The government-it industrial complex is controlled by the same sort of corrupt relationships that the military-industrial complex. Come in to that situation with new ideas and you will get slapped down by entrenched interests intent on making use of networks of people moving back and forth between government and industry in order to create personal wealth. New ideas and new technologies only rock the boat.

The classic example is the PPACA web site. Hundreds of millions spent on something that would be a 5-10 million dollar project in a sane world.

Actually in terms of volume both are shrinking.

The problem with sapphire is that it's BRITTLE. Drop it and it will break. It's why steel is better than cast iron.

You aren't likely to drop a checkout scanner. Iphones though are regularly dropped.

The hardness is is great if you are worried ONLY about scratches.

Nonsense. The life expectancy in India is 10 years shorter than the US. It wasn't until just this year it was considered to be polio free.

There was a survey published in Nature showing belief in God is dwindling among scientists....

https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek...

Typical theist baloney. Set up a false premise i.e. people have to have unquestioning belief in something and then argue therefrom.

Skeptics doesn't hold such a viewpoint. They work from evidence, not belief.

That's incorrect. Rational philosophies and even evolution provide non-theistic justifications for altruism.

It in fact looks now that altruism is a survival trait that is hard wired in the human brain through natural selection.

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

As a young ham, myself and another member of our club were rebuked for what we thought was a clever workaround to a persistent jammer. We came up with a list of repeaters, assigning a number to each. When a jammer would come along, we'd simply say "meet me on number 4" and we'd QSY to that repeater to continue our QSO.

At a subsequent meeting, one of the OM officers of our club told us to knock it off as it could run afoul of the "codes & ciphers" prohibiting of part 97.

Get rid of your dictator and adopt a representative democracy and it will be over. Indeed, nobody could have thought it would go on this long.

Guilt by association is a terrible and dangerous thing.

Well, as someone who has posted on a public forum used by people advocating the violent overthrow of the US government, you would say that, wouldn't you?

Note: China is already constructing additional carriers. However compared to something like the USN Gerry Ford they are sorta lame.

> Was the water contested before the island was build?

Big time. The airspace above it too. The warlike history of the nations in this area is scary.

Current international laws are newcomers to this area where squabbles go back a long fucking time.

And, of course, it's inconceiveable that there were cross-dressing prostitutes during that period..?

Huh? Are you suggesting that Catherine Eddowes was a crossdressing male prostitute? Don't you think that may have come out post-mortem?

OTOH, and upon the assumption of that the shawl was in fact Eddowes' ... What is not inconceivable is that semen found on her clothing might be that of a prior customer rather than her murderer. However the fact that she was a) wearing this at the time of death and b) the match is to a known suspect of all murders, the evidence is fairly suggestive.

This is exactly the same profile as any other e-waste. I'm fine with treating LED bulbs as such.

It's not a quirk if pretty much every fukin language does it.