1. 0. This is pointless busywork. Further, someone on the government end has to create and manage the paperwork, making it pointless and inefficient. taxpayer, libertarian or otherwise should want that.
2. 1. There's nothing inherently wrong with keeping funding levels constant but providing a higher level of service. Would you complain if the Highways department managed to maintain the roads to a much higher standard with the same budget?
3. I'm assuming you're in the US. So I should think that this would be administrated as a State program, rather than a federal one. Either way, you're still on the first of your four boxes, as this is being proposed for Finland. As such, is still a pretty long way from even being an election issue in the US.

Not saying you're wrong, exactly, but it's worth noting that a lot of places have welfare without food stamps or housing vouchers, and it seems to work okay. In fact, it appears that food stamps are a uniquely American thing. Where I am (British Columbia), welfare is just a monthly cheque.

That's only true for hardwood (which is often sold rough). Softwood used to be cut to 2x4, but with better milling technology, it's now cut to the smallest size that still ends up at 3.5" x 1.5" after planing.

Interestingly, in Canada, our whole forest industry is metric. The only part that is imperial is the labels (We still turn out 2x4s but they are defined in millimeters). Construction is still all imperial here though.

What are you talking about? That is the definition of sovereign. Of course they can refuse to pay. They just can't expect favourable interest rates afterwards.

Argentina is kind of a bad example. They had huge inflation through the '80s, then locked their currency to the US dollar through the '90s to compensate. This made their position much worse, as they needed to be able to devalue their currency to keep what industry they had competitive. The default was just an unavoidable consequence of decades of economic stagnation and bad policy. They were screwed before the default, and surprise, surprise, are still kind of screwed after.

It's just a trade. You trade your ability to borrow money in order to drop the obligation to repay past debts.

But you don't really need 40,000 GPS receivers, you just need one, and put the antenna up on the roof. Then you have one computer attached to it that keeps time, and all the others can sync from it over your network.

I suppose with that many clients, your time computer might get overloaded, so we better create a second tier of load balanced servers that can query the tier 1 time computer thingy, and serve requests out to the rest.

The scheme just needs a name. Lets call it the Network Time, umm, Program. There. Done.

I had wondered where all the old Slashdot trolls went. Looking at Pipedot, now I know. It's a pity, as the layout and UTF support are rather nice.

You forgot the /s.

If that wasn't intended to be sarcasm, note that the price for a five year old quad core machine on that site averages about $1200. You could get a new quad core i7 for two thirds that price. In short, prices for Macs represent terrible value, and have since about 2005.

Either the author is an idiot, or his universe has more dimensions than mine.

Hmm. I get 15 FPS on my mother in law's old laptop. Core 2, 2GB RAM, some shitty mobile Nvidia thing. Granted, that is with reduced settings, but I get get ~90FPS at full settings with my desktop machine that is still much less than yours. Perhaps you have a video driver problem?

The dreadnaughts effectively were made obsolete in the First World War. They were forced to stay far enough out to sea as to avoid the small, cheap, torpedo boats. By the time the Second World War rolled around, battleships couldn't safely leave port except in cloudy weather, or risk destruction by land based aircraft.

I suspect aircraft carriers are where the battleships were in the First World War. Great for force projection against lesser navies, but have to stay far from shore to keep from being overwhelmed by small, cheap, missile boats and land based missiles and aircraft. As always, you can't know until you try.

You know V for Vendetta wasn't a documentary, right?

Because oil tankers never call on ports in North Dakota or Alberta. It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

Powershell is a scripting environment, not a command line. The fact that you can enter your script interactively doesn't change the many inadequacies it still sports.

Wait. What does Capitalism have to do with democracy? Some Capitalist countries, especially the richest ones, are democratic, but democracy is by no means a required part of the Capitalist economic system.

A better statement might be to say that central planning of economies doesn't work. While central planning is a typical feature of Communism, they aren't always the same thing.

Nope. That's the Just In Time part of the JIT. Javascript can't be (efficiently) compiled to native code until the data types of function arguments are know. Since Javascript is a dynamic language, the types can't be known until the function is actually called.