As I understand it, the sanctions are used to punish violations of international law. Yes, Iran is allowed to pursue civilian nuclear power under the NPT. At the same time, the NPT places obligations on them that they have been shirking.

Nuclear weapons are good for Iran in that they give the regime the power you're suggesting WRT brinksmanship. However, they're bad for Iran in that actually possessing them will touch off a nuclear arms race in the region as other powers will want the same guarantees in dealing with Iran. That would be a massive blow to stability not just in the region, but world-wide.

Their primary naval weapon is a missile that can get into ballistic mode before a ship's countermeasure can intercept it. I'm not sure what you're after there. A ballistic missile is one that follows a suborbital path (shitloads of power in the boost phase, and gravity and minor steering after). Even leaving that aside, AFAIK, the only serious countermeasure that the USN has for unguided missiles is Phalanx. I would think that relatively slow, small, unguided missiles* would be meat for the Phalanx. You could probably overwhelm the system, but that assumes the USN has no way to deal with said speedboats *cough* artillery *cough* Hell, you don't even have to hit the boats -- just throw up enough of a barrage that they don't get a stable platform long enough to take a shot. *The kind of MLRS that fits on a single engine fiberglass boat doesn't lend itself to having large munitions.

Wasn't it George Carlin that had the bit about adding dart guns to cars? When some guy did something wrong, you'd shoot a dart at his car, and when he got to 3 darts, the cops would pull him over for being an asshole.

Fishing in the Western Central Pacific is highly governed. The WCPFC, which is a treaty organization that includes Japan*, regulates what can and cannot be done in this part of the Pacific.

AFAIK, the WCPFC does limit whaling (and catch of other mammals).

*Japan is nice enough to send a lot of money to WCPFC

The transcontinental railroad and the interstate highway system were built by the WPA?

Cassandra can do it but it doesn't have the ability to deal with arbitrarily large binary objects.

Where did I put that Z-machine compiler again...?

Meh, Douglas Adams has 'em beat:

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

How dare those Indians! If they actually wanted to eat they should have had the good sense to be born in America just like me.

I understand you're trying to be funny, but billionaires do not typically pay almost nothing. The (in)famous Warren Buffett says that he's paying a lower rate, not a lower amount. As another example, Theresa Heinz-Kerry had to release her returns when her husband was running for president. She paid $627k in federal income taxes on $2.3 million of AGI. How is $627k "almost nothing"?

Puhleez! What is necessary is density that Americans won't put up with and mass transit proponents who don't get pointless hard-ons for trains over busses. Mass transit makes sense in the dense cities that have always had mass transit (e.g. New York, Chicago). Mass transit in sprawling Phoenix or Seattle is just sowing seeds of transit hate.

Hate to break it to you, but we're not living out "Fight Club". There are many different alleged "smoking gun" memos, but the one I'm most familiar with is the Ford memo. I won't tell you what you think it said, but I will tell you what it really said: NHTSA allowed that safety improvements that would cost more than $200K per life saved were not cost effective. In 1973, NHTSA wanted to change safety standards to reduce the posibility of a post-rollover fire. Ford then wrote and circulated a memo that showed that the compliance costs for that change were 3x the NHTSA threshold and should be opposed. Now for me, personally, an appropriate regime would be to have the auto manufacturers put a notice on the steering wheel, to be removed by the first owner, that says "We're insured to $X dollars in the event of death due to a design flaw." If that number is too low for you, buy a different car.

Magnuson-Moss, which has been on the books for nearly 40 years, already makes most of what you are pissing and moaning about illegal.

My guess is that this is for people in the "Chair Force", not those at the sharp end. Even if AT&T offers 3G in Kandahar, how far do you think the coverage area is? ;)