You don't. You launch guided rockets. It wouldn't be too hard to launch light drones (with pivotable wings) either. The problem with subs is you can't move infantry and equipment with them.
Cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional and with very good reason. If you don't know why, think about it a bit and consider the punishments dished out in Britain back in the 18th and 19th century. Also, consider the fact that not everyone sent to prison is in fact guilty of the crime (such as all of those men convicted of rape and years later freed thanks to DNA testing). Prison is supposed to serve two purposes: 1) punishment and 2) reform. It's hard to reform when being tortured.
Frankly, I wish there wasn't permanent guards at prison (whom will cover for each other). Rather, they should be there on a rotating basis or perhaps require cops in the local area to serve guard duty from time to time as part of their job.
That's a good idea, but I think it would be difficult to read the numbers from a distance at a high rate of speed unless the sign was huge. Maybe they could break the yellow light up into three horizontal bands, start with all three illuminated, followed by only the bottom two being illuminated, then only the bottom illuminated and finally red.
Yellow lights should be required by law to all last the same amount of time.
That would be awful, because they would have to raise the length up to whats necesary for a high-speed highway (say 60mph) when the stopping time is greatest. When you are driving along a city street at 25mph, you don't need a light to stay yellow for 6 or 7 seconds!
My recommendation would be to have a minimum set for the length of a yellow light, or have some function defined so that the time is proportional to the speed limit of the road. However, this shouldn't be a law (since it is the government setting the light timings) but a regulation defined by the Department of Transportation.
It is absolutely true. It becomes increasingly difficult to create well-formed pits at higher rotation speeds due to the more difficult timing tolerances. Also, it is easier to get predictable burn results at a lower laser power setting.
You presume that a nearly infinite amount of power is available. While it is conceivable that fusion power may one day become feasable, it still seems very far away indeed. Until the power problem is solved, there really isn't a chance that zillions of robots could be produced and deployed doing all sorts of manual labor.
I can't say I remember ever getting my dad a beer when I was 5, but I certainly can recall getting him and his co-workers beer when I was 8 or so (after work). It was actually pretty fun because every once in a while I would shake one vigorously and randomly give it to one of them, thus making them quite jumpy when receiving a beer from me:-).
The fear is probably based at least in part on what happened the last time NYC lost power (back in '77). While some parts of the city were very peaceful, other parts experienced tons of rioting and looting. Just 12 years before that, though, there was another power outage and in that case the entire city was peaceful.
Generally speaking, losing power in sparsly populated areas anywhere in the world is less troublesome than losing power in a densly populated city for several reasons. One, the people in rural areas tend to depend on power less and have an easier time enjoying nature and getting along with their neighbors (each person has more space to themselves). However, in a city, the people depend on the power grid to get them home, provide them with comfortable surroundings, and provides much of their entertainment. When there's no power in a dense city, there really is no escaping the heat island or even getting a quite sanctuary of your own (at least outside).
My other question is...isn't the 2nd Amendment about creating a mulitia to defend your country...not about defending your house? And is it the gun culture of the USA that brings about this fear?
The 2nd amendment was mainly for securing the rights of forming a militia, but was written broadly enough to allow any citizen to 'keep and bear arms.' Also, the militia's purpose was to protect the 'security of a free state' which is closely tied to protecting the citizen's liberty and property (ie, house). The fear has next to nothing to do with fear of guns. Rather, it is fear of mob mentality that leads to riots like in LA. I think NYC has come a long way since 1977 and almost certainly won't experience the riots they did then and doubt that many others fear that possibility occuring now.
What's the alternative then? There must be a DC->AC converter in any battery backup system, which AFAIK always generates square waves. I guess you could buy a gas-powered alternating current generator, but that seems rather extreme to me.
Well, the common events leading to a system wide power overload are:
Hot day with tons of ACs running. Check.
The "magic smoke" being released from one or more power substations. Check.
Instant power shutdown as a domino effect of overloaded substations occure. Check.
Really, this isn't even the first time something like this has happened at NYC (and surrounding area). A huge power outage just like this happened in 1977. Also, just a couple of years ago several STATES lost power for a short while.
There could be a flaw in your logic. Most people who are ignorant of something tend to believe that their colleagues are ignorant of the same thing as well (no one wants to be the last to know something or appear to be so). While it is possible that all of their friends at other locations know nothing about Linux, I really doubt it--it could simply be the person projecting their ignorance on other people.
I've had some more time to re-read your post. Some thoughts:
See my previous post regarding the U.S. Debt. Clinton didn't balance anything and increased the debt almost as much as Reagan without any impressive accomplishments such as ending the cold war.
Well, as I said in a parallel post, he did nearly balanced the budget even by those figures. In the process, he eliminated tons of cold-war enduced military spending and streamlined a variety of federal agencies.
He brushed aside North Korea that now has to be dealt with.
Come on now, the North Korea problem is Clinton's fault? He inherited from Bush I, who inherited from Reagon, etc. We never declared peace with them and technically the war is ongoing (for 50+ years!!). He did communicate with N. Korea directly and managed to get an agreement from them to stop pursuing nuclear technologies (with the only result being to delay them from reprocessing their spent fuel rods). What did Bush II do until very recently with N. Korea? AFAIK absolutely nothing; he wouldn't even talk with them. Once he found out that N. Korea had lied and were still developing a nuclear program, he essentially told them to piss off, called them an evil nation (which, if only considering their government, may as well be true), and once again ignored them for about a year, until finally meeting with them and China. If Bush II didn't brush off N. Korea, then I must not know what 'brush off' means... Also, during Bush's campaing, he kept telling everyone that America was too much involved in foreign affairs and should pull back somewhat. As he found out (and was told beforehand by the Dems), the world is a much more complex place than it used to be and what he desired to do was not truly possible. Of course, the Bush administration claims that pre-9/11 this was impossible to see...
And then, 50 years from now, Bush would be blamed for not dealing with Iraq before the "San Francisco Bay" chemical attack (i.e. Pearl Harbor) and they'd accuse Bush of having allowed the attack to give him a justification to take the middle east.
Actually, they probably wouldn't accuse Bush. Heck, if N. Korea suddenly nuked Hawaii or Japan, do you honestly think a president from 50 years ago would be blamed?* Heck no! The one in office, or maybe if he's lucky the one that immediately preceeded him would get the blame. Just for example, who got the blame for 9/11? Osama. And where did Osama come from? The war between Afganistan and Russia with some inherited money and some training from the CIA (during Reagan). And why does he hate the US? He would hate us anyways, but especially despises how we have military bases in Saudi Arabia (which resulted from Gulf War I during Bush I). Is Reagan blamed? Of course not. Bush I? Nope. The journalist who published an article detailing how the CIA was spying on Ossama's satellite phone calls? To a small extent, yes (and deservedly so!). Clinton? To an extent, yes, as he had his chance to attack Iraq, which would have solved everything (depite the fact that Al Qaida carried out the attack and hated Saddam as much as anybody).
Personally, I don't see how flipping the bird to virtually everyone on earth is going to help us out in the long run. We can't simply go around the world saying "Come on guys! If you help us we'll keep giving you money and guns, otherwise we won't." with the back up plan of relying on aircraft carriers for cases where we don't have access to any local air fields (and you thought I wouldn't get back on topic:P). It takes a hell of a long time to earn peoples trust and about 1 day to loose it. Thanks to the current administration (and his predecesors to be fair), very few people around the world trust us at all. No matter how much evidence we have in the future that Syria, for example, has WMD, people around the world will probably presume the opposite. How is this helpful? How does this contribute to home security?
* I'm not being flippant as the president whom was in office at the time that the mess with Korea was initiated was there approx. 50 years ago.
Can you tell me where that is in the Constitution? I can't find it.
Going off of memory, my bad (it was discussed by the founders, I probably read it in the Federalist papers). There are very good reasons to not have a standing army, but I don't care to discuss it now. After WWII, I really doubt that America will ever be taken lightly again, unless the country really goes on a downard spiral.
As for the debt, it looks like it got very close to being balanced (the difference between '99 and 2000 is only 20 bil). In 10 years, the government is really going to be in a financial crisis and, without significant budget cuts everywhere (including military), there will either need to be a nearly 100% cut to social services or we'll pull an Argentina, which I don't think anyone wants to see. On a side note, any theories on why the rich keep getting richer?
International relation skills (many Germans still love Clinton, same can't be said about Bush (1 or 2)...)
And if you think that since its post 9/11 that we couldn't possibly lower military spending, consider how useful it was immediately preceding and following the attack. Even with the largest army on earth, it couldn't do anything to prevent the attacks and, to this day, only the airforce would be even slightly useful should a similar attack occure (to shoot the planes out of the sky first of course). Afterwards, we blew away the Taliban using almost exclusively special forces and a small portion of our air force. We absolutely don't need a giant military for those purposes. As for Iraq, we still wouldn't need such a large war machine if we could convince allies to help us (this is where the international relation skills come into play). If France, Germany or Turkey had been convinced, the war would have been much easier, probably with a significantly better post-war outcome. I don't think the US has ever had a president that was so unpopular with the rest of the world, and unfortunately, this reflects badly on all Americans. I could go on all day, BTW...
Military spending is the closest thing this country has to a pure R&D investment in technology.
Err, no. That would be either NASA or the American Science Foundation NOT the military. Take a look at the Constitution. The government should not have a standing army for more than X years (5 I think it was), but the legislature should encourage the persuit and progress of science. That sort of implies that it wasn't intended to primarily do R&D via the military...
A better question would have been "Name a year when Reagan proposed spending less than the previous year?" The only year I see is 1986. It's also a bit missleading how the passed budget was higher than the proposed one every year as this was caused by the elimination of many important social service programs year after year in the proposals, which were, of course, reinstated by the Congress. One missing statistic is the deficit for each year (it depends on both spending AND income--not sure how those tax cuts helped). Another statistic that would be interesting would be the levels of funding for various programs over those years (ie, military,...).
Also, nothing would have stopped him from vetoing the budgets and sending them back to Congress as Clinton did.
I once inadvertently started a Rube Goldberg-style chain of events which catastrophically destroyed the motherboard in my old laptop. Unfortunately, this happened a few months after the warranty expired and, somewhat to my surprise, I found that it would have been only a little more to buy a brand new laptop than having it repaired. I'd recommend buying an extended warranty on any laptop purchase in the future, regardless of the brand. When the manufacture gives a 1-yr warranty, they mean it. Afterwards, you're just playing the laptop lotto.
Tax collection is written into the original Constitution. However, it specified that the states would collect taxes based on the census. The federal government originally had a very tiny budget. Some states (such as Texas) still don't gather income tax, only property and sales tax. The difference boils down to whether:
a) should the state governments get most of the power?
b) should the federal government get most of the power?
Additionally, there is the question of how much control the collective government (local, state and federal) should have over its citizens and property. It is certainly possible to privatize roads (tollways) and even mail (FedEx, UPS, Airborne). Of course, in situations of unavoidable monopolies (such as utilities), the government must control and regulate them (which was also written into the original Constitution). Libertarians don't advocate the complete removal of government (see anarchists), they only want the government to revert back to the way the Constitution had perscribed it to be: as small as possible.
For that matter, whatever happened with the story about the listening devices found at a UN embassy in Europe? Wasn't it suspected that the devices were an American design?
I think you would have more luck moving the Pentagon than moving/shutting down Reagon National. There's simply too much money invested in it now and too few alternatives for other locations for an airport of that size.
I would say that the fact that it is NOT ground-based makes it even MORE vulnerable. After all, get the plane in the sky, then commence with the hacking, right?
Unless you are referring to ground-base options like shooting missiles, I don't see what you mean by more vunerable. If ground control were trying to direct the aircraft, you STILL would only need to hack the equipment on the plane to ignore the broadcasted commands.
What about using a large database of questions (in text format) and asking for the answer? For example:
What color is the sky? -- valid answer: blue
How many people take the job of president of the US at a time? -- valid answer: 1 or one
etc.
The problem I see with this is that the answers would need to be varied enough that a program couldn't simply brute-force its way in. Also, you would need to have the dictionary available in multiple languages for some sites. So long as the questions are garbeled a bit and spoken fairly quickly, it should be difficult for a program to decifer them. At the very least, it would greatly slow the programs down, given the amount of CPU usage typically needed for voice recognition.
Though the US provides a large dollar amount, it is not as great a percentage of the GDP as other countries provide. Obviously the other nations do not have the means to provide equivilant amounts but the fact they provide a greater percentage of their GDP serves to debunk all the self congratulation that we Americans do when we claim "We cary every other nation on our shoulders".
There is a logical fallacy in your argument. You are presuming that the percent GDP that a nation (ie, the government) donates is the end-all of measures of good will. Consider, for instance, that Norway, which donates the greatest amount per capita (more than the US anyways) also has significantly higher taxes. In the US where taxes are substantially lower (among the lowest of the industrialized nations), individuals are more free to make charitable contributions. So a better comparison would be the amount of money a government donates in addtion to the ammount that citizens and corporations donate (per capita). This would be difficult to estimate accurately, though, as many corporations and individuals inflate these numbers on tax returns (such as Microsoft claiming full retail value for software donations to schools and non-profits).
Saudi Arabia gives a greater percentage of its gross national product to foreign aid that any other nation in the world.
Even if that is true (I think Norway, in fact, donates the most per capita), who is footing the bill for Saudi Arabia's defense? The last I checked, the US was providing a significant amount of their overal national defense and, at their bequest, constructed a significant air base in '90 to defend them from Iraq.
If Saudi Arabia is ever significantly threatened by their neighbors in the future, their Western buddies will come in to save them, thus they have the ability to allocate more dough to the Palestinian cause (which, I believe, is where nearly 100% of their donations go; not always for food/medicine mind you...).
Re:Interesting technology
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Isn't Wal-Mart adopting it?
RTFA!! The guy almost blames Wal-Mart for the widespread adoption of the technology in consumer products.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't. You launch guided rockets. It wouldn't be too hard to launch light drones (with pivotable wings) either. The problem with subs is you can't move infantry and equipment with them.
As the article states "There's a limit to what taxpayers should pay for."
Frankly, I wish there wasn't permanent guards at prison (whom will cover for each other). Rather, they should be there on a rotating basis or perhaps require cops in the local area to serve guard duty from time to time as part of their job.
That's a good idea, but I think it would be difficult to read the numbers from a distance at a high rate of speed unless the sign was huge. Maybe they could break the yellow light up into three horizontal bands, start with all three illuminated, followed by only the bottom two being illuminated, then only the bottom illuminated and finally red.
That would be awful, because they would have to raise the length up to whats necesary for a high-speed highway (say 60mph) when the stopping time is greatest. When you are driving along a city street at 25mph, you don't need a light to stay yellow for 6 or 7 seconds!
My recommendation would be to have a minimum set for the length of a yellow light, or have some function defined so that the time is proportional to the speed limit of the road. However, this shouldn't be a law (since it is the government setting the light timings) but a regulation defined by the Department of Transportation.
It is absolutely true. It becomes increasingly difficult to create well-formed pits at higher rotation speeds due to the more difficult timing tolerances. Also, it is easier to get predictable burn results at a lower laser power setting.
You presume that a nearly infinite amount of power is available. While it is conceivable that fusion power may one day become feasable, it still seems very far away indeed. Until the power problem is solved, there really isn't a chance that zillions of robots could be produced and deployed doing all sorts of manual labor.
I can't say I remember ever getting my dad a beer when I was 5, but I certainly can recall getting him and his co-workers beer when I was 8 or so (after work). It was actually pretty fun because every once in a while I would shake one vigorously and randomly give it to one of them, thus making them quite jumpy when receiving a beer from me :-).
Generally speaking, losing power in sparsly populated areas anywhere in the world is less troublesome than losing power in a densly populated city for several reasons. One, the people in rural areas tend to depend on power less and have an easier time enjoying nature and getting along with their neighbors (each person has more space to themselves). However, in a city, the people depend on the power grid to get them home, provide them with comfortable surroundings, and provides much of their entertainment. When there's no power in a dense city, there really is no escaping the heat island or even getting a quite sanctuary of your own (at least outside).
My other question is...isn't the 2nd Amendment about creating a mulitia to defend your country...not about defending your house? And is it the gun culture of the USA that brings about this fear?
The 2nd amendment was mainly for securing the rights of forming a militia, but was written broadly enough to allow any citizen to 'keep and bear arms.' Also, the militia's purpose was to protect the 'security of a free state' which is closely tied to protecting the citizen's liberty and property (ie, house). The fear has next to nothing to do with fear of guns. Rather, it is fear of mob mentality that leads to riots like in LA. I think NYC has come a long way since 1977 and almost certainly won't experience the riots they did then and doubt that many others fear that possibility occuring now.
What's the alternative then? There must be a DC->AC converter in any battery backup system, which AFAIK always generates square waves. I guess you could buy a gas-powered alternating current generator, but that seems rather extreme to me.
- Hot day with tons of ACs running. Check.
- The "magic smoke" being released from one or more power substations. Check.
- Instant power shutdown as a domino effect of overloaded substations occure. Check.
Really, this isn't even the first time something like this has happened at NYC (and surrounding area). A huge power outage just like this happened in 1977. Also, just a couple of years ago several STATES lost power for a short while.There could be a flaw in your logic. Most people who are ignorant of something tend to believe that their colleagues are ignorant of the same thing as well (no one wants to be the last to know something or appear to be so). While it is possible that all of their friends at other locations know nothing about Linux, I really doubt it--it could simply be the person projecting their ignorance on other people.
See my previous post regarding the U.S. Debt. Clinton didn't balance anything and increased the debt almost as much as Reagan without any impressive accomplishments such as ending the cold war.
Well, as I said in a parallel post, he did nearly balanced the budget even by those figures. In the process, he eliminated tons of cold-war enduced military spending and streamlined a variety of federal agencies.
He brushed aside North Korea that now has to be dealt with.
Come on now, the North Korea problem is Clinton's fault? He inherited from Bush I, who inherited from Reagon, etc. We never declared peace with them and technically the war is ongoing (for 50+ years!!). He did communicate with N. Korea directly and managed to get an agreement from them to stop pursuing nuclear technologies (with the only result being to delay them from reprocessing their spent fuel rods). What did Bush II do until very recently with N. Korea? AFAIK absolutely nothing; he wouldn't even talk with them. Once he found out that N. Korea had lied and were still developing a nuclear program, he essentially told them to piss off, called them an evil nation (which, if only considering their government, may as well be true), and once again ignored them for about a year, until finally meeting with them and China. If Bush II didn't brush off N. Korea, then I must not know what 'brush off' means... Also, during Bush's campaing, he kept telling everyone that America was too much involved in foreign affairs and should pull back somewhat. As he found out (and was told beforehand by the Dems), the world is a much more complex place than it used to be and what he desired to do was not truly possible. Of course, the Bush administration claims that pre-9/11 this was impossible to see...
And then, 50 years from now, Bush would be blamed for not dealing with Iraq before the "San Francisco Bay" chemical attack (i.e. Pearl Harbor) and they'd accuse Bush of having allowed the attack to give him a justification to take the middle east.
Actually, they probably wouldn't accuse Bush. Heck, if N. Korea suddenly nuked Hawaii or Japan, do you honestly think a president from 50 years ago would be blamed?* Heck no! The one in office, or maybe if he's lucky the one that immediately preceeded him would get the blame. Just for example, who got the blame for 9/11? Osama. And where did Osama come from? The war between Afganistan and Russia with some inherited money and some training from the CIA (during Reagan). And why does he hate the US? He would hate us anyways, but especially despises how we have military bases in Saudi Arabia (which resulted from Gulf War I during Bush I). Is Reagan blamed? Of course not. Bush I? Nope. The journalist who published an article detailing how the CIA was spying on Ossama's satellite phone calls? To a small extent, yes (and deservedly so!). Clinton? To an extent, yes, as he had his chance to attack Iraq, which would have solved everything (depite the fact that Al Qaida carried out the attack and hated Saddam as much as anybody).
Personally, I don't see how flipping the bird to virtually everyone on earth is going to help us out in the long run. We can't simply go around the world saying "Come on guys! If you help us we'll keep giving you money and guns, otherwise we won't." with the back up plan of relying on aircraft carriers for cases where we don't have access to any local air fields (and you thought I wouldn't get back on topic :P). It takes a hell of a long time to earn peoples trust and about 1 day to loose it. Thanks to the current administration (and his predecesors to be fair), very few people around the world trust us at all. No matter how much evidence we have in the future that Syria, for example, has WMD, people around the world will probably presume the opposite. How is this helpful? How does this contribute to home security?
* I'm not being flippant as the president whom was in office at the time that the mess with Korea was initiated was there approx. 50 years ago.
Going off of memory, my bad (it was discussed by the founders, I probably read it in the Federalist papers). There are very good reasons to not have a standing army, but I don't care to discuss it now. After WWII, I really doubt that America will ever be taken lightly again, unless the country really goes on a downard spiral.
As for the debt, it looks like it got very close to being balanced (the difference between '99 and 2000 is only 20 bil). In 10 years, the government is really going to be in a financial crisis and, without significant budget cuts everywhere (including military), there will either need to be a nearly 100% cut to social services or we'll pull an Argentina, which I don't think anyone wants to see. On a side note, any theories on why the rich keep getting richer?
And if you think that since its post 9/11 that we couldn't possibly lower military spending, consider how useful it was immediately preceding and following the attack. Even with the largest army on earth, it couldn't do anything to prevent the attacks and, to this day, only the airforce would be even slightly useful should a similar attack occure (to shoot the planes out of the sky first of course). Afterwards, we blew away the Taliban using almost exclusively special forces and a small portion of our air force. We absolutely don't need a giant military for those purposes. As for Iraq, we still wouldn't need such a large war machine if we could convince allies to help us (this is where the international relation skills come into play). If France, Germany or Turkey had been convinced, the war would have been much easier, probably with a significantly better post-war outcome. I don't think the US has ever had a president that was so unpopular with the rest of the world, and unfortunately, this reflects badly on all Americans. I could go on all day, BTW...
Military spending is the closest thing this country has to a pure R&D investment in technology.
Err, no. That would be either NASA or the American Science Foundation NOT the military. Take a look at the Constitution. The government should not have a standing army for more than X years (5 I think it was), but the legislature should encourage the persuit and progress of science. That sort of implies that it wasn't intended to primarily do R&D via the military...
Also, nothing would have stopped him from vetoing the budgets and sending them back to Congress as Clinton did.
I once inadvertently started a Rube Goldberg-style chain of events which catastrophically destroyed the motherboard in my old laptop. Unfortunately, this happened a few months after the warranty expired and, somewhat to my surprise, I found that it would have been only a little more to buy a brand new laptop than having it repaired. I'd recommend buying an extended warranty on any laptop purchase in the future, regardless of the brand. When the manufacture gives a 1-yr warranty, they mean it. Afterwards, you're just playing the laptop lotto.
a) should the state governments get most of the power?
b) should the federal government get most of the power?
Additionally, there is the question of how much control the collective government (local, state and federal) should have over its citizens and property. It is certainly possible to privatize roads (tollways) and even mail (FedEx, UPS, Airborne). Of course, in situations of unavoidable monopolies (such as utilities), the government must control and regulate them (which was also written into the original Constitution). Libertarians don't advocate the complete removal of government (see anarchists), they only want the government to revert back to the way the Constitution had perscribed it to be: as small as possible.
For that matter, whatever happened with the story about the listening devices found at a UN embassy in Europe? Wasn't it suspected that the devices were an American design?
I think you would have more luck moving the Pentagon than moving/shutting down Reagon National. There's simply too much money invested in it now and too few alternatives for other locations for an airport of that size.
Unless you are referring to ground-base options like shooting missiles, I don't see what you mean by more vunerable. If ground control were trying to direct the aircraft, you STILL would only need to hack the equipment on the plane to ignore the broadcasted commands.
What color is the sky? -- valid answer: blue
How many people take the job of president of the US at a time? -- valid answer: 1 or one
etc.
The problem I see with this is that the answers would need to be varied enough that a program couldn't simply brute-force its way in. Also, you would need to have the dictionary available in multiple languages for some sites. So long as the questions are garbeled a bit and spoken fairly quickly, it should be difficult for a program to decifer them. At the very least, it would greatly slow the programs down, given the amount of CPU usage typically needed for voice recognition.
There is a logical fallacy in your argument. You are presuming that the percent GDP that a nation (ie, the government) donates is the end-all of measures of good will. Consider, for instance, that Norway, which donates the greatest amount per capita (more than the US anyways) also has significantly higher taxes. In the US where taxes are substantially lower (among the lowest of the industrialized nations), individuals are more free to make charitable contributions. So a better comparison would be the amount of money a government donates in addtion to the ammount that citizens and corporations donate (per capita). This would be difficult to estimate accurately, though, as many corporations and individuals inflate these numbers on tax returns (such as Microsoft claiming full retail value for software donations to schools and non-profits).
Even if that is true (I think Norway, in fact, donates the most per capita), who is footing the bill for Saudi Arabia's defense? The last I checked, the US was providing a significant amount of their overal national defense and, at their bequest, constructed a significant air base in '90 to defend them from Iraq.
If Saudi Arabia is ever significantly threatened by their neighbors in the future, their Western buddies will come in to save them, thus they have the ability to allocate more dough to the Palestinian cause (which, I believe, is where nearly 100% of their donations go; not always for food/medicine mind you...).
RTFA!! The guy almost blames Wal-Mart for the widespread adoption of the technology in consumer products.