It's useful to remember that missiles are the fast showy way to get warheads to targets. Smuggling is a much lower tech and more realistic (for them) threat. As for introducing the new leader to all the goods of the west, he apparently went to school in Switzerland from 1993 - 2000 so it's doubtful he hasn't seen such. He was 16-17 so I don't know about the strippers. He probably has all those he wants though.

>If the US decided right now to nuke NK the bombs would be falling within the hour. Everybody knows that. And NK surely knows that if they somehow lobbed one of their weapons at us the response would be, well...excessive. Yes, millions of NK people the leaders don't give a crap about would undoubtedly be killed. Given the time required to find Osama and Saddam the bunker the leadership was in would probably be missed. China might well suffer extensive fallout issues. The US would suffer a catastrophe thousands or tens of thousands of times greater than the 9-11 attacks. This does not work out well for us. This skips the possibility they will launch at a US carrier group, barren island or other non-continental target to induce terror but not civilian damage. We don't want them to have nukes for lots of reasons.

People trust robots around their kids all the time. It just depends on having the robot not look scary and to act in predictable ways. Don't believe me? Here are a jillion photos: http://www.proboticsamerica.com/photos.html

They didn't. They said an arguably political paper "played a role in the prosecution" . They don't consider the paper political or they don't consider it the whole motivation. It's a short paper, probably worth reading so you can make up your own mind how wrong they were.

http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

>Law is a great thing until you realize you're on the wrong side of the line, at the wrong moment in time

Ever download something copywritten, participate in a fantasy football league or shower naked in Florida....criminal? If so it sounds like you were carrying a gun during the commission of a crime so the penalties are strengthened (ok not with the showering perhaps).

Law has progressed to the point where if you piss off a DA he can find something to charge you with. You are always on the wrong side when they want you to be.

Hey let's push the state into exempting out of state companies so we can get the exemption too. Oh crap, we just screwed it up for everyone and wasted millions in legal fees for a ruling that will get us nothing. Who could have ever guessed California would take the money grab option?

Welcome to life as a small business. I hope you're good at finding work for your robot.

V2.0, no doubt destined for Kickstarter momentarily courtesy of some local hacker, would probably have onboard storage for your data to deal with just such a concern.

No point, a market couldn't possibly compete with the illegal firmware you'll be able to download off of Pirate Bay.

If the information in any laptop (or desktop) could be worth tens of thousands in fines we might just see an increase in health care thefts and blackmail. Cheaper to pay to get the laptop back than to pay the fine if the data goes public.

Will they be happy if I send them 300 copies of Planetside2? There's a lot of shooting in that one.

Wouldn't you?

It's really amazing to take a look at the first strips then walk through as the artist has improved in technique and detail. There's an easy jump to the first strip. Compare that to the latest one. The difference is profound.

In Texas we call this list the phone book. Not published much any more.

China has had 4+ times the population of the US for a very long time. The real reason they haven't been ahead of the US in production for many decades is that the productivity of the people was squandered by political forces within the country. It was corruption at the highest level, trading the productive potential for political stability.

We have corruption too. Bad politicians who do sweetheart deals with contributors, crappy patent or copyright laws, lawsuits over unreasonable things with unreasonable settlements and banking malfeasance are all examples of our elements of corruption and there are many more. I think it's relative corruption that will decide if one population is a dozen times as effective as another. That means it will decide who's economy runs things in the 21st century.