Not the movies, but the Strategic Defense Initiative proposed under Reagan.
Fifty-year-old Alistair Beckham was a successful British aerospace- projects engineer. His specialty was designing computer software for sophisticated naval defense systems. Like hundreds of other British scientists, he was working on a pilot program for America’s Strategic Defense Initiative–better known as [...]
Maccabee on The Daily KOS has an superb post on a Navy officer discussing the current military situation, and how impending an attack on Iran is:
Like most Marines and former Marines, she is largely apolitical. The fact is, most Marines are trigger pullers and most trigger pullers could care less who [...]
Two people have been charged with a felony for using flour and chalk to mark a trail through a parking lot to direct runners. For those who don’t know what a felony is, and on what category this pair is being charged, here’s a helpful description from Wikipedia:
Crimes commonly considered [...]
On Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End all hardware and operating systems have embedded Digital Rights Management software, a fact that while Vinge doesn’t specifically explain it, probably outlawed operating systems such as Linux which you have under your control (and not the other way around).
Now a guy in the U.S. who has been convicted of uploading [...]
Venezuela has passed a constitutional reform that will allow Chávez to legally stay on as a president for the rest of his life.
Assembly President Cilia Flores said Chavez’s proposed changes to the constitution, including the lifting of presidential term limits, were approved by all 167 lawmakers after about six hours of [...]
Some group is advocating blocking Firefox from accessing some sites, and has set up a site to explain their reasons. Their argument is that Firefox provides an easy way to block ads and - get this - watching a site without ads is theft.
Numerous web sites exist in order to [...]
Detailed fiat currency article over at Technocrat, with a very spirited discussion on the comments. I completely disagree with Thomas Lord’s points, but an anonymous poster already went through a lot of work calling bullshit! on them. I’d never heard of the Working Group before (more on that group on The Telegraph).
From Rudy Guiliani:
“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
Oh, come on! [...]
Remember Cramer flipping out? I think we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Singaporean banks try to reassure local investors that they won’t be affected by the sub-prime mortgage problems in the United States. On France, their biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, freezes $2.2 billion worth of funds and the European Central Bank injects around $130 [...]
China has decided to start swinging its economic club, threatening the U.S. to affect the value of the dollar by selling some of the $1.3 trillion and change they own, unless the U.S. backs off the tough trade talk and economic chest banging that Congress has engaged on.
The Chinese government has [...]