Both your position and TFA's to be perfectly clear. Members of the House, Military, and all of the various intelligence agencies are masses of people with a huge amount of collective knowledge. That "Bob" didn't know something is complete crap, because last time US Security relied on one person was... well, absolutely NEVER!

Saddam had no Nuclear weapons, and the whole story about yellow cake was fabricated by various intelligence agencies to fit an agenda. Everyone in politics and the Military knew it was bullshit, and everyone knew why it was invented by the Italian version of the CIA (which is why they attempted to hide the source). Bush was going to go to war no matter what. It was sold to the public by lots of politicians using every method imaginable (free oil, those damn terrorists, that evil dictator, etc...). The point in the propaganda game is not to convince other politicians of an action, it is to convince the public that the action is justified. That is right, the war was going to happen regardless of public opinion so it was purely justification.

Why do some people that believe politicians are stupid, do things from complete ignorance, and do things without understanding all of the possible outcomes? Well, those same people are quite frankly batshit crazy.

Can it create a chain reaction popcorn burst and wreck that guys house again?

Humor aside, as you point out targeting is not the problem here. TFA points out the problem, and questions whether or not there is actually a solution. Given the little video I saw, the laser is no different than the Air Force's airborne laser which failed.

Nifty, and sure.. some R&D should go into these projects. R&D != trying to fit a ship with something that has a range of about 1 mile on a clear day. Lasers are subject to all kinds of atmospheric issues.. including a very common thing on the Oceans called "FOG".

Missiles have much longer range, less requirement on perfect weather, and are far far cheaper.

What they are doing is well within the regulations preventing ambulance chasing. Those are ethics violations. There is actually a good amount of flexibility in what an attorney can be disbarred for in almost every State. The issue is really getting the action started. This one, pulled at random, says (pardon the formatting, I'm lazy but you have the original link).

Items 10 and 11 are why attorneys don't pursue cases of people spitting on sidewalks even such a Law exists. They are also the reason that attorneys have been disbarred for "ambulance chasing". It may be hard to get things started because attorneys starting these always fear retribution (and some of the pot calling the kettle black).

Further, if they are not actually filing court cases and just settling things out of court.. the Police could arrest them for blackmail and press charges. The charges alone could surely result in them being disbarred.

The problem with the death penalty is that there is no way to repair damage to people who were not guilty of the crime they were executed for. This happens way more often than anyone likes to admit.

With this case, do you want me to believe that rehabilitation is not possible? I say bullshit, especially when the person convicted was a minor at the time this happened with an adult influencing his behavior. Rehabilitation is possible until proven otherwise, and it was not attempted here.

Unfortunately, people in the US have been duped into thinking that the only purposes of a sentence are punishment and retribution.

I work with a guy who uses a refurbished old IBM keyboard. Heavy clicking, bulky, and honestly awesome. I grew up with an IBM manual and love feeling like I pressed a key. Now if my monitor would stop falling over when I accidentally hit the invisible carriage return...

Get your new fangled crap off my lawn!

The same thing they claim on-line voting has problems with, is the exact same thing we have problems with using boxes. Every election there is somehow missing ballots, and don't even get me started on dangling chads, absentee ballots, and how many dead people are voting every election.

No system is perfect, but what they have currently can't be any worse than on-line voting.

Absolutely correct, and exactly the point of my response. Not only can you not prove you prevented an accident but you can't claim "a billion people would have died if we didn't take their keys", which you just did with the Cuban Missile crisis.

You attempted to claim that spying has saved more lives than it has cost, which is contradictory to _ALL_ evidence and historical data. Pay attention to that! Not "some", but all historical data shows you are wrong. Your defense for your claim is based in a hypothetical which never occurred, claiming that the Cuban Missile crisis cost lives. Brilliant! (*sarcasm*)

I know many places that only wrote IE code because it was simple to plug in other MS data. I have never agreed with this mentality, but it's not always a question of developers choosing to do so. Upper management forced it to increase profits.

The simple fact is that MS sold itself to the devil attempting to monopolize the market. The whole point of IE has been to make it so easy to access other MS data that nobody could compete, no matter the security implications (anyone else remember active installer?). Thankfully other Browsers didn't give up, and people did eventually get fed up with the pathetic security in IE. Just not before a hell of a lot of damage was done.

When you can't answer basic issues insult the person asking. Then ask questions that are not really questions but rather the same excuses you used previously attempting to look intelligent.

If you stop and realize that the overwhelming majority of today's Servers _are_ Linux then you can not use the excuse that nobody will support Linux. Most companies have teams of administrators doing just that, supporting Linux.

So perhaps you are stuck in 2000 and think Windows will be the biggest thing in servers, but that has not been true for any Server market ever. You simply can't, or are a shill so won't, acknowledge basic facts. Further, you refuse to correlate Servers with Desktops. Not because it's impossible but because you are either ignorant or a shill so simply refuse.

Since your only retort has been ad hominem, I'll prefix my next responses as "Go pound some sand up your ass!" I refuse to waste my time on people who are so intellectually challenged that they must resort to personal attacks as their first and only method of debate.

This is going to be harsh, but I have no idea how else to put your statement into perspective. You mean to say that because you are lazy the rest of the world must be too? Since you are choosing to remain ignorant, everyone else must be just like you?

I have spent nearly 30 years working in IT. The last 15 of that has been where Linux was the primary business operating system. This is not at one company, but every company I know runs Linux as their primary OS. Anything Oracle Database is probably running Linux today (not all, but most). Anything running SAP is probably running Linux today, anything running LAMP, anything running a firewall (most are pure Linux), any load balancer (most I know are running Linux), most embedded devices I can think of, most hosted cloud servers run Linux, most FEA/CAE (simulation/analysis) runs on Linux.

I have run Linux as a primary desktop for the majority of that same 15 years. If I need Visio (about the only thing I can't run in *nix) I can boot a VM. "support myself" has translated into not as much work as I would have had to do with Windows. Why? No anti-virus needed, no anti-malware needed, no "patch tuesday" and every other graphics update breaking my PC. I have had to learn about OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but they are both at least as easy to install as MS office and just as easy to use. I run KDE which has been stable and performs better than Windows for graphics. Windows every year or so needs to be reloaded due to cruft, bloat, and corruption in the magical Registry. Linux, I copy a config file and can see everything my computer is doing at all times.