Or you could spend at least 30 minutes sorting out a car hire and drive in through heavy traffic. Yeah!

Oh, they tax petrol a lot as well, but having an explicit connection to engine sizes makes it easier for the dumber members of society to figure out that smaller vehicles are better for their pocket.

That just means that you need to find an appropriate funding model. A yearly tax on every weapon owned by the citizenry could quite easily raise the monies required.

When push comes to shove, when it comes down to actual votes, do they really work to do such a reduction, or do they just claim to do that for the purposes of propaganda?

That was true in some societies, but for the most part not in the African slave trade. There slavers went out specifically in order to capture slaves. They weren't otherwise engaged in warfare.

Strategically, it might make more sense to have these fuel production systems at the depots that the logistics ships/tankers come from, so that you're not critically dependent on having fuel supplies to them. Like that, an unfortunate catastrophe (whether natural, accidental or due to malicious intent) at a US naval base would be less likely to render large parts of the fleet impotent. The key is thinking in terms of ensuring that even if something really bad happens, the operational missions are not compromised more than necessary; planning for the worst, even if not hoping that it will come to pass.

I think that Disney may have shot themselves in the foot. A patent must by definition describe the method in sufficient detail that a person of ordinary expertise in the field can figure out how to implement it by reading the patent. Since the patent merel describes a ranking algorithm, it can be trivially inverted to select sites likely to contain pirated material.

A scripting language that I find much cleaner than Perl and without the unpleasant tabbing of Python is Tcl. A more recent language with more familiar syntax than Tcl is lua.

The "Oh, you want to pay for that via a mechanism usable by mortals?" fee seems to the current favourite. There are a few companies that I simply will not trade with, ever, because of that sort of thing.

Without denying that Apple customers are annoying elitists, being able to travel with just your phone (a device you're carrying anyway, and probably using shortly before the checkpoint too) doing everything that previously required paper is rather awesome. Or at least less grating than carrying a whole stack of printed things with you.

But for all that, Congress is the legislative body, and has responsibility for defining the laws of the USA. That's its principal constitutional purpose. You can blame other parts of the federal government somewhat, but blaming Congress for bad laws is always precisely the right thing to do.

Ah, but in that case there would also be a strong case to be made for setting aside the contract (it having been obtained through fraudulent actions; an illegal "contract" is never a real contract) or at least the lock-in terms of it. You mustn't just penalize one half of the crooked agreement; you've got to deal with the other side if they were part of the conspiracy too. And no, the fact that a contract has been signed off by all the people who were authorized to do so at the time doesn't make it sacrosanct and beyond review, and it cannot do as that would provide a mechanism to allow fraud on a massive scale without any legal recourse, which would be exceptionally abhorrent to the public morals.

Hmm... In fact, "conspiracy" is a very suitable word to be considering here, given the reported statements, as it would allow some pretty extreme penalties to be levied against all concerned (e.g., a corporate conviction for conspiracy would be catastrophic for the company concerned, and would run the real risk of making them go bust. Like you ought to care.) In fact, check who the state DA has been taking payments from, just in case. It pays to be careful with this sort of thing...

I would emphasize that I definitely don't know the facts of the case or any of the individuals concerned. I'm merely commenting on how I would expect such things to be possible to go forward, treating the whole thing as hypothetical, given the (not necessarily unbiased) statement of the situation in the posts I'm replying to.

Desktops may. Laptops, not really. You run into problems with loss of battery life and gradually increasing general crankiness of the hardware. (The higher-powered a system is when first bought, the longer it lasts; low-ball it, and you're going to have to refresh sooner. And it's possible to replace some components in a desktop far more easily than in a laptop.)

A 3 year payback time is really quite good, in the region where garbage truck operators will do it without any additional incentives.

Because if it is installed as /bin/sh (fairly common), it gets called in a great many places because of the OS APIs system() and popen(), which are both defined to use /bin/sh on Unix. Much of the reporting about it has been more than a little breathless, but that's journalists for you.

Not everything is vulnerable. CGI is not inherently vulnerable (it could use execve() directly) and the called code need not use bash ever. But it's still a serious problem as anything that explicitly requires bash is also definitely broken: we want it fixed ASAP. (A start would be to never process environment variables for function definitions during startup, especially when running as /bin/sh...)