If Kip Thorne can win a year's worth of Playboys for his bet that Cygnus X1 was a Black Hole, when current theory from Professor Hawking says Black Holes don't really exist, then can Professor Thorne please give me a year's subscription to the porno of my choice due to the non-existent bet that this wasn't such a star?

So, any serious multinational can have the stock distributed enough to get past your first law....

As to your second, at least in the USA, you're going to be blocked by the First Amendment to some extent. After all, "lobbying" is done by people no matter where the money comes from. As is "political activity".

IN other words, you need to think the problem through a little more carefully...

By the by, are you aware that if Google (for example) were paying ZERO taxes in the USA now, and the laws were changed so that they were taxed at 50% on worldwide revenues, their tax obligation would pay to run the Federal government for a bit less than 16 hours.

Do note that Google is paying some taxes in the USA, and corporate tax rates are rather under 50%. Which means the actual benefit from taxing Google's worldwide income would not be nearly so significant as you might think....

"If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.

The problem isn't that you can't save everyone.

The problem is that you can save either of two people (hypothetical people, in this case). So, how do you code things to choose between the two, when you can do either, but not both?

Let me guess - a PRN?

Interesting...

Note that the President that got us into WW1 was a Democrat (Wilson).

As was the one that got us into WW2 (Roosevelt).

Then there's the Korean War (Truman).

And the Vietnam War (Kennedy/Johnson).

Carter was the only Democrat President of the 20th Century who didn't get us involved in a war.

And, as of last week, there are no Democrat Presidents this century that haven't gotten us involved in a war (or does anyone really think that this ISIS affair is really going to be a quick bombing campaign?).

So, is this something which actually exists and is being tested? Or is this vapor ware?

A little of both.

Boeing doesn't do development work without a contract. So, when they got a contract to start development of their capsule, they started.

And then they stopped working on it as soon as the contract ran out. They're waiting on a new contract to resume work.

The only way their thing is going to be flying within a year is if you define flying as "unmanned test launch" (note that Dragon has been doing "unmanned test launches to the ISS for a while now in the form of its CRS flights. Another of which is due this week, as I recall.).

It's quite possible they'll have a usable capsule in three years. It's not the way to bet, but it's possible....

This is clear evidence of corruption, because the government is selecting the lowest bidders instead of the most popular companies.

Lowest bidder??

Last time I looked, Boeing was the highest bidder of the various bidders.

Also the one farthest behind in the design process, since Boeing doesn't do development work until they have a contract signed, while SpaceX has been working on Dragon on its own dime.

It's similar to the filter that gets applied to modern music: it always seems to appear that things were better in the past because you forget the bad songs and only remember the good ones.

Just so.

It's why I listen to oldies stations when I'm driving.

90% if everything is crap. But for oldies, the 90% filter has already removed most of the crap before it has a chance of being repeated.

So the oldies stations playlist is taken from the "non-crap" survivors of the era in question. Unlike stations playing modern music, where the crap filters haven't yet engaged effectively.

So I guess your eyes glossed over before you got the part where I talked about how someone is still maintaining current releases of Firefox to run on the original iMac (from the 20th century)?

Assad is our enemy. He has always been our enemy. ISIS are our friends.

ISIS are our enemies. They have always been our enemies. Assad is our friend.

Yah. When we started attacking ISIS (ISIL, IS, whatever), my first thought was "we're helping the rebels fight Assad, and we're helping Assad fight the rebels" (for varying values of "rebel"), since anything we do to ISIS helps Assad and allows him to bring more force to bear on the other rebels that we're helping....

With government, you can complain on Constitutional grounds if they infringe your rights.

Interesting...

Just read a news article this AM about the NSA working to develop a "map of the internet", with every device using the internet at any given moment mapped as to both virtual and physical location.

Looks like it'll be tough, but the only real problem I see is going to be making the "map" usable once they acquire the information...

Good luck on getting that sort of thing killed on Constitutional grounds....

Memory transistors are about a thousand times larger than CPU transistors. Do try to keep up.

Why would there be any question that Chromium could still be compiled for 32-bit CPUs? It it's open-source, it can be. The only question is whether anyone cares enough to do it.

The Firefox devs walked away from PPC processors some time ago, but there's enough interest in that platform that an independent fork of its code has been maintained.

If you combine the populations of India and China, isn't it something like seven times the population of the United States?

More like eight times....

Unlike for civilians, there are open statistics for police officers being shot with their own firearms. In fact, the percent is 5% of officers shot are shot with their own weapon. One in twenty.

It might be worth noting that your 5% figure actually translates to THREE officers shot with their own weapon in 2011 (from the FBI report). Out of 780K police officers. So, in any given year, about 0.0004% of police are killed with their own weapon....

Hardly a significant problem.