Germany was spending far more on their military during that time than Britain was. If Britain and France had stepped in earlier, Germany would have been totally unprepared and the war would have ended quickly. Not to mention all of the horrors of the Holocaust that would have been prevented.

If Britain and France had managed to delay the war to "prepare" even more, say a few years, the Luftwaffe would have been dominated by jets, German ballistic missiles would have been longer range and more precise, and they might even have become a nuclear power. I really don't think this is the analogy you're looking for.

I'm from Holland. It's pretty easy to obtain a gun if you really want to. But law-abiding citizens typically don't do this, because ... it's the law (duh).

By not having an arms-race, I'm not afraid being shot at by a burglar, because also they don't typically carry a gun.

There are a fair number of people out there who happily traded the 2-week battery life of their perfectly functional cell phones for dead-in-a-day smartphones. As it turns out, the inconvenience of having to constantly recharge a smartphone was worth putting up with in exchange for being able to do all the things you can do with a smartphone. Clearly, not everyone shared this sentiment, as you can still see any number of people using non-smartphones today--but significant numbers of people chose functionality over battery life.

It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to see the same thing happening with smart watches.

By now would be surprised if they don't have at least a couple Taepodong 2s that have at least a fair chance of a successful flight. They're not impressive as far as ICBMs go, but they are ICBMs.

If that's their biggest problem, they are in better shape than I thought.

Come on man. The USA and USSR literally drew the DMZ line at the end of World War II. Koreans didn't have much to do with that. Instead of reintegrating Korea into 1 republic, the two countries set up their own preferred style of government in each part of Korea. Nobody can argue that for the first few years after World War II, that the governments were anything but a puppet government. The US set up a South Korean constitution modeled after the US constitution, and the USSR set up communisim in the North with a hand-selected autocrat as the leader.

Korea and Vietnam were cold war fights by proxy. Maybe they would have had a conflict without foreign powers interfering, but the resources that the USSR and USA poured into the fight ensured that it was a far bigger, nastier, and longer war than it would have been otherwise. If either of the superpowers had stayed out of it, one or the other side would have won the war reasonably quickly. Both countries were responsible in creating the stalemate and both are responsible for the poor decisions of the past.

Its also important to keep in mind that outsiders of all types have been fiddling around in Korea since the 1600s- first the Chinese, then an incident with the American-owned ship "General Sherman", then the Japanese, then the USSR and USA. The History of Korea is not a very uplifting read. Korea has been shit upon by every country in their neighborhood and most of the superpowers as well. Given that history, it shouldn't be surprising that they turned inward and cut ties with the West and South Korea, which is strongly aligned with the USA.

Propaganda campaign by who? I think Singer needs to check his haughtiness at the door:

the ability to steal gossipy emails from a not-so-great protected computer network is not the same thing as being able to carry out physical, 9/11-style attacks in 18,000 locations simultaneously. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this."

Except, of course, for the fact that the prime suspect is the hand-picked hacker squad of the Hollywood-obsessed leader of a nuclear armed state with ICBMs, whose family's Hollywood obsession has gone to such extremes in the past as kidnapping filmmakers and forcing at them at gunpoint to make movies for them. I can't believe I'm saying this. I can't believe I have to say this.

I'm thinking they made a financial calculation. If the value of the materials which the hackers have, but have not yet released, exceeds the expected revenue of the movie, then it makes sense to trash the movie and just move on. I can easily imagine that such materials (especially if they implicate Sony in illegal or questionable activities) having a value of millions of dollars to be kept secret.

Plus, the Korea situation isn't that funny. The bottom line is that families were split apart and have remained apart for 60 years directly because of squabbling between the US and the former Soviet Union. That's not a joke, its just sad.

Well, at least Russians won't freeze to death this winter. They can use wheelbarrows full of rubles to insulate their homes. ;)

That's not all that different from how he got started with Tesla. He had no intention of starting a car company (he already had SpaceX), he just wanted AC Propulsion to build him a copy of their t-zero - but they had no interest, even for a small fortune. But then they pointed him to this guy named Martin Eberhard who had this wild idea to commercialize the t-zero's tech base on a Lotus Elise body and was looking for funding... and thus Tesla was born.

I was a regular user on groklaw as well. She quit because she was a private person and email was no longer private. You may be able to protect the contents of your email by encrypting it (assuming that the encryption hasn't been intentionally compromised, which is NOT a safe assumption), but that doesn't encrypt the "From/To" fields. PJ quit the internet (not just groklaw) because she's a private person who didn't want to be watched.

You have your view, I have mine. Everyone else can read what she wrote and decide for themselves.

g++ supports it with __restrict__. And if you're writing high performance code but not having support for the features of modern compilers, you're an idiot. In appropriate situations, the performance difference for using restrict or not is huge. Array-heavy tasks like image processing often get a 2-fold or more benefit with using restrict. There's very few places in the coding word where a single keyword can raise your performance that much.

And examples of these which could plausibly be on Titan are....?

There's not much in nature that's that light.