I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstood, but did you really just say most teens have a history of violence and justify it as being part of growing up? Seriously? If this is true where you live, you should move. The rest of the world is different.

Keep in mind this was 1969, a new house cost $25k, average wage was $8k, Pontiac Transam was $4k, Cadiallac deVille $6k. Refrigerators, washing machines and such were $150-$200, fruit cost about 10 cents/lb, etc.

Notwithstanding the great non-monetary loss to the family, $100k would be quite a lot more than "basic" back then.

It's thus. At least the 4 different devices our family has bought in the last two years have all come with a USB-microUSB cable and a wall charger with no cord but a USB socket.

All true and agreeable, except that in the real world, or the vast majority of it where cost IS an object, all of this doesn't matter. What good is 5 or 10GHz when it costs many times more than 3GHz? IBM's gear costs so much more than Sun gear which costs so much more than HP gear (initial purchase + support) that for anything but tech startups rolling in VC dough or Fortune500 giants don't usually give much consideration to IBM.

Nevermind that Oracle with its draconian license terms (e.g. have to license an entire VMware cluster if an Oracle DB is running inside a single virtual machine in that cluster) and ever increasing costs is probably doing most of the damage to its own server business on that aspect alone. IBM is probably going to have its mainframe-high end enterprise customers for the next 50 years as well, things just don't change much in large corporations where money is no object.

Just to clarify, that list isn't quite correct either. Different countries measure differently.

For example the 28 days (4 weeks) in Estonia is just that, 4 weeks vacation, not 28 working days (close to 6 weeks of vacation). You are supposed to take it in chunks of at least 1 week obviously, and by law you have to have one vacation of at least 2 weeks in length. For Canada however, the 10 days means 10 working days, so really 2 weeks.

Holidays - again quite a big difference. In Estonia, if a holiday falls on a weekend, it doesn't get carried over to the next week like it does in Canada. So hence some years you'll have more actual holidays than others. In 2010, 7 out of the 12 holiday days in Estonia fall on actual working days. In 2011, only 5.

Sick days - another difference maker. All depends on local labour law and how sick pay is legislated. In Estonia, the first 3 days are considered your "deductible", to use an insurance term, so you don't get paid anything by anyone. Days 4 through 8, your employer pays 70% of your calculated daily wage (calculated from your last 6 months of employment). From day 9 onwards, the state pays 70% of your calculated daily wage (calculated from your previous calendar year's income). In the province of Ontario, Canada, by law you are allowed up to 10 unpaid sick days per year, but most Canadian employers provide paid sick days, some even bankable and some allow it to be paid out if you leave the company.

So all in all, tables such as this are rather meaningless without an actual analysis of the labor laws and practices of each country.

Not to substantiate any parent's claims about PJ not existing, but your response is curious - the proof is supposed to be in a blog post written by a journalist who has firmly sided with PJ in his views, and 70 pages of legalese in PDF with no references to where the point is? This makes an intelligent person?

Actually Oracle charges per socket on Standard and Standard One licenses and per Core only on Enterprise licenses.

http://www.amazon.com/Adesso-WIRELESS-SLIMTOUCH-TOUCHPAD-WKB-4000US/dp/B00083Y0YG

Done! What's next?

FWIW, I have 2 of these, the one used further out is about 25 feet. Works great. Looks like it's the same thing, but mine are: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Keysonic-ACK-540RF-Wireless-Keyboard-Touchpad/dp/B002WB1JYQ

So, if it isn't fine Caribbean coral, it's not a plant? There's no plants in a sea that's an average of only 50 meters deep (about 170ft for you metrically challenged people)? Just because it isn't pretty doesn't mean it isn't there or important. But anyway, the problem isn't so much destruction of plant or animal life, the area affected is relatively small, but the fact that the Baltic Sea floor is covered not only with regular ordnance from the Russians and Germans, but also with tons upon tons of chemical weapons from WWII era and probably even more significantly, with untold amounts of industrial chemical waste that was produced during the cold war era and was regularly dumped by the russians into the waters all over the sea.

Web servers aren't of course the only type of servers running out there. You know the whole big shut-off-the-light initiatives all over the world in office buildings? Well this is much of the same. You may not need terminal servers going 24/7, or even some databases that are only used during business hours for internal operations. Or you likely have development, test, live environments - why not shut down dev and test during hours where no one uses them? Or for larger operations, smart monitoring may shut down / start up cluster nodes as necessary, as demand falls or rises.

As other posters have mentioned, it all comes down to economics. If it there is no cost benefit to the server owner then there's no incentive other than goodwill to do any of the above. Currently, I don't know of any provider who separates the electric bill from the rest of your bill - as in if you keep your servers shut off the entire month, you pay nothing, if you draw huge power, well then you get walloped.

In cases of larger operations / data center owners who have their own dedicated data center, then other than the electric bill itself, the huge benefit would be the (un)necessity of upgrading the power infrastructure. Or in cases of capped power in an area (yes, there are some where extra power cannot be had from the utility because their own infrastructure would have to be upgraded and the resulting passed down cost would be unfeasible), the simple fact that you can still add more servers is also incentive enough.

And using a 3000 lb. box (the Prius for example) to carry that same person is a great and efficient idea?

How about a 130lb box, does that make more sense? It sure does, but your buddies are probably going to have a good laugh, nevermind the little pieces of you that are going to be all over the road if you hit anything bigger than a cat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_P50

"Also: a Russian can not be a president of Latvia, also Russian language is _forbidden_ for certain things there. For example, it's against the law to send a bill in Russian (even if it is translated into Latvian)."

[citation needed]

"In Estonia you can say that "The best Russian is a dead Russian", but saying the same about Estonians will land you in the prison."

I can already tell you that is BS. But, again, [citation needed] :)

"Estonian committee on war crimes somehow overlooks all the war crimes committed by Estonians."

Which committee? Which war crimes were committed and by who? Which war crimes have which russians been convicted of there (since you seem to imply that they have)?

The atrocities russians perpetrated even AFTER the war in Estonia (and many many other countries), nevermind during it, should make any russian hang their head in shame. Germany acknowledged its role in the terrible fate of Europe in the 20th century, they've apologized, they've even paid real money to victims, but Russia to this day refuses to acknowledge any such thing. To this day, russians living in countries they happily occupied for 50 years gather to celebrate "victory day", which always comes as a slap in the face to the so called native population of those countries. Nothing like watching a bunch of babushkas celebrate the start of occupation, deportations, tortures, etc.

"But of course, that's a good thing! We can't let those stupid Russians maintain their culture. After all, USSR was the Evil Empire and the practice of Russification was universally condemned by the West. So it's a good thing that we preemptively destroy Russian culture."

Who is destroying russian culture? Nobody is outlawing russians speaking russian to one another, procuring russian language books isn't outlawed, travel to russia isn't restricted, etc. Unlike that which happened during the occupation and russification which you I guess don't condemn at all.

Funny how russians in the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, etc. don't demand that everyone speaks russian to them, don't cry about having to pass citizenship exams, don't yell discrimination when they can't become the president of the US because one has to be a natural born citizen there...Is it maybe because in those countries even the russians themselves would find such expectations ridiculous, but in their former "sphere of influence" it was and still is somehow expected?

"[citation needed]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_9_tragedy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhumi_Massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Abkhazia_(1992%E2%80%931993)

"Do you know that it's not Edisson who's invented the lightbulb? And not Marconi who's invented the radio."

Let me guess, you'll next claim Popov invented the radio (not Marconi, not Tesla, not Hertz) and the light bulb was invented by Lodygin (not Edison, not Davy, not Swan) :)

"Can you cite examples of unquestionably bad data from a recent (~15 years) Russian textbook?"

Not directly, no, which is why I posed the question. I do however have enough soviet era textbooks to draw a conclusion from though, from your posts I guessed you're going by those, but if not then I guess the propaganda didn't die with the union.

Is that really the russian school textbook version of the story? Because the rest of the world sure doesn't recognize it that way. But hey, no surprise, during the soviet times, all major discoveries were apparently also made by russians and "stolen" by the big bad capitalists in the west. Reading soviet era textbooks is half sad, half hilarious. Propaganda rules though right?

Oh, do tell. In which way are they mistreated and discriminated? Are the poor things being forced to pass a simple official language test as a part of becoming a citizen? Because you know, it's quite difficult to do so even after living in the country for the last N decades?

It always amazes me that when russians emigrate to say New York, they speak passable english within months, but in the formerly occupied countries were they've lived for decades, they still haven't come to grasp it.

In case anyone's wondering, the reason is that in those formerly occupied countries they were previously the "ruling elite" and everyone was forced to speak russian with them. Not so much anymore, and I guess that just hurts inside :)

Funny also that even when Mr. Putin offered a program for those poor repressed russians in other countries to come back home, with financial assistance and all, almost none took up the offer. Yet they still loudly complain about their "terrible treatment".