They could also count it as "They download the song once and then uploaded it once again". Which is simpler to understand, and when worded that way it makes it sound like defendant committed two crimes.
Of course they then run into the not so minor issue that the law only covers distribution (uploading). Downloading is not really covered by the language of copyright law.
Yes, or the PC LOAD LETTER error message which was _never_ fixed?
The implication was that Apple's QC is somehow better because of their "iron fist" control over the platform. With the exception of Linux APM where there is no QC because there's no one running the show, your examples simply illustrate that Apple's QC is just like everyone else's, and that the "iron fist" approach clearly isn't the only way to get there.
Why do Americans buy Toyotas? In my case, it is because Europeans don't have a good small truck on the American market (or any small truck, good or bad, that I'm aware of).
Blame the "Chicken Tax". In 1963 Germany passed an import tariff on chicken to protect their domestic poultry market. In typical bizarro-world political thinking, congress passed a retaliatory import tariff of 25 fucking percent on commercial vehicles. The chicken tariff in chickens is long gone, but the 25% "chicken tax" on trucks is still there. Trucks and commercial vehicles are pretty much the only decent source of revenue for the domestic auto manufacturers, so they lobby VERY hard to keep that bullshit protection in place. Toyota et al have built factories in the US to get around the tax, but the closest the Euros have done is the Sprinter van partial assembly plant in South Carolina. The strength of the Euro combined with the chicken tax pretty much precludes us ever seeing a European commercial vehicle imported in any noteworthy quantity, at any reasonable price. Hell, I'd love a VW TDI Crafter van for work, but that'll never happen...
As a VW nut who has owned everything from a 50's beetle, to an 80's Vanagon, to a 21st century Jetta, I can assure you that VW automobiles are not members of the set referenced by the statement "Germans know how to engineer good cars". There's a lot of fiendishly clever engineering, but when it comes to VW vehicles (particularly the electrical systems) the word "good" is thoroughly incorrect. Granted, some of that is due to what German auto manufacturers consider "good engineering" vs what engineers building for the US market think. German vehicles are not designed to be treated as appliances, but rather carefully and diligently maintained. A classic example is the mid-80's Vanagon, with its water cooled boxer engine. A coolant loss incident would blow the head seals almost instantly. Running water without antifreeze would cause corrosion which would also lead to head seal failure. An American auto engineer would look at such an engine design and ask "Hey, what happens when cousin Cletus ignores a minor coolant leak and the system is run only half filled with tap water?" A German engineer would reply "WHY would anyone DO such a preposterous thing?!?!" It's good to keep that subtle engineering culture difference in mind when discussing "German engineering".
I don't have the AT&T user agreement in front of me, but I believe when you sign the contract with them, you agree not to use their data plan with a tethered computer.
AT&T sells tethering for Windows Mobile based phones, so that can't be true. Plus, you can bypass the stupid buggy proxy system the use to control tethering access by using any non-AT&T crippled GSM WM smartphone, which has USB "internet sharing" capability built in.
Do you have a different version of Windows Mobile to the rest of us?
What, are you one of those poor bastards still running WM5? WM6.1 is a perfectly serviceable operating system. My HTC TYTN II doesn't get "rebooted" unless I decide to reflash the ROM. I reflashed it a couple weeks ago, but before that it ran for months without a restart. Now the phone I had before this one, the Mio A701, that piece of crap needed to be rebooted 5 times a day. Really, the problem with WM isn't the OS, but craptastic hardware compatibility due to mediocre "value engineered" phone hardware. If the iPhone OS was available to any and all Taiwanese phone mills, you'd see the same shit. Really, most problems with WM can be solved fairly easily: quit being such a cheap fuck and buy a decent piece of hardware to run it. Windows Mobile runs like a swiss watch on well-designed hardware--- just like the iPhone.
My only wish is that HTC would make a phone using the same size display as the iPhone. This tiny QVGA shit sux0rz.
Create a single touch, and a multi touch version of your app. The UI development suddenly doubles. Developing an app for Android now has a higher cost than the iPhone.
Single touch and multi-touch are not that far apart conceptually. You're overstating the difficulty of dealing with more than one set of x-y coordinates in a UI. An app that work with multi-touch will also work with single.
Face it, if Apple fully opened the OS for the iPhone, it would turn to crap in a matter of weeks. The platform would lose its integrity.
WTF does that mean? The platform would lose its integrity? My HTC TYTN II has its "integrity" despite Windows Mobile 6 being open to development. My brother's Nokia running Symbian has its "integrity" too. When you say "integrity", do you mean "some people's iPhones would have things running on them that might not look or feel the way Steve Jobs wants the iPhone to look and feel"? You're an idiot.
The next batch of proposed laws will have to cut the DOJ in on a slice of the action. Maybe let them resell the confiscated servers or take the money found on/near the "criminals".
No good. They still wouldn't go for it. It's one thing to RICO seize the property of drug rings, because they have mansions, Ferraris, and hefty bags stuffed with cash. Copyright infringers have what, exactly? A $1200 Dell computer and a poster of Marilyn Manson? There's no money in copyright infringement.
You really want to make the Executive even more powerful?
False dichotomy.
More power in the form of telling people what to do: BAD
More power in the form of thwarting the legislature when is pulls bullshit like an "Omnibus Farming, Technology, Education, and Bridges to Nowhere in My State Bill": GOOD
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not every lawyer is a RIAA extortionist.
Substitute "thief" for "lawyer". It is indeed possible to name a handful of thieves who steal for good reasons, but the exceptions don't magically erase the malfeasance of the rest. The nature of "lawyering" is such that it attracts a lot of folks with a certain degree of "moral flexibility", the ability to rationalize their client's position as the "right" one, based solely on the fact that their paycheck is coming from there. People like that aren't often good people. My cousin is one. Slick, charming, and as morally ambivalent as any psychopath.
Heh. I'm gen-X, F youse guys! When I was a kid, all the commercials were about fun stuff for young-to-middle aged folks. Now that I'm older, all the commercials are about goddamned erection pills and adult diapers! You people are monopolizing the marketing world! Nobody is selling me the shit *I* want!
In fact, I think my neighbor's car has a display on the windshield for the speed she's going. And the car is at least from the mid to early 90s. I don't know if it reads the speed limit, though.
Seriously? If you pause to think about the difference between simply projecting a digital readout onto a reflective patch on the windshield and recognizing and reading speed limit signs on the side of the road, I think you can probably answer your own question. No, your neighbor's early 90's car isn't reading the fucking speed limit signs!
Note the difference between "too many" and "all". In instances such as this clock, a bright blue LED has a purpose. My cell phone, however, does NOT need a blue LED flashing a bright spotlight on my bedroom ceiling every 6 seconds to tell me bluetooth is turned on.
And for that matter, blue is not the only bright LED available.
Who tagged this "technology"? This is 100% art. It uses nothing more technologically noteworthy than a bunch of blue LEDs and a grasshopper escapement. The irritating blue LED has been annoying us as we try to sleep for the better part of a decade, and the grasshopper escapement is almost 3 centuries old. Personally, I think blue LEDs are generally the sign of an INFERIOR designer. Too many things nowadays have bright flashing blue LEDs for no other apparent reason other than "look! we have bright blue LEDs now!"
if you'd RTFA, or even bothered to read the/. blurb and think about it, this is subvocalization, only they're monitoring the speech center of the brain to pick it up.
'Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.'
Has this guy talked to one of us lately? Or listened to a Lieutenant on the radio? "...Clean, clear, and formulaic..." do NOT apply to our thought processes, and never will. I call shenanigans on the whole concept.
Heh. Yeah, well, it's just the usual disconnect between the R&D guys who only talk to the pentagon suits, and how it really works in the field. In theory, we're supposed to say:
"FOXTROT SEVEN NINER this is ROMEO PAPA THREE, ADJUST FIRE, OVER"
"RP3 this is F79, adjust fire, out"
"GRID FU12345678, direction 0900, over"
"grid FU12345678, direction 0900, out"
In reality, it's more like this:
"FOX SEVEN NINE this is ROMEO PAPA THREE, GIMME SOME GODDAMN SUPPRESSION FIRE! GRID FU311... CRAP! CORRECTION! GRID FU12345678! DO IT NOW!"
There is a difference between TALKING and THINKING.
Not when you're talking about monitoring the speech center of the brain.
I suspect some rather HEAVY training will have to be involved
The idea is that it will pick up certain sub-vocalized keywords and string together the appropriate canned audio fragments. It'd take less training than using voice dial on your cell phone.
Training soldiers to think in short thoughts will invariably cross-over into actual thought patterns that will reduce soldiers' creativity, adjustability and preparation for future events.
Invariably? You obviously missed the entire premise of this device and went off into some bizarre Firefox fantasy-land. This device is essentially intended to pick up sub-vocalized speech neurologically. It has fuck-all to do with "thinking". In combat we already speak in short, terse language. That hasn't stunted our "creativity" in the slightest.
You can see the effects, now, of how the Army trains vs. how young soldiers actually think when they come out of Basic and AI training - the world is all black and white.
You think a nug fresh out of basic/AIT is representative of a fully trained soldier? You've clearly never been in the army. That shit's just to put you in the proper frame of mind to learn how to be an effective soldier. A PV2 out of AIT is just beginning.
From my family's experience, Reserve units are often more flexible in the field and do better at war games because they can think on their feet.
In my own personal experience, reserve units are frequently fatter, slower, whinier, and can't remember how to call for artillery support. Who is your "family", anyway? A bunch of reservists? Not much bias there! There's no military advantage to working in an office 50 weeks a year. I know. I was regular from 1987 to 1993, then reserve from 1993 to 2001. When I went regular again and deployed to Afghanistan in '02, I had a long way to go to catch up with the other regulars. I have seen reservist beat regulars in exercises, but only when the "weekenders" were [Rangers|SF|etc] and/or the regulars were a bunch of fuckups. Keeping a uniform in your closet does not make you a better soldier than a guy who wears one every day. "Creativity" simply cannot replace long hours of practice at warfighting.
Robotizing our forces' thinking, even unintentionally, is a serious step that they ought to fully consider.
Yeah, they obviously haven't considered the ramifications! We should hire an expert like you to vet all ideas first. Heck, we'll make you the R&D Czar!
How about some sensor in a glove or on the weapons' grips that would pick up finger pressures and send those out as hand-signals instead? With an on/off momentary switch of some kind, signals would be sent when the soldier wanted them to be, and not when he was merely gripping differently.
Yeah, because chord-keyboarding is so much easier to learn than sub-vocalized speech, particularly when done on a pistol grip or virtually through a dang glove. Let's hear it for our new R&D Czar!
Honestly, I don't know what it is about Slashdot readers that they think that by virtue of being mildly intelligent and having (partially) read a vague and misleading blurb, they suddenly think they know more about military R&D than the people who do it every freakin' day.
Unless there's one time pad data in the helmet, the war might come to a tragic halt for the USA when the enemy fills up our heads with porn.
Don't be daft. The helmet system is read-only. It's basically the neurological monitoring of subvocalized speech.
This wired up army is a dumb idea. It's better to give troops the flexibility to matters into their own hands on the battlefield.
Yeah, because communication is just a distraction in warfare. You think this is about creating a Soviet model army, where the officers basically move mindless units around like chess pieces? Please. We simply don't work that way, and haven't since before WW1.
If you want to have a better US Army, maybe instead of blowing billions on trying to turn platoons into borg, maybe pay sergeants more and jack up their retention rate. Sergeants are the backbone of any army and always will be more, more so than any communications gizmo.
NCO retention is important, but it's not the end-all be-all of warfare. Also, throwing money at the problem isn't the answer. I was a sergeant in the army 5 years ago, and when my obligation ran out, nothing they could have offered me was enough to make me stay. Money doesn't make you not exhausted. Money doesn't magically banish PTSD. Money doesn't wish away the frustration inherent in not being able to pursue an enemy across an arbitrary political boundary that's ignored by every man and beast in the area but the ones wearing US flags and Union Jacks.
It's commonly considered an oxymoron as an oft-repeated joke, but it isn't really accurate, it's rhetoric.
Indeed, being a former member of the military intelligence community, I can say with a high degree of surety that the vast majority of the people I worked with make a lot of the self-supposed braniacs on slashdot look like idiots. Hell, a number of them made me* feel dumb.
* I am, of course, a self-supposed braniac, though my analysis of the matter is clearly accurate!
Well, they already wear a rather large and uncomfortable kevlar helmet
Bah! Kids nowadays! The new Advanced Combat Helmet they issue now is NICE compared to that old nasty PASGT we had in the 90's. It's only 3.25 lbs vs seven freakin' pounds, and has a higher back and 4-point strap so it doesn't slide down over your eyes when you go prone.
perhaps it will be incorporated into the existing helmet and commo systems.
Slashdot Mirror
For a nation so obsessed with cars, you don't seem to spend much effort maintaining them.
People treat cars like appliances in the US. It's disgusting. "Hey, my car's getting bad mileage and looks grubby. Time to buy a new one!"
They could also count it as "They download the song once and then uploaded it once again". Which is simpler to understand, and when worded that way it makes it sound like defendant committed two crimes.
Of course they then run into the not so minor issue that the law only covers distribution (uploading). Downloading is not really covered by the language of copyright law.
You should use != for "not equal". Anyone on slashdot who can't parse THAT is beneath contempt!
Yes, or the PC LOAD LETTER error message which was _never_ fixed?
The implication was that Apple's QC is somehow better because of their "iron fist" control over the platform. With the exception of Linux APM where there is no QC because there's no one running the show, your examples simply illustrate that Apple's QC is just like everyone else's, and that the "iron fist" approach clearly isn't the only way to get there.
Why do Americans buy Toyotas? In my case, it is because Europeans don't have a good small truck on the American market (or any small truck, good or bad, that I'm aware of).
Blame the "Chicken Tax". In 1963 Germany passed an import tariff on chicken to protect their domestic poultry market. In typical bizarro-world political thinking, congress passed a retaliatory import tariff of 25 fucking percent on commercial vehicles. The chicken tariff in chickens is long gone, but the 25% "chicken tax" on trucks is still there. Trucks and commercial vehicles are pretty much the only decent source of revenue for the domestic auto manufacturers, so they lobby VERY hard to keep that bullshit protection in place. Toyota et al have built factories in the US to get around the tax, but the closest the Euros have done is the Sprinter van partial assembly plant in South Carolina. The strength of the Euro combined with the chicken tax pretty much precludes us ever seeing a European commercial vehicle imported in any noteworthy quantity, at any reasonable price. Hell, I'd love a VW TDI Crafter van for work, but that'll never happen...
...and VW is price-competitive across the board.
As a VW nut who has owned everything from a 50's beetle, to an 80's Vanagon, to a 21st century Jetta, I can assure you that VW automobiles are not members of the set referenced by the statement "Germans know how to engineer good cars". There's a lot of fiendishly clever engineering, but when it comes to VW vehicles (particularly the electrical systems) the word "good" is thoroughly incorrect. Granted, some of that is due to what German auto manufacturers consider "good engineering" vs what engineers building for the US market think. German vehicles are not designed to be treated as appliances, but rather carefully and diligently maintained. A classic example is the mid-80's Vanagon, with its water cooled boxer engine. A coolant loss incident would blow the head seals almost instantly. Running water without antifreeze would cause corrosion which would also lead to head seal failure. An American auto engineer would look at such an engine design and ask "Hey, what happens when cousin Cletus ignores a minor coolant leak and the system is run only half filled with tap water?" A German engineer would reply "WHY would anyone DO such a preposterous thing?!?!" It's good to keep that subtle engineering culture difference in mind when discussing "German engineering".
Apple has good sides too.
So does Microsoft. So the fuck what? Shitty behavior is still shitty behavior.
I don't have the AT&T user agreement in front of me, but I believe when you sign the contract with them, you agree not to use their data plan with a tethered computer.
AT&T sells tethering for Windows Mobile based phones, so that can't be true. Plus, you can bypass the stupid buggy proxy system the use to control tethering access by using any non-AT&T crippled GSM WM smartphone, which has USB "internet sharing" capability built in.
PocketPC ... the thing works
Do you have a different version of Windows Mobile to the rest of us?
What, are you one of those poor bastards still running WM5? WM6.1 is a perfectly serviceable operating system. My HTC TYTN II doesn't get "rebooted" unless I decide to reflash the ROM. I reflashed it a couple weeks ago, but before that it ran for months without a restart. Now the phone I had before this one, the Mio A701, that piece of crap needed to be rebooted 5 times a day. Really, the problem with WM isn't the OS, but craptastic hardware compatibility due to mediocre "value engineered" phone hardware. If the iPhone OS was available to any and all Taiwanese phone mills, you'd see the same shit. Really, most problems with WM can be solved fairly easily: quit being such a cheap fuck and buy a decent piece of hardware to run it. Windows Mobile runs like a swiss watch on well-designed hardware--- just like the iPhone.
My only wish is that HTC would make a phone using the same size display as the iPhone. This tiny QVGA shit sux0rz.
Create a single touch, and a multi touch version of your app. The UI development suddenly doubles. Developing an app for Android now has a higher cost than the iPhone.
Single touch and multi-touch are not that far apart conceptually. You're overstating the difficulty of dealing with more than one set of x-y coordinates in a UI. An app that work with multi-touch will also work with single.
Face it, if Apple fully opened the OS for the iPhone, it would turn to crap in a matter of weeks. The platform would lose its integrity.
WTF does that mean? The platform would lose its integrity? My HTC TYTN II has its "integrity" despite Windows Mobile 6 being open to development. My brother's Nokia running Symbian has its "integrity" too. When you say "integrity", do you mean "some people's iPhones would have things running on them that might not look or feel the way Steve Jobs wants the iPhone to look and feel"? You're an idiot.
The next batch of proposed laws will have to cut the DOJ in on a slice of the action. Maybe let them resell the confiscated servers or take the money found on/near the "criminals".
No good. They still wouldn't go for it. It's one thing to RICO seize the property of drug rings, because they have mansions, Ferraris, and hefty bags stuffed with cash. Copyright infringers have what, exactly? A $1200 Dell computer and a poster of Marilyn Manson? There's no money in copyright infringement.
You really want to make the Executive even more powerful?
False dichotomy.
More power in the form of telling people what to do: BAD
More power in the form of thwarting the legislature when is pulls bullshit like an "Omnibus Farming, Technology, Education, and Bridges to Nowhere in My State Bill": GOOD
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not every lawyer is a RIAA extortionist.
Substitute "thief" for "lawyer". It is indeed possible to name a handful of thieves who steal for good reasons, but the exceptions don't magically erase the malfeasance of the rest. The nature of "lawyering" is such that it attracts a lot of folks with a certain degree of "moral flexibility", the ability to rationalize their client's position as the "right" one, based solely on the fact that their paycheck is coming from there. People like that aren't often good people. My cousin is one. Slick, charming, and as morally ambivalent as any psychopath.
Heh. I'm gen-X, F youse guys! When I was a kid, all the commercials were about fun stuff for young-to-middle aged folks. Now that I'm older, all the commercials are about goddamned erection pills and adult diapers! You people are monopolizing the marketing world! Nobody is selling me the shit *I* want!
In fact, I think my neighbor's car has a display on the windshield for the speed she's going. And the car is at least from the mid to early 90s. I don't know if it reads the speed limit, though.
Seriously? If you pause to think about the difference between simply projecting a digital readout onto a reflective patch on the windshield and recognizing and reading speed limit signs on the side of the road, I think you can probably answer your own question. No, your neighbor's early 90's car isn't reading the fucking speed limit signs!
Note the difference between "too many" and "all". In instances such as this clock, a bright blue LED has a purpose. My cell phone, however, does NOT need a blue LED flashing a bright spotlight on my bedroom ceiling every 6 seconds to tell me bluetooth is turned on.
And for that matter, blue is not the only bright LED available.
Who tagged this "technology"? This is 100% art. It uses nothing more technologically noteworthy than a bunch of blue LEDs and a grasshopper escapement. The irritating blue LED has been annoying us as we try to sleep for the better part of a decade, and the grasshopper escapement is almost 3 centuries old. Personally, I think blue LEDs are generally the sign of an INFERIOR designer. Too many things nowadays have bright flashing blue LEDs for no other apparent reason other than "look! we have bright blue LEDs now!"
if you'd RTFA, or even bothered to read the /. blurb and think about it, this is subvocalization, only they're monitoring the speech center of the brain to pick it up.
'Because soldiers are already trained to talk in clean, clear and formulaic ways, it would be a very small step to have them think that way.' Has this guy talked to one of us lately? Or listened to a Lieutenant on the radio? "...Clean, clear, and formulaic..." do NOT apply to our thought processes, and never will. I call shenanigans on the whole concept.
Heh. Yeah, well, it's just the usual disconnect between the R&D guys who only talk to the pentagon suits, and how it really works in the field. In theory, we're supposed to say:
"FOXTROT SEVEN NINER this is ROMEO PAPA THREE, ADJUST FIRE, OVER"
"RP3 this is F79, adjust fire, out"
"GRID FU12345678, direction 0900, over"
"grid FU12345678, direction 0900, out"
In reality, it's more like this:
"FOX SEVEN NINE this is ROMEO PAPA THREE, GIMME SOME GODDAMN SUPPRESSION FIRE! GRID FU311... CRAP! CORRECTION! GRID FU12345678! DO IT NOW!"
There is a difference between TALKING and THINKING.
Not when you're talking about monitoring the speech center of the brain.
I suspect some rather HEAVY training will have to be involved
The idea is that it will pick up certain sub-vocalized keywords and string together the appropriate canned audio fragments. It'd take less training than using voice dial on your cell phone.
Training soldiers to think in short thoughts will invariably cross-over into actual thought patterns that will reduce soldiers' creativity, adjustability and preparation for future events.
Invariably? You obviously missed the entire premise of this device and went off into some bizarre Firefox fantasy-land. This device is essentially intended to pick up sub-vocalized speech neurologically. It has fuck-all to do with "thinking". In combat we already speak in short, terse language. That hasn't stunted our "creativity" in the slightest.
You can see the effects, now, of how the Army trains vs. how young soldiers actually think when they come out of Basic and AI training - the world is all black and white.
You think a nug fresh out of basic/AIT is representative of a fully trained soldier? You've clearly never been in the army. That shit's just to put you in the proper frame of mind to learn how to be an effective soldier. A PV2 out of AIT is just beginning.
From my family's experience, Reserve units are often more flexible in the field and do better at war games because they can think on their feet.
In my own personal experience, reserve units are frequently fatter, slower, whinier, and can't remember how to call for artillery support. Who is your "family", anyway? A bunch of reservists? Not much bias there! There's no military advantage to working in an office 50 weeks a year. I know. I was regular from 1987 to 1993, then reserve from 1993 to 2001. When I went regular again and deployed to Afghanistan in '02, I had a long way to go to catch up with the other regulars. I have seen reservist beat regulars in exercises, but only when the "weekenders" were [Rangers|SF|etc] and/or the regulars were a bunch of fuckups. Keeping a uniform in your closet does not make you a better soldier than a guy who wears one every day. "Creativity" simply cannot replace long hours of practice at warfighting.
Robotizing our forces' thinking, even unintentionally, is a serious step that they ought to fully consider.
Yeah, they obviously haven't considered the ramifications! We should hire an expert like you to vet all ideas first. Heck, we'll make you the R&D Czar!
How about some sensor in a glove or on the weapons' grips that would pick up finger pressures and send those out as hand-signals instead? With an on/off momentary switch of some kind, signals would be sent when the soldier wanted them to be, and not when he was merely gripping differently.
Yeah, because chord-keyboarding is so much easier to learn than sub-vocalized speech, particularly when done on a pistol grip or virtually through a dang glove. Let's hear it for our new R&D Czar!
Honestly, I don't know what it is about Slashdot readers that they think that by virtue of being mildly intelligent and having (partially) read a vague and misleading blurb, they suddenly think they know more about military R&D than the people who do it every freakin' day.
Unless there's one time pad data in the helmet, the war might come to a tragic halt for the USA when the enemy fills up our heads with porn.
Don't be daft. The helmet system is read-only. It's basically the neurological monitoring of subvocalized speech.
This wired up army is a dumb idea. It's better to give troops the flexibility to matters into their own hands on the battlefield.
Yeah, because communication is just a distraction in warfare. You think this is about creating a Soviet model army, where the officers basically move mindless units around like chess pieces? Please. We simply don't work that way, and haven't since before WW1.
If you want to have a better US Army, maybe instead of blowing billions on trying to turn platoons into borg, maybe pay sergeants more and jack up their retention rate. Sergeants are the backbone of any army and always will be more, more so than any communications gizmo.
NCO retention is important, but it's not the end-all be-all of warfare. Also, throwing money at the problem isn't the answer. I was a sergeant in the army 5 years ago, and when my obligation ran out, nothing they could have offered me was enough to make me stay. Money doesn't make you not exhausted. Money doesn't magically banish PTSD. Money doesn't wish away the frustration inherent in not being able to pursue an enemy across an arbitrary political boundary that's ignored by every man and beast in the area but the ones wearing US flags and Union Jacks.
It's commonly considered an oxymoron as an oft-repeated joke, but it isn't really accurate, it's rhetoric.
Indeed, being a former member of the military intelligence community, I can say with a high degree of surety that the vast majority of the people I worked with make a lot of the self-supposed braniacs on slashdot look like idiots. Hell, a number of them made me* feel dumb.
* I am, of course, a self-supposed braniac, though my analysis of the matter is clearly accurate!
Well, they already wear a rather large and uncomfortable kevlar helmet
Bah! Kids nowadays! The new Advanced Combat Helmet they issue now is NICE compared to that old nasty PASGT we had in the 90's. It's only 3.25 lbs vs seven freakin' pounds, and has a higher back and 4-point strap so it doesn't slide down over your eyes when you go prone.
perhaps it will be incorporated into the existing helmet and commo systems.
yes, that's the plan.