My understanding was based on articles like this one. Can you point me to evidence that the Moskit's can be destroyed by this ships anti-missile defences?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that anti-ship missile technology has been ahead of defence systems now for quite some time, such that basically any ship that gets within range of them is basically always sunk. What's more, Russia, Iran and China all have such missiles. What exactly are these ships being built for, beyond the jobs they produce?

I hope those guides include my preferred option: Fuck off. I was dying, you got me to agree to treatment under duress, it's not a legal contract and I refuse to accept it now.

What are they going to do, undo the treatment?

It's a tort. Civil, not criminal.

(Though the **AA is trying to change that and I'm not up-to-data on how much they've succeeded.)

If we'd have left [the terrorists in Afghanistan] there and did absolutely not one damn thing to try and stop/kill them, well, how much did 9/11 cost the economy?

Quite a bit, actually. Took out a lot of infrastructure (including a major telecommunications hub and a number of business headquarters with all their personnel).

Then there was the cost of the reaction. For starters it stopped air traffic for days, and led to the creation of Homeland Security and all its costs - both direct and indirect (such as the large number of people who now drive rather than submit to the airport security theater.)

But I agree it was far less than the cost of the war that followed.

If someone walks in and shoots the party planning committee, how much does the next party cost the company? Trick question, there isn't one. Same with terrorists.

Actually, not the same with terrorists. Look up the term "blowback". Terrorists are hydras: Killing them tends to make martyrs, leading to the recruiting of more new terrorists than were killed

  It also leads to diversification: The longer the tit-for-tat goes on, the less centralized and connected, the more independent and self-sufficient, the factions of the opposition become.

9/11 itself (along with his previous shot at the Twin Towers) was, according to Bin Laden, retaliation for the US bombing of a similar tower on his side of the world.

How much does ObamaCare cost the economy?

Way less than the last few wars.

Of course the cost of the civil war, when it collapses the economy, will be even greater.

Do you count that as also "way more" than the cost of Obamacare, or part of that cost?

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

You forgot the "Seig Heil!"

Wouldn't this work well with some kind of solar panel technology that charges the panels. You would never have to plug it in.

Only if you drive it no more than an hour a month.

A horsepower is almost exactly 3/4 kilowatt. A square yard gets about a kilowatt of raw sunshine at high noon. Factor in the efficiency of the solar panel, battery storage, and motor control and you're lucky to get a fifth of that. Call it a quarter-horse for each square yard of cross-secton as seen by the sun, if you're parked in the open on a clear day. A good, sunny, location might get five "solar hours" - equivalent of five hours of noontime sun - per day. So call it a tad over a horsepower hour per day.

Crusing at highway speed takes maybe 18 horsepower. (Acceleration much more, but only for a short time - but then you lose much of it with breaking - even regenerative breaking that scavenges some of it. So stop-and-go driving is substantially lower mileage than highway.)

Remember the intro to "The Jetsons", where George hits the button on his flying commuter car and it folds up into a briefcase? You need a car that does the opposite: Spread out over a half-acre when you park it. But your company probably won't want you to use that many parking spaces...

So you plug in your electric car, move to the planet Mercury, or wait for Mr Fusion to get cheap.

If an impact creates a short through the surface, the energy of the battery will be dumped through the short, appearing as heat in the resistance of the (non-superconducting) short and the conductors leading to it.

If something isn't done to interrupt this discharge, the energy will be dumped as heat (and perhaps actinic light and vaporized material) at the short, the region around it, or the whole panel.

The trick will be to build the panel so that, in a crash, the breakage and/or the current from the short(s) itself will interrupt the circuit before a dangerous amount of the battery's stored energy is converted - rather than creating a cascading failure that releases the whole charge, surrounding the car's occupants with red-hot walls, white-hot walls, or clouds of incandescent vapor.

If there's one car company with a track record of focusing their engineering on keeping the car's occupants safe, it's Volvo.

It depends what you really want when you say, "boost the economy". The reason so many EU economies are trashed right now is because they were fundamentally weak for a long time, ever since the flight of manufacturing to Asia really, and this weakness was covered up through extremely large amounts of borrowing and government deficit spending. In the UK for instance large parts of the north were almost being kept afloat by large deficits run up under Labour. In Spain a lot of employment came from an unsustainable housing bubble that triggered over-construction - construction being an industry loved by politicians because it employs lots of relatively low-skilled labourers.

So these economies were already "boosted" for a long time on what amounts to economic caffeine, and like all caffeine-fuelled energy streaks eventually it comes to an end and the drinker has to crash for a while to catch up on sleep and get things back to normal. People that were being pointlessly employed through bubbles or government jobs programs have to find something more useful to do, which is often really hard and involves complicated retraining, assuming they can even afford that, and then of course such huge amounts of resources were misallocated for so long who even says there are jobs for them to take? In fact there often aren't. This "crashing out on the sofa for 24 hours" is a recession.

Meanwhile tax takes drop, interest payments go up due to the cost of banking bailouts and thus deficit spending rises still further. But that process of adjustment is still required.

The US economy is doing marginally better than most EU economies (except maybe Germany?) because it is still jacked up on caffeine, it never had the crash, specifically, it's jacked up on massive government work programs and the resulting secondary employment, like all the towns that revolve around military contractors working on pointless boondoggle projects. Common sense tells you that the US does not need to sink so many resources into advanced weapons programs or building yet more jets or aircraft carriers. But those people and resources get directed towards such projects anyway, partly because the excuse of national security means it's easy to exclude foreign contractors and get Americans working. American can afford this much longer than most countries can because the dollar is very large, US Treasuries have a privileged place in the worlds financial system, and the Fed has basically broken the US bond markets by buying vast amounts of government debt using newly created money. Theory tells us this should cause inflation. In practice it hasn't become a huge problem yet because the dollar is such a very very deep currency, so it's possible to print more money without impacting the overall supply, and because so many prices are indirectly connected to the price of food and fuel, both of which are very cheap in America.

You do understand the reason that companies like Apple come up with such convoluted tax arrangements, right? It's because the US tax system is fundamentally broken in a very important way - it tries to tax income regardless of where it was earned or who earned it - for people this is "citizenship based taxation", for companies what it means is if they earn money overseas and spend that money overseas, not only does the overseas government take a slice but the US wants a slice too. That's not how other tax systems work. If this was actually enforced properly then every US company would get double taxed on foreign-earned income, which would make them less competitive against foreign companies that only pay tax on income where it's earned. The reason it's NOT enforced properly, is exactly because closing this "loophole" would be very harmful.

Generally the rule is that if a US company brings the income home, then it gets double taxed. So big tech companies which are very profitable end up stockpiling profits outside the USA. They don't want to bring it back to the US because then they'd lose a lot of it, after it was already taxed once. But they don't have anything to spend it on outside the US either. They instead sit it out and hope for a "tax holiday". From time to time politicians grant these because it doesn't make any sense for the money to be sitting around outside the reach of the IRS waiting for investment opportunities abroad, when it could be spent inside the US instead.

Companies that are not US based don't have this problem.

ATM cards that don't offer POS payment capabilities do exist. Why do you think otherwise?

... if the NSA is wiretapping a Somali terrorist in Somalia, and notices that he keeps talking to people in San Diego, it doesn't seem like the descending boot of tyranny for them to call the FBI and say "Check out these guys." As long as the FBI then gets all the warrants it's supposed to, I think I'm OK with it.

But that's not what's at issue.

What's at issue is whether the defendant can force the prosecution to prove the agencies followed the law and the constitution.

The government claims he can't.

I say that's bogus. The prosecution has to put up or shut up.

No, in fairness to Clegg, he has stated he wants to update oversight of the intelligence agencies:

British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is to start conversations in government about how to update the legal oversight of the UK's security services in the light of disclosures by the Guardian that powerful new technologies appear to have outstripped the current system of legislative and political oversight.