The SR-71 was derived from the YF-12 which was an armed interceptor.

Also, to cope with heat expansion the fuel tanks don't seal on the ground. It always has to refuel after take-off, so there's no point in filling the tanks. You fill it with just enough fuel to get off the ground and get up to speed (and heat).

In the US, generally the maximum penalty for killing someone is death, which I think most agree is more severe than 15 years.

As a matter of course, most people convicted of killing someone else don't get the death penalty, and neither is this man is likely to face 15 years in prison. Those are both the maximum penalty.

It was Eisenhower, not Kennedy or Roosevelt, who started desegregation.

The thing about trends is they never end, until they do. Just because some people were wrong about Apple years ago, doesn't mean they're wrong about Apple today.

Apple may be extraordinarily successful, but its success is based upon a product line that is:
1. Almost entirely consumer driven, and
2. Incredibly undiversified.

That's an incredibly risky strategy. Most companies build successful long-term business by establishing well diversified product lines, or by building product lines and business relationships that establish long-term cash flow. Apple's bet their success on their ability to stay cooler than the competition. So what's a more likely scenario for 2022: that the world is still addicted to Exxon's oil, or that the iPhone 10 is still the hottest product on the market?

1920 x 1080 x 24fps is 50 million pixels per second. Recent CPUs from Intel top 100GFlops, which is 2000flop/pixel, and recent GPUs from NVidia are topping out around 4000Gflops, or 80,000 flop/pixel.

Throw in enough geometry and you can cause problems, but that's more than enough horsepower to draw a simple scene in realtime.

That's the only way to economic recovery.

That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?

No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.

In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.

But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.

No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.

It's been quite a while since a 'normal' PC couldn't do realtime raytracing. Nobody does it because unless you're going for photorealism, rasterization gives you more bang for your buck.

Yeah, like the GE LM500, a purpose designed turbine specifically for electrical generation, except for the fact that it's a minor derivative of the J79 jet engine.

Turbine design is a very high cost process. Most turbines are derivatives of jet engines, because it's a lot cheaper that way. You can't just put a military jet engine directly into a power plant, but the conversion process is usually not expensive.

And the core of a gas plant is a gas turbine. The US has thousands of mothballed jet engines sitting in the Mojave dessert that can be inexpensively repurposed into gas generators.

The law that the UK is threatening to use was created in response to the murder of Yvonne Fletcher.

And frankly, that's fair. A small business is a very risky investment, which also demands an enormous amount of time.

If you get your broker to buy you some shares in Hershey's, then spend one weekend a year doing your taxes and rebalancing, there's no reason why you should get the same kinds of return that a small business owner would expect, who is taking a large risk and investing 70+ hours a week.

The Taliban doesn't have high altitude SAMs.

Inflating your way out of sovereign debt (i.e., printing money) is considered by most to be a default.

A blimp big enough to carry a person around is enormous. It's also a giant sail, and navigating one in any wind, with any sort of traffic, would be very challenging.

Consider Top Gear's experience with DIY blimping: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzQq3nOj5c