Um, you have it backwards. Assad was the first Arab to sign a peace deal with Israel, and he was such a reliable ally of the US that he was allowed to build M1A1 tanks domestically. Gaddafi was a state sponsor of terrorism who was a total belligerent until Reagan ordered a bombing run.

But it matters not. When the revolution comes, we shall flee to the safe haven of Russia. Brother Putin will let us stay at his airport. I plan on taking a nuclear sub with me. It will be awkward to store at the airport, but the plan must be held.

The dead children will slow them down.

Um, Assad?

Ethics is an interesting discussion. The road is a finite resource for which demand exceeds supply. As a result, there is already rationing taking place - in the form of waits times to use the road: congestion. This is, on the surface, very "fair" and "egalitarian", but also very wasteful of time, gasoline, pollution, and wear-and-tear on equipment.

On the other hand, a system that lets poor people get where they want to go, albeit by bus, faster and more cheaply than before also could be deemed "fair". You'd have only affluent people driving, so that would create a societal divide.

I guess my answer is: I don't know.

Thank you, finally a future subject who "gets it". You'll go far in my administration.

Are you sure about that? I would think that clogging the roads is an inefficient use of infrastructure.

If I were dictator, I'd toll the roads as high as need be until traffic levels come down to designed capacity. If there is some excess cash after paying for maintenance, this would subsidize a bus route along the same now-free-flowing highway(s). The bus would actually be attractive, since it would be cheap and fast instead of simply stuck in traffic.

Then I'd jail or execute my political rivals and invade Canada.

You mean like people who want to prevent people from using their public street because it makes it unpleasant to walk the dog?

I just watched Raiders of the Lost Ark with my kids and it was still fun. The special effects are dated, but that isn't the fault of the movie.

Fair enough, but did he ever say, "Crystal Skull is the best script I have ever read," or did he say, "This is the biggest paycheck I've ever seen!"?

I agree that there probably is some role for intellectual property protections, but I get mad when people start to feel entitled to be compensated for something that boils down to a government handout. The government is quite literally forcing other people to pay you through threat of force, just like a tax.

On a more philosophical level, I'm not even sure that copyrights are necessary. It's too bad that a modern society doesn't exist that has experimented with abolishing them to see if they are really needed to generate artistic works. Certainly artistic works were created prior to copyright's modern implementation in the late 18th century.

Yes, I would like copyright law seriously revisited. It is a concept left over from the British monarchy - that someone can "own" information. There may very well be benefit to society from having short durations of monopoly - something more similar to patents. But there is no way that any artist considers the 90+ year duration of copyrights when pursuing their work. It's blatant abuse of state power, and I consider the ruling class to be the criminals - not the so-called "pirates".

This is why I tend to prefer buying former rental cars. One owner who at least changed the oil and a weird set of options that includes things like power windows but generally excludes everything else and has cloth seats. Simpler, very little to go wrong. They don't always offer that combination of options to the general public.

We XP embedded in a (duh) embedded application. It's OK for the most part, but there are two problems. First, since the system is not patched after manufacture, viruses are a problem. Yes, it's partially bad design - but viruses won't be a problem with QNX. Security through obscurity means fewer support calls. The other problem is that it decides to take a little break every once in a while. It's probably just cleaning up memory or something, and it only lasts a few hundred milliseconds - but it is enough that we have to make allowances for that in the real-time part of our system (which runs mostly on vxWorks and on DSPs). Coincidentally, we used to run QNX (pre acquisition by Blackberry) for this application, but had to switch because an important library was unsupported. Also, at the time USB thumbdrive support was not good in QNX (and utterly atrocious in vxWorks). If Ford is doing anything that cannot tolerate a little 100ms timeout once in a while, then they conceivably would need to switch to a real-time OS.

I think you are getting drunk wrong.