My understanding is that Chinese law doesn't allow foreigners to own a Chinese strategic asset.

Yes, which is exactly why China's campaign to make the yuan a major world currency is laughable. People aren't going to buy a currency just so they can buy consumer goods from you, they are going to want to invest it, and current Chinese law pretty much makes that impossible to do in any sort of meaningful fashion. China is trying to "have it's cake and eat it to" by throwing it's weight around like one of the big boys but still being ultra-protectionist like a developing economy. Sooner or later this is going to catch up with them, and it's not going to be pretty.

Um, COLBOL is probably one of the few languages out there that DOESNT have a dedicated fan-boy following. Seriously, watch this thread and see which of the following statements gets the most hate:

Ruby, as an untyped language, is incredibly slow and thus should not be used for large scale systems

Node.js encourages unmaintainable code because of "callback hell" and prototype inheritance is an abomination

Java is way too verbose to be useful, and the JVMs gc sucks

Python is a fractured environment and should only be used for small-scale projects

COBOL is a dinosaur language that is only useful for maintaining crufty legacy code.

Except for most of that "debt" was actually accrued by GW Bush resolving his daddy issues, Obama simply stopped playing games with the debt. The deficit is now lower than it was at any time under Bush..... but silly me, debating a Republican with facts. We all know Republicans are immune to them.

But hey, Bush was able to work out his daddy issues, doesn't that count for something?

You are also oh so conveniently ignoring one tiny little fact, year over year DEVICE SALES ARE GOING UP! Yes, market share is going down, but that's largely because the smartphone market has been growing so fast, Apple's share of it hasn't been growing as fast as the market has. You want to know whose sales have been dipping recently? Samsungs!. But don't let those silly facts get in the way of your baseless ranting!

Which is part of what drives the radicalism of the Islamic clerics. They have a perverse incentive for keeping things as fundamentalist as possible. They look to what happened to the clergy in Europe, who in roughly a 100 year span went from being basically on top of the social hierarchy to near the bottom, and are scared it might happen to them. In their eyes the situation in Europe was brought around both by the clergy actively supporting reform, but perhaps even more importantly the clergy not fighting back against reform hard enough(read cutting the heads off of reformers). In a society where your social status not only dictates the amount of property you have, but also your access to women, it's not surprising that the Islamic clergy are scared shitless of modernization and are doing everything in their power to stop it.

That's why I only eat the meat I catch using nothing but a club. Chasing those damn deer through the parking lot does really help keep off the fat, and keeps the neighbors talking.

Well, in the future here is a handy rule of thumb that has helped me throughout my life: if someone offers to have sex with you in exchange for a bucket of fish, run.

That's not entirely true, you have to have a 64 bit boot loader to be able to run the latest and greatest OS X. The first generation of Intel Mac Pros had a 32 bit boot loader and are thus officially unable to run anything post Lion(there are workarounds however)

So who does a prostrate exam? Sticking your fingers in your own ass?

Well, if you fork the feed then you may just be able to pay for the medical exam while performing it.

I was about 100 km from Fukushima when it happened, the reason they didn't flood the reactors with seawater right away was that the president of TEPCO, who before the earthquake was famous for being a cost cutter, wanted to save the reactor because if they flooded it it would never produce power again. He only reluctantly agreed to have it flooded after it was clear not doing so would result in an even bigger catastrophe. The dude should be hung for what he did.

Apparently employees at Apple are required to don something similar when working on "top secret" projects....

Yeah, because the dude was there volunteering in Africa because he just hates black people. And of course, drug manufacturing is just SOOOOOOO simple that anyone can do it, it's just those greedy bastards(who cares who they are, anyone but you is a greedy bastard, right?) who are preventing it. Here is a clue dipshit, if developing drugs is so easy, why don't you be the hero and do it? Or would that interrupt your self-righteousness time?

Actually ebola is quite deadly for non-human primates as well, in fact they have successfully created a vaccine that prevents the disease in non-human primates, it just hasn't been developed for humans as of yet. Also, fwiw the most likely reservoir for the disease is bats, bats apparently can carry the disease without suffering any ill effects.

Unfortunately that is pretty much an apt description of everything Sony has made in the past 2 decades or so, really slick hardware with crap software and frustrating incompatibilities. They either need to just do a clean sweep of their software division or else just become a hardware design consulting company.