I wish I had your optimism.

The time of the aircraft carrier is over in any major power conflict. Generals always fight the previous wars because they can study them.

Aircraft Carriers are good operational platforms for rescue and humanitarian operations. Maybe we could figure out some way to consistently re purpose them?

North Korea and Iran are both relatively small nation states capable and interested in building this type of missile system. North Korea would like to end its stalemate with South Korea whether the US was there or not. In Iran's case it is to attack a country some distance away with which it shares no borders.

Dictatorships and closed systems/societies have the advantage that Amnesty International can't get all the information to make valid conclusions. They get rumors and innuendo. Half the time AI only knows there are problems when bodies start flowing down the rivers. I view this in the same way I view those who say that Snowden's documents prove the USA is the most intrusive. (Yeah I'm in the minority that think both the NSA is violating the constitution and that Snowden belongs in jail) This of course isn't true to the degree Europeans like to run on about. Snowden's documents show that many other countries willingly cooperated for information sharing. Dig out the documents from eastern Europe or china and we can talk about how governments rank against each other on some human rights and freedoms scale.

The 80s and 90s are littered with the bodies of proof that cocaine, in its various forms, is a dangerously addicting drug.

Metro apps don't appear in the task bar. You can't kill them that way. Killing metro apps on a non-touchscreen device is totally non-intuitive for me. Hmmm. Maybe we just agreed with each other?

You're required to take a test for a temp license for PWC (Jetskis)

They are in the most danger of having their weapons taken from them and their children having access.

I'm not sure about your math. The last three places I've worked have all been over 20% H1B developers some over 40%. Where is this 2% place of which you speak?

It is too complicated for a mulit-player scenario when martyrdom is considered a viable end state.

A lot of the Microsoft API documents contain no actual information. You end up relying on code samples or stack overflow. Sometimes you get lucky and there is community documentation at the bottom it seems ridiculous to have to rely on that. I'm assuming that the API docs are generated from the Class / Method documentation which makes me think they have millions of undocumented lines of code. You see this in Visual Studio when using intellisense. You see some method with 10 overrides and no documentation on how they should be used. It would be great if class docs showed usage. Then that would be auto-generated into the public docs. I worked in the Java space and used to complain that some companies didn't generate decent class/method documentation because their developers don't think it is important. The microsoft space is even worse :-( Beauty is in the eye of the creator. Your baby (API) is ugly!

A single CPU architecture across operating systems and devices has worked out well for consumers. There are a wide variety of operating systems and user leve software on that platform. We'd need a viable cross platform application VM architectures, JVM/CLR style, if we want to avoid application islands.

I'm almost for DC statehood. We'd never have to worry about the possible catastrophe of retro-cession. MD: over taxed, over regulated all the while telling you how good you've got it living there.

How did this get mod'd up? I own 4 Dell Latitudes (3 year warranty) and a MacBook. The Macbook has better screen resolution, 1680x1050, and a great trackpad. The dell has a docking connector and better warranty. In 2011 the Macbook had higher memory capacity and cost less or the same as a quad core Latitude.

Another case where I wish I had "off topic" mod points available...