we're building more aircraft carriers because they have to be replaced. Enterprise was just retired after 50 years and is being decommissioned. The Kitty Hawk class are all retired now. Nimitz is 42 years old -- yes, its keel was laid in 1968 and it entered service in 1972. It takes 4-5 years to build one of these floating cities. There may be 10 of them (not counting Enterprise and Ford); but, one is usually in the yard being refit (15 year overhaul cycle -- Lincoln is currently in the yard) and there are several in port at any time. It takes 10-12 of them to support Naval operations worldwide. The rest of the world has basically stopped using aircraft carriers, because they're expensive. The U.S. uses them for force projection and as a platform for operations of all types, including disaster relief. Oh, and aircraft carriers run on renewable energy -- they have a pair of nuclear reactors in the hull.

I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years), and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025.

Blackjack and hookers, duh.

Looks like Chris Crocker has someone new to white knight for.

That would certainly explain some of his fixations.

I can't find reference to this. Link?

Don't be jealous, APK. I'm sure someday you'll find a woman willing to spend a few minutes with you. She may not technically be alive, or human, but she'll be all yours.

please give me citation of a country where Democracy brought freedom to the masses.

I think most of the citizens of former Warsaw Pact nations would agree that they're freer now that they can elect their own leaders instead of being de-facto provinces of Greater Russia.

I don't know how right handed people do it, but as lefty, I wear my watch on my left hand

You're doing it wrong. :-) You put your watch on the non-writing wrist. I'm right-handed, and I've always worn watches on the left. If I wore them on the right, the wristband would've scraped against the paper or the desk as I was writing.

Then again, who needs a watch anymore when your cellphone shows network-synchronized time that never needs adjustment?

Aircraft do look nice and airy on the inside - right up until you cram in extra rows of seats to make more money, then fill them up with people and luggage. Even in coach, I had some very comfortable long-haul flights in the months after 9/11 with an entire row of seats on a 777 to myself - of course, the airlines weren't quite as comfortable with the plane being that empty. (I'm told this is how Sean Connery flies: rather than pay for first class, just book a whole row in coach. Presumably the airline's perfectly happy with an empty seat, as long as it's being paid for.)

Actually this is complete bullshit. Torrent'ing in no way "help ISPs".
The shear number of connections a single person generates by downloading using torrents is ridiculous. It is basically a legal DDoS (well depending on what your downloading). The problems from bittorrent isn't because of the bandwidth used, it is from the number of connections.

The number of connections is completely irrelevant to any proper ISP (i.e. one which isn't NATting or snooping on your traffic): 100 packets per second on a single TCP connection is precisely the same traffic as 1 packet per second on each of 100 connections, except that it may spread out across more peering/transit links. My ISP literally does not know, let alone care, how many TCP connections I have open right now - only how many packets and how many bytes I'm transferring each way. It does indeed benefit my ISP if more of my traffic is local, since that means it can go via cheaper peering links at LoNAP or LINX rather than the expensive Level3 global transit they use for routing to/from more remote networks.

Where it does matter, though, is your home router/firewall/NAT device, which does need to keep track of each and every connection while it's active: a hundred or so connections might well overwhelm the available state storage long before you run out of bandwidth. On that level, downloading a single file is the same whether it comes from the ISP itself or another continent.

Of course, some ISPs are more clueful than others; mine is not only entirely happy for us to run torrent, servers (official policy: do whatever you like except spam; copyright and other issues are up to the police/courts not your ISP) but are even considering hosting their own Tor exit node. No shaping or filtering except the overall bandwidth limit - which caused packet loss for 0.83% of the last week. If only all ISPs could run like that!

I wasn't speaking to the specific case because of the guilty plea.

FWIW, I read somewhere (MRA site?) that woman-woman violence is particularly bad and particularly underreported.

And I don't know how to fix things either. You slap the hands of people making false claims, and legitimate victims clam up. You do nothing, and you encourage people like my ex wife.

Boy, talk about stupid assumptions...

Let's not forget the not insignificant problem of false claims. Are there as many as the MRA's claim? Doubtful. Are there as few as the feminists claim? Not a chance.

Done.