Yep were getting them at all international airports here in Australia.
Just so we can make Uncle Sam happy and keep feeding the treats to our lapdog politicians.

The only sanity in the entire thing is that its not mandated for domestic travel.
The moment they try that I'm taking a day off to politely ensure that my MPs in both houses know my opinion.
Probably by standing in their office till they either drag me out or i get to talk to them. They arent far fortunately, I could do it in a lunch break but I want the extra time to guarantee i get to talk to them.

Yes but we did it with a goal of NOT putting that much dirt in the air. Specifically designed detonations of weapons would most certainly have the ability to seriously screw up everyone.

Read a little about the detonation scenarios for nuclear war and it becomes clear, they understand that if the goal is to deny a very big place. Buried weapons can work very well. Typically such scenarios are under the label of 'scorched earth tactics' and never considered useful. Its the reason they never went ahead with any of the 'nukes to make big holes for civil engineering' type projects. If Russia wanted to wrap the globe in nuclear winter. It has the capacity to do so without a single rocket.

Nuclear scorched earth tactics can scale up in a big way and were all cactus if anyone tried them. How about gently melting a few nukes down under the Antarctic ice. Note the word melt, not drill, melting can be rather quiet and unlikely to be noticed seismically. Shift the entire west antarctic ice shelf perhaps? even part of it would work well given estimates of its likely runaway melting behavior. That would be an approximate 3m sea level rise. Several countries gone, and potential deniability if they wanted to be REAL dicks about how they played the game. It sounds like a stupid Bond movie plot, who would believe they actually did it?
Not to mention the good old fashioned bury the nukes where they will kick up the most dirt, plan.

The sane response to this is to offer more money to buy these weapons as part of "helping these states disarm"
for examples sake.
which is more likely to stop terrorists using a Topol-M against the USA.
A $1billion missile defense site/program
or
Offering to buy 100 Topol-M units off ex-soviet republics at $10million a piece.
or
A standing offer to outbid anyone trying to sell this hardware.

Im pretty sure people with an understanding of risk analysis will agree. If you offer to buy the damn hardware, you never have to worry about it again.
Except for if your worried about ideological affiliations that may just GIVE the terrorist of the day such a weapon, in which case, well they will probably give a bit more help than just the weapon. I would imagine some area coverage info on USA BMD systems would be NATO information, and some innocuous transportation arrangements to a more 'useful' launch site would be likely too.

A BMD site anywhere doesnt 'stop the terrorists' because if you have the bomb you have the damn bomb.
Its going to get used somewhere, even if the USA closed shop, borders & all, you cannot guarantee that they wont float the damn thing into Miami with a military quality Cuban drug submarine and sneak it to the target on land. Yes it would be hard. But guess what. If you have a 100% effective BMD, they will work out how to use the nuke some other way....
Simply because an unplanned mushroom cloud would be the ultimate method of inspiring abject terror in the minds of millions. Mostly because the average person doesnt know a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging device from a Cobalt 60 Irradiation device. Nuclear is scary to most people, ergo its perfect if you want to scare people.
T

I use a pretty odd arrangement at work & it makes my work 'mouse behavior' very different. I use a trackball i bought myself at work and I've always been aware that having to move my arm less to use it seems to have increased the 'nervous tic' like mousing behaviors.

Best example of which is that if I'm working my way through a page of boring documentation, its quite likely (>25% probability) that I will be highlighting & un-highlighting bits of the paragraph as I read it for no reason at all. This behavior is completely context dependent. I only seem to start doing it when reading long sections of text, and not when for instance I'm reading a long section of text/code in my editor.

Your comments about noticing the tic has made me realize that i have several very distinct different patterns depending on what is going on. I wonder if this would throw off their algorithm due to passing a difference threshold that they cannot correlate against, such as the type of text I'm reading.

The Sea Shadow has a pretty strait forward advantage over a submarine, a lower active sonar signature.
The side 'spars' are using a design known as SWATH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_waterplane_area_twin_hull

The lack of a single flat plate reflective surface (the face on profile of a typical V bottom hulled warship) means that the design of their hulls is much harder to find even when you give up your stealth and active ping for it. Its not going to be perfect, but between the hull design, the electric drive designs to reduce motor & shaft noise, and Sonar Absorbent Materials, this thing would be likely be very very deadly to lone submarines.... possibly more than a standard hunter sub even, but no one will ever know.

Just correcting a minor misconception. DICE admitted that they changed focus and developed primarily for consoles in the last few month.
PC was't a 100% PC -> console port.

Also... they have the stupidest patching process ive ever met.
They are only releasing a Patch every 3 months or so, so they (I'm quoting a lead dev at DICE) "aren't playing favorites" between PC, Xbox & PS3. (Consoles have a month or so QA process on games as big as BF3 apparently)

Yes, I really want to keep playing your game with brutally broken weapons... M26 MASS shotguns that are as deadly as tank cannons & as accurate as a laser... that i have to put up with till June or so when they put out the next patch...

Its the implied point. "You have the source code, if something doesnt work then you have no obstacles to fixing it yourself" and other such RMSish statements.

Not saying you should have to do it all. Just saying that the fact you "CAN" do it yourself is a significant part of the reason Linux was created and grew in the first place.

Defeating the point of linux that ... you can do it all yourself.

I am a Libertarian ... who believes in the economic reality of universal healthcare.
We do exist!

Charitable giving being claimable has to do with the fact that donating to charity is meant to be giving to the needs of the community which is what Taxes are for as well, hence its kind of a "your helping more than you need to, so we wont take as much" type deal.
And to be fair, I don't believe that churches should be tax exempt, I think that any genuine charitable work they do should be organised separately and then treated as a charitable non-profit. The group that pays for the house of worship & pays a living wage/salary to the ministers/priests/holy men/women, nope, not charity in my book. Non profit perhaps, but not a charity. Donations to them arent helping the community as a whole, they just help members of which is no different to being apart of some kind of social club, its not charity.

Thank you, just when I was starting to think I couldnt keep calling myself Libertarian, someone steps in and reminds me there are people that understand the balance properly. I typically call my opinions "Libertarian Socialist" but that sounds odd and the 'socialist' sounds superfluous when your talking about the principles of how to organize a society/country, you cannot discount a certain amount of collectivist thinking.

Bloated government = very bad ... but... Basic services = Good for all.
I favor allowing central government regulation of key things eg, FCC radio usage regulation (maybe not device compliance, but someone has to coordinate the radiofrequencies & FAA Air Traffic Control coordination. Sometimes a standard is good, but I've never met a corporate monopoly I would trust enough to be in control of something as important as either of the 2 examples above, so I'd rather be able to bloody vote out the people in charge of them.

I would say that if you were reforming things on such a huge scale as this would be, then from the start, the provision of health care should be universal.
As you said, there is nothing wrong with something that favors no group over another. I would rather not throw away things like herd immunity or deal with the weaseling of an insurance company while in pain or try deciding the best approach to my treatment based on how expensive it is, or risk charities not being able to afford to vaccinate enough of "the poor" to provide effective herd immunity and there be a pandemic that shuts down half a city due to staff home sick or dead. Healthcare should have an across the board universal base standard of cover and paid for by the state. No elaborate private hospitals subsidized by the sate nonsense either. There are decades of evidence & academic study on the economic benefit of universal healthcare to a sovereign nation. I wouldn't say you have to be required to use it or any such nonsense. Freedom to setup & use a private hospital as you please, a hospital bed with silk gown & plasma TV awaits. But I would be more than happy to pay the cost of universal healthcare in my taxes. Knowing clearly that it will be in my best interests both as a member of society and as a statistical member of a population pool who will be X% likely to suffer from incidents in the set {requires medical care} despite my best efforts to avoid needing it.