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.

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.

The insurance company would win that battle in court.

Welcome to Detroit.

You've obviously never experienced a situation where you'd actually need to defend yourself. I've lived in areas where I've had shots fired in the apartment upstairs in one instance, a TV stolen from our house in another, and a multitude of crime in the area. If you think it's irrational, then you're an idiot.

Your assumptions are not backed up by the facts.

The only places where it's "civilized" enough in the U.S. would be very rural, and lack jobs.

Depend where you live...
http://www.wxyz.com/news/detro...

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.

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

You're off by about a decade. I was playing chess on machines like Boris, and Chess Challenger back in those days. And while they were easy for a serious chess player to beat, they'd typically beat a novice. This is from http://www.computerhistory.org...

Until the mid-1970s, playing computer chess was the privilege of a few people with access to expensive computers at work or school. The availability of home computers, however, allowed anyone to play chess against a machine.

The first microprocessor-based chess programs were produced by hobbyists who shared information openly through computer clubs and magazines. As computer chess became commercialized, the increased investment in programming and marketing produced better programs and a larger audience. Even beginning chess players could learn and improve their game without the need for a human opponent.

The sophistication of microprocessor-based chess software had improved so much by the mid-1980s that these systems began winning tournaments against supercomputer-based programs and even top-ranked human players.

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.

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.