Unlike the above books, it's non-fiction, and people were actually killed for the crime of reading it. ("In Soviet Russia...")

By any measurable metric, the US economy has rebounded from recession far better than the Eurozone. GDP growth, unemployment... take your pick.

And the comparable growth rates you cite since 1989 are based, in Argentina's case on a "percentage of fuck all".

Military coups are the kind of thing that happen in a society that does not abide by the rule of law and respect property rights - which is exactly the kind of society you have been advocating. The moment the US embarked upon a programme of nationalisation of industries like Microsoft would be the moment that the US economy crashed with a speed (and irreversibility) that would take the world by shock. You think you have new solutions? They're the same failed "solutions" that have been tried for a hundred years or so around the world, leaving nothing but disaster in their wake.

Back in the first half of the 20th Century, Argentina was tipped to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Then the people who think like you do got into power...

Yes! Why not kill off all of the major companies in one of the shrinking number of industries in which the US remains a world leader?

That will help massively.

And 20 years later, the Indians will be complaining about cheap illegal immigrants from the US taking all of the menial jobs in their country.

Currency has nothing to do with it.

Or rather, a Government which showed it was happy to nationalise a private company's assets on such flimsy pretences as you put forward would forfeit its nation's ability to do any kind of business on the world stage. Nobody would care about doing business in the US when it became clear that the moment the US Government didn't like them, it would nationalise their assets.

So the US dollar would quickly reach (and then fall below) parity with the Mexican Peso.

It will, of course, never happen. Thank god.

Nintendo OS?

I hope you're looking forward to only being able to post to slashdot using a sequence of happy-face emoticons.

Sad-face emoticons might upset people, so those are banned.

And words? Words?!?! Won't somebody think of the children?

Because that wouldn't have any wider consequences at all...

Like perhaps a total flight from the US of almost every other significant business (on the grounds that "we might be next"), a total economic collapse and a catastrophic reduction in living standards.

Certain parts of South America are performing this particular experiment for our education at the moment. Watch how that pans out before wishing to see it replicated in your own country.

I'm going to claim there's prior art on that cubic water thing. I have several copies of a device that produces cubic water in dozen lots, in the bottom of my refrigerator.

Probably, it's more like the reason Kurt Vonnegut did the same thing. Slaughterhouse Five, for just one of his works, really needs to be read like the reader isn't allowed to be sure whether Billy Pilgrim is objectively experiencing being unstuck in time and meeting Tralfamadorians and such, or has become a trifle unglued coping with tremendous shell-shock from WW2. If it comes prelabeled as SF, the deliberate ambiguity is ruined. Wondering if Tralfamadorian anatomy makes sense for a realistic alien is not even close to the biggest points Vonnegut hoped people would take away from Slaughterhouse Five.
              Even Heinlein, who didn't usually mind being called things like the "number one Science Fiction author ever" and such, had cases like this - Glory Road deliberately switches at the very end from Fantasy tropes to SF, and Stranger in a Strange Land exists in two published forms, one more clearly SF, one deliberately deemphasizing those elements.

Michael Totten did, and he found a police state overseeing wrenching poverty, complete with shortages for essentials and goods of retched quality.

In short: Communism.

Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people. Both The Black Book of Communism and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government come up with roughly the same number of people killed.

Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.

Embargoes have nothing to do with it...

"There is no purpose to manned spaceflight. The scientific return comes from unmanned spaceflight."

You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I have points, I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot - there's too many like you around - the signal to noise ratio keeps dropping towards an absolute zero, and I join all the 3 digit old farts in saying "This site just ain't what it used to be!" .

Halo was really based in the same universe (or a very similar one) as an earlier series of games usually called the Marathon trilogy. These were Bungie's first big hits, and had two major properties that make them remembered fondly.

1. They were like Doom (2 1/2 D shooters), but with great plots and characterization for their time. (And most of this keenness was something more players saw there for the first time, often before Doom came out, or at least caught on, because Apples were around more then- see point 2). Bungie may have been first with some features, was definitely first to get them right with others, and it took some time for Id games to even be taken seriously. Think of the story everybody wanted for Mass Effect 3, and mostly felt disappointed in. For most gamers who started the series, Marathon 3 was like everything more modern players hoped Mass Effect 3 would be. Plus, many players felt they got a lot of other things right, like squad level control, vehicle movement, microphone talk in multiplayer, weapons/ammo ratios (and not being able to carry 10 or so weapons and thousands of rounds of ammo all at once), being able to design your own levels, and the whole blend of Single Player/Multiplayer/Deathmatch modes.
2. They ran on Apples, and were so big there that many people actually complained about how there was notihng in gaming for the PC as good as for the Apple. (There were other games, such as Myst and Armor Alley contributing to this effect too, I'm not saying it was all Marathon, but Myst and Bungie doing ports to Microsoft shifted the whole gaming scene away from Apple over just a couple of years).

Halo was supposed to be the updated version of those, going to a fully 3D engine, and it delivered an really exciting story with a giant ring around a planet, a weapon that could destroy whole worlds, and A.I. systems that would burn themselves out in 3 years or so just through being so ubersmart (and you had to hope the one you were relying on got you through the next scenario before it popped). And for the first time, there was a version for the X-Box and you didn't ahve to have an Apple Mac!

Tetraethyl Lead was used in automotive fuel from the 1920s through much of the 70s, and is still used in some aviation fuel. There appears to be illegal manufacture and use of the substance ongoing in the PRC. The amounts involved as a fuel antiknock ingredient exceed Lead's use in mold control and paint, and should be considered the primary source for increased Lead in the environment..