What's wrong with his wealth? The man is a serial entrepreneur and he started out selling budgies and Christmas trees. If we had ten of him, the world would be a better place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Richard_Branson's_business_ventures

That's how all of war works. Battles usually have lower casualties than a casual observer would guess, and those that do are usually remembered as bloody. You don't engage until you know you can win. If your enemy advances you retreat. The weaker side retreats until they can't, then they surrender or are destroyed.

If anti-carrier missiles have a longer range than the carrier's aircraft, then the carrier is in check. So now maybe you have to use a guided missile submarine and cruise missiles to destroy the anti-carrier missiles first. Maybe your opponent has a good anti-submarine force. But maybe your carrier's planes don't have enough range to hit the anti-carrier missiles, but they do have enough range to hit the anti-submarine force.

War is not rock paper scissors.

Don't worry, your union dues are well appreciated by the politicians your union supports in your name.

Unions would be okay if they were subject to the same market forces as their employers. But they're not, they're protected by reams of labour law. Unions are allowed to monopolize labour in an industry and force anti-competitive security agreements, which would be considered anti-competitive and illegal in any other contract.

Consider the infamous 'right-to-work' states. What does being a 'right-to-work' state mean? It means unions can't compel people to join. In Germany, for example, the decision to join a union is considered an individual decision, and workers have an equal right to join or not join a union; the right to free association, means you're also free not to associate if you don't want to. But if you disagree with your union in Michigan and want to opt out, good luck making that legal argument.

The moronic part was so publicly expressing an opinion about something which the poster obviously knows so little.

Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.

Alan Greenspan. If you're going to accuse somebody of not knowing what they're talking about, it behoves you to avoid such simple errors.

Well, right now NASA gets directed to spend half its money on a new decade-long project every 5 years. A little bit of long-term political focus couldn't hurt.

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.