> Sales totaled $44.89 billion

Yey! We can put off borrowing for 14 days!

> [of which] contribute $20 billion to deficit reduction

Yey! I mean 6 days!

Europe and other government purchases are not driving Cisco and other equipment advances in speed. That's mostly capital investment. Euro governments (and US munincipalities) are leveraging this by way of uaving taxes to pay for it.
A
  few years down the road, it won't see so fast when quad streams, each of 4k video, to every house are the desire.

Then there's turnaround latency, need to have twitch games 3d generated at the server in a reasonably tiny time frame.

No, these city services, akin to water and sewer and electricity, will be reliable, but no longer on a timely upgrade path.

I hear a presidential limo made from a Chevy Bolt, with an electric engine and no armor, is much more fuel efficient, too.

I wondered that, too.

In any case, Boeing saw no business case for larger planes, while tons of room for smaller, direct jets. More to more airports with less hub crap.

The Airbus decision flabbergasted them. Officially, anyway. Cynics realized it was some European Union pride/multistate boondoggle as pieces were mandated to be made in most countries. Business case is irrelevant to politicians in such a situation. See also perennial money-loser SST.

You want scary? The same can be applied to general text on the Internet, tying posters on different sotes together, including anonymous (not your real name avatar) to a site with your real name.

Which the NSA probably has churning away on its databases. Which probably does little more than add confirmation of said links from watching and recording all traffic to any and all of a billion IP addresses.

And I, for one, welcome our new panopticon overlords who won't abuse it, not one of their thousand agents, because they're supposed to check a got-a-warrant box on a piece of paper before choosing to abuse it.

That is 24%. That means your device could be 20% cheaper and they would STILL make more money then anybody else in percentage per product in the electronics world.

It's the bottom end that's the problem with this, not the top end. The bottom, not-Apple, not-iPhone product end, where a guy with some money is sitting there and wondering if he should invest.

Lessee. Taxes on corporate profits look like they're going up. I see a marginal chance at success at best. Screweth it!

A few percent of investment scared off the bottom, and there's your decade of stagnation.

Not like there's much room for options. Here's how it's gonna go down:

New Finance Minister nee Valve Employee: Ok, goodbye austerity, hello ballooning spending! Ok, loan us money at tiny rates we can afford. Oh, I think I see some. Let me fire the portal gun at the wall so I can get it.

> Plays host to a system of five small exoplanets

No, it plays host to a system of five planets. Unless you think surgeons, after cutting open a patient, should talk about operating on that there exoliver.

"Income inequality" is a red herring. The real measure is average health and wealth in a nation.

This, by the way, is skyrocketting in the now-world economy as China and India and other nations become more economcally free, and people can better themselves.

You should be happy for capitalism, as it is the cause of this, now that it can operate there, just like it did in the west 150 uears ago with the industrial revolution.

But nobody listens or looks at the bigger picture. They just look at stagnation in the west brought on by spending driving fears of tax increases, making investors say fuck it.

Mexico is a corrupt nation, where you can'tt do anything from build a building to get a driver's license or even pay bills without having to pay for expedited service kickbacks.

Thhat's why they remain full of suckage. As usual, the government fails to secure rights.

Welcome to third world, postapocalyptic status.

I guess the first men to the stars really will be the Chinese, who were opening the trade routes, making business easier, rather than closing them down, like Europe, and now the US.

This was some bizarre leftist. Sorry, I must adopt their knee jerk rhetoric -- extreme leftist disasterbation fantasy.

Apparently we have no right to go anywhere without car and license plate tracking, and facial recognition software on tens of thousands of cameras. Or in cyberspace without tracking everything. Or using credit and debit cards, to buy anything untracked.

Dictators of old would dream of such a thing at their disposal. England, having abused it badly during the revolution, would have caused the founding fathers to have banned it all...had they succeeded, which would have been far less likely.

More and more government observation can "be done by steam", in the words of Blaise Pascal. It shouldn't be. When politicians have a system "they're supposed to" get a warratlnt for (probably not even that in this case) but no penalty or even alarm if they don't, it will be abused to track political opponents to those in power.

This is blown way out of proportion. Companies are made of citizens who get to persuade officials like anyone else.

I (insert Senator's name here) stake my reputation on it!

Thus does the repblic fall, and the center of empire move on to the outskirts, where the roads of trade remain open, and the old empire does little other than impede trade. Hail China.

Doesn't matter how well-reasoned (or well-memed) the impedance is. Just that it be a burden. The latest in a death of a (hundred) thousand cuts.

Now downmod me, as censorship driven by outrage, caused by that meme in your head, is part of the meme's meechanical method of operation, of which you are literally a driven cog.

Kind of scary to see it that way, isn't it? The meme has fingers reaching into your outrage center, by way of which it induces you to behave in ways that protect it, and its spread.