Even if you merged them all into one unified "branch", you'd still have basically the same thing as I suggested. It's not like the Army has cavalry (tanks) training alongside infantry for no good reason or something. You'd have major departments who would handle specific functions, and then subdivisions of those departments would be sent where needed (so fighter pilots trained by the AIr Force to launch off of ships would be attached to carrier groups, for instance).
Combining the whole military would at least save a lot of money in redundant R&D, equipment, training, and especially management. Less branches means less useless administration.
See, unfortunately, it's very difficult for your average middle class person to get a JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) car over here. Aside from the import fees, most JDM cars aren't street legal for many reasons (window glass composition, emissions, engine's too powerful, etc.) Sometimes it gets done under the table and a VIN from a different version of the American car gets swapped in or something like that to make it appear like a heavily-modified American car.
My buddy had something like 3 or 4 Corollas of the same (or near) model year and cobbled together all the good parts from them to make the Trueno Sprinter facsimile. While it was the American Corolla, he got everything done up properly with the exception of a right-hand driving kit (down to legitimate TRUENO badges for the grill).
People had no problem with the PLEXes after a while. PLEXes allowed things to work both ways - players could earn in-game money to buy game-time cards (and thus not spend real money), and people could in turn spend money to buy PLEXes and sell them.
It was a very simple tradeoff. Do you spend 30 or so hours grinding ISK to save $15? If that's worth your time, great. If not, you can switch things around and save time grinding for ISK by buying PLEXes.
When they added a new currency which basically turned into a cash-only shop (in a paid MMO), that really irked people (and for good reason).
It is kinda insane. The Army, Navy, Marines, and (of course) Air Force all have flying vehicles. I think if it flies, it should be handled by the Air Force, period. If you need special forces stuff like SOAR, then they should be an air forces special division. Similarly, the Navy ought to handle the boats (save for the Coast Guard, which is separate for a good reason), the Army should handle infantry, etc.
I really don't get why there's all these branches of the military with overlapping roles - branches who don't talk to one another. That's how stuff like this happens. You really need one organization to handle something like networking but you end up with 4 or 5. Bureaucracy at its finest!
A good friend had an RX-7 dolled up like the white one in Initial D. He also owned an '86 Corolla properly dolled up to look like the Panda Trueno. Both are now gone, but I've had the pleasure of sitting shotgun in both.
The RX-7's rotary engine looked almost alien to me. The car was a bit loud and it smelled of burning oil - something about that really appealed to me - and the thing ran beautifully despite it being very, very used. I was always fond of alternatives to the mainstream.
They said "that's not what we mean," I said "that's what's written on the contract I'm not signing," they said "all of our other employees signed this," I said "that's not my concern." They amended the contract.
Unfortunately, today that conversation would end, "All of our other employees signed this, and if you don't want to we have a hundred equally qualified people lined up to take the position".
One way or another, a whole bunch of people get shot up and you start all over again.
It isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. Hell, it's happening right now in the Middle East. It's starting to brew here. Granted, it's a bunch of rail-thin, jobless hipsters who think they can bank a liberal arts degree towards a white collar salary, but it's starting nonetheless.
The point was that the old model of "players hosting their own servers" will never go away. Even games that were designed to not even have a dedicated server package (going all the way back to stuff like Diablo 1, i.e. BNETD or whatever it was called) had them thanks to packet-sniffing and reverse-engineering. The "official" company stances on TRIBES (no more master server), Starcraft 2 (no LAN play), and MW2 (no dedicated servers) were all broken and handled by the community to be non-issues. Anytime a game has a feature that is less than desirable to the community (often DRM), the technically adept people in said community remedy it rather quickly. Even something like Blu-Ray's DRM scheme (which was backed by millions of dollars in R&D) was broken in, what, a couple of years? And it was broken by a few enthusiasts in a CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!!
Yes, I know... there's also programs to run LAN play with Starcraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2 and/or cracked versions of the games that already do this. I guess my sarcasm flew over some people's heads. (I tried to use fairly well-known examples.)
Doesn't facial recognition software act by measuring depth at certain points of the face? So if you were to get flesh-colored eyebrow rings, lip rings, etc. it would probably throw the technology off...
I agree with you on this. I wonder how long phone and/or telegraph lines were private before they were turned over into a government utility. What about electric?
It'd be nice to be able to change Internet or Cell providers as easily as you can change landline providers.
This can go the wrong way, though, too... look at ESCOs (Energy Service Companies). Google "IDT Energy New York" and see the sort of dirt shenanigans they've been up to. I've yet to meet anyone who actually saved money switching to an ESCO.
My first thought was that it was more of those "wireless/EM sensitive" nutters. If they have tangible proof though, well... this could turn out interesting.
How does that even work? Isn't provoking someone a defense to assault in many places? If I don't touch you but I get in your face and end up getting punched for it, well...I shouldn't have gotten in your face.
One of these days someone from WBC is going to picket the wrong funeral and some grieving father or mother is going to end up killing some of these idiots. It's just a matter of time.
And clearly, it's working. There absolutely aren't any utilities to facilitate LAN play with Starcraft 2. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have any dedicated servers. Starsiege TRIBES multiplayer was gone forever once the master servers went down.
Say you want to have political change. A recall election, a referendum, etc. Would it be easier to cover a state assemblyman/senator/etc.'s district, or the entire state (in the case of Senators)? Senators cover such a wide area that it's difficult to organize politically and exert the will of the people. You don't have to cover such an impractical area to influence enough of the State legislature to enact a recall action on a State-appointed (or elected) Senator.
The (not entirely insane) thought is that it allows for an easier chain of escalation plus many potential remedies. It was one of the checks on the government - mainly to make sure the Fed didn't get too much power or do something that a particular state's residents didn't like. If a Federal Senator really fucked up, he could be recalled by the State legislature. It's easier to get the State legislature to take action simply by virtue of them being local.
If the 17th were repealed, Senators would once again be beholden to the states they serve. They do something that's not in the best interests of the state (or the country, at least from the perspective of his/her state's residents), then he gets recalled... or shitcanned.
I don't know what it is, but BigDog and AlphaDog unsettle me. They look like something out of Silent Hill. Maybe it's because their gait seems very unnatural, like a film that's run at double speed.
A lot of that noise seems to be from the tethers that are carrying power to the device. It's obviously hooked up to a scaffold with a track or pulley system to support all of the wires.
Serious R&D can be a money sink, but when you come up with the right thing it can bring in a ton of money - in the long term. That's the problem. Businesses today only give a flying fuck about the next quarter's earnings. Having a loss this quarter to make a huge profit five years down the line is blasphemy in the gospel of modern American business.
Because some of the stuff in the scrolls aren't in the "real" religious texts.
I think a lot of people have the perception that the bible, torah, etc. as we have it is the perfect, immutable word of God. It's not. Every one of the three Abrahamic religious texts went through some sort of revision and compilation process, and there are things such as "unofficial" or "lost" gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls partially contain some of these.
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You absolutely shouldn't don't can't do not mod this down, up, down, up, down three times, take a left, and then up again.
Even if you merged them all into one unified "branch", you'd still have basically the same thing as I suggested. It's not like the Army has cavalry (tanks) training alongside infantry for no good reason or something. You'd have major departments who would handle specific functions, and then subdivisions of those departments would be sent where needed (so fighter pilots trained by the AIr Force to launch off of ships would be attached to carrier groups, for instance).
Combining the whole military would at least save a lot of money in redundant R&D, equipment, training, and especially management. Less branches means less useless administration.
It was an '86 or '85 US Corolla.
See, unfortunately, it's very difficult for your average middle class person to get a JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) car over here. Aside from the import fees, most JDM cars aren't street legal for many reasons (window glass composition, emissions, engine's too powerful, etc.) Sometimes it gets done under the table and a VIN from a different version of the American car gets swapped in or something like that to make it appear like a heavily-modified American car.
My buddy had something like 3 or 4 Corollas of the same (or near) model year and cobbled together all the good parts from them to make the Trueno Sprinter facsimile. While it was the American Corolla, he got everything done up properly with the exception of a right-hand driving kit (down to legitimate TRUENO badges for the grill).
People had no problem with the PLEXes after a while. PLEXes allowed things to work both ways - players could earn in-game money to buy game-time cards (and thus not spend real money), and people could in turn spend money to buy PLEXes and sell them.
It was a very simple tradeoff. Do you spend 30 or so hours grinding ISK to save $15? If that's worth your time, great. If not, you can switch things around and save time grinding for ISK by buying PLEXes.
When they added a new currency which basically turned into a cash-only shop (in a paid MMO), that really irked people (and for good reason).
It is kinda insane. The Army, Navy, Marines, and (of course) Air Force all have flying vehicles. I think if it flies, it should be handled by the Air Force, period. If you need special forces stuff like SOAR, then they should be an air forces special division. Similarly, the Navy ought to handle the boats (save for the Coast Guard, which is separate for a good reason), the Army should handle infantry, etc.
I really don't get why there's all these branches of the military with overlapping roles - branches who don't talk to one another. That's how stuff like this happens. You really need one organization to handle something like networking but you end up with 4 or 5. Bureaucracy at its finest!
A good friend had an RX-7 dolled up like the white one in Initial D. He also owned an '86 Corolla properly dolled up to look like the Panda Trueno. Both are now gone, but I've had the pleasure of sitting shotgun in both.
The RX-7's rotary engine looked almost alien to me. The car was a bit loud and it smelled of burning oil - something about that really appealed to me - and the thing ran beautifully despite it being very, very used. I was always fond of alternatives to the mainstream.
They said "that's not what we mean," I said "that's what's written on the contract I'm not signing," they said "all of our other employees signed this," I said "that's not my concern." They amended the contract.
Unfortunately, today that conversation would end, "All of our other employees signed this, and if you don't want to we have a hundred equally qualified people lined up to take the position".
One way or another, a whole bunch of people get shot up and you start all over again.
It isn't the first time it happened, and it won't be the last. Hell, it's happening right now in the Middle East. It's starting to brew here. Granted, it's a bunch of rail-thin, jobless hipsters who think they can bank a liberal arts degree towards a white collar salary, but it's starting nonetheless.
The point was that the old model of "players hosting their own servers" will never go away. Even games that were designed to not even have a dedicated server package (going all the way back to stuff like Diablo 1, i.e. BNETD or whatever it was called) had them thanks to packet-sniffing and reverse-engineering. The "official" company stances on TRIBES (no more master server), Starcraft 2 (no LAN play), and MW2 (no dedicated servers) were all broken and handled by the community to be non-issues. Anytime a game has a feature that is less than desirable to the community (often DRM), the technically adept people in said community remedy it rather quickly. Even something like Blu-Ray's DRM scheme (which was backed by millions of dollars in R&D) was broken in, what, a couple of years? And it was broken by a few enthusiasts in a CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!!
Yes, I know... there's also programs to run LAN play with Starcraft 2 and Modern Warfare 2 and/or cracked versions of the games that already do this. I guess my sarcasm flew over some people's heads. (I tried to use fairly well-known examples.)
Doesn't facial recognition software act by measuring depth at certain points of the face? So if you were to get flesh-colored eyebrow rings, lip rings, etc. it would probably throw the technology off...
I agree with you on this. I wonder how long phone and/or telegraph lines were private before they were turned over into a government utility. What about electric?
It'd be nice to be able to change Internet or Cell providers as easily as you can change landline providers.
This can go the wrong way, though, too... look at ESCOs (Energy Service Companies). Google "IDT Energy New York" and see the sort of dirt shenanigans they've been up to. I've yet to meet anyone who actually saved money switching to an ESCO.
My first thought was that it was more of those "wireless/EM sensitive" nutters. If they have tangible proof though, well... this could turn out interesting.
How does that even work? Isn't provoking someone a defense to assault in many places? If I don't touch you but I get in your face and end up getting punched for it, well.. .I shouldn't have gotten in your face.
One of these days someone from WBC is going to picket the wrong funeral and some grieving father or mother is going to end up killing some of these idiots. It's just a matter of time.
And clearly, it's working. There absolutely aren't any utilities to facilitate LAN play with Starcraft 2. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have any dedicated servers. Starsiege TRIBES multiplayer was gone forever once the master servers went down.
Say you want to have political change. A recall election, a referendum, etc. Would it be easier to cover a state assemblyman/senator/etc.'s district, or the entire state (in the case of Senators)? Senators cover such a wide area that it's difficult to organize politically and exert the will of the people. You don't have to cover such an impractical area to influence enough of the State legislature to enact a recall action on a State-appointed (or elected) Senator.
The (not entirely insane) thought is that it allows for an easier chain of escalation plus many potential remedies. It was one of the checks on the government - mainly to make sure the Fed didn't get too much power or do something that a particular state's residents didn't like. If a Federal Senator really fucked up, he could be recalled by the State legislature. It's easier to get the State legislature to take action simply by virtue of them being local.
If the 17th were repealed, Senators would once again be beholden to the states they serve. They do something that's not in the best interests of the state (or the country, at least from the perspective of his/her state's residents), then he gets recalled... or shitcanned.
I don't know what it is, but BigDog and AlphaDog unsettle me. They look like something out of Silent Hill. Maybe it's because their gait seems very unnatural, like a film that's run at double speed.
A lot of that noise seems to be from the tethers that are carrying power to the device. It's obviously hooked up to a scaffold with a track or pulley system to support all of the wires.
It's not just a government problem here.
Serious R&D can be a money sink, but when you come up with the right thing it can bring in a ton of money - in the long term. That's the problem. Businesses today only give a flying fuck about the next quarter's earnings. Having a loss this quarter to make a huge profit five years down the line is blasphemy in the gospel of modern American business.
No, sadly he died. He was coding with a BAC of 0.21 and ran his desk into a tree.
Oh sure, design a robot that has a segfault every time it tries to leave the kitchen.
Open Source Governance is a dream. The best fix we could do in the immediate future (i.e. the next few years) is repeal the 17th amendment.
Because some of the stuff in the scrolls aren't in the "real" religious texts.
I think a lot of people have the perception that the bible, torah, etc. as we have it is the perfect, immutable word of God. It's not. Every one of the three Abrahamic religious texts went through some sort of revision and compilation process, and there are things such as "unofficial" or "lost" gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls partially contain some of these.
Parent post's ideal job
Holy shit, the ending to that movie is fucking METAL!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b3fDrnYsUg
I can't stop laughing at the father's reaction to the fire...