The price to the U.S for WW2 was $288 trillion, imagine the accelerator we could have build with that.
[citation needed]
According to The Navy Department Library, the second world war cost about $300 billion in 1945 dollars, or $4.1 trillion in today's dollars. If you include the costs of the Marshall Plan, etc, I'm sure that changes things quite a bit, but probably not almost two orders of magnitude.
Have you compared the prices of the two?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to take anything away from Google here (if I could have a nexus phone on Verizon, believe me, I'd be rolling a couple of dozen out tomorrow). I'm not comparing price/performance here, I'm just pointing out how silly it is to make a big deal out of the fact that someone's unreleased flagship device is faster than everyone else's existing devices.
According to Rightware's Power Board, the Nexus 5 delivered the second-highest Benchmark X gaming score among smartphones, behind only the iPhone 5S, making it the most powerful Android-based handset in the land.
Latest generation flagship smartphone faster than previous models. Film at 11.
I have a better punishment: no visas of any kind for three years. No h1b, no b1, your CEO can't have a visa for his quarterly visit, nothing. The punishment should fit the crime.
This is a bit like asking physicists to come up with a reason that newtons apple falls that DOESNT involve gravity. It just stops being science.
Why, exactly, is this not science? Science is a method, not a tucking religion! Our understanding of the universe is imperfect at best and it's certainly POSSIBLE that there is another explanation. Not at ALL likely, but possible.
If everyone had your hostility toward retesting what we already know, we'd still think the earth was flat and that it was the center of the universe.
The post he responded to referenced Elon Musk and Bell Labs. Going a bit further afield the old xerox PARC and IBM of of did plenty of research. Microsoft spends a bunch on pie in the sky stuff. John Carmack plowed plenty of money into building rockets.
Has government funded research produced absolutely incredible results that we're all better off for? Abso-freaking-lutely! Is the government the ONLY one that spends on basic research with no immediate application? Absolutely NOT!
I was referring to the animated type, unless you can come up with an ascii emoticon that is rolling its eyes?
Also an excellent example
To be fair, Obama didn't show up for work in 2007-2008, he was too busy running for higher office to do the job he was elected to do. I wish
Once upon a time, politicians would resign from their current office in order to run for a different one, but the last one I can remember doing that was Bob Dole in 1996. The worst example I can think of was Joe Lieberman, who simultaneously ran for reelection to the Senate and for Vice President just four years later.
I think one thing you say above is a key point:
in theory, anybody can form a corporation and operate it to take advantage of the extra "rights" to be gained thereby,
I don't believe a corporation should have "extra" rights. I think should they have all the rights of the people that make them up, and that's where it ends. I agree completely that there is a massive problem with how we treat corporate entities--whenever someone can, say, commit a felony resulting in the deaths, and some limited liability entity walks away with a token fine as a result, there is something seriously wrong... but your proposed solution doesn't correct that! We need to overhaul the courts, not restrict free speech.
How would restricting the political activities of that entity-in-law have in any way affected the Constitutional rights of the people operating it?
How does, say, the New York Times corporation operate in an environment where corporate entities do not have free speech and freedom of the press? You can argue that the individual reporters are simply exercising their own rights, but that fails once you dig into it--the corporation's money is being spent to give those reporters a voice. The editorial page is more than just the editor's personal opinion, it's the de facto position of the newspaper. "Vote for Giant Douche! He's better than Turd Sandwich!" is being broadcast to millions of people, and it's a corporation that's doing it.
How, possibly, can you deny this right and still be faithful to the spirit of the first amendment?
I've been shouting slippery slope for decades... usually to a chorus of "traitor" and "terrorist sympathizer"
Haven't you heard? The slippery slope is a fallacy, and anyone who makes the argument can be dismissed out of hand. Basically, we're fucked.
Between the Patriot Act and Citizens United we no longer are a constitutional democracy.
I am vehemently opposed to the PATRIOT act, but I personally cannot understand the notion that people, when acting together, lose their constitutional rights, and that's exactly what an opposite ruling in Citizens United would have implied.
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If this is true, law enforcement (a) blatantly exceeded the scope of a lawful search warrant; and (b) used a search warrant as a pretext to seize material that they had no authority to seize.
This is unusually bad. People need to lose their jobs for this.
No, people need to be jailed for this.
Just how stupid are you? They gave you exactly the same card with exactly the same functionality as everyone else. Then they told you your card is special, and you bought it?
The only thing special is you... In a short bus kind of way.
Some (though not all) banks (for example, Bank of America) still offer cards that only work with a PIN in the ATM, and do NOT work as debit or credit cards. Your abusive post above merely proves that you're not only an asshole, you're also an ignorant one.
Do you have a bank loan at 1.99% for your car, and pay the dealership in cash, or did you get the 1.99% through the dealership. In many cases, the "low" interest rates you get from the dealership are only offered because the price of the car is high to compensate. Tell the dealership you'll pay cash, and the price of the car will drop significantly.
This is really only true when you're talking about manufacturer subsidized loans ("0% financing through GMAC with approved credit!"), which usually are not available in conjunction with manufacturer rebates--which almost EVERY car on the market has (even Toyota these days). In some cases, the rebates are absurdly large (pickup trucks) so you can see massive swings in the price of the car if you forego the manufacturer financing. Overall, dealerships typically MAKE money on finance deals (kickbacks from the banks/credit unions for writing the loans).
That said, walking into the dealership with a cashier's check DOES tend to short circuit the negotiating process... not because the dealership is somehow losing money on a loan, but rather because the finance manager is no more immune to having cash waved under his nose than anyone else is.
Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty. -- Plato
