Feel free to sufficiently provoke the US to test your hypothesis. I'll check the Vegas line and watch on video.

Re Iran, the Mossadegh government seems to have been a little too friendly to the Soviets. They shared a long border and the USSR had occupied substantial parts of Iran during (and for several years after) WW2, so there was real fear in the West about losing the whole country to the Soviet bloc. This would have given Persian Gulf ports to the Soviet Navy, an existential threat to the West's oil supplies.

I am not saying the Iran coup of 1953 was a brilliant or ethical move, only that it is somewhat understandable in the geopolitical calculus of the time. It wasn't ONLY commercial profits at stake.

Well one thing that comes to my mind is a dead-man switch. Require whatever ordnance or vehicle to check in and obtain a new certificate from a trusted authority (no not a commercial CA) to continue functioning. Sign the firmware with this cert, and make it hard to get physical access to the ASICs without destroying the gear. In normal circumstances this could be a trivial, largely automated process associated with standard maintenance processes. Set the TTL to something like 6 months and there's no danger of impacting legitimate operations, while minimizing the usefulness of looted gear.

I believe there were many benefits, well justifying the cost. You apparently disagree, fine. Your arguments are unlikely to persuade me, and vice versa. Good day sir.

Really? This article concerns NASA, which pioneered the exploration of space. Are you saying that was unjustifiable? Which private sector entities were clamoring to throw money at it in 1961?

Those Blackadders are quite deadly I hear.

Those noted nuclear apologists at the World Health Organization state that "up to 4000" people could die due to exposure to radionuclides released by the Soviets' stupidity at Chernobyl. But hey, everyone alive in 1986 will eventually die, so maybe we should just count everyone, right?

Meanwhile coal (like that sweet lignite that Germany is digging up now) goes on killing at least HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR*, yet people seem only to care about teh ebil raydeeayshun. Maybe the coal casualties aren't as dead or something.

It is way past time to grow up and stop pissing and moaning about nuclear.

* According to Forbes, the figure is about 300000/yr in China alone.

Granted on the (very large) technicality. However, TSR sent me a letter afterward basically saying, "Haha, sucks to be you. We got the company, but we are going to do nothing at all for the S&T magazine subscribers, despite continuing to publish it. You want it, pay up again."

Well, gee, thanks but, go to hell TSR.

Gygax, and TSR in general, got what they deserved in my opinion, following their "acquisition" of board wargame publisher SPI. Screwed thousands of longtime gamers such as myself (I played both RPGs and wargames extensively), who then like myself voted against them with our wallets, never spending another dime on that company. What goes around, comes around.

The subject line that the data covers only Japan is disproved. I didn't call you an idiot. Just pointed out that the assertion is wrong and trivially verifiably so.

So the minnows apparently haven't benefited greatly to the detriment of the poor oppressed corporate farms?

So where did that water go, genius? Reservoir levels, Stream flow. Most of those numbers look well below long term median/average to me. So if the water isn't in the reservoirs or flowing in the rivers, where exactly is it?

Maybe there's a lot of room in certain people's posterior orifices that isn't accounted for here.

And your weather anecdote constitutes global data somehow. I am suitably impressed.

This looks like a temperature map of the WHOLE EARTH to me, found on the source site after about 10 seconds of terribly difficult clicking on a couple of buttons.

Umm, actually the air temps at Yellowstone were below average when I drove through the park one day before the Firehole Road melt happened. That is pretty much entirely due to upwelling heat from the subsurface magma chamber – otherwise why would only a very specific part of road be melting? Repeatedly so, though only every couple of years as I understand it. A few degrees' delta of air temps will not significantly alter the heat dissipation here. If the air temps get past 160F I'm pretty sure we have a major problem planet wide.