What I'm saying is a combination of:
- long range SAM
- extremely long range detection through drones, radar and satellites
- interceptors with half decent air-to-air missiles and cannons with a pretty hefty range
- anti-aircraft/missile defense on ships
- Absolutely unreal target tracking capabilities

They all still provide pretty damn good defensive capabilities. Far from obsolete. Some of the tech could use some modernizing but most of it is good gear. Other than bombing already backward people into the stone age we haven't had much use for it as of late.

At the end of the day, if we were to go to war with Russia (or China)..... both countries would be fighting with sopwith camels and whatever rifles could be scraped up by the time the conflict was over with as economic resources evaporated and both countries' production capabilities are bombed out of existence.

Our fleet is far from defenseless against long range threats. The US Navy has some absolutely BADASS surface-to-air and surface-to-surface long range capabilities.

You give tactical nukes too much credit. A hydrogen bomb maybe but a suitcase nuke would probably take out 1 carrier and give folks on a couple others radiation poisoning. And then the homeland of whoever delivered the suitcase would be a glass parking lot with glowing wildlife.

Disrupt, yes. Piss off, definitely. Kill quite a few people, yeah. Destroy..... no.

Last I checked, guns and cannons were still devastatingly effective when air-to-air missiles aren't an option. And those bombers would be significantly less maneuverable than an F18 or F14. Especially with a full bomb load. And while Mach 1.8 is REALLY fast..... Mach 2.5 is faster.

There's a reason planes are still equipped with them besides strafing soft targets. We found out pretty quick in 'nam that relying solely on Air-to-Air missiles is suicidal.

If you are in a surface ship, chances are the sub probably already knows where YOU are. All Active Sonar would do is let him know that you know where HE is.

Active sonar is really rough on marine life and such though.

Hmmm.... Whirlwind, EDSAC, ENIAC, early Zuse machines, Colossus..... and various other defense-funded computing projects that are responsible for the evolution into the technologies you describe were defense projects.

And most of IBM's R&D budget came from military contracts.

Without the defense R&D you wouldn't have an ISA, OS or programming language. BTW, COBOL, the first high level language was a defense project.

For a Seth Rogen movie, it wasn't bad. Certainly no worse than most of the other movies he's done. I thought it was funny personally.

1.) It's not theft.... more like counterfeiting but even that doesn't quite fit.

2.) Digital piracy has been with us as long as digital electronics. And distribution systems as long as the Hayes SmartModem. PirateBay isn't unique. There's plenty of other alternatives out there. The PirateBay raid also had no serious measurable impact on worldwide piracy. And most likely, they'll be back. Probably with something more distributed.

3.) Are you seriously arguing the folks who wrote the initial FTP client and server "enabled thieves" by not building in rigorous rights-violating DRM from the onset? DRM and BS like it violate the rights of many to preserve the rights of a handful of people. Most of them already pretty well off. It also makes preservation of creative works much harder later on down the road. And in the end, every scheme is broken if there's enough interest in breaking it so it's all wasted effort and money anyway.

Remove the sockpuppets in DC and we basically DO have a corporation-state. As far as that goes, we invade whoever the hell we want with almost complete impunity. We've generally sucked at it since the '40's. It's never been quite as profitable since.

Likely a DDOS from Anonymous....

It would be interesting if the DPRK *IS* responsible for the Sony hack.... now.... Sony is twice as big as the DPRK from a financial standpoint. Can Sony hire a bunch of mercenaries to retaliate or nuke the DPRK and call it self defense? If corporations are people and people have a right to defend themselves with weapons if necessary..... is a corporate army in the US legal?

Awww... cry me a river. UK cops actually have to engage in police work to catch criminals instead of resorting to outright criminal or at least very shady methods to catch them. I guess the UK and US govts shouldn't have abused the power we entrusted them with.

Want an easier time catching criminals? Stop BEING criminals.

Personally, I think if law enforcement, the civil courts and the MPAA don't have a right to force Google to do their jobs for them. I also think that due process for individuals still exists and the MPAA shouldn't have a right to tell Google to pull content without a court order or valid evidence.

So yeah, this guy kinda needs to be sued. Google has done nothing but try to balance the rights of these greedy bastards and the rights of individuals. Google has spent a ton of money to implement functionality just to help placate these morons while pissing off its user base.

And if people don't get their pirated content with a Google search, there's MANY other trivially easy ways to find it.

We shut down movies now over terrorist threats of 9/11-style attacks?

If they are so worried that a few hackers could hijack a plane, and pull this off successfully, that they are willing to sink a multimillion dollar film that's probably already in circulation on the net.....

Why do I need to have people try to feel my nuts at the airport and treat me like I'm entering jail?

If they can't stop a few nerds with laptops from hijacking a plane, how can they ever hope to stop an actual skilled boogie man terrorist jihadist child molestor movie pirate? I know a lot of us play flight sims but come on..... f**king seriously? This is a whole new dimension of retarded. Why couldn't someone do this when they were about to release Titanic or Pearl Harbor?

The problem there is the 10th amendment. If the constitution doesn't say they're allowed, they aren't. It's for the States to decide. The 10th amendment has been ignored for about a century which means legal precedent and existing decisions hold more weight than the actual law. So they made sure any case that would be in OUR favor was shot down a long time ago when the Feds decided to tighten their chokehold before, during and after the civil war. Unfortunately racism pushed by the rich slave owners funding the fight for the South overshadowed any and all of the other perfectly valid reasons half the country wanted to secede.

Unless they make the same mistake the Nazis did and start persecuting the rich, no one will have the funds or manpower to organize an effective resistance. And due to very effective media manipulation techniques, anyone else who tried to rise would be labelled a lone, kiddie murdering, child molesting, atheist, serial rapist that preys on cute rich white girls.... and boys. And the cops will obviously be in fear for their lives as they shoot you in handcuffs.

They aren't making the same mistake the Nazis did. This is not race warfare. This is not religious warfare. This is CLASS warfare. And you aren't part of their class but they will never truly admit this to you directly. They'll just have you pulled over for your car being too old, shoot your dog in the backseat, and tell you to stop resisting as they cave your face in with onlookers doing nothing because you dared look them in the eye. And the perpetrators of the violence will investigate and clear themselves. Welcome to 21st century America.