... George Lucas?

Maybe my google-fu is weak today, I got nothing (but pages and pages of that Amidala quote). Please cite the original quote from the actual person?

MIRV = Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle. So each of those 1500 MIRVs carries multiple nuclear warheads. Need five mid-sized nukes to wipe out NYC? No problem. Ten for LA? Still no problem. One missile each, just program in your preferred detonation pattern for the warheads:

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

Here's a long-exposure photo of a single "Peacekeeper" missile dropping eight independent warheads (unarmed in this case):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

I had understood the US to have the most with some 6000, and other than western europe and Russia I didnt think anyone else had any.

From the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia and US have rough parity, then it's France/China/Britain, then Israel/Pakistan/India, then North Korea, in descending orders of magnitude.

http://bos.sagepub.com/content...

You're thinking "world" = "surface area". I strongly suspect the GP is thinking "world" = "modern civilisation". Deploy even a fifth of those 1500 MIRVs against the planet by strategically targeting urban population centres in order of descending population, and the world as we know it would be gone.

Why not have each reviewer's rating for a given item/location be statistically compared/weighted to that reviewer's history of ratings, e.g. a 5-star rating from someone who consistently gives 5-star ratings for everything could be valued less than someone who only does so some of the time, with weighting for older reviewers, anonymous reviewers, etc. Basically the equivalent of a bayesian spam filter, except for reviewers instead of mail. Yes, it won't be perfect, but can it at least be better than what we have now?

To borrow from HHGttG, maybe the foreigners realise the purpose of the president is "not to wield power but to draw attention away from it"?

On slashdot, GP usually means "Grand-Parent (post)", as in:

Grand-Parent post
.. Parent post
.. .. This post.

... where did you source your monitor, Umbrella or Weyland-Utani or something?

Point taken.

That's (state) socialism, not communism. I've pondered that communism ("characterized by the absence of social classes, money and the state") should be easier to achieve via capitalism than via (state) socialism, since the former more strongly encourages the technological innovations required to provide the means of eliminating scarcity that communism requires to be at all practical.

That, so far to me, was the deepest irony of the USSR: to eliminate the State, they created the State, and It was doomed from the beginning; whether or not communism may one day be feasible, our 20th Century selves lacked (and still lack) the technology to compensate for our psychology.

The USA and similar "capitalist" nations do have their own irony: one of their economic foundations is the very non-capitalist structure of copyright and patent law (think about it: fundamentally, the state dictates who may use any idea, enforcing artificial scarcities and artificially captive markets). It will be interesting to see if/how they overcome this flaw.

Ugh, one of those questions. By which I mean, people do tend to unconsciously insert "knowingly" into such questions, proceed to consciously answer "No", and then there it is, lurking silently in the filing cabinet for if HR ever need a pretext to fire someone.

I believe the implication is that if your opponents are claiming to be proponents of the existing government, it's hypocritical of them to use illegal means in their efforts to silence you - the old "do as I say, not as I do" problem.

Hmm. Also from Wikipedia, later in that same article:

This issue did come before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago, in which the Supreme Court, "reversed the Seventh Circuit, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment makes the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense applicable to the states."

As for your assertion that there is no right to overthrow the government, that is not strictly true. Note that the Second specifies not just any "state", but a "free state". A lawful government should have nothing to fear from the Second. An unlawful government, on the other hand, one would hope not so much.

Actually, per the official download page, MSE is free for "small businesses with up to 10 PCs".

Really? What if that database field is CUSTOMER_NAME? Do you think it won't "shape the business" if the chosen field length turns out to be too short for 20% of the intended customer base?