It depends. If you're talking about average GDP growth by term, then Reagan is 0.2% better than Carter.

But if you measure by presidency... Well, go see for yourself. I've posted the very recent study elsewhere in this thread.

When France supported the United States in the Revolutionary War, I'm sure there were some criminals in the US.

The Assad regime was a brutal dictatorship. The opposition to Assad is made up primarily of people who are not at all jihadists. In fact, the freedom fighters have in many cases fought the Al Qaeda forces who came into Syria to exploit the violence.

When Thatcher and Reagan supported the apartheid white minority government in South Africa, they were doing so to preserve apartheid.

Mrs Thatcher profited directly from apartheid, since her husband had extensive investments in white South Africa during apartheid.

What is YOUR answer to that?

It's always better to oppose unjust, undemocratic regimes. 20th century American history is littered with occasions where the US supported the unjust regime and came to regret it later, in sometimes devastating ways. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America, South America, Africa, Cuba...the list goes on.

If you average the GDP growth by term, Reagan comes out 2 tenths of a percent ahead.

If you average the GDP growth by presidency, Carter comes out ahead.

I've posted a link to the very recent study elsewhere in this thread. Look for figure 1b.

"Stanford scientists say they could help boost people's motivation to overcome difficulties by electrically stimulating the anterior midcingulate cortex in the brain.

You want motivation? I knew a guy who took two hits of crystal meth and a pint of schapps and was able to overcome a solid wall with his forehead.

It probably didn't do much for his anterior midcingulate cortex, though.

Reagan after the Congress vote on SA sanctions:

Which is exactly an indication of the kind of lying piece of shit Ronald Reagan was. He claimed to oppose apartheid after the whole world had already sided with Mandela, yet he moved to thwart him at every step.

When Mandela was looking for support from the West, Reagan and Thatcher decided to stand by the minority white apartheid regime. The only reason Mandela sought the support of the Soviet Union was because the West had already turned him down.

Ronald Reagan was as evil a man as has ever been in such a high office in the United States. He negotiated for Iran to hold Americans hostage so he could get elected. He sold arms to Iran in order to support fascist regimes in Central and South America. He undermined the industrial economy of the United States. He used the ugliest sort of racial stereotypes in his "Southern strategy". Reagan's "supply-side economics" have caused what Pope Francis has called the "New Tyranny".

Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were blights on the free world. They supposedly "defeated" the Soviet Union only to turn the United States and Great Britain into the neo-feudal countries they are today.

I don't believe in erasing anything from history

I didn't say anything about erasing from history. My suggestion was to erase their names from the Book of Life, which is an ancient curse, equivalent to damning them to Hell for eternity.

Read twice, comment once. This way you won't make the same mistake again.

About ten years ago, I went to a talk at Stanford where someone showed that the increasing costs of wafer fabs would make this happen around 2013. We're right on schedule.

Storage can still get cheaper. We can look forward to a few more generations of flash devices. Those don't have to go faster.

30 secs of google found a NY Times article* by Floyd Norris from 2011, using data from the Commerce Department, shows that it avg GDP growth was 3.5% under Reagan, The Gipper and 3.2% under Carter,

Here's something more recent that shows something different:

If you calculate the average GDP growth by term, you get the figures you cite. If you calculate the average GDP growth by presidency you get Carter ahead. See the paper below, figure 1b:

http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf

Picasa acquired by Google - New York Times, 2004. "'They came to the conclusion that it would be easier to buy this business than to build it themselves. It's the type of acquisition you can expect Google to do more of in the future.'' The self-driving car technology was acquired from Stanford, along with Sebastian Thrun. Google did do a lot with language translation in-house; that's probably the most innovative area. Most of Google's big-name products, though, came from elsewhere.

Google is good at scaling, and yes, many of the acquired products had to be rewritten to scale up. Still, Google Earth today looks a lot like the Keyhole Earth Viewer I had in 2003.

The worst part is the remnant of the "loser pays" provision. If you try to enforce a patent against a big company, if you lose you have a good chance of being hit with the big guy's legal bills. There's no cap on that. That provision was amended, which made it "slightly less awful", as one congressman put it. After the amendment, the new language now means you get to litigate over the legal fees. Statistically, the patent holder wins about 40% of the time, and even with a good case, it's easy to make a mistake and lose.

The Leahy bill is better. It's more narrowly directed towards bulk-type patent enforcement operations, doesn't have a loser-pays provision, and proposes a small claims court for smaller patent cases.

Glaciers melting in the dead of night
And the superstars sucked into the supermassive
Supermassive black hole

This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill.

If so, good then; the sooner the myth of patents being for the small inventor dies the sooner everyone will finally be rid of the impediment of patents forever.

It's another FU to small inventor, just like the last patent reform.

The small inventor, and the little guy in general, has been FU-ed out of the game for a long time now. Patents are now all about legal fights and trolling, not innovation or rewarding it. It's time for them to die.