I am nervous as this feels like early 2008 all over again.

People though ack a few banks will be late paying each other for it's silly home instruments. Big deal let's buy banking shares now while they are cheap etc ...

We all know what happened next? Last year we finally came close to full recovery. The house of cards collapsed and is still being pumped up by the federal Reserve as we never had a full collapse!

Japan, America, and the EU may be next should Greece not to pay with skyrocketing rates and a great depression awaiting as the Federal Reserve won't be able to pump borrowed money to the banks, again.

Am I the only one who sees this?

There's a lot to be said for not having to completely replace the API and backwards compatibility. That's a pragmatic choice, not a "computer scientists screw up a pragmatic language" choice. Your initial assertion is unfair.

Anonymous coward( 'Bull Fucking Shit', below) is far too strident; but it is the case that there's a curious sort of 'bifurcation' in the 'terrorist' labor market(a confusion we probably contribute to by conflating the various local tribal militias, warlords, strongmen, etc. who cause us trouble during our ground campaigns with the 'terrorists' who are much more international in scope).

On the one hand, as you say, the terrorist grunt supply is heavily drawn from frustrated young men(inconveniently, lots of prime recruiting grounds have demographics that skew fairly young, so there are lots of them), with limited economic prospects, often compounded by a culture where you probably aren't getting laid unless you've achieved enough economic stability to get married. The miscellaneous 'insurgents' who raise hell when you attempt to occupy their home sand trap; but lack international ambitions and/or capabilities are mostly these guys. Some of the lower-skill terrorists proper are as well(particularly for the Israelis, since Gaza's festering-prison-slum atmosphere provides an endless supply of the angry and hopeless; and you don't even need to buy them plane tickets to have them go do a 'martyrdom operation'.

On the other hand, a lot of terrorist leadership, and high-skill recruits(if you want to blow stuff up, it sure helps to have some real engineers and chemists around), are not driven by economic desperation. Bin Laden himself was basically a trust-fund fundamentalist, and a lot of the more influential and logistically important figures are people with decent university degrees, often in marketable subjects, who are financially stable; but alienated by some aspect of the injustice of the world, or disaffected by secularism or the wrong sort of religious practice, exactly which one varying by person.

They come in both flavors.

If anything, Al-Qaeda isn't actually in the mass-murder business.

They are a nasty bunch, treat civilian casualties as a feature not a bug, etc.; but they don't have nearly the resources or the direct combat assets; much less specialized infrastructure that must either be carefully hidden or sited in an area where you are the de-facto government, to do 'mass murder'.

They do terrorism: that tends to include a good deal of violence; but calibrated with an eye to maximum psychological impact, attacks on culturally salient targets, that sort of thing. In terms of straight body count, they rank well below more-or-less-strictly-business drug cartels, and even a fair percentage of the 21st century bush wars in countries that aren't interesting enough to even attract a few foreign correspondents; much less the sort of stuff that made the 20th century so notorious.

The numbers get a bit fuzzy because of the various more-and-less-actually-connected 'franchise' operators, some of which were actually collaborators to some reasonably close degree, some of which were little more than unrelated thugs with a taste for trademark infringement; but Al-Qaeda's body count just isn't that big. It's well weighted for psychological punch, lots of Americans in important buildings, fewer peasant conscripts in ethniclashistan; but in absolute numbers? Chickenshit. ISIS and Boko Haram are almost certainly well ahead; and let's not even talk about how quickly the professionals working for established nation states can stack up bodies...

"What's the other half, Joe?"

"Killing those Cobra motherfuckers!"

> Yes, they do. It's called free trade and is generally seen as very desirable, as it reduces paperwork and leads to countries competing to be better places to do business than their neighbours.

With all due respect, if you actually believe any of that, as pertains to THIS topic, you're a fucking idiot.

This isn't any idea of free trade, nor have they been reducing the paperwork- on the contrary they've been filling a whole bunch of extra paperwork.

What they've been doing is performing most or all of the work in (say) the UK and then filling the tax in Luxembourg as if all the profit was magically done there; and this is purely and simply a tax fiddle.

By running two or more different companies in different countries you can "sell" things across the borders at artificial (fake) prices so that, no profit is made in the UK, and all of it is in Luxembourg or Ireland, on paper. There's no free market for those trades, it's all between two companies, controlled by the same people.

If they actually did everything in Luxembourg, that might well be fair enough, but that's NOT at all what's been going on.

This isn't some free trade utopia, it's essentially fraud, they're saying they made no profit in a country, when they really did. It's not totally dissimilar to the types of things that Enron got up to.

Yes, prices may go up somewhat.

But if you think about it, at the moment transnational businesses have an unfair tax advantage over national ones.

So companies like Amazon are creating and extending monopolistic positions; not because they're necessarily better companies, but simply because they're able to rig their tax positions; if you don't pay taxes, you can lower prices and take markets that you don't necessarily have any right to.

In other words, tax avoidance of the type they're legislating against is anti-competitive; and that too can raise prices in the long run.

You seriously think that an entire civilization was built on sexual slavery, and the emancipation of it women will bring it down?

Boy this place sure does attract the dark underbelly.

Well, now women have full civil liberties, and that is that.

Civilization will survive husbands not being able to rape their wives. And yes I support a spouse's right to leave a marriage. Women are not chattel, which was the underlying argument for spousal assault.

Why indeed. I have no issue with multiple spouses, though I wouldn't want to be part of such a group.

But one step at a time.

One class: consenting adults

Extrensing marital rights to gay couples is no more creating a new class than overthrowing anti miscegenation laws created a new class. From my point of view, allowingf same sex marriage in fact creates fewer classes.

Sodomy with an infected person is a transmission risk for almost all diseases.

As does vaginal intercoursw. And, of course, many heterosexual coup!es have anal intercourse as well.

In most common law jurisdictions, a religious ceremony has no legal standing at all. The magic in a marriage ceremony isn't "by the power invested in me by God", it is " by the power invested in me by the State of Massachusetts."

Churches' attachments to marriage is historic and I doubt there is anywhere in English speaking North America where a religious ceremony was ever required.