I'll add to that and say it was one of the worst things for Microsoft also. Not breaking them up has allowed Microsoft to stagnate.

You might have to illuminate the difference between liberterians and anarchists. From an non-US perspective it seems to be debating whether the pot or the kettle is more blank.

Good point. I'm off to smash some windows.

My mother has a glass hedgehog on her desk, basically a clear glass ball.

There are little burn marks all over the desk from where the sun has hit it.

Don't confuse results with aims. Also, never understimate incompetance. Although the administration of GWB truly reached new heights of incompetance....

The *aim* was to establish US supremacy in the region. WMD, democracy etc was a fig leaf. The *result* was to diminish US stature worldwide, reduce US influence in the region and increase Iranian influence in the region.

Life is too short to read books spawned by movies or games, particularly sci-fi. I'd prefer not to us my min to go sifting for diamonds through raw sewage.

Murder and rape have victims. Dope, prostitution, and noncommercial piracy don't.

Prostitution is tightly tied to people trafficing. Not all prostitutes have a choice about their line of work (and I am not talking about a financial choice).

A corollary to this: data structures tend to very long lived. Screw up your database structure and you will have to live with it for a long time. This is typically because it is hard to migrate from one data structure to another.

Truth is an ultimate defence for civil libel in England and always has been.

No it is not. There is a two factor test, one is whether it is true, the other is whether it is in the public interest. To successfully defend against libel both must be fulfilled.

Wasn't Texas the place where someone caught two burglars, forced them to kneel at gunpoint and shot them in cold blood? He was aquitted.

We don't have an "empire"...

Don't be ridiculous. The US has military bases in most of the civilised world and a lot of the less civilised world. The US feels free to intervene (using military and other means) throughout central and south America whenever they don't like the results of an election.

The US is probably the only power in the world that you could say has an empire.

How does the perl hammer feel on the fingers? Perl is one language I've spent a fair bit of time on and decided to not use unless forced to. It shares that category with VB6. Perl massively tends towards unmaintainability.

Where the hell was Petraeus when we invaded these countries?!

In the case of Iraq he was saying don't invade....

I'll have to dig out the quote from The Accidental Guerrilla (written by his senior advisor on counter-insurgency.

Sure, full credit to Petraus and Bush for the surge. However no credit to Bush for going into Iraq in the first place. Even Petraus said going into Iraq was a stupid idea before the event.

Obama does deserve credit for opposing the war before it started (which matches Petraus' position).

There is also one more:

3. You are expecting people to remember too many passwords