The discussion wasn't about the military budget, it was about the cost of the wars.

Surely, when you want to know how much it costs to drive a car, you want to include gas and maintenance, right? Insurance and parking costs. Even the cost of traffic tickets.

The Council on Foreign Relations, who likes wars, tried to minimize the cost of the war just to the line items in the budget. It's worth having a more realistic estimate.

There is a perception among open source advocates that if open source software saves you money, you now owe some of that money to them. If you don't pay, you get called a freeloader. This agrees with the "from each according to his abilities" part of Marx's famous saying.

Here's Heritage's numbers

Why not give us Marvin the Martian's numbers too? For all the time the Heritage Foundation has cooked the books on their reporting, you might as well just give us Glenn Beck's numbers.

"Figures don't lie, but the Heritage Foundation Does"

http://mythfighter.com/2014/01...

Military budgets were higher as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan, but you'd have to count the entire military budget as "war costs" to reach even $4T, much less $6T.

Well, it adds up pretty fast when you look at the lost productivity of the men and women who went to fight and the fact that now we're on the hook for a lifetime of medical care for every single one of them, plus other benefits, and a lot of them came back very broken, with pieces missing and will require expensive medical care for the rest of their lives.

When you see the $4-6 trillion figure for the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're looking at more than just the cost of bullets and MREs. The notion of True Price Accounting, where you look at the externalities of a product, service or government policy, is actually quite useful. It gives us a good idea of the true costs of things. A former CIA guy named Robert David Steele has written a few books on this topic and they're quite illuminating. He's also the guy who wrote a book called "Open Source Everything" which is a very interesting take on government and information.

So, if Apple intends for your iPhone to only last a year, why do they sell 2 year AppleCare plans, again?

My point was not that the products actually do last more than a year. My point is that sleazy Apple purposely borks their old hardware with updates so you have to buy a new gadget.

The notion that the best we can hope for, paying $900 for an iPhone 5 (64gig) is that it last 12 months is absurd. And you're saying, "Well, what do you expect?"

I guess I can't tell if you're trying to cover for Apple or if you agree with me in hoping that people figure it out.

No one promised you could own something that works for more than a year.

Then why do they sell 2 years worth of AppleCare?

I'm guessing if you were to ask Tim Cook, "Say, you scrawny little Cryptkeeper-looking fuck, will your product work for more than a year?", I bet he'd tell me about all this customers that are still using 60gig iPods and swear to God that Apple isn't doing what everyone here knows they're doing, which is borking anything over a year old. Then, he'd ask if I've ever seen a grown man naked.

Oh, gimme a freakin' break. Appendectomy, really? Polio victims are crippled and won't pass the qualifying rounds. Or did you just come up with ridiculous examples for some unclear end?

When there's money in it, people will cheat. That's what causes all the drug problems.

Just like car racing, we need different divisions for athletics. One for stock, unmodified humans like us. No drugs, etc. And the "top fuel" division for prosthetics, hormones, steroids, etc. My interest in several sports (bicycling, weightlifting) has already died because of rampant drug abuse. Heck, if you don't do drugs then you won't even qualify for televised events. It's sort of like F1 racing, it's not really a competition between humans, it's a competition between scientists.

Ever since the Olympics went professional, it's been boring. Of course, once these two divisions have been established, the athletes will still cheat in the stock division. Because there's money involved. Even the Korean Starcraft players cheat for the same reason.

People who run adblock aren't going to click on the ads anyway. I'm sure it makes them better to get all self-righteous about it, though.

Run defrag. Done. Even idiots knew to do this back in the XP days. Still doesn't answer the question.

I've never seen a hard drive last more than a couple of years

I've got a hard drive sitting here that's pretty old. I converted it to an external drive after replacing it with newer ones in my computer.

I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but I'm pretty sure that instead of storing the data as 0's and 1's it's using cuneiform symbols. I'm telling you, it's old.

I've noticed the same thing about my body. Damn you, Apple!

The article says, "phones feel slower over time as they hold more software". How does this follow? How does the phone get "slower" just because more software is installed? This sounds an awful lot like the cargo cult thinking of "well the hard drive is full so we have to buy a new computer because this one is slow."

I know some software will start agents on boot, but they just sit in the background and do little. top reveals very little CPU time and memory consumed by these.

On what basis do you judge that? On the fact that in the past, you didn't hear about all the things the government kept secret?

I've posted links to data and graphs of the number of documents classified by the US government by year.

When you see the graph, you will never again need to ask that question.

Here, I'll do it again just for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...