seriously? only for a few. opium for the masses in the US = NFL on Sundays, Budweiser beer and throwing pennies at homeless people. (UK is probably Premier League Soccer, Rugby Union, shin kicking, and trying to follow up on what Kate Middleton is wearing today).

well, we had bnetd back in the day... Thanks, Blizzard. I think for more people, though, if it's horked up accessing Netflix via their XBox or PS (because you have to "authenticate" to XBL or PSN first before using Netflix), that's gonna be a bigger pita. At least it is for me.

Short term annoyance only, I hope. C'mon, Microsoft. Is this only what we get for your $80 Billion cash on hand? Don't know what to say about Sony & PSN, except perhaps it's just a pathetic q.e.d.

So it sucks, right? It's not web-scale, either.

The track may be, but any tunnelling doesn't have to be, although the more precise it is the less jiggering and time spent actually aligning the track for the railway and desired tolerances. Same goes for the tunnels for this proposed accelerator. Doesn't matter if those tunnels are curved or straight.
Granted, with this accelerator (whether it be for leptons or railroad cars), they're not going to have Maintenance Of Way equipment come down and lift up the accelerator tubes, shove some new ballast and ties under it, and then tamp it down to the point it meets desired tolerances, like they do with normal railroad tracks.

same uses, at least initially (Hulk-smash minute particles to make even smaller ones). Much different implementation, and much different design tradeoffs. No bremstrahlung in a linac, for one, until the beam hits the target.

The problem with those, as anyone who has worked with those systems, is that the canned reports are quite generic. At best, for a decent-sized enterprise, they're starting points for the business report writers. Been there, done that, too many times. So, you either roll your own or customize what's there to fit the idiosyncrasies of your company's accounting and ways of doing business. NO company fits the Chart of Accounts exactly how it is set up in the default COA's of accounting systems. So there goes many of the canned reports out the door right there.

Using a major ERP system (e.g., SAP), you're not going to be reinventing the wheel, but hiring various levels of contractors and consultants to do it for you, or in the case of SAP, to customize your business and systems to fit SAP, as that is usually the path of lesser resistance, but still expensive.

Go check out Movietime Videos, in McMinnville, OR and tell to their owners. Part of it is figuring out how to keep in contact with and foster those people who still want the physicalness of the video store. Part of it is being in a vibrant small town with a dense-enough rural area (but not so dense as to have cable out there). Another part probably is its a college town. And their location works.
And yes, they have quite the catalog, too.
Believe it or not, they don't rent porn.
Almost worth it still for me to go there from Beaverton...

Dogmatic, stubborn (or psychotic) assholes breed war.

Still have cruise missiles, though.

Yes, I do remember reading an article (Air & Space?) around the time the last F14 was leaving service, that the F14 required 10 hours of maintenance for every 1 hour for the F18E/F or something like that.

...all less bad, even in sum, than a large regional or even global conflict would have been. Lots of small earthquakes, while annoying, are less bad than the infrequent/rare epic ground spasm.

Hmm... well, the US rewrote the Japan constitution forbidding them from having an (obvious) offensive military capability. With the Cold War, the US didn't need to be this heavy-handed about it. But West Germany was divided up into 3 zones for the US, GB and France to "defend" in case the Warsaw Pact forces decided to invade through Germany.

It also worked good enough for European countries as well. They only had to maintain plausible military forces to "help" fill in with NATO if necessary, as the US took on the role to backstop them if the USSR attacked them. This freed up GDP in these countries for other uses. Same with Japan. The US benefited from this as well, as we then had viable economic partners that were favorable to US economic interests. The US kind of demonstrated a potential industrial capacity for military production that only the USSR and now China can really come close to matching.

This is kind of a dead argument, really. It's been kicked around for...oh...the last 60 years or so. The US does it because it's been good economically for the US corporate interests, as well as the corporate interests of most of the countries we "police" for.

What good is diplomacy without something to back it up? Switzerland is a bad example. No resources pre-WWII, not a strategic location. There wasn't really a good reason for Germany to attack Switzerland.

The US military is a subsidy for US economic influence. The US learned this lesson the hard way with the Barbary pirates. And, probably learned more than a little bit about how military might can influence economic decisions internationally as well. The US learned however that it's better to keep it visible, just don't need to make it so obvious or brandish it like the British did in the 1700-1800's. The strong military lying in the background lets the businessmen be bigger dicks in their trade negotiations.

The Marshall Plan would not happen today, as it would be seen as both too leftist for our "allies" we'd be trying to bring back up or our recent enemies.

Yet, I felt a disturbance in the Force. It was as if billions of souls were suddenly...illuminated.

In other news, that space station is now operational.