They are fairly adept with short-range missiles. During the Iran/Iraq ware, Iran was actually purchasing missile technology and production-ready missiles from North Korea. A number of these were launched and fell on Baghdad and other cities.

Their range, however, is short and would be barely capable of striking Japan (though S Korea is obviously in range).

You're only talking about LONG range missiles (capable of hitting the US).

They have had at least a dozen successful tests of a short-range missile based on the old SCUD design that could hit parts of Russia and Japan (as well as S Korea and parts of China, obviously).

They are even said to have exported this design to Iran and Pakistan.

Here is a history of North Korean Scud missile designs and mentions a number of successful tests:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scud#North_Korea

The fuses inside your car operate the radio, lights, accessories, etc.

The fuses that operate the ignition coil, engine computer, etc, generally reside in the engine compartment.

You're competing against China. They subsidize their solar panel industry heavily. In order to compete directly on cost, without subsidies, you would have to pay your people less than the average Chinese factory worker. Even Chinese CEOs make a fraction of those in the West.

Besides, the environmental regulations in China are appalling.

If THIS is your ideal place to live, I'm going to strongly disagree.

To be fair, 4 of the top 5 most profitable annual reports in the history of the US stock exchanges come from oil companies. (the other is from Apple)

They are the single most profitable industry in the world, often by several orders of magnitude above any others. Even when they flush $200 billion down the toilet in environmental cleanup bills, they still pocket the largest profit of any core industry in the world.

I don't care if it's on a 10% margin, they are profiting enormously.

The infrastructure costs of a large and mostly empty area like upstate NY are much higher, per-capita, than anything in NYC.

The result of dense populations and higher per-capita income lead me to believe that it's more likely that NYC subsidizes the remainder of NY more than the opposite occurs.

Agreed, but there is a HUGE majority of seniors who vote republican and poll numbers show they overwhelmingly support the idea of "cutting spending", but when you list out the 10 biggest things that constitute that exact spending, don't feel that we should touch any of them.

This is where the puppy farts joke become salient. They like the IDEA of cuts, but not the actual cuts themselves.

They don't want to cut Medicare, they don't want to cut Medicaid, they don't want to cut Social Security, they don't want to cut the Military, they don't want to cut Education, they don't want to cut Police and Fire services, they don't want to cut Infrastructure spending.

They want the cuts to some from somewhere that doesn't affect them personally.

Puppy farts, I guess.

Denver has done a pretty swell job at their rail system and it's apparently so packed they are having to lengthen the platforms because they're already running trains at maximum frequency during rush-hour.

So they went and built 15 more. Cool! :-)

I suggest you look at Denver as an example. There was staunch opposition to a rail system in the city, and when it was pushed through, many people decried it as a waste of money.

Now, 10 years later, they need to upgrade the existing system because it's packed like a Tokyo subway every weekday and ridership is strong into the wee hours of the morning . It revitalized a whole portion of downtown, and raised property values along the entire rail corridor.

Now they're building 15 more lines because it turned out (in hindsight) to be such a damn good idea.

*shrug*

Maybe it's just cultural. I have found that in the south, many people often view public transit as "poor people only" territory and regard it as a bit of a status issue if they were to be seen riding a bus or train to work, because, by golly, they can afford an SUV. :-)

Cultural issues aside, well-designed tramways and light rail is actually a GREAT idea, even in the suburban environment of today's western US cities.

There isn't a binary "self-sufficient" and "utterly dependent" choice.

Rather, there is a pretty long and convoluted slope in between those two things.

I'm not quite ready to start trying to define where on this subtle slope one must be forced to pose the question:

"Are you sure life is worth living under those circumstances?"

Just not sure, there....

Every reputable company implements a VPN, MPLS or something similiar for internal traffic between their remote locations.

I would be completely shocked if they did not. Router management traffic or log data dumps, for example, is completely inappropriate over the broader Internet.

Now, it's possible that some traffic between datacenters is using public pipes, but I would think they have it set up to prefer internal VPN or MPLS or other private circuit arrangements between their own locations.

On consideration, I dislike the definition, although this planet simply cannot have existed very long in its current orbit if it is regularly smashing through a belt of debris. Each transit would wreak havoc on this belt and after a few billion years, it should have been scattered to the wind.

So, either this object was recently (last million years) shifted its orbit has a very unusual orbit, or it is not solid.

The researcher does point out it could be inclined vs the cloud's orbit, which would make it unlikely to interact with the debris, or it could, even, be simply a cloud of ice from a comet smashing event.

As far as the definition of planets, there are two options. Either... every object large enough to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. shaped by its own gravity) is a planet, which likely adds 5-8 new planets to our own solar system, or we have to have other criteria, such as a being gravitationally dominant in their orbital region.

Childbirth rates did, incidentally, crash during the 1970s and 1980s in cities, with the bulk of growth in all western societies coming from immigration.

Just FYI.

No, it's not "watertight" for causation, it shows a STRONG CORRELATION, to use the original authors words.

The fact that the strength of the correlation is strikingly similar to the strength of the correlation with abortion rates doesn't surprise me.

There are a number of other factors that closely track with the crime rates on a delayed timescale.

I propose that changes in a society that might itself lead to both increased focus on education, rights, safety, child care and also to focus on issues such as lead-abatement is a more plausible causative factor than some simplistic "single element" cause like "brains has lead, case closed".

I still, having read the articles, find it more likely that they are a co-equal result of some other more general change in society.

Methamphetamine impairs brain function as well, and also maps very closely with increases in crime rates in geographic and temporal studies.

Does it too cause crime?

Or is it, perhaps, also a co-equal phenomenon of changes in social attitudes, education, health, etc that are far more complex than one factor?

I can't believe this got -1 flamebait, that's insane! hah