While World War II-style ship-ship naval warfare is irrelevant, the Navy remains an excellent way to project power into remote regions without the need for land-based facilities.

It's a lot easier to fly sorties off a carrier deck than it is to fly planes halfway around the world, not to mention providing a platform for command/control, logistics, troops and helicopters. It's fun to read about B-2s flying out of Kansas to bomb Afghanistan, but you won't be flying A-10 missions from Kansas unless you're attacking Missouri.

The downsides are the vulnerabilities of ships generally, but there's a lot of risk mitigation. The principal risk are anti-ship missiles but the Navy puts a lot of effort into anti-missile systems, but few players have the sophisticated anti-ship missile technology needed to even be a threat and fewer still are willing to risk retaliation. Sea-borne and airborne risks are pretty low to near zero.

Is a carrier group expensive? Sure, but so are building, maintaining, staffing and equipping land facilities, and these have a diplomatic cost or may be unobtainable.

I've read that most of the road network in Europe at this time was originally built by the Romans and Roman armies would basically build a fort at the end of every day's march; these forts would be the basis of towns along the road. This meant that the nearest village was basically a day's walk.

I would argue that they didn't have much reason to travel even to the next village. At best they would trade for agricultural products or craft goods they didn't have or have enough of (pottery, animals, wood goods, ground flour maybe, wine or beer). There really wasn't anything else to buy even if they had gold because they wasn't that much else made.

It really wasn't a consumer products society. People made what they needed.

For the same reason you can't go to the IRS web site and fill out your taxes in a web form instead of paying $79 for TurboTax.

Lobbyists in congress said it was unfair that the government would do something that they could possibly make money on.

A lot of evidence suggest that Alzheimer's is "type 3 diabetes", so does that mean that a "good diet" is what we've been told is a good diet since the late 1960s (high carbohydrate, low fat), or is a "good diet" what is suggested by low-carbohydrate advocates suggest, one high in fat and very low in carbohydrates (a ketogenic diet)?

And what kind of exercise? From what I've read, there's not a lot to suggest that exercise has much influence on weight loss, so perhaps just "being active" (walking 2-3 miles per day) is good enough versus engaging in running or other vigorous cardio? And then there are those who suggest that weight training is better.

My sense is we really don't know the answers to these questions very well and there may be huge variations in response on an individual basis, suggesting a strong genetic influence.

The news article said it would be 2.5 megatons of TNT, which I would equate to a 2.5 megaton nuclear bomb (which AFAIK, uses the same explosive yields).

While that would be, well, a disaster if it hit near something occupied, it seems too small to wipe out the earth.

I'd be more than a little worried. If he does that with the computer, what the hell will he do with the car??

If he's finding his stuff when you have taken it away, how do you punish that? If it was my son I would be inclined to take them away on a more long-term basis, up to just getting rid of them or making sure they were totally inaccessible (like leaving them at a friend's house or another place).

The issue isn't his technical ability, it's his absolute lack of deference to parental authority.

Why does Apple get to lobby the government or expect the support of the government when they won't pay for it?

Maybe the next time Apple has a patent dispute, the Chinese authorities embargo their product at the docks, or the EU starts making demands the US government should tell them to sit down and take a number.

I love how corporations and the rich hate the government and won't pay for it until they need it to do their bidding.

I'd love to see something like this. Clearly it wouldn't work for everyone, but it would be fun to have the ability to encrypt -- even if it was a basic substitution cipher -- postings and messages that would automagically be decrypted by anyone using the add-on (and having whatever the key was).

I'm not thinking of "hard" encryption, but scrambling that would totally defeat Facebook's analytics and the desire by Facebook to turn off privacy settings to enhance their search, etc.

Really, it is.

There's lots of reasons not to -- power, network connectivity, etc.

I suspect that actual commercial server hosting happens by accident, a small consulting or partnership that just needs basic access to get off the ground (FTP, test web site, etc) and it just grows from there.

Although considering I pay $79 per month for Comcast business class internet with unlimited throughput, I don't think there is any colo option cheaper than that that's not a grossly oversubscribed low-budget VPS.

Even so, were they inclined to smash stainless steel boxes on the wall in the head?

My sense is that knocking those things off the wall would require tools of some kind, at the very least something like a hammer or a tire iron. It's hard to see any place staying in business where the patrons can literally rip things off the wall.

How do you contain the flywheel? I would imagine a flywheel capable of accelerating a 3000 pound mass would also be highly destructive if it got loose.

Because they have had these here for years and the closest thing to vandalism I've seen happen is that one bar quit using the advertising service but kept the displays and started piping ESPN to the screens instead, so you could have a piss and keep up with sports while you did it.

I can only imagine its a code/safety/insurance thing, but the active displays I have seen in bathrooms all use stainless steel boxes with high-impact plastic fronts and behind-the-wall wiring. You could destroy it if you wanted, but it would take pretty serious effort.

What does this have to do with the environment?

Every iPhone comes with a lightning cable with a plain old USB-A connector on the other end. There would be no material difference if they shipped with a micro-USB cable.

The same is true with "extra" cables -- presumably, most people who wanted an extra cable would go buy a micro USB cable. I suppose some small minority of tech fanatics would have a bunch of micro USB cables already and never buy any additional cables, but this is really a trivial difference which wouldn't likely affect the number of Apple-branded cables they made anyway.

As for thinking different, as you can tell most people who have used both vastly prefer the lightning design. I'm glad there's something of a standard for USB devices generally (which is commonly micro-USB on small devices), but really the most important factor is durability and usability and the lightning system works better.

I just bought the latest iPhone and didn't need to buy any new cables to have spare chargers. Why? Because I already had them from my iPhone 5 and I'm just guessing that this will be the case for several years to come.

The original dock connector cables were proprietary, too, and eventually I had so many of them I started throwing them away when they showed any evidence of wear.

The lighting cable works well and I'd rather see Apple license this than switch to microUSB with its tiny, hard-to-see connector and difficult to see orientation.