Correction: nothing positive happened. Plenty of happened: we've got troops in foreign lands where we have 'officially' ended the wars and combat operations entirely; we're wasting millions of US taxpayer money trying Gitmo combatants in civil courts; we've dedicated trillions to a healthcare system which will bankrupt employers and be unaffordable to citizens.
As an added bonus, we've also nationalized the banks and one of the largest automotive makers in the country. We've inflated the dollar to the point of being worthless and have continued to accelerate the rate of borrowing from China.
I've seen this TV show, except I saw an earlier visioning of it. I think it had something to do with Germany or Italy in the 1930s - I can't quite remember. (Argentina in 2000 is a good enough example as well.)
If you'd rather sit it out than "vote for the guy or gal that lies the least", let me make a suggestion or two.
1) Vote for the challenger, regardless of party, assuming they are not more odious than the incumbent. If we're able to refresh the political representatives every 2 years (and 4 for the Presidency), we'll hopefully get a group that isn't completely corrupt by the time our children are able to vote. 2) If you're disillusioned by the system, vote for the least Marxist candidates at the local level, and push the most odious ones into the federal positions. Wait for the fireworks when everyone else does the same. 3) Move somewhere else, outside the US, where your vote will not be possible or not matter.
Isn't this basically a boxer motor? Granted, from the picture, it loosk quite a bit smaller than most boxers, but boxer motors are, as they say, a real bitch to mount.
These have been around for a long time, and would have a number of problems all their own.
Hollywood is under the axe right now: studios are having to cut costs. There are many films which have finished principle (at MGM) which simply won't even be finished, it looks like - despite the primary production cost having already been spent. (Sadly, this includes a movie I've been waiting for with baited anticipation - the Red Dawn remake).
3D films require significantly more principle filming budget due to the complexity of filming such scenes. You need to coordinate multiple cameras for the exact same shot, and then editing is likewise more complex. Moving away from 3D saves them money: the returns from 3D films has not been that substantially higher to justify the expenditures.
This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.
It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.
To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.
...that you people continue to put up with this crap.
I agree, it is appalling.
So what's the alternative? We've tried to vote the idiots out, but we got even worse idiots in their place. (The Douche vs. a Turd paradigm is entirely too close to reality.)
Some of us have stopped flying when we can (work requirements make this somewhat difficult). I drove 3600 miles (5700 odd km) two years ago to visit family so I could avoid the security theater. I don't need that kind of violation in my life, thanks: I'd rather be inconvenienced and pay more, and I'm not going to support that kind of boot-thuggery one way or another.
So, seriously: how do we get the federal government to scale back? They appear fully capable of continuing on the same track regardless of who is voted in - largely because they control that process, too. What's left?
Not a hell of a lot. Armed rebellion? Even if the US military rebelled against the government allowing such a thing to be possible, you can bet the US government would petition China, Britain, the EU, etc. - another massive government with interests in maintaining control over the people of the world - to come crack down on us.
The world - particularly the Western world - is looking increasingly fucked.
I can make it across the US in 24-36 hours if there's no really bad weather.
No, you can't. Best case, you're looking at around 48 hours, assuming you don't sleep: two days of straight travel.
Realistically, you're looking at 3 or maybe even 4 days of travel: sleeping, resting, stretching your legs and eating all take time (losing you about 8-10 hours a day). This number is a little higher if you've got children to contend with (more food and exercise requirements).
If you've got a week+ to burn and don't mind driving, go ahead. A couple years ago I drove from the Black Hills to upstate NY (and then back again a month later). I was unemployed, so the trip was tenable due to not having any time obligations, and it was slightly cheaper than 4 plane tickets (even after a small collision with a deer). However, it took almost 3 days (1800 miles), and that was traveling at around 85mph for most of the trip.
However, for any distance under (say) 600 miles or so, I'd agree: drive. It actually is quicker, and is substantially cheaper without the hassle. An hour to the airport, 1-3 hours waiting, an hour or so in transit, and another hour to get your bags, rental, etc. and then another 30 minutes to 2 hours to your actual destination. Anywhere on the seaboards, I'd say "just drive".
Anything up to 12 hours of driving is, IMO, acceptable at this point - even for a single person. I'd love to get a small turbo diesel van to make these trips pleasant and (even less) inexpensive for me and my family.
First, the US hasn't fought a single legitimate war in the last 65 years. Give me one good reason to fight the vietnam war.
Because the communist regimes throughout the world were growing and oppressing millions of people, and stopping said encroachment was the morally superior thing to do?
The fact that it was a poorly fought war, with shitloads of bureaucratic nonsense and incompetent commanders doesn't change this fact. The war was winnable had we fought differently - diligently, and not as a military experiment.
Same shit for every other war the US has fought. The same is actually true for WWII, you were dying to get into that war, and tried hard until you found a good excuse. Same thing in WWI, you actually sent the Lusitania knowing that it would get destroyed in order to get into the fucking war.
So maybe we should have let the Germans walk all over Europe, cleansing all the Jews in the process. "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!" and all that. And I'm sure France (and the majority of Europe) wouldn't have fought to the last man during WWI, or anything, had the US not stepped in with substantial aide.
I suppose you think the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor never happened, and it was actually US ships attacking?
What you don't seem to realize is that the US was mostly opposed to joining the World Wars. Western Europe would have been destroyed utterly had we not interceded.
Humanitarian efforts? Fuck of, you fucking hypocrite.
Please see: pretty much any hurricane or tsunami worldwide, the rebuilding of Japan and Germany after WWII, and the food surpluses given to famine-stricken places for the past 40+ years. The US has done more than any force (except for the British Empire) in the past several centuries to keep the world regionally stable and people world-over fed and un-oppressed.
I appreciate your underhanded slights; they're quite indicative of where you're coming from.
A substantial proportion of humanity is without the personal power, education, and upward mobility needed to worry about lofty things such as social standing, ideology, or material gain.
Really? In India, social standing is often a prerequisite to finding work and, ultimately, eating. Great efforts are put towards getting one's starving children into a higher class through marriage.
When someone is hungry, all they think about is where their next meal is coming from.
Yet many of these hungry people have children who are also likely hungry. Somehow these children manage to get fed to the loss of the parents. Surprising that there are future generations being made - an act requiring sex and some degree of social fabric - if the situation is as dire as you propose (and I believe it is, to a large degree).
One could argue your neo-conservative perspective is not only failed, but the cause of much misery in the world today.
What? Maslow's hierarchy has been used to get the so-called "neo-con agenda" where it is. (By this, I'm assuming you're referring to people in Demoines, Iowa and similar cities throughout the US funding the improvement of people and cities on the other side of the world through trade.)
The facts do not lie. The middle class in America is on the retreat and it is questionable whether it will rebound in the near future or not.
You realize that the decline of the middle class has been directly related to the increases in government size and spending, right? It has nothing (and everything) to do with "neo-con" anything - no more so than it does any other closet ideology within the government.
Just ignore for a second the fact that if an enemy is unable to kill your soldiers, they will give up. Ignore the fact that killing all enemy combatants quicker and more effectively (fewer deaths) that the conflict will end sooner. (Any context in which these realities do not hold acknowledges an existential ideological conflict.)
As a child poster to you said: they'll be generally more effective at humanitarian aide as well.
Believe it or not, humanitarian efforts - providing food, support, etc. - have long been the bulk of US military operations. We've seemingly stopped doing that recently, but that may have been due to the greedy, hateful "give us more, and fuck off" mentality of the recipients.
Being selfish long-term - ie, with long-term dominance and control - can have some of the same vehicles as short-term selfishness; albeit, in somewhat of a less forward, more secretive fashion.
What the original poster was seemingly arguing for was one of the following:
* government backed search, created from scratch * the nationalization of Google
With the current government in the US and its current predisposition for nationalizing industry, I'd suggest the OP was attempting to push the later forward in people's minds.
Maslow's hierarchy is a hack. The hierarchy of needs has no basis in actual, human needs: it was designed as a self-dependent prerequisite, and it's application tends to result in selfish aims alone.
Maslow tried to discredit detractors by emphasizing that his study only examined 'healthy' people and was not applicable to those with mental/emotional/etc. deficiencies. This is disingenuous:
The bulk of humanity will often do things which meet the 'higher' things on the hierarchy while neglecting the lower. They'll spend time, money, etc. for the shelter and care of loved ones while neglecting their own. They'll spend money to gain social standing while things as existential as their rent goes overdue. They'll pursue ideological ends while neglecting basic safety. This can be said for the bulk of humanity, at one point or another in their lives.
What's more, things are often done to meet the higher needs (esteem, self-actualization), in the complete absence of the lower levels. See: the sales of Coca Cola in 3rd world countries.
In contrast, pursuing or adhering to Maslow's hierarchy tends to only be achievable with no concrete acknowledged external responsibilities. It's a pyramid of self-fulfillment. You can't adhere to the hierarchy and be a good parent, for instance, without substantial funds or an external force (eg. government/charity) to aide in the basic physical needs. Ultimately, Maslow's hierarchy seems better - or at least, as good - at encouraging socialist agendas (as I have seen it done) than it does business practice.
Oh, wait, maybe human behavior is more complex than that... That would explain why anyone would be interested in investing time in a search engine/web browser/OS not corrupted by a. money and b. power.
"Corrupted" by money or power? Who said it had to be corruption?
Someone involved in the creation of something is, indeed, doing it for money or power, at some level. "Power" can be summarized in a number of ways - it's not necessarily a desire to be a totalitarian overlord:
* Social standing * Community esteem (not quite the same as social standing) * Influence through one's work itself (eg. a search engine's results might nix mention of things you find oppositional, as google does with politics) * Ideological prominence through social standing
And money is power - yet just another means to acquire social, political, economic, etc. power.
If you look at "kill ratios", the US soldier (moreso the US Marine) is quite effective as it stands.
A HUD with targeting/fire control wouldn't prove entirely useful until Friend/Foe systems are worked out to the point of being infallible.
You're not going to get any vertical launch munitions with a mere 200lb payload, and they wouldn't be terribly effective without substantial control systems. (For instance, SAW alone is going to weigh in at 20lb or so. Ammo for that is going to be another 50lb-100lb. Add in gyros for stabilizing and aiming/etc. controls, and you're looking at the full support weight of the system. It's never good to design to the system's maximum capabilities.)
And, guess what? All that would rely on vertical support systems, and communication with them. If you're sending data to request data, the enemy can detect your location. The ability to detect your enemy's location is a big part of being able to effectively kill them.
What this will do is making existing soldiers more capable on their own. They will have motorized assistance to carry their 80lb rucks, so they will be able to do everything they do today - faster, more agilely, and for a longer period of time - without being exhausted in combat.
For this thing to be effective in combat, what they need to do now is figure out a means to make it self-carrying (say, a 'low power' mode that would only support its own weight + a little, relying on the soldier to do the rest, combined with solar trickle charging), and improve its ability to hold things independently/not use those stupid pads. This way it'd improve effectiveness without actually interfering when not directly in use. (Soldiers spend a lot more time just standing around and walking than they do fighting. Something that just adds weight during this period of time will be quickly discarded/taken off, even if it's effective at other times.)
Short term, the linked Raytheon XOS2 looks like it'd be more useful, short-medium term. Think: the skid loaders in Aliens. You'd be able to (as a group of 3-5 men, say) quickly and easily move 500lb to 1/2-ton crates on and off vehicles and the like. 30 cal or 50 cal cans would take a single person, and they'd be able to move them quickly.
To the exception of Netflix, I can think of no site I've been to which uses silverlight.
I've got a friend who, despite his worthwhile attributes, really likes Microsoft software (always has). He's mentioned that "does not work with silverlight" is a big game killer for him: apparently there are a number of sites and appliances which require silverlight plugins to use, which are important to his clients and their management. IMO, that's a huge fail.
Unfortunately, like IE6 is now, it looks like Silverlight will be another Y2K type problem for IT in a couple years, if MS starts avoiding Silverlight improvement. They had been pushing Sharepoint + silverlight for some time, even. People won't be able to upgrade their systems to Windows 2015 or whatever, because they need Silverlight. Shame...
(And people think IPv6 is a good idea. Hrmph. Lacking IPv6 support is an even lower level shortcoming than requiring IE, and there are many, many, many 'must have' appliances and devices which need to be gotten rid of before we can even consider rolling out IPv6. - Does your smartphone support IPv6?)
the more to the right you get, the more portable you inherently become.
No, you don't. That is only the case if the language(s) you're dealing with are transportable due to having a virtual machine/runtime compilation design - and those languages have a multitude of platform-specific interpreters.
Examples: perl, python, java, javascript,.NET.
Silverlight is a very 'high level' language - but it only has runtimes for Firefox and Safari on OSX, and (essentially) Windows. There are no mobile implementations (except for possibly Windows Mobile 6.x, couldn't find any info on it.) Flash is much more portable and cross-platform.
Even javascript isn't all that cross-platform/portable due to the use of different browsers/javascript implementations.
IE6 is beginning to be a bigger mess than Y2K. It's not yet such a long-term problem, but the scope is pretty board due to the fact that it's the entire program, not just date fields, which are broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly by not linking to a politically biased blog with known credibility issues.
Yes, I had my dates incorrect.
This is, indeed, what is happening in the US as we speak:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920s_German_inflation
. Nothing happened.
Correction: nothing positive happened. Plenty of happened: we've got troops in foreign lands where we have 'officially' ended the wars and combat operations entirely; we're wasting millions of US taxpayer money trying Gitmo combatants in civil courts; we've dedicated trillions to a healthcare system which will bankrupt employers and be unaffordable to citizens.
As an added bonus, we've also nationalized the banks and one of the largest automotive makers in the country. We've inflated the dollar to the point of being worthless and have continued to accelerate the rate of borrowing from China.
I've seen this TV show, except I saw an earlier visioning of it. I think it had something to do with Germany or Italy in the 1930s - I can't quite remember. (Argentina in 2000 is a good enough example as well.)
If you'd rather sit it out than "vote for the guy or gal that lies the least", let me make a suggestion or two.
1) Vote for the challenger, regardless of party, assuming they are not more odious than the incumbent. If we're able to refresh the political representatives every 2 years (and 4 for the Presidency), we'll hopefully get a group that isn't completely corrupt by the time our children are able to vote.
2) If you're disillusioned by the system, vote for the least Marxist candidates at the local level, and push the most odious ones into the federal positions. Wait for the fireworks when everyone else does the same.
3) Move somewhere else, outside the US, where your vote will not be possible or not matter.
A small diesel paired with a variable drive transmission is going to smoke that hybrid drivetrain, though.
Isn't this basically a boxer motor? Granted, from the picture, it loosk quite a bit smaller than most boxers, but boxer motors are, as they say, a real bitch to mount.
These have been around for a long time, and would have a number of problems all their own.
Hollywood is under the axe right now: studios are having to cut costs. There are many films which have finished principle (at MGM) which simply won't even be finished, it looks like - despite the primary production cost having already been spent. (Sadly, this includes a movie I've been waiting for with baited anticipation - the Red Dawn remake).
3D films require significantly more principle filming budget due to the complexity of filming such scenes. You need to coordinate multiple cameras for the exact same shot, and then editing is likewise more complex. Moving away from 3D saves them money: the returns from 3D films has not been that substantially higher to justify the expenditures.
Take a look at the Android logo. Look at the Chrome logo. Look at the Simon Says logo.
This seems like a bit of an awkward kludge - capacitive touchscreens are evidently not terribly well suited to such precise inputs.
It's been about 10 years since I've regularly used a Palm Pilot. Handwriting recognition on those devices Worked. I could get quite consistent input, at roughly the same speed as I could writing by hand.
To this day, my written "T" still looks like a "7" on occasion. It felt quite natural and, as far as I know, no handwriting mechanism has come close to rivaling it for effectiveness/consistency.
Do the WebOS devices still have this capability?
Actually, the bus isn't all that much cheaper. It costs more than the gas to go the same distance in a sedan.
...that you people continue to put up with this crap.
I agree, it is appalling.
So what's the alternative? We've tried to vote the idiots out, but we got even worse idiots in their place. (The Douche vs. a Turd paradigm is entirely too close to reality.)
Some of us have stopped flying when we can (work requirements make this somewhat difficult). I drove 3600 miles (5700 odd km) two years ago to visit family so I could avoid the security theater. I don't need that kind of violation in my life, thanks: I'd rather be inconvenienced and pay more, and I'm not going to support that kind of boot-thuggery one way or another.
So, seriously: how do we get the federal government to scale back? They appear fully capable of continuing on the same track regardless of who is voted in - largely because they control that process, too. What's left?
Not a hell of a lot. Armed rebellion? Even if the US military rebelled against the government allowing such a thing to be possible, you can bet the US government would petition China, Britain, the EU, etc. - another massive government with interests in maintaining control over the people of the world - to come crack down on us.
The world - particularly the Western world - is looking increasingly fucked.
I can make it across the US in 24-36 hours if there's no really bad weather.
No, you can't. Best case, you're looking at around 48 hours, assuming you don't sleep: two days of straight travel.
Realistically, you're looking at 3 or maybe even 4 days of travel: sleeping, resting, stretching your legs and eating all take time (losing you about 8-10 hours a day). This number is a little higher if you've got children to contend with (more food and exercise requirements).
If you've got a week+ to burn and don't mind driving, go ahead. A couple years ago I drove from the Black Hills to upstate NY (and then back again a month later). I was unemployed, so the trip was tenable due to not having any time obligations, and it was slightly cheaper than 4 plane tickets (even after a small collision with a deer). However, it took almost 3 days (1800 miles), and that was traveling at around 85mph for most of the trip.
However, for any distance under (say) 600 miles or so, I'd agree: drive. It actually is quicker, and is substantially cheaper without the hassle. An hour to the airport, 1-3 hours waiting, an hour or so in transit, and another hour to get your bags, rental, etc. and then another 30 minutes to 2 hours to your actual destination. Anywhere on the seaboards, I'd say "just drive".
Anything up to 12 hours of driving is, IMO, acceptable at this point - even for a single person. I'd love to get a small turbo diesel van to make these trips pleasant and (even less) inexpensive for me and my family.
I feel the same way; unfortunately, I've had to fly several times for work. Due to the time it would take to drive, it has not been an option.
First, the US hasn't fought a single legitimate war in the last 65 years. Give me one good reason to fight the vietnam war.
Because the communist regimes throughout the world were growing and oppressing millions of people, and stopping said encroachment was the morally superior thing to do?
The fact that it was a poorly fought war, with shitloads of bureaucratic nonsense and incompetent commanders doesn't change this fact. The war was winnable had we fought differently - diligently, and not as a military experiment.
Same shit for every other war the US has fought. The same is actually true for WWII, you were dying to get into that war, and tried hard until you found a good excuse. Same thing in WWI, you actually sent the Lusitania knowing that it would get destroyed in order to get into the fucking war.
So maybe we should have let the Germans walk all over Europe, cleansing all the Jews in the process. "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!" and all that. And I'm sure France (and the majority of Europe) wouldn't have fought to the last man during WWI, or anything, had the US not stepped in with substantial aide.
I suppose you think the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor never happened, and it was actually US ships attacking?
What you don't seem to realize is that the US was mostly opposed to joining the World Wars. Western Europe would have been destroyed utterly had we not interceded.
Humanitarian efforts? Fuck of, you fucking hypocrite.
Please see: pretty much any hurricane or tsunami worldwide, the rebuilding of Japan and Germany after WWII, and the food surpluses given to famine-stricken places for the past 40+ years. The US has done more than any force (except for the British Empire) in the past several centuries to keep the world regionally stable and people world-over fed and un-oppressed.
I appreciate your underhanded slights; they're quite indicative of where you're coming from.
A substantial proportion of humanity is without the personal power, education, and upward mobility needed to worry about lofty things such as social standing, ideology, or material gain.
Really? In India, social standing is often a prerequisite to finding work and, ultimately, eating. Great efforts are put towards getting one's starving children into a higher class through marriage.
When someone is hungry, all they think about is where their next meal is coming from.
Yet many of these hungry people have children who are also likely hungry. Somehow these children manage to get fed to the loss of the parents. Surprising that there are future generations being made - an act requiring sex and some degree of social fabric - if the situation is as dire as you propose (and I believe it is, to a large degree).
One could argue your neo-conservative perspective is not only failed, but the cause of much misery in the world today.
What? Maslow's hierarchy has been used to get the so-called "neo-con agenda" where it is. (By this, I'm assuming you're referring to people in Demoines, Iowa and similar cities throughout the US funding the improvement of people and cities on the other side of the world through trade.)
The facts do not lie. The middle class in America is on the retreat and it is questionable whether it will rebound in the near future or not.
You realize that the decline of the middle class has been directly related to the increases in government size and spending, right? It has nothing (and everything) to do with "neo-con" anything - no more so than it does any other closet ideology within the government.
Just ignore for a second the fact that if an enemy is unable to kill your soldiers, they will give up. Ignore the fact that killing all enemy combatants quicker and more effectively (fewer deaths) that the conflict will end sooner. (Any context in which these realities do not hold acknowledges an existential ideological conflict.)
As a child poster to you said: they'll be generally more effective at humanitarian aide as well.
Believe it or not, humanitarian efforts - providing food, support, etc. - have long been the bulk of US military operations. We've seemingly stopped doing that recently, but that may have been due to the greedy, hateful "give us more, and fuck off" mentality of the recipients.
Being selfish long-term - ie, with long-term dominance and control - can have some of the same vehicles as short-term selfishness; albeit, in somewhat of a less forward, more secretive fashion.
What the original poster was seemingly arguing for was one of the following:
* government backed search, created from scratch
* the nationalization of Google
With the current government in the US and its current predisposition for nationalizing industry, I'd suggest the OP was attempting to push the later forward in people's minds.
Maslow's hierarchy is a hack. The hierarchy of needs has no basis in actual, human needs: it was designed as a self-dependent prerequisite, and it's application tends to result in selfish aims alone.
Maslow tried to discredit detractors by emphasizing that his study only examined 'healthy' people and was not applicable to those with mental/emotional/etc. deficiencies. This is disingenuous:
The bulk of humanity will often do things which meet the 'higher' things on the hierarchy while neglecting the lower. They'll spend time, money, etc. for the shelter and care of loved ones while neglecting their own. They'll spend money to gain social standing while things as existential as their rent goes overdue. They'll pursue ideological ends while neglecting basic safety. This can be said for the bulk of humanity, at one point or another in their lives.
What's more, things are often done to meet the higher needs (esteem, self-actualization), in the complete absence of the lower levels. See: the sales of Coca Cola in 3rd world countries.
In contrast, pursuing or adhering to Maslow's hierarchy tends to only be achievable with no concrete acknowledged external responsibilities. It's a pyramid of self-fulfillment. You can't adhere to the hierarchy and be a good parent, for instance, without substantial funds or an external force (eg. government/charity) to aide in the basic physical needs. Ultimately, Maslow's hierarchy seems better - or at least, as good - at encouraging socialist agendas (as I have seen it done) than it does business practice.
Oh, wait, maybe human behavior is more complex than that... That would explain why anyone would be interested in investing time in a search engine/web browser/OS not corrupted by a. money and b. power.
"Corrupted" by money or power? Who said it had to be corruption?
Someone involved in the creation of something is, indeed, doing it for money or power, at some level. "Power" can be summarized in a number of ways - it's not necessarily a desire to be a totalitarian overlord:
* Social standing
* Community esteem (not quite the same as social standing)
* Influence through one's work itself (eg. a search engine's results might nix mention of things you find oppositional, as google does with politics)
* Ideological prominence through social standing
And money is power - yet just another means to acquire social, political, economic, etc. power.
Why are those things necessary?
If you look at "kill ratios", the US soldier (moreso the US Marine) is quite effective as it stands.
A HUD with targeting/fire control wouldn't prove entirely useful until Friend/Foe systems are worked out to the point of being infallible.
You're not going to get any vertical launch munitions with a mere 200lb payload, and they wouldn't be terribly effective without substantial control systems. (For instance, SAW alone is going to weigh in at 20lb or so. Ammo for that is going to be another 50lb-100lb. Add in gyros for stabilizing and aiming/etc. controls, and you're looking at the full support weight of the system. It's never good to design to the system's maximum capabilities.)
And, guess what? All that would rely on vertical support systems, and communication with them. If you're sending data to request data, the enemy can detect your location. The ability to detect your enemy's location is a big part of being able to effectively kill them.
What this will do is making existing soldiers more capable on their own. They will have motorized assistance to carry their 80lb rucks, so they will be able to do everything they do today - faster, more agilely, and for a longer period of time - without being exhausted in combat.
For this thing to be effective in combat, what they need to do now is figure out a means to make it self-carrying (say, a 'low power' mode that would only support its own weight + a little, relying on the soldier to do the rest, combined with solar trickle charging), and improve its ability to hold things independently/not use those stupid pads. This way it'd improve effectiveness without actually interfering when not directly in use. (Soldiers spend a lot more time just standing around and walking than they do fighting. Something that just adds weight during this period of time will be quickly discarded/taken off, even if it's effective at other times.)
Short term, the linked Raytheon XOS2 looks like it'd be more useful, short-medium term. Think: the skid loaders in Aliens. You'd be able to (as a group of 3-5 men, say) quickly and easily move 500lb to 1/2-ton crates on and off vehicles and the like. 30 cal or 50 cal cans would take a single person, and they'd be able to move them quickly.
Symbolism! I believe the word you were looking for was ssssssssssssssssssymbolism!
Jesus. I've watched that movie (BDS) so many times I've started to pick up the improper grammar in it. :P
It started off with me saying it as a joke, but now I can't get away from it. Hah!
To the exception of Netflix, I can think of no site I've been to which uses silverlight.
I've got a friend who, despite his worthwhile attributes, really likes Microsoft software (always has). He's mentioned that "does not work with silverlight" is a big game killer for him: apparently there are a number of sites and appliances which require silverlight plugins to use, which are important to his clients and their management. IMO, that's a huge fail.
Unfortunately, like IE6 is now, it looks like Silverlight will be another Y2K type problem for IT in a couple years, if MS starts avoiding Silverlight improvement. They had been pushing Sharepoint + silverlight for some time, even. People won't be able to upgrade their systems to Windows 2015 or whatever, because they need Silverlight. Shame...
(And people think IPv6 is a good idea. Hrmph. Lacking IPv6 support is an even lower level shortcoming than requiring IE, and there are many, many, many 'must have' appliances and devices which need to be gotten rid of before we can even consider rolling out IPv6. - Does your smartphone support IPv6?)
the more to the right you get, the more portable you inherently become.
No, you don't. That is only the case if the language(s) you're dealing with are transportable due to having a virtual machine/runtime compilation design - and those languages have a multitude of platform-specific interpreters.
Examples: perl, python, java, javascript, .NET.
Silverlight is a very 'high level' language - but it only has runtimes for Firefox and Safari on OSX, and (essentially) Windows. There are no mobile implementations (except for possibly Windows Mobile 6.x, couldn't find any info on it.) Flash is much more portable and cross-platform.
Even javascript isn't all that cross-platform/portable due to the use of different browsers/javascript implementations.
IE6 is beginning to be a bigger mess than Y2K. It's not yet such a long-term problem, but the scope is pretty board due to the fact that it's the entire program, not just date fields, which are broken.