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$1 billion USD/day is just over $3/day/resident.

First of all, our defense budget is closer to $450B.

I'm not really concerned with how much I personally have to pay each day to keep our military running (BTW, the US work force as of 2003 amounts to 146.5M people, thus placing the cost/person/day at around $6.5, or $8.4 using the $450B figure). What I am concerned with is the fact that $450B is a tremendous amount of money that could really be put to better use somewhere else. For example, 12% of our 293M people are below the poverty line (35M people), which for an individual living alone is about $9K/year. That 450B in defense spending each year amounts to $13,000 each year for the people that really need it. That could pay for food, shelter, basic healthcare, and most importantly, education. Although it wouldn't make much sense to cut our defense budget altogether, there is no reason it couldn't be less than what it currently is. We have far too many other problems in this country that are going largely ignored while we sink billions into the military.

The rest of your post is just as unrealistic.

If you'd like to explain how exactly I was being unrealistic, that might help things along. Thanks.

Any discussion of a lack of women at the top should also include discussion of a lack of women at the bottom.

In a lot of endeavors, (objective ones, even) women tend to perform towards the middle of the pack, with most of the winners and most of the losers being men.

Here is an example.

It's not THAT stark a difference in the case above. But it's significant. There ARE a lot of women who achieve, but there are MORE men who do. In just about everything measure of success and failure, men dominate the high end of the scale. I think the dominance of men in power and in prison is more likely a symptom than a cause. (though it could be both.)

Never mind how women tend to avoid technical fields in droves. Maybe Ms. Hockfield could be a step towards changing that.

In my computer science classes in college, there were two sections. 80 students. Of those, 3 were female. And two of them were over 40. (One was the mother of a friend of mine, she was in most of my classes, actually).

If this patent is valid, and Intermec raises the license fees high enough, it could kill RFID before the technology has really come into its own. What side will CASPIAN come down on? Will IBM stand idly by and let this happen? Will other tinfoil-hat-wearing consumer groups seize on this patent, or try to buy it outright to effectively halt the implementation of RFID?

This has the potential to fracture EFF and PubPat too, seeing as the privacy nuts will be all for anything that makes it harder or more expensive for RFID to become ubiquitous, but this sounds like a job for PubPat (or some other private entitiy) to investigate, to protect the very real benefits that RFID will bring to supply chain management.

or will this be a case where the Feds stand up to fight against a technology patent, now that the DOD has declared that all if its suppliers must use RFID by Jan 1 2005? Can the government claim eminent domain over patents or other IP? This page seems to address the question, but doesn't give me a clear enough picture of the consequences for suppliers when government takes an "eminent domain" license... and it kind of leaves me thinking that if Intermec sues the goverment, and the patent isn't invalidated, taxpayers will be left holding the bag twice.

Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons.

For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined.

As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

Doesn't anyone know how to read the fucking news critically anymore?!

Dateline of the linked article: July 31, 2001

Dateline of this article: November 21, 2002

This is what I meant by incremental improvements. Yes, some of the first tests were done under "ideal" circumstances. But those were designed to test the feasability of actually hitting a supersonic missile and disabling it, not tracking it, too. As we go along, the technology will mature and we'll be more able to protect not just our homeland, but our allies, too (since they're unwilling to do it themselves).

Now, answer this: the Navy has been able to knock down incoming anti-ship missiles for years now. The technology has gotten to the point where the chance of a missile impacting one of our ships is miniscule. How is that fundamentally different from shooting down an ICBM? Answer: it's not, it's only a question of scale.

The defense budget is the odd-man-out when compared to other budgets.

Thanks to the Internet, it has become trival to check statistics on this sort of thing, which makes the continued repeat appearance of this sort of dogmatic mantra rather depressing.

CBO Historical Data

"Entitlements" (including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) have outweighed total "discretionary spending" (of which defense is less than half) every year for more than a quarter-century.

"Discretionary" spending in 2002 was about 350 billion for "defense", $26B "international", and $360B "domestic" spending.

For 2002, entitlements cost about $1.2 trillion, three and a half times as much as defense spending, including over $450B for Social Security, $400B for Medicare/Medicaid, and $424B for other means-tested programs, each of which is more than the total spent on defense.

Note that "defense" spending includes money for items such as personnel salaries ($100B, an interesting comparison to the $50B spent on unemployment benefits), as well as such clearly evil programs as "Military Family Housing" or the "Armed Forces Retirement Home Fund". About $50B is R&D, helping to bring you such horrors as GPS, MRAM, and the Internet. You can see the whole overview for yourself.

Defense spending is currently about 3-3.5% of GDP. It's come down since the early 90s, when it was around 5%. In the "Reagan years" in the mid 80s, it was about 6%. And that was down from spending in the 60s and early 70s, when it was up as high as about 9% of GDP. Over the same period, entitlements have gone from about 6% of GDP, to about 11-12% of GDP. Defense has been cut to about one third, and entitlements have doubled, since the early 60s.

Countries that spending near this percentage of GDP on defense include the UK (~2.5%), France, and South Korea. Countries that spend more include Bahrain, Greece, and Turkey. Countries that spend 10% or more of their GDP on defense include Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Other NATO allies in the 1-2% range include Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Canda. Even Japan spends more than 1% of GDP on defense, despite their constitutional limitations.

In what way is defense spending in the US an "odd man out compared to other budgets"? "Providing for the common defense" is, after all, one of the chief purposes for the existence of the US Federal government, even if we neglect "to secure the blessings of liberty" and a bit of "insuring domestic tranquility". There's certainly no shortage of promoting the general welfare going around just due to the defense budget.

A lot of people have a /8 network. From what I remember from my networking class, there was a scheme for how the ips should be divided.

If the first digit is less than 128 (ok, in reality, it is 127), they get a /8. If it is less than 192 (I think this is about where it is) they buy in a /16. If it is over 192, they get a /24.

Of course these can be subdivided.

Other examples of people who have /8 networks

MIT 18.0.0.0/8
Merck & Co., Inc 54.0.0.0/8
General Electric 3.0.0.0/8
US Department of Defence 6.0.0.0/8, 7.0.0.0/8, and 11.0.0.0/8
Genuity 4.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8
American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) 12.0.0.0/8.

And that is just barely touching the surface.

--CPM

What many people apparently don't realize is that alot of research conducted by universities is subsidised by various interest groups. The research that comes out of these programs becomes property of the University and is passed on to whoever funded the research. The only thing the students (who did most of the work) receive in compensation is 3 or 4 credits.

I doubt this is true about CS and related programs at Penn State (where I recently graduated from), and to my knowledge, they do not claim ownership of students' code. But don't get me wrong, they stick it to us in another way.

Students in "non-engineering technology majors" are now assessed a $750 surcharge per semester to (supposedly) cover costs of their respective majors. I don't know exactly how many students this includes, but you can bet Penn State is making a boatload of money from it.

So no, we don't need to take money from the military to dump into an already greedy education system.