Actually the term "yes sir" is used in the gender neutral in the US military. You are just as correct addressing a female officer as "sir" as you are a male officer. I didn't really appreciate this until I saw a couple privates getting smoked for calling a female captain "ma'am."
well...i wouldn't call them my ideals, but the author of Forever Peace and more importantly The Forever War was a Vietnam vet. I think he might have some insight into war that I should pay attention to or at least think about from time to time.
Okay, I understand why we have a system for this but how in hell does it always get to be elevated? Doesn't that violate some mathmatical law about averages? If I am always at a greater chance to do something doesn't that just reduce me to an average chance after a long time? Or maybe I'm just a blathering idiot. Those grades in calc and stats coming back to haunt me...
Hell, Screw giving it to the Russians, let them keep their interest, why don't we just lease out the extra room to corporations and universities that can actually pay the money to maintain the station and do meaningful research. NASA does the upkeep, everyone else reaps the benefits of great facilities and lowers the cost of operations. Be kind of nice to do you graduate thesis on astronomy in space. At least it would open up some other options. Although the astronaut training might complicate things a bit...
What time is it?
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is kind of scary stuff really. When I was in the military there were several times when we were using Satellite Communications Uplinks and we had to sit around on our asses waiting for the right time so we could get an allotted frequency. There is so much demand for the few frequencies that the military satellites possess that you can end up waiting quite a while. The bad thing was sometimes you REALLY needed it. And you could get it...in 30 minutes.
Although it will probably be brought up again, Peter Disch wrote a pretty decent book that was reviewed here on Slashdot a while ago called "The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of" that examines the impact that science fiction has had on both our technology and society at large.
These guys had a pretty cool product running there for a little while, but since they dropped Linux support I didn't really feel like sticking with them any more anyway. Of course now Metallica will be able to ban me from concerts or something when I download their damn MP3s.
What gets to me is the amount of people out there with the knee jerk reactions that practically scream "oh god, there go all my civil rights." How many people out on Slashdot have ever gone to sleep knowing that someone a few hundred meters away was trying to kill them, or woke up in the middle of the night wondering if that was thunder or incoming artillery, then passing the time between booms wondering about their anthrax vaccine, hoping that it will protect them. Don't forget that our people in uniform have VOLUNTARILY given up some of their civil rights to protect the citizens of the United States. Will crypto backdoors and some of the other suggestions stop all the terrorist attacks? Probably not. Anybody willing to spend a few months learning to program the stuff can come up with their own methods. But at what point to we value human lives? Is easing wiretap restrictions worth it? Perhaps and perhaps not, but I agree with Katz, we need to look at all the options and not dismiss any until all the sides have been reviewed and weighed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the term "yes sir" is used in the gender neutral in the US military. You are just as correct addressing a female officer as "sir" as you are a male officer. I didn't really appreciate this until I saw a couple privates getting smoked for calling a female captain "ma'am."
well...i wouldn't call them my ideals, but the author of Forever Peace and more importantly The Forever War was a Vietnam vet. I think he might have some insight into war that I should pay attention to or at least think about from time to time.
Okay, I understand why we have a system for this but how in hell does it always get to be elevated? Doesn't that violate some mathmatical law about averages? If I am always at a greater chance to do something doesn't that just reduce me to an average chance after a long time? Or maybe I'm just a blathering idiot. Those grades in calc and stats coming back to haunt me...
The EPA all over me like rash?
yeah...right...
The current administration would offer me a tax break.
Hell,
Screw giving it to the Russians, let them keep their interest, why don't we just lease out the extra room to corporations and universities that can actually pay the money to maintain the station and do meaningful research. NASA does the upkeep, everyone else reaps the benefits of great facilities and lowers the cost of operations. Be kind of nice to do you graduate thesis on astronomy in space. At least it would open up some other options. Although the astronaut training might complicate things a bit...
This is kind of scary stuff really. When I was in the military there were several times when we were using Satellite Communications Uplinks and we had to sit around on our asses waiting for the right time so we could get an allotted frequency. There is so much demand for the few frequencies that the military satellites possess that you can end up waiting quite a while. The bad thing was sometimes you REALLY needed it. And you could get it...in 30 minutes.
For what its worth...
Although it will probably be brought up again, Peter Disch wrote a pretty decent book that was reviewed here on Slashdot a while ago called "The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of" that examines the impact that science fiction has had on both our technology and society at large.
These guys had a pretty cool product running there for a little while, but since they dropped Linux support I didn't really feel like sticking with them any more anyway. Of course now Metallica will be able to ban me from concerts or something when I download their damn MP3s.
What gets to me is the amount of people out there with the knee jerk reactions that practically scream "oh god, there go all my civil rights." How many people out on Slashdot have ever gone to sleep knowing that someone a few hundred meters away was trying to kill them, or woke up in the middle of the night wondering if that was thunder or incoming artillery, then passing the time between booms wondering about their anthrax vaccine, hoping that it will protect them. Don't forget that our people in uniform have VOLUNTARILY given up some of their civil rights to protect the citizens of the United States. Will crypto backdoors and some of the other suggestions stop all the terrorist attacks? Probably not. Anybody willing to spend a few months learning to program the stuff can come up with their own methods. But at what point to we value human lives? Is easing wiretap restrictions worth it? Perhaps and perhaps not, but I agree with Katz, we need to look at all the options and not dismiss any until all the sides have been reviewed and weighed.