What sort of nonsense is that? Millions are spent all the time on projects with no expectation of a measurable profit. Typically it's done for less easily measured returns, and often it's called "charity". Or the returns are so far in the future that no business will try it, so other organizations have to do it if it's to be done at all. How do you compute the returns on a nice medieval church or the eradication of a disease or putting a man on the Moon?
Haven't been to church lately have you. The nicer your parish, the more parishioners you attract, the more hands the collection plate passes through, the more income the church generates. Those cathedrals paid for themselves thousands of times over, why do you think the church has so much money. Try going in a church in a poor area sometime, and notice that it's always the same set of priests. Then go to a church in a rich area ($50M+ annual donations), and you'll notice they constantly bring in traveling clergy that are really great motivational speakers. There's economic incentive behind this.
The irradiation of a disease is measured similarly. Why else do you think anybody with enough cash can buy an instant hard-on today, but there is still AIDS in Africa.
If you think anybody is going to spend $100M to develop something so that a company in China can come along and stamp disks and sell them for a dollar each, you're sadly mistaken. Especially for something with no measurable benefit, like the arts.
That's right. Art should only be enjoyed by those rich and sophisticated enough to a) deem it worthy of being art, b) condescending enough to believe the artist doesn't deserve to be compensated for their work, and c)stupid enough to believe that everyone else cares what they think. Get over yourself.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
But the arts have absolutely flourished with copyright. You're totally discounting modern films and large-scale video games, which wouldn't be possible without unbreakable DRM or copyright. In order to conduct art on a massive scale, the producers need to be able to recover their costs. You couldn't spend $100M on a project, if you could never recover the expense.
In addition to enabling the creation of such works, copyright has also provided tremendous financial incentive to produce these works. In the US alone, about $30B per year is spent on these two art forms. In addition to that, art has never been more available. We have public libraries that lend audio recordings, books, and films. Everyone in the United States is able to access electronic entertainment free of charge via radio and television. Art creation is no longer restricted to those patronized by the rich, but can be performed by anyone for the common person, as even the little guy can protect and profit from their work.
And just to defuse this argument before it starts, the one about what constitutes are, ask yourself this. If you were a (probably digital) archaeologist looking back to the mid 20th to early 21st century from 500 years in the future, do you think you would learn about our culture from Band of Brothers, From the Earth to the Moon, The Godfather, and GTA 4, or from a bunch of Pollock paintings?
I look at this a bit differently. I recently had a friend that died quite unexpectedly, at 20 years old. Basically, he went into his room one day, and never came back out. Facebook has been an invaluable resource. Since his death, thousands of pictures and stories have been posted that really filled in some memories of someone that I'll never see again. Personally, I don't go to funerals or any of that other stuff, because I feel like all you end up remembering is how bad that was, instead of how good they were.
I can't imagine setting something like this up for yourself, but it is kind of nice to have for others.
Get fucked. I saw a video just like this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoy8JprKI0&fmt=18, 8 years ago in a psychology class, where at the time I was totally convinced it was an experiment. That is, until the plane hit the pentagon and the guy next to me got to see his dad die. That seemed to be the part where it was more real than surreal. It's too bad it didn't happen in California so all you self righteous hippies would have some perspective.
It is? The Chinese would need to multiply their space budget 34 times, and India would have to multiply their budget by 13 times to match ours. Even if you don't include our military space budget, which is larger than the NASA budget, we have a larger budget for space exploration than every other country on the face of the earth combined. We should stop spending, entirely, until other countries have a chance to catch up. There is no need for the American taxpayers to subsidize their substandard space programs any more than we already have.
The comments for this story are really quite amusing. It's rather entertaining seeing just how bigoted the progressives on this site actually are. If a colony of homosexuals, or a socialist nation had announced they were going solar in such a major way, you all would undoubtedly be falling all over yourselves to pat them on the back. However, as soon as an organization as evil as the church, with dastardly tenets like do unto others as you would have others do unto you, obey your father and mother, and thou shall not kill announces the plan, they must be decried for how truly foolish they are. Careful, your duplicity is showing. Apparently the liberal love for the environment is vastly overshadowed by their hatred of well meaning do-gooders that believe in something foolish.
I'm personally somewhere between atheist and agnostic, but is it really necessary to tear people down for their beliefs. It would seem that, while they are still human, they're only trying to help.
Perhaps before the city invests in even improving the smell, they should figure out NYC 2.0. The version that doesn't need to be bailed out with Federal tax dollars and ridiculous new taxes. Of course, then they'd have to balance the budget, which would require them not spending money on stupidity like this, and eliminating some of their unsustainable social programs that don't work anyway.
Except that the RAM used for prefetch isn't paged out, ever. If an application needs it, it's immediately released to the application. All modern OS's that I know of do this, including Linux, OS X, and Windows. Don't talk about things that you don't understand.
The problem started when some people stopped believing that hard work, dedication, and pride in one's work are the way to get ahead in life.
Absolutely. Are you aware that the vast majority (~80%) of millionaires in the US are first generation millionaires with a median income of $131,000 and an average income of $247,000, with two-thirds working 45-55 hours a week, and fewer than 20% inheriting over 10% of their wealth? The average millionaire lives in a $320,000 house, and has lived there for an average of 20 years. It's a shame that a certain political and ideological group has spent the last 20 years declaring various subsets of the country victims, so they capitalize on their rage over the evil rich. The fact of the matter is, if you want to be wealthy, the easiest way is to work as hard as you can, for as long as you can, and save as much as you can.
Even if the roof was a full square meter, which it's not, and always faced the sun, which it doesn't, and there was no atmospheric interference, which there sometimes is, and the solar panels were 100% efficient, which they're not, the most you could generate is between 1,353 and 1,395 W/m2. The Tesla battery holds 53 kWh of energy. That means that in the absolute best case, it would take 38 hours to charge with roof mounted solar panels. Cars don't run on pipe dreams and pixie dust.
Hell, I'm a legit user, I don't download music (anymore, I did when I was younger) and I don't pull pirated movies/software either. I don't run bittorrent except for the occasional WoW update (when I did play). But I've seen a large jump in bandwidth usage with my new Roku box for watching NetFlix on my tv. That's a lot of streaming video. Are they keeping tech like this in mind? Doubt it.
Of course they kept that tech in mind. Do you have any idea how much money the cable companies would lose if everyone canceled their TV services in favor of less expensive, on demand, online offerings? Enough that it makes sense to piss off some of their customers on the internet end, to keep all of their customers on the TV end. These bandwidth caps are designed to kill IPTV before it gets a real foothold.
Verizon already figured that out, that's why they built the FiOS network. The cable companies are too concerned about cannibalizing their TV revenue by going with low cost internet options like Hulu or Netflix to not impose the caps. When they got into the internet game it seems that they never really realized that their main business was probably on the way out, and now they're fighting like hell to stay relevant by attempting to make it impossible to use the other service because of the caps.
How did the liberal counties keep finding hundreds of ballots, almost all for Franken, until Franken was in the lead? All the legal votes were counted, plus some.
How many times did they have to recount so he wasn't in the lead? I suppose as soon as a recount favors the liberal candidate, the count should just stop.
There's a very good explanation for that. Liberals are sore losers. If you can't win, demand a recount. If you can't cheat through the recount, protest. If you can't protest, bitch.
Reagan won in a landslide in 1984, taking 49 of 50 states, with about 60 percent of the vote. Obama was nowhere close, with under 53% of the vote. More people attended and watched his inauguration as well.
The media and the democrats would like you to believe it was a landslide, but the fact of the matter is it really wasn't.
Remember, the foreign public will judge you by your dumbest, or at least least desirable, citizen. Americans sue McDonald for hot coffee and believe the Fox network, British love crappy food and their queen, Finns are constantly drunk (unless they code neat kernels) and Russians are commies, mafia members or malware writers.
And of course the Germans are Nazis.
Which goes to show exactly how delusional the rest of the world is. If you knew anything about the hot coffee incident, you probably wouldn't cite it. The fact of the matter is McDonald's was serving coffee at temperatures at least 20 degrees hotter than everywhere else, in flimsy paper cups with lids that popped off quite easily. Because of the temperature of the coffee, it was able to cause severe burns in under 10 seconds, whereas normal coffee would cause comparable burns in over 30. Hundreds of people suffered from severe burns from spilled coffee, and McDonald's knew about it, yet they did nothing. All they had to do to settle that particular case, was pay the $800 medical bill of the woman who burned her genitals, yet they refused, and even went so far as to admit in open court that they knew of many people being burned, but weren't going to change. Did you know there were many other cases as well, before that one, where the drive through worker had slipped, knocked the lid off, and threw piping hot coffee all over the person in their car?
The jury decided that this went beyond negligence, and was actually reckless behavior. Negligent behavior is when you do something accidentally that causes someone to be injured, whereas reckless behavior is when you do something knowing full well that people will likely be injured, and you do nothing to inform them of that or make it safer. Recklessness carries a much larger penalty than negligence, since it's designed to discourage them and others from continuing to engage in reckless behavior.
As a result of this ruling, McDonald's now lets the coffee cool to safe levels after it is brewed, before it is served, and has designed new rigid plastic cups, as well as lids that fit snugly. I personally can attest to this being a vastly better design, having on more than one occasion had the lid pop off the old style cups from the pressure of picking it up, then watching the sudden loss of rigidity cause coffee to spill all over my leg, and my car.
All McDonald's would have had to do to avoid that ruling was implement the rigid cup design before hand, and demonstrate that the new cup was designed to prevent such accidents, or post a warning along the lines of "Caution: Coffee Served Extremely Hot, Severe Burns Can Result In 10 Seconds Or Less". They chose not to, and for that they deserved to be punished. You cannot produce and sell an unsafe product in this country, find out it is injuring people, then do nothing.
Your post further demonstrates the ignorance of so many foreigners. You talk about us judging you, as you judge us. You don't really need to pay attention to us, we'd probably be happier if you didn't.
There are so many things wrong with that post I hardly know where to begin, but here goes.
1. You are implying that correlation implies causation in the most ludicrous way imaginable. Are you seriously suggesting that "Star Wars" was responsible for the Soviet Union's collapse? The USSR did not break up because it felt it had lost the ability to emerge victorious in a war with the United States (if it ever had it), but because of the enormous dissent within its member states. While there may, may, be some argument that the Reagan presidency caused or accelerated the USSR's collapse, it certainly wasn't because of his plans vis-a-vis nuclear weapons, and more than likely it would've happened no matter who was president of the USA. Gorbachav, not Reagan, was responsible for the breakup of the USSR. This point is all moot though, because:
Star Wars absolutely increased the speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan pushed Gorbachev into a corner, and forced the Soviet Union to spend themselves into bankruptcy, which caused all that dissent in the member states. At the time, both our progress and spending on the system were greatly exaggerated, in order to bluff the Soviets in trying to keep up. Take a look at some of the pictures of Gorbachev and Reagan, as time goes on you can see it in Gorbachev's face, he ages quickly and looks quite frustrated.
2. Reagan's plan was never finished in the first place. This one's pretty simple. Do we have a functioning missile defense system, capable of protecting us from ICBMs? Answer: no. Since Reagan didn't actually accomplish anything in this regard, how can you attribute any lasting effects, political or otherwise, to it?
It was a bluff, designed to break the back of the Soviet economy. In addition to that, we've made quite a bit of progress toward an actual missile shield since then, although I doubt we'd ever hear about it being done, kind of like how the stealth bomber existed for 7 years before it was revealed.
3. You are badly misinterpreting Obama's plans for missile defense. Obama is on record as saying that he is not opposed to missile defense systems if they can be shown to work. And if they can't, we shouldn't be spending on them anyway.
The patriot missiles aren't perfect, but they are pretty effective, they've come a long way since 1991 when they were first deployed. In 2003, they shot down all of the Scuds that the Iraqi's launched.
4. You are making up attributes to his disarmament plan out of whole cloth. His statements were the typical grandiose words that politicians have been making at summits since time immaterial. If you look through his words carefully, this plan is very open-ended and could be implemented any one of several ways (if it is at all).
This doesn't surprise me, Obama tries to keep everything as vague as possible so the results, or lack thereof, can't be quantified. Sort of like how he stopped talking about creating jobs with stimulus packages, but saving or creating jobs. As long as somebody has a job, it's because Obama saved it.
5. You are implying that "lacking nuclear weapons = defenseless". Even if we got rid of all our nuclear weapons, we would still have the most technologically advanced, well-financed military on Earth, easily strong enough to act as a sufficient deterrent to so-called "rogue states".
The problem with people like you is that you're incredibly naive. Not everyone out there is farting rainbows, and a single nuclear weapon could kill tens of millions of American's.
For exactly the same reason that the Democrats changed all of the documents about their stimulus packages from "Jobs Created" to "Jobs Saved or Created". You can't quantify jobs saved, just as you can't quantify climate change, but it's happening, trust.
Slashdot Mirror
The data is digital, it's not going away any time soon. You can go find NES ROMS and emulators right now.
What sort of nonsense is that? Millions are spent all the time on projects with no expectation of a measurable profit. Typically it's done for less easily measured returns, and often it's called "charity". Or the returns are so far in the future that no business will try it, so other organizations have to do it if it's to be done at all. How do you compute the returns on a nice medieval church or the eradication of a disease or putting a man on the Moon?
Haven't been to church lately have you. The nicer your parish, the more parishioners you attract, the more hands the collection plate passes through, the more income the church generates. Those cathedrals paid for themselves thousands of times over, why do you think the church has so much money. Try going in a church in a poor area sometime, and notice that it's always the same set of priests. Then go to a church in a rich area ($50M+ annual donations), and you'll notice they constantly bring in traveling clergy that are really great motivational speakers. There's economic incentive behind this.
The irradiation of a disease is measured similarly. Why else do you think anybody with enough cash can buy an instant hard-on today, but there is still AIDS in Africa.
If you think anybody is going to spend $100M to develop something so that a company in China can come along and stamp disks and sell them for a dollar each, you're sadly mistaken. Especially for something with no measurable benefit, like the arts.
That's right. Art should only be enjoyed by those rich and sophisticated enough to a) deem it worthy of being art, b) condescending enough to believe the artist doesn't deserve to be compensated for their work, and c)stupid enough to believe that everyone else cares what they think. Get over yourself.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
But the arts have absolutely flourished with copyright. You're totally discounting modern films and large-scale video games, which wouldn't be possible without unbreakable DRM or copyright. In order to conduct art on a massive scale, the producers need to be able to recover their costs. You couldn't spend $100M on a project, if you could never recover the expense.
In addition to enabling the creation of such works, copyright has also provided tremendous financial incentive to produce these works. In the US alone, about $30B per year is spent on these two art forms. In addition to that, art has never been more available. We have public libraries that lend audio recordings, books, and films. Everyone in the United States is able to access electronic entertainment free of charge via radio and television. Art creation is no longer restricted to those patronized by the rich, but can be performed by anyone for the common person, as even the little guy can protect and profit from their work.
And just to defuse this argument before it starts, the one about what constitutes are, ask yourself this. If you were a (probably digital) archaeologist looking back to the mid 20th to early 21st century from 500 years in the future, do you think you would learn about our culture from Band of Brothers, From the Earth to the Moon, The Godfather, and GTA 4, or from a bunch of Pollock paintings?
Only because you wouldn't be paying for it anyway.
I look at this a bit differently. I recently had a friend that died quite unexpectedly, at 20 years old. Basically, he went into his room one day, and never came back out. Facebook has been an invaluable resource. Since his death, thousands of pictures and stories have been posted that really filled in some memories of someone that I'll never see again. Personally, I don't go to funerals or any of that other stuff, because I feel like all you end up remembering is how bad that was, instead of how good they were.
I can't imagine setting something like this up for yourself, but it is kind of nice to have for others.
in the most effective way.
There is also a most effective way of fighting insurgencies, perfected over several thousand years of warfare.
Get fucked. I saw a video just like this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoy8JprKI0&fmt=18, 8 years ago in a psychology class, where at the time I was totally convinced it was an experiment. That is, until the plane hit the pentagon and the guy next to me got to see his dad die. That seemed to be the part where it was more real than surreal. It's too bad it didn't happen in California so all you self righteous hippies would have some perspective.
Yeah, if you give something to someone, you should have to keep giving it to them forever. How else will we all feel entitled.
It is? The Chinese would need to multiply their space budget 34 times, and India would have to multiply their budget by 13 times to match ours. Even if you don't include our military space budget, which is larger than the NASA budget, we have a larger budget for space exploration than every other country on the face of the earth combined. We should stop spending, entirely, until other countries have a chance to catch up. There is no need for the American taxpayers to subsidize their substandard space programs any more than we already have.
The comments for this story are really quite amusing. It's rather entertaining seeing just how bigoted the progressives on this site actually are. If a colony of homosexuals, or a socialist nation had announced they were going solar in such a major way, you all would undoubtedly be falling all over yourselves to pat them on the back. However, as soon as an organization as evil as the church, with dastardly tenets like do unto others as you would have others do unto you, obey your father and mother, and thou shall not kill announces the plan, they must be decried for how truly foolish they are. Careful, your duplicity is showing. Apparently the liberal love for the environment is vastly overshadowed by their hatred of well meaning do-gooders that believe in something foolish.
I'm personally somewhere between atheist and agnostic, but is it really necessary to tear people down for their beliefs. It would seem that, while they are still human, they're only trying to help.
Perhaps before the city invests in even improving the smell, they should figure out NYC 2.0. The version that doesn't need to be bailed out with Federal tax dollars and ridiculous new taxes. Of course, then they'd have to balance the budget, which would require them not spending money on stupidity like this, and eliminating some of their unsustainable social programs that don't work anyway.
Except that the RAM used for prefetch isn't paged out, ever. If an application needs it, it's immediately released to the application. All modern OS's that I know of do this, including Linux, OS X, and Windows. Don't talk about things that you don't understand.
The problem started when some people stopped believing that hard work, dedication, and pride in one's work are the way to get ahead in life.
Absolutely. Are you aware that the vast majority (~80%) of millionaires in the US are first generation millionaires with a median income of $131,000 and an average income of $247,000, with two-thirds working 45-55 hours a week, and fewer than 20% inheriting over 10% of their wealth? The average millionaire lives in a $320,000 house, and has lived there for an average of 20 years. It's a shame that a certain political and ideological group has spent the last 20 years declaring various subsets of the country victims, so they capitalize on their rage over the evil rich. The fact of the matter is, if you want to be wealthy, the easiest way is to work as hard as you can, for as long as you can, and save as much as you can.
Even if the roof was a full square meter, which it's not, and always faced the sun, which it doesn't, and there was no atmospheric interference, which there sometimes is, and the solar panels were 100% efficient, which they're not, the most you could generate is between 1,353 and 1,395 W/m2. The Tesla battery holds 53 kWh of energy. That means that in the absolute best case, it would take 38 hours to charge with roof mounted solar panels. Cars don't run on pipe dreams and pixie dust.
You can get both, but they've got to run a second fiber and install a second ONT. It's a pain in the ass, but they will do it.
Hell, I'm a legit user, I don't download music (anymore, I did when I was younger) and I don't pull pirated movies/software either. I don't run bittorrent except for the occasional WoW update (when I did play). But I've seen a large jump in bandwidth usage with my new Roku box for watching NetFlix on my tv. That's a lot of streaming video. Are they keeping tech like this in mind? Doubt it.
Of course they kept that tech in mind. Do you have any idea how much money the cable companies would lose if everyone canceled their TV services in favor of less expensive, on demand, online offerings? Enough that it makes sense to piss off some of their customers on the internet end, to keep all of their customers on the TV end. These bandwidth caps are designed to kill IPTV before it gets a real foothold.
Verizon already figured that out, that's why they built the FiOS network. The cable companies are too concerned about cannibalizing their TV revenue by going with low cost internet options like Hulu or Netflix to not impose the caps. When they got into the internet game it seems that they never really realized that their main business was probably on the way out, and now they're fighting like hell to stay relevant by attempting to make it impossible to use the other service because of the caps.
How did the liberal counties keep finding hundreds of ballots, almost all for Franken, until Franken was in the lead? All the legal votes were counted, plus some.
How many times did they have to recount so he wasn't in the lead? I suppose as soon as a recount favors the liberal candidate, the count should just stop.
There's a very good explanation for that. Liberals are sore losers. If you can't win, demand a recount. If you can't cheat through the recount, protest. If you can't protest, bitch.
Reagan won in a landslide in 1984, taking 49 of 50 states, with about 60 percent of the vote. Obama was nowhere close, with under 53% of the vote. More people attended and watched his inauguration as well.
The media and the democrats would like you to believe it was a landslide, but the fact of the matter is it really wasn't.
Remember, the foreign public will judge you by your dumbest, or at least least desirable, citizen. Americans sue McDonald for hot coffee and believe the Fox network, British love crappy food and their queen, Finns are constantly drunk (unless they code neat kernels) and Russians are commies, mafia members or malware writers.
And of course the Germans are Nazis.
Which goes to show exactly how delusional the rest of the world is. If you knew anything about the hot coffee incident, you probably wouldn't cite it. The fact of the matter is McDonald's was serving coffee at temperatures at least 20 degrees hotter than everywhere else, in flimsy paper cups with lids that popped off quite easily. Because of the temperature of the coffee, it was able to cause severe burns in under 10 seconds, whereas normal coffee would cause comparable burns in over 30. Hundreds of people suffered from severe burns from spilled coffee, and McDonald's knew about it, yet they did nothing. All they had to do to settle that particular case, was pay the $800 medical bill of the woman who burned her genitals, yet they refused, and even went so far as to admit in open court that they knew of many people being burned, but weren't going to change. Did you know there were many other cases as well, before that one, where the drive through worker had slipped, knocked the lid off, and threw piping hot coffee all over the person in their car?
The jury decided that this went beyond negligence, and was actually reckless behavior. Negligent behavior is when you do something accidentally that causes someone to be injured, whereas reckless behavior is when you do something knowing full well that people will likely be injured, and you do nothing to inform them of that or make it safer. Recklessness carries a much larger penalty than negligence, since it's designed to discourage them and others from continuing to engage in reckless behavior.
As a result of this ruling, McDonald's now lets the coffee cool to safe levels after it is brewed, before it is served, and has designed new rigid plastic cups, as well as lids that fit snugly. I personally can attest to this being a vastly better design, having on more than one occasion had the lid pop off the old style cups from the pressure of picking it up, then watching the sudden loss of rigidity cause coffee to spill all over my leg, and my car.
All McDonald's would have had to do to avoid that ruling was implement the rigid cup design before hand, and demonstrate that the new cup was designed to prevent such accidents, or post a warning along the lines of "Caution: Coffee Served Extremely Hot, Severe Burns Can Result In 10 Seconds Or Less". They chose not to, and for that they deserved to be punished. You cannot produce and sell an unsafe product in this country, find out it is injuring people, then do nothing.
Your post further demonstrates the ignorance of so many foreigners. You talk about us judging you, as you judge us. You don't really need to pay attention to us, we'd probably be happier if you didn't.
There are so many things wrong with that post I hardly know where to begin, but here goes.
1. You are implying that correlation implies causation in the most ludicrous way imaginable. Are you seriously suggesting that "Star Wars" was responsible for the Soviet Union's collapse? The USSR did not break up because it felt it had lost the ability to emerge victorious in a war with the United States (if it ever had it), but because of the enormous dissent within its member states. While there may, may, be some argument that the Reagan presidency caused or accelerated the USSR's collapse, it certainly wasn't because of his plans vis-a-vis nuclear weapons, and more than likely it would've happened no matter who was president of the USA. Gorbachav, not Reagan, was responsible for the breakup of the USSR. This point is all moot though, because:
Star Wars absolutely increased the speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan pushed Gorbachev into a corner, and forced the Soviet Union to spend themselves into bankruptcy, which caused all that dissent in the member states. At the time, both our progress and spending on the system were greatly exaggerated, in order to bluff the Soviets in trying to keep up. Take a look at some of the pictures of Gorbachev and Reagan, as time goes on you can see it in Gorbachev's face, he ages quickly and looks quite frustrated.
2. Reagan's plan was never finished in the first place. This one's pretty simple. Do we have a functioning missile defense system, capable of protecting us from ICBMs? Answer: no. Since Reagan didn't actually accomplish anything in this regard, how can you attribute any lasting effects, political or otherwise, to it?
It was a bluff, designed to break the back of the Soviet economy. In addition to that, we've made quite a bit of progress toward an actual missile shield since then, although I doubt we'd ever hear about it being done, kind of like how the stealth bomber existed for 7 years before it was revealed.
3. You are badly misinterpreting Obama's plans for missile defense. Obama is on record as saying that he is not opposed to missile defense systems if they can be shown to work. And if they can't, we shouldn't be spending on them anyway.
The patriot missiles aren't perfect, but they are pretty effective, they've come a long way since 1991 when they were first deployed. In 2003, they shot down all of the Scuds that the Iraqi's launched.
4. You are making up attributes to his disarmament plan out of whole cloth. His statements were the typical grandiose words that politicians have been making at summits since time immaterial. If you look through his words carefully, this plan is very open-ended and could be implemented any one of several ways (if it is at all).
This doesn't surprise me, Obama tries to keep everything as vague as possible so the results, or lack thereof, can't be quantified. Sort of like how he stopped talking about creating jobs with stimulus packages, but saving or creating jobs. As long as somebody has a job, it's because Obama saved it.
5. You are implying that "lacking nuclear weapons = defenseless". Even if we got rid of all our nuclear weapons, we would still have the most technologically advanced, well-financed military on Earth, easily strong enough to act as a sufficient deterrent to so-called "rogue states".
The problem with people like you is that you're incredibly naive. Not everyone out there is farting rainbows, and a single nuclear weapon could kill tens of millions of American's.
For exactly the same reason that the Democrats changed all of the documents about their stimulus packages from "Jobs Created" to "Jobs Saved or Created". You can't quantify jobs saved, just as you can't quantify climate change, but it's happening, trust.