You've not been there, have you?

You mean, like Japan did, then completely rolled all over US industry once it had the production base?

A realist will examine it properly, and notice that there's a small gap (and thus take that, as it's more efficient). If the gap isn't there, they'll look for a way round..
In your analogy, the people who are the "positive" adjusted ones will quite possibly spend the time until they starve to death or die of thirst looking for that small gap "that must be there, just near here", while the realist acknowledges that there's something insurmountable, so routes round it.

Winning would be getting in, achieving the objective and getting out without making an international incident out of it, or giving the opponent a chance to stir things up and look strong (they didn't capture a leader, just a soldier who was glad to die for the cause, and will now be in 'heaven' with his fourty virgins, or whatever is promised).. The eyes of the world suddenly look America's way (hot on the heels of the international disbelief that the USA can be held to ransom internally by a hard line faction within its own government, almost shutting it down totally). The US is currently looking VERY incompetent on the international stage. This is bad for diplomacy, and the negotiating stance (and possible alliances).
The losses for the US in this are actually pretty staggering if you take into account that their "successful" mission cost the country far more than they could ever hope to gain (a pyhrric victory), and the "failed" mission just makes them seem inept and ineffective.. The world's most highly funded military pushed back by a few guys who are portrayed almost as frothing at the mouth backwards sheep-herders with cheap guns and no real military knowledge and funding that doesn't amount to a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on gearing up the US squad.
It's pretty damning really.
And no, I don't hold the military guys in lesser regard because of this.. I put it squarely in the hands of the politicians who thought it would be a good idea. You know, the same kind of people who are currently so patriotic about their country, they're willing to see if crash and burn because they're not getting their own way.
Maybe that's not the real truth, but that's pretty much the international perceived view.. And that's not something any country wants..

Interesting.. You mention that SWAT raids increase, and more people incarcerated tallies up with fewer gun crimes being committed.
That seems to imply that if you lock up (or shoot in a SWAT raid) the group that are prone to committing gun crime, they don't get to commit it. So the system seems to work as intended; the law abiding non-psychotic population are protected.

What's your beef with that?

Payroll, cleaners, administrative staff that send letters, most of the techies that keep things running, internal post, park wardens, public garbage colleciton.. You know, everything that isn't directly front line on keeping the basic lights on (but just don't ask for anything because there isn't the resource).

No, they had lots of people that said the system was unusable.. There were priorities of error, and a priority 1 was a showstopper.
The places that consistently tested showed that the system for the first several years (already way past expected implementation date) for the Care Records part was seriously broken, and not fit for live use (bear in mind, this system isn't just supposed to be able to hold your office files, and it's fine if it's down for half an hour now and then, and perhaps lose a few things along the way with only a grumble; it holds your medical records.. The things that make the difference between life and death in some cases).

With things not working out on either side (again, for the Care Records parts; some parts, like PACS [Picture Archival and Communication System;the digitisation of your X-Rays instead of using film] work fine and are in almost universal use now, vastly changing the nature of care in the NHS.
The big problems with it were:

A) Tony Blair not having a clue what was wanted, but saying it should be done in a year.

B) Setting a guy in charge of it that failed his computing degree.. One Richard Granger. It was pretty much his ideas that doomed the Care Records part of it, and allowed out a spec that was more a back of a cigarette packet sketch than a real spec.

C) Failing to have a real spec. Now the companies all bid for a very nebulous thing that said "You give us a lovely system that does what we want, and we'll give you billions.". Of course, they produced what they thought the NHS wanted, but the NHS discovered that it wasn't what they wanted. You know, basic Spec documentation you cover on computing. Which Granger failed.

D) There was also fault with the companies who leaped at the cash without a real spec.. They should have known that the contract was WAY too wooly and actually tied it down to real deliverables.

At renegotiation time, some of the vendors (like Fujitsu) worked out the cost of really doing what the NHS asked for (which was all the project management of the first round, plus a semi accurate spec). Which was a truly staggering figure. More than the NHS could stomach. The two are still in a legal scrap.
Some vendors still kept the lights on in the data centres, and hosted what was there, but those installations are likely going to have to move out of those data centres by about 2015, as they're too expensive to maintain for the few installs.. And none of the vendors want to renew the system contract.

So, the price tag covers all the allocation (it was scaled to host EVERY NHS hospital in the UK, which is most of them), training, consultancy, migration of data (a high precision activity that needs zero data loss on a vast amount of very complex information, coming out of a vast quantity of different databases, and being shoehorned into one uniform schema. Doing this while still providing clinical care (you don't get to shut a hospital down for ripping out the heart of its data systems and replacing them with a new; it's all done while still treating patients and making sure nothing gets mis-recorded).. Training of a huge number of clinical staff (doctors, nurses, and anyone else who needs to use the system inside the NHS), the feeds.. Interfaces between that system and the various disparate ones that it needs to communicate with inside a hospital..

When you look at it, it's a breathtaking proposal, just nobody on high seemed to recognise that, and expected fast results because they said so and waved a fat wallet around. Unsurprisingly it went awry. The current UK government looked at the figures, the legal position and the chances of getting it sorted from a more businesslike side, and canned the bits that wouldn't work (the care records area).

As for the data protection side, that was one of the most heavily guarded I've seen anywhere.. It was pretty robust. The few 'leaks' that happened (people looking at records they shouldn't) were spotted by access audit, and people lost the jobs.. That simple, that strict.

Actual phychological and physical harm (bullying) is ok.. But god forbid you make a drawing of a video to sate your frustrations (or map a photo onto a game avatar, you know, like we used to put pictures on a dartboard).. That's illegal, terroristy and you need to be locked up for that!

Step 1) Someone is found to be bullying, punish them.
Step 2) See a lot of this kind of behaviour vanish.

When you have no presence in a market, and most of your customers are about to enter an upgrade cycle to "your new product", sure, the growth rate is high. There again, iOS and Android have a huge market, close to saturated, yet still growing.
This is akin to saying "my herb garden expanding at a faster rate than a continent filled with forest".

Teenagers are neurologically wired to take risks. It's part of the development of brains; many go on to do circus tricks far more dangerous (hell, American Football is as dangerous; there's zero legitimate reason to run full pelt into another guy who's also running full pelt at you, just to grab a ball.. Yet it's an American national sport that everyone applauds!).
This guy was involved in a scene that often leads to interest in aeronautics and engineering, certainly a more technical side than most, so I don't think he was as 'stupid' as many here seem to think.. He made one mistake, and it was a fatal one.. That's a sad thing..
Sportsmen who push the edge always expose themselves to risk, but they're also the ones that if they survive, everyone applauds the most.

Getting resource to the moon is expensive (fighting against a heavy gravity well). Getting stuff back to earth is pretty cheap.
Once you have the operation set up, it's pretty cheap.

Very few Americans know their history.. A lot remember the revisionist rewrites.. But very few know the histories that were written at the time..

Yes you can.
"Pirating" something on the personal scale would be to take a copy of the program for your use without permission.
Taking the source to sell elsewhere is commercial piracy, which is rightfully pilloried everywhere (I don't think I've seen many, if any, posts here defending commercial pirates; most of the replies I've read have flat out called for a lynch mob. They're in the same social category as spammers).

What you're effectively saying in your post is "You can't commit theft while with the same breath defend copyright infringement". Which, being completely separate things, you can do without the slightest hint of hypocrisy.

It's all part of the Eternal September playing a rush to the bottom.
Trolls have discovered there's very little (if any) consequence to them being as obnoxious as possible, and many have come to realise that if you troll and upset people, they can't let it go as well as a well reasoned argument.
Thus, it seems that if you Troll, you get a response, so more people troll, and the more abusive you are, the more attention is paid (and god forbid, someone deletes the abusive post, as that then ends up noted on all the tech blogs that the developer is censoring).

While things are stacked towards letting trolling pay off, I don't think anything's going to change..

I run an Android tablet, Linux laptop, iPhone and Win7 desktop. Each of them is fine for what I need them to do (they were individually chosen for a particular task)..
The Android tab isn't a Nexus.. It's one of the cheap, but surprisingly good imports (a Rapid5 v2 from a company called A1CS) with a nice flash expansion from a micro SD, USB connector and HDMI out.. Gives me a nice 32GB flash expansion right there, quad core CPU, ability to watch movies (with good quality video and perfectly acceptable audio, though like all these devices, best done using headphones).
I have my dive log on it, some movies, some books through the kindle app for when I'm not toting my kindle (Which I prefer for reading, but can use the tab at a push).. Notepads to write things with.. Tools to play around with photographs.. Pretty much all the things I need to keep myself occupied without having a network available that I need.. As soon as I get a net connection, then there's always the social nets, the web, email etc..
To date, I'm happy with my little Android tab.. The fact that it cost me under £100 means I can take it to dive sites and use the log, without worrying too much if it gets broken (which it hasn't done to date, nor has its predecessor).