3TB of ram. Heck, my VMWare hosts are 40 threads and 384GB of RAM, we run everything except Oracle DB and OBIEE on them, and only then due to licensing idiocy, not capability or reliability.

That's nice, and for those of us who want to spend less than $1M per year per box there's VMWare which provides nearly the same uptime at a fraction of the cost, and we don't have to put up with IBM. Commoditization is a good thing for the customer.

Given the fact that they outsourced Power chip production you have to wonder how long that will be true. Then again HP outsourced their processor development to Intel over a decade ago and they still sell Itanium, so it might be a long time before they give up that gravy train.

How about look at TPC-H, where in the 10TB test the T5-4 gets beat in performance by the DL580 G8 and the x64 system is half the cost per transaction? The number of shops that need more than 120 threads and 3TB of ram is vanishingly small.

The CRA did NOT cause the financial crisis! This has been debunked many times. In fact in ~75% of communities CRA loans had lower default rates through late 2009 than traditional conforming loans (let alone crap like interest only, sub-prime, and liar loans) due to more stringent underwriting criteria. No, the cause was improperly rated securities comprised of crap that was sold in bundles to the big banks and through the back door to Fannie and Freddie.

Solar panels don't use/contain rare earths.

Bullshit!
First solar uses cadmium telluride cells, cadmium and telluride are two of the 17 rare earths. Don't be such a condescending ass when you are flat out wrong.

without blasting the top off of a single mountain or pouring contaminates into rivers

Well, there are all the rare earths needed to make 2,900 acres worth of panels, so it's not like it's for free. In fact on a per MWhr basis I'm willing to bet that nuclear fission is still more environmentally friendly (though heat pollution of the cooling water source can be an issue depending on where the plant is sited).

Google now in Lollipop will be in always listening mode (by default, once you confirm the privacy statement) if there is a dedicated hardware voice component (like those found on the Moto X, Galaxy S5, and Nexus 6).