You seem to have missed the reference to "Mutual Assured Destruction". The concept was popularised in a film as, "The only way to win is not to play the game", IIRC.

IOW, the parent was saying we should keep enough nukes around to maintain the balance of terror--you and your neighbour don't need to keep 50 cannon each, when 2 or 3 will suffice to level the other's house.

This helps keep the big powers from going after each other directly. Alas, as we learnt during the Cold War, it does nothing to stop proxy wars between the principals' sidekicks or wars among third parties; and as we're finally figuring out now, it doesn't deter attacks by non-state actors.

The original comment implied that regulatory uncertainty is detrimental to the economy, which is generally true. When investors don't know what to expect from regulators, they tend to hold their money in less-risky investments, which don't move as much money around the economy as much as other investments.

Enry pointed out that it's pretty certain that January 1st, 2015 is politically likely to be the final date, but OakDragon reminds us that within one week (being the time it took for the due date to change), long-term corporate plans for implementing the required changes may have changed wildly.

Personally, I'm more inclined to agree with OakDragon. I currently work in the mad world of finance, and I've seen the research our investment managers do into each company they consider. Now, at least the last week's research needs to be rechecked, because companies' plans have likely changed to push the new law's expenses into the future. That means that until the research is done (again), we're probably holding more money in cash, leading to that aforementioned economic impact.

Not really. The shareholders always have grounds to sue management... you can sue for practically no reason, and just get laughed out of court faster. Implementing government mandates ahead of schedule is an investment at an opportune time, not mismanagement of funds. Yes, the shareholders can still sue, but they could also sue for having the wrong color of carpet in the lobby, with a similar chance of winning.

Exactly.

A much shorter period than, say, 700 million years. Or even 14 thousand.

Ain't no way that shit's getting out into the hallway from here.

(I got the back window open and the fan turned on, man.)

not so fast! if your canoe breaks on a lake in sweden, you'll get accused of lake rape

Most *nix systems since 1979's V7 at least try to defeat fork bombs by capping the number of processes allowed to be spawned by a user.

I think it's probably fine to store non-empty cells as objects, as long as you use something like the Flyweight pattern to avoid carrying too much baggage in each cell. It makes for a fine user interface, I'm sure.

To really get good recalc performance, though, you really need to drag the cell dependence graph out of the grid and treat it like an actual program. Once you do that, you could actually JIT the computation represented by all those cells. If you're really walking the object forest for every recalc, you'll never speed up.

I'd like to see you implement an AND gate with just XORs and NOTs. Use as many as you like... ;-)

In all seriousness, you can build all other gates from NANDs. Or from NORs. In fact, that's how the Cray 1 was built, apparently. Tons and tons of ECL NAND gates.

The 4th what? Surely you don't mean the 4th amendment? After all, that amendment protects against unreasonable searches, which is completely unrelated to the issue at hand.

The Fourth Amendment's protection of "papers" has never applied to the external surface of mail. The outside of mail must be read by the USPS for the service to function, so when you drop a letter in the mailbox, you're implicitly giving the USPS permission to read the visible surface. To my knowledge, there has never been a law preventing the USPS (or any other courier, for that matter) from reading anything visible from the outside. If the surface of mail is particularly confidential, it's not "unreasonable" to expect the mailer to put it in a plain outer envelope.

...Because it's not like your side of the story could possibly be corroborated by receipts, packing slips, or even the actual product.

Surveillance itself isn't inherently bad, but it's an all-or-nothing deal. Once the investigators know you've been receiving packages from $ENEMY, they need to also know that those packages were unrelated to $PLOT or $TARGET, so it's obvious you're just another mundane person.

How? Which piece of legislation forbids the USPS from logging what it handles?