I don't know what you're talking about. Police departments get sued all the time, and often lose.

That's right. Since 2008, the Chicago Way has gone national. I'm sure I don't need to explain why.

An Al Qaeda member named Anwar al-Awlaki is not an American citizen in any meaningful way. Killing him was perfectly acceptable. American citizens have fought against their own country in previous wars too, only you didn't hear about it. They were killed with no trial and no fanfare, because that's the way war works.

It would be hard to make a programming language slower than Java, even if you tried.

Chicago residents have zero interest in individual rights and freedom. In fact, the very idea frightens them. They would much rather have the government take care of them and tell them what to do. This is why every Chicago incumbent (all Democrats) gets reelected as long as they are interested in running. People here have no desire for reform, as they are either getting something from "the system" or think they will be too.

Once I realized this, a lot of things that were previously a mystery all of a sudden became clear.

It's actually the opposite. Libel and defamation laws offer public figures virtually NO protection. Otherwise any politician who lost a race could sue the winner for defaming him through those nasty attack ads, etc etc.

That petition is a bunch of socialist BS. The real victims have already been compensated - AI is just making a shameless cash grab.

Like buying a $500,000 medallion PER CAR? This is one case where I will enjoy seeing the large multinational corporation squashing the little guys (the cab Mafias of the world).

Tenure would do nothing to stop this, and would in fact make it worse. Without tenure, you're free to go work somewhere else if you find the current environment too oppressive. Anyone working in IT knows the importance of being able to switch jobs. You can't plan on working in one place forever. If there were tenure, you would be unable to switch jobs without starting on the bottom at the new place. Good luck escaping a bad work environment under that system! Imagine the horrible political environment that would result from management trying to force out a tenured employee that they couldn't fire, so the only way is to make the environment so miserable the person quits.

That's very very unlikely to happen. The school board and parents would come down hard on any administrator who was that dumb.

Should we give IT workers tenure too? What if the boss threatened to fire everyone who doesn't want to program in VB6? See I too can come up with completely ridiculous examples to prove non-existent points.

The $150k is in "government numbers", ie total fantasy.

Wikipedia is very slanted towards recent and Eurocentric events.

Yes, this is somewhat explainable in terms of how much literature has been produced over time, and how much literature is accessible online. Wikipedia isn't the problem here, the problem is that the authors didn't acknowledge this issue, let alone attempt to account for it in their computation. (though it's a long paper, so I might have missed where it was discussed)

What are these ads you speak of? Chrome with AdBlock makes for a beautiful (not to mention useable) internet.

You forgot to include lifetime costs for VA health care for surviving vets, who tend to have fairly difficult to treat injuries that would have killed people in prior wars.

This is why there's such a backlog in the VA.

No it's not. The majority of the people at the VA are mostly Vietnam vets with a few WWII and Korean War vets hanging on. Most of your Iraq/Afghanistan vets are under the age of 50, meaning they have their own health insurance through the company they work for. For example, ME! I've never been to a VA hospital. Never had to. I always had my own insurance.

As for the total cost, right now, it ranks at about $1.5 trillion for 14 years. Since the expensive part of launching million dollar missiles to blow up a $100 tent and fueling tanks that get gallons to the mile are over, the rate at which the cost is increasing is slowing substantially. It is unlikely that it will reach $2 trillion.

Either way, you said "wastED", meaning past tense. We haven't spent $2 trillion and won't for many years, if ever.

Finance guys are so cute.
I was an IT guy so....

For example a retail bank needs two tables in it's accounts database. One for the account, a second to record the transactions.
The DB needs a customer table (name, address, phone, address, ect), transaction table, account type table, account table, interest rate table, payee table, payroll tables (complete with more account data from other banks, employee names, etc) etc. There's a LOT of data involved, and this still doesn't include the cutesie stuff banks throw in like customer preferences.

The database may be queried by other databases (ie: the guy approving loans), but it is not actually a part of those databases.
Actually, different systems maintain different databases. For example the Internet Banking side will maintain it's own database. the ATM side will have it's own side. Then there's the credit card system, ACH systems, wire systems, the core system itself and others. All of these systems must interact with eachother. For example, the a customer may log into the Internet banking side, which will have to hit the core to get the current balance, EOD balance from yesterday, unprocessed transactions, processed transactions, interest rates, any messages from the bank, and so on. It also has to be able to inject transactions such as payroll into the core system, wires into the wire system and so on.
Of course, all of these systems are different. The ACH system uses a flat text file. The core is usually an UNIX based system with a terminal interface. The Internet Banking is probably an Apache Tomcat connecting to a MSSQL system. Then, there is the bank end that is comprised of DB front-ends, screen scrapers, batch files, transaction injectors and so on.

You could probably convince a bunch of PHB-English Majors your database is more complicated because you have six different, totally unrelated databases in the same file, but don't try that shit in front of engineers.
Not just different DB's but completely different architectures. And, of course, different states have different laws. For example, all states that take income taxes have a different method to pay them. Then their are business taxes, both federal and for all 50 states, loan laws, interest rate laws etc.

And there is much much more, but this is getting out of hand. Suffice to say that you have no friggin' clue as to what you are talking about when it comes to everything a bank does, much less when it comes to tying all those systems together.

Compare that to the ACA system which involves user data, finance data, what companies are available per state, what plans available per company, and an interface system to communicate between the handful of ACA authorized insurance companies per state and the back-office system. Many states run their own system. The government has claimed that their system doesn't even keep the data!