"You're just applying a different "morale" than the people who actually have the power to take decision in the present world."

I am guessing English is not your native language, in which case your English is quite good, but "morale" doesnt mean what you think it does. (This is an error I have seen many non-natives make.) The word you are trying for is 'moral' (specifically a phrase such as 'moral code') not 'morale' - they are pronounced differently and not closely related in meaning. Morale is the high spirits of a group, for instance when you become convinced of defeat and quit fighting you are said to have lost morale.

"You probably also believe that all people should be equal, but you live in a world that clearly disagrees and believes people are valued by their economic value (both possessions and influence in the economy)."

Cant speak for everyone else, but I dont expect or desire equality in ALL aspects, that would be absurd. People are clearly different economically, for instance. Equality here is neither possible nor desireable. But all people should be equal *politically* - the basic rights of each individual should be protected equally.

Unfortunately that is far from the case.

There's nothing wrong with art history. There is something wrong with a system that says you should go study art history for 4 years in order to qualify for a job flipping burgers or mopping floors. That doesnt lift you out of poverty, it cements you into it with debt.

Increased cancer? Are you freaking serious? With all urban centers destroyed outright, industrial capacity wiped out, radioactive fallout and nuclear winter going on, you think increased cancer rates are what we will be worried about? I am sorry you seem intelligent and serious but that is just absurd.

The books you are referring to are propaganda. And yes, they are well written. It takes a good writer to make the laughable and absurd seem serious and scholarly.

Chrome is just unbearably creepy. It installs itself like a virus, keeps begging you to 'sign in' to something you dont want or need so you can be more effectively tracked, and fundamentals like noscript are missing/broken.

Firefox is by far the fastest browser for me, for the simple reason that noscript works properly on it and we leave large amounts of useless crud on the server without downloading it let alone trying to parse it. But with default settings every modern browser is absolute crud.

With all respect, you are wrong. 50% population loss would only be the *beginning.* The property damage combined with the massive increase in mortality rates for decades would threaten and quite possibly end the existence of our species. Best case scenario we would be reduced to stone age population levels and our modern civilization and societies would effectively cease to exist. People object to me calling this 'destroying the world' because there would still be a rock here flying around the sun and some living things on it, but that would be the end of the world we live in.

"Clear headed strategy is a much better deterrent than a head in the sand reliance on MAD as your only deterrece philosophy."

Agreed. Didnt advocate anything like that.

"All it takes are some unchallengeable secret court orders, and off to your nearest cloud/service provider to suck down all your datas."

Not been paying attention to the news the last few weeks?

We've known they could and would do what you described, but it turns out they got a general warrant in secret years ago, and they can skip a step. They already 'suck down' all your data and store it, and whenever an analyst thinks he has a good reason to pull it up it's there waiting for the click of a button.

There are according to a quick ask google a total of 2851 Cities with Population of 150,000 + on earth. That appears to be accurate to me if you have a better source feel free to present it. Assuming that is correct, 2149 could be allocated two, which is easily "most" of 2851. 161 of those would be in the US btw.

Of course the definition of city is somewhat arbitrary and this is a ballpark figure but I think it makes the point. There are huge urban areas that are counted as several cities but can still be taken out with one of the larger warheads. There are more spread out areas where you might have to use 2 or 3 smaller warheads. But in essence it's clearly more than enough weaponry to firebomb every densely populated area on earth simultaneously. Actually using a significant fraction of it would cause a disaster that affects not just the targets but comes back and kills us too.

"Why isn't he hiring Harvard grads instead of immigrants? Perhaps the cost of a US education has inflated to such a level that the payback required to justify the expense makes you unemployable. Perhaps we need to deflate the cost of the US education system because it's economically unsustainable."

Insightful. Education has become such a racket in this country. The lefties thought that if everyone had a college education it would make us all richer. Nice thought but it doesnt work that way, it just leads to inflation. You have to spend more money and more time acquiring a college degree to get the same menial job you would have gotten with a high school diploma or a GED before all the good intentions were inflicted on us, and wind up carrying a heavy debt burden. Once again good intentions prove no substitute for understanding what the heck is going on.

" The patent system worked rather well for a few hundred years."

Eh, even back in the days of the steam engine and the cotton gin and before it was hardly a clear cut benefit to the general welfare. It's just become more and more destructive as the pace of technological advance has increased, that's all.

"No such arsenal has ever existed that could do that once, much less a dozen times."

There are a little over 5,000 warheads in the US stockpile (as of 2010 wikipedia quoting reuters.) That's enough to hit every small city in the world, and most of them twice. Each is many, many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial blast fatalities alone from a full scale launch would decimate any nation on earth, it would make things like hurricanes look like hangnails.

The rural population outside the cities would survive the initial blasts, but the lingering effects of radiation would decimate that remnant in short order - as well as the populations of any areas that were not initially struck directly. And only a small fraction of those weapons would need to be detonated to invoke a nuclear winter which would make survival problematic even if all the explosions are on the other side of the globe from you.

Life would continue, yes, the cockroaches would inherit the earth. But humanity would be lucky to survive even in stone age form.

"Which is why it makes sense to leave them where they are. Decommissioning is even more pricey"

Not really. A one-time cost to decommission, defrayed by salvage, versus a large recurring expense.

"Most of the cost is military. Personally, I think guarding holes in the desert is a much finer jobs program than bombing people in the Middle East."

Cant say that I disagree on that. But nukes are extremely expensive toys and the maintanence cost is huge, and NOT mostly on personel. Just maintaining the nuclear arsenal accounts for around $18million a year currently and it's rising every year.

These are very delicate, precision machines, and each and every one of them is a minimum of 20 years old, many much older than that. As time goes on they require more maintanence, and it becomes more expensive.

I'm no naive hippy and I am ok with paying for deterrence. But it's clear we could cut our stock in half tomorrow with no reduction in deterrence. An arsenal that is capable of destroying the entire planet is in no way inferior to one that would be capable of destroying the planet a dozen times. It just costs less.

What the US administration has been trying to do, however, is get the Russians to make some concessions in return for us reducing our stock. This just wasnt a great approach to take. It probably actually spooked the Russians, who wonder why we are so concerned about their arsenal, hmmm? And they have other reasons to resist. They have indicated they are not interested in bilateral agreements that were reasonable back in the cold war days. It's a multipolar world, there are many nuclear nations, not just two and their respective pack members. The Russians want negotiations that include all the other nuclear powers as well. And the US administration would probably find that very reasonable if it werent for Israel...

At any rate we should cut stock for a number of reasons. It would soothe the Russian fears and might well lead to them reducing their own stock in response, but that's not the reason to do it, that's just some possible gravy.

"If we were sick of throwing money into a pit, we wouldn't have approved TARP, TARP2, and we would have had some campaign promises kept, like closing Gitmo, and getting us out of our two major wars, instead of getting us into two new ones as well. That'd save a bunch of money right there."

True that.

What exactly is the point of making this a 'web app' anyway? I cant imagine it's portable, if it's windows-only already why not just distribute it as a normal win32 application instead?

"Disrespecting the end user is one of the stages of software development team meltdown.'

Well do tell us the other stages, hopefully this is near the end?

Because I sure see a lot of it these days. Might we see every commercially significant software development team meltdown in the very near future? Please?

Because I have a feeling complete meltdown is necessary before anything gets better.