There are already pressure meters, flow rate monitors, gravity meters, automatic shutdown valves. Every origination station, booster station, tank farm, delivery station, and pumping station monitors their assigned segments while simultaneously passing all the monitoring data back to a centralized pipeline control center. However these precautions cannot stop at least some product from being released into the environment if the actual pipeline is ruptured.

The NK government stays in power because of the severe isolation that it keeps it's citizens in. 65 years of non-stop government repression coupled with brutal penal laws for any dissent has produced a docile, compliant, and non-questioning public that literally knows nothing about the outside world and how there lives measure up when compared to others around the world. There will never be any citizen led protests against the NK government.

Outside of a full military invasion there is not much China can do about NK. The NK hissy fits and temper tantrums hurt China more than they do the US. Do you think China wanted to see the US and it's Asian allies beefing up their missile defense systems? That's exactly what they got when NK was spouting all the BS about launching nuclear attacks against the US and anyone else who happened to be in range.

Actually it gives Cuban citizens a non-governmental channel they can use to communicate with one another. Such communication doesn't necessarily need to be political in nature. Twitter was born out of the efforts to provide Iranians with a way to communicate that could bypass the government controls.

Memory and CPU power are there to be used so why not take advantage of it. And what the hell is a hand coded app? Or are you referring to programming against a runtime versus programming directly against the OS? And what does eschewing OO approaches mean? Are you talking about an application that encapsulates all it's functionalities without referencing any external resources or dependencies?

I see absolutely no propaganda in my earlier statement. Are you actually saying only the US operates foreign intelligence programs to push for desired outcomes that could benefit its own interests? As far as a US Ministry of Truth goes the US is the only major power that places national firewalls or internet filters to restrict access to any information. People that speak of Ministries of Truth are just upset that their pet opinions might not be as popular as they would like them to be. Anyone expressing a differing opinion is automatically stupid, lying, or a state agent looking to suppress the truth.

Wasn't there a recent private company looking for people to sign up for a one way trip to Mars?They got a couple hundred thousand applications. NASA could just chip in some money for access to study the health data on those going to help research ways into making it safer.

Russia is not the only country capable of this type of action. After all how much precision is really necessary when you are dealing with nukes?

The US does not act in a vacuum. It is not the only country with aggressive intelligence agencies looking to collect information from every one they can. And the preposterous claims that the US should not spy on it's "friends" is hilarious in the extreme. Countries don't have "friends" they only have interests which are constantly in flux. Outside of some initial indignant statements for public consumption concerning the NSA foreign intelligence programs the issue has been gradually pushed to the background because hypocrisy does have it's limits. When the Russian FSB, China's MSS,
England's GCHQ, Brazil's ABIN, France's DCRI, Germany's BND, and all the other international agencies close up shop then the NSA and CIA can be disbanded.

And who exactly was threatening their shipping traffic? Even the most idiotic countries understand that attempting to interfere with international shipping traffic gives any maritime power all the authority it needs to correct the situation. Even supposedly allied countries frown upon any disruptions of the established shipping lanes as the US proved when it refused to support England, France, and Israel from taking control of the Suez canal from Egypt in 1956. The Egyptians and surrounding Arab countries paid a steep price when they tried to deny Israel the use of the Suez canal in 1967. Just a few poor fishermen hijacking shipping off the coast of Africa resulted in a multi-nation modern task force being formed to secure shipping through the area. If Iran was to ever attempt to follow through with their threats to close the Strait of Hormuz they would give the US, SA, Israel, and possibly China all the justification they need to correct the problem.

And now the Russians are burdened with propping up Syria and tying up resources in the Ukraine for little or no gain while scaring the European countries into breathing life back into NATO. Not to mention they have kicked off a mad dash for Europe to come up with alternative natural gas sources because they don't want to be at the Russians mercy. That will hit the Russians where it really counts. It seems the Russians are no better than the US when it comes to entering into pointless and ultimately unproductive foreign policies.

As long as gay couples are mandated to use the exact same divorce laws why not let them join in the fun known as marital bliss?

It doesn't matter whether it was a Civil or Military expenditure, what matters is that the project was funded. There is also a manned version of this vehicle in the works. If you need billions to pursue technology research you are more likely to get your funding if your project can pitched as having any military related applications.

There buggy software might have something to do with the rapid evolution of the processors and memory architectures during this era. In the beginning good enough replaced perfection when it came to releasing new software. By the time something was perfect you risked the chance that your targeted architecture was deemed obsolete. During this time you also had rapid increases in the number of peripherals such as network cards, video cards, printers, and input devices. This all happened when there were no industry standards and companies were building proprietary hardware and software solutions. It's amazing things worked at all.

All of the countries who don't like the US (as if it were a popularity contest) still invest their reserves in the US. The oil producing countries are well aware that US dependency on their oil is rapidly disappearing and their leverage over the US has also disappeared. One more thing, an 18% drop in exports is enough to rollback every economic advancement China has made over the last 20 years.