The most common (cheapest) ground based heat seeker missiles in use today detonate prior to impact and throw shrapnel (multiple, small, high velocity projectiles) into the target to obtain the widest kill radius. It's like the difference between buckshot and a slug. And yes there are missiles of all sorts where the warhead stays intact until impact but they are usually more high end (expensive) and need the guidance systems intact as long as possible to make sure it goes through the right window or down the correct air shaft when launched from several miles away.

And the US was lucky the Japanese didn't know the US only had 2 nuclear weapons. Had the Japanese knew they most likely would have not surrendered which would have lead to a US invasion of Japan where millions on both sides would have been killed.

A little late but have you seen the 747 Google uses as it's corporate executive ferry? It probably doesn't have any missile defenses and a constant fighter escort but I imagine they make do without those amenities.

That's the ticket! More taxes to be collected by a government full of senators and their lackeys who would be hard pressed to balance their own personal checkbooks. The reason the US can't balance it's budget is that there isn't anyone in Washington who even knows what that means let alone on how to achieve it. There is no column for political rhetoric in the budget spreadsheet. The energy market will sort itself out fine all by itself. The large oil companies today are investing billions of dollars in alternative fuel R&D. The current US oil and gas boom is just making their alternative fuel R&D investments easier to justify as their profits rise. The people running these companies are not idiots. They know perfectly well oil and natural gas are finite resources that will become scarcer as the world population continues to grow faster than the planets resources can ever hope to sustain. When that time comes they want to make sure they control the market and make the same amount of profits they have made in the fossil fuel markets. You want hybrid or electric car sales to increase than build the recharging infrastructure needed to support vehicles of that type. As it is the current battery technology is still weak and inefficient if you plan on driving more than 150 miles away from the nearest charging outlet. The perfect and most efficient electric car ever invented could roll off the production line tomorrow but you would still need to support both the fossil fuel delivery infrastructure as well as a corresponding infrastructure for alternative energy cars. You think every fossil fueled vehicle is going to be magically replaced overnight? Lower fuel prices are attracting foreign manufactures to the US to take advantage of the ridiculously low energy costs when compared against shipping products to the country and paying the import taxes. Lower fossil fuel prices take the steam out of those countries who use the energy markets punch above their weight in international power rankings. The fossil fuel cars today are lighter, increased mpg, and have lower emissions than at anytime in the history of internal combustion engines.

Pharmaceutical companies have no need or right to even $1 of government funding. Engineering vaccines is not fast or cheap. But the pharmaceutical companies do have a lengthy patent exclusivity to ensure they can recoup the R&D expenses and make a handsome profit before generics hit the market. The government has already allowed new Ebola drugs to be used even though the drugs have not finished human trials or completed the extensive process to certify the drugs.

The perceived panic about Ebola is blown out of proportion just like a host of other bullshit you have to wade through on a daily basis in an attempt to get to the truth. Wonder how people today would react to the Polio epidemic that occurred back in the early 1900's? Today's society has devolved into a bunch of entitlement riddled crybabies who know without a doubt everything that is wrong in their life is someone else''s fault. The firms who run the polling services to collect the average citizen opinions produce a combination of unreliable conclusions with a large amount of bullshit. Asking 100 people a question and then extrapolating that minuscule result set to cover 300 million people in the US or the 6 Billion people worldwide is ludicrous. When is the last time anyone challenged a polling firms results? Are any of these firms willing to divulge their statistical methodology in detail to validate their results? Will they detail and publish their base assumptions they use as the corner stone of their data analysis? The entire world has stopped using facts and instead have chosen to use opinion polls and the number of "Likes" a statement may receive in any internet forum. I mean the more people that like something has to mean it's the iron clad truth? If you can't locate a news source that supports your predetermined mindset you need only find another source that does validate your own opinions.

The salaries and benefits provided for the President and Congressman are relatively low. Compare the salary and benefits of a top Google or Microsoft executive against the presidential and congressional pay scales.

Rare earth elements are not really as rare as the name implies. The deposits can be hard to identify and access but there are plenty of sites that can be utilized to increase domestic production. The US uses foreign suppliers for rare earth elements because it is cheaper than extracting and processing the elements domestically. However as a precaution the US has re-opened one of the larger rare element US mining sites when China started threatening to stop providing the materials to Japan.

He "earned" his monopoly because all his potential competitors at the time damn near sold every price of technology and accompanying rights to MS. These were business decisions that benefited both parties. When MS gained it's monopoly it was investigated and penalties, both monetary and operational, were implemented. And who really cares what you think if you can say the Gates Foundation almost 2 Billion dollars worth of world healthcare investments have not helped anyone.

The British survived the German air attacks and naval siege primarily because of US industrial and food assistance before the US officially even joined the war. The US also provided fuel, jeeps, trucks, weapons, and food to Russia using both US and British ships. This gave Stalin the time and resources he needed to locate all the military officers and scientists he condemned to the gulags prior to the war. Factories in the US were building Spitfires and other military equipment while practically ignoring the US Neutrality Act. The US Lend lease program also relied on President Eisenhower willfully ignoring the laws that had been passed proscribing US involvement when he handed over US naval vessels to Britain that had been sitting idle at the time. The President also extended US territorial waters by fiat to help protect British shipping which was being sent to the bottom of the ocean in record numbers. The French resistance displayed incredible bravery and commitment to defending their country but their contribution would not have won them their country back without outside assistance. Their effectiveness was waning as D-Day approached because the Germans had been improving their counter espionage network to hunt down any suspected resistance fighters. Of course none of this matters in the least today. The old alliances are weak and unreliable at best. The US has no reliable or even capable allies that would ever come to it's defense if a situation such as WW2 were to re-manifest today.

They surrendered because their various political groups were so busy undermining each other they had no time to actually defend the country. France had communists, fascists, monarchists, and parliamentary political divisions all fighting against one another instead of defending the citizens of France. They were a disgrace and the French citizens paid dearly for their political cowardice and back room deal making. Also a hell of a lot of French soldiers died providing the rear guard during the British evacuation of Dunkirk. The French suffered over 90% casualties providing Britain with the valuable time needed to extract their military. And like France Britain was also betrayed by it's infighting and cowardly political class who were so busy being "Lords" of the universe they left Britain damn near defenseless. Without the benefit of the English channel for a moat England would have been conquered and occupied in record time.

They just got the passwords from Snowden.

One more observation. If a company wants to increase their market share in both applications along with the corresponding hardware the applications run under they should go out of their way to make the barrier for developers as low as possible. The more developers they can attract means more applications are created for a particular OS or environment resulting in an increase in OS sales and overall system buy in. VB is probably the top reason of how MS gained it's overall dominance in the 90's. Regardless of the merits or flaws of VB it opened the door for new developers who didn't have to know and use C/C++or other lower languages to build applications. Windows development went from the developers implementing dialog classes and class templates to dragging a form icon and corresponding controls into their work space along with it's defined events and properties. Of course at the time you had to use Windows to take advantage of this magical developing capability in the eyes of those making corporate IT decisions.

I wasn't disputing your observations. I just added my observation of being able to use development only licences across multiple VM's or desktops provides a good app testing environment without the hassle of dealing with licensing costs in the development area. The MS development licenses I require are provided and managed through an MSDN subscription in conjunction with an MS Partner agreement which expands the number of developer only licenses. I have also obtained libraries built by non-MS vendors with the most recent example being libraries providing PLC and OMNI comm services. These libraries also came with an unlimited development only license from the vendor with any licensing costs only charged when distributing the applications that use these libraries. The cost of obtaining generous developer only licences more than makes up for the MSDN and MS Partner related costs.

VM's make excellent DEV and QA testing environments and can be used as many times as needed under most development only licensing options. VM's are good in production environments but this is where distribution licenses need to be taken into account. During development and testing VM's provide the ability to reset the entire environment back to the pre-testing state. Testing applications can end up creating and leaving behind invalid registries, assemblies, old installs, and event logs that make debugging errors more time consuming. Being able to revert back to a pristine environment for the next round of testing can be helpful especially when testing installation processes and application configuration changes that can effect the base OS level.

If the US really wanted him they would have had him one way or another a long time ago. He was and still is nothing but a bag boy who tried to manage the release of information in a way that best supported his political agenda and self image. He attempted to replace the state press agencies with one more in line with his political agenda that had just as much right and wrong as the governments justifications. And water boarding is old school. I mean there is like 4 or 5 people that had to endure this procedure. And you only get 4 or 5 people if you exclude the 1000's that under went the same procedure for training purposes. It's much more effective to dress someone up in an orange jump suit, force them to read a prepared statement while on their knees, and then sawing their fucking heads off so people know something really serious was being revealed. And before you try to fix a "wrong" you should first make sure you have actually identified a "wrong": and not some personal hangup created using hearsay, rank speculations, and pseudo intellectual bullshit.