Not true. My wife's MIT Alumni club brought Dr. Peter Diamandis in for a discussion on the X-Prize Foundation, and it was fully catered with open bar at the local science museum, which was partially open for exploration. Good time. Good enough that Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson crashed the party, with a couple of attractive grad students in-tow.
It's pretty interesting stuff. While there appears to be a regulated cap on the number of taxis in Dallas, they have a lot of other regulations that are much more important, like age of the vehicle, condition of the vehicle, minimum insurance requirements ($500,000!), and the driving history of the operator.
Taxis with conventional drivetrains cannot be more than six years old. This means they're forced to be fuel efficient (though most drivers seem to want more fuel-efficient cars as they rent the car from the taxi company, so that's less of a problem than it used to be), less bad on the environment, and probably safer for passengers as newer cars generally perform in collisions better than their predecessors. Taxis also have their rates defined by the city, so that passengers aren't screwed over and can take any cab and get the same rate.
Uber might be able to operate as a Limo service, but would have to use vehicles that qualify as limos per Dallas' requirements, which must be luxury vehicles to qualify, and has otherwise most of the same insurance and driver record rules.
Laws covering things as mundane as public-interacting business are usually reactionary. Such high insurance limits are probably necessary to protect passengers, and fares defined by the city are designed to both keep customers from being screwed and to keep drivers earning a living wage.
Except that it's easy to ignore the telephone, e-mail, text messaging, and software-based chats, especially when one is out shopping or playing video games or working on personal stuff out in the workshop.
I'm starting to wonder if maybe more employees, rather than less, need to be made hourly and not exempt from receiving overtime. Employees that do not supervise less than four other employees, for example, regardless of what they actually do for a living, that personally own, not as a retirement fund, less than 10% of the company. If the point of being salaried originally was that the salaried employee had a stake in the company itself and could write their own hours as they managed how the company operated, then the entire point of being salaried is shot to hell nowadays.
That 'system' is only present in the old downtown and strip areas, and the reason for limited pickup and dropoff points in those areas is due to Vegas' limited-access city streets in those areas. They've erected Jersey barriers along most of the Strip now, to keep people from wandering out into the street and to try to force people to use the overhead walkways, and as a consequence it's tougher to get from the street to the sidewalk now too. I had to take a cab in Vegas because of a vehicle breakdown and it was no worse an experience than any other time I've taken a cab, it met me at my hotel and took me to the rental facility, no curb attendant, no weird pickup or dropoff areas.
You live in a suburban city, not an urban city. Your city was designed with with the automobile in mind, and the vast majority of residents of your city drive themselves. That goes a long way to explaining why you can't easily grab an unscheduled cab ride except from certain hubs of activity, as there's no profit in hanging out in the suburbs to wait for a fare that may or may not come.
I expect that you'll find taxis waiting at the airports, at busier hotels, at the sports venues during activities, at the convention centers during activities, at the more popular shopping centers, and possibly any of the higher-density downtown-type areas. Part of the reason you have to wait for a taxi in the suburbs is because they're going to pick you up after another fare into that part of the suburbs needs to be dropped off, so they can justify the trip out there.
The taxi services don't owe you anything. The taxi services are also operating within the law as the state, the counties, and the cities require, with commercial insurance, commercial vehicle inspections, and probably with extra screening for their drivers and their licenses. Uber, by claiming to be a ride-sharing service where the driver is supposedly already going your way and you're supposed to be reimbursing him for your portion of the drive, is cheating when the drivers are just picking up and dropping off fares without the drivers themselves having their own destinations to attend to along the route. Those drivers don't have the same insurance and don't have to have their vehicles inspected to commercial levels, and probably don't even have their drivers' licenses scrutinized.
Last time I took a taxi was in SF. Worked fine. Hailed one on the street and took it the few blocks I needed to go. That's a high-density city. I could have hailed one in London or in Paris, but I didn't need cabs in those cities. Either way, it would have been an easy option, where the population density was high enough to make it cost effective to have cabs roaming looking for fares.
The trend toward homogenization is based on communication as well, and since the goal seems to be encouraging everyone, everywhere to be able to communicate with everyone else, everywhere else, that will only help make everyone sound more similar to each other than before.
In Europe, already a large portion of the population speaks English, technically as a second language, but almost as effectively as their first. Numerous European pop music groups have sung just about the entire body of their work in English even though they're not from English-speaking countries (ABBA, Aqua, Rednex, etc) and are most popular in countries that never were established by the British Empire.
French could have had this level of expansion, but French has been intentionally held back as language, new words are basically forbidden. This has meant that large combinations of words to describe new things have been necessary when English simply creates new words or appropriates words from other languages as needed.
...so they can keep an eye on you, so they can 'manage' you.
There's a whole lot of BS in this world, and many of the people that sling the BS best can't really do much else. They talk a great game, but they produce little to nothing. The problem with this is some endeavors, like writing software in a collaborative setting, make it difficult to measure the contributions of the individuals that are supposed to be applying themselves. It's not so easy as simply counting lines of code or commits or functions written when there's distinct possibility that flaws in those contributions will require extensive rewriting or will end up being orphaned code, and further complicating matters, there's no good way to measure how only slightly flawed code, easily corrected by another, contributes to the project. Either a project maintainer must keep on top of all of the code all of the time, which is a daunting task, or they must keep on top of the people, to see what they're doing, to measure how much they're applying themselves and how much time they actually spend working.
I'm sure I'll be flamed for this perspective, but given the sheer number of distractions around us these days, it's very easy for someone to do anything besides their paid job.
There's also an argument that chasing fantastic superweapons with high development costs and fairly low return on investment was bad economic deal for a country whose defacto borders were all battle fronts. Initial V-2 attacks were horribly inaccurate, and by the time a degree of accuracy was achieved the Germans were headed for defeat by boots on the ground and conventional bombing by aircraft. It makes one wonder if the vast sums of money spent developing the rockets would have been better applied to winter materiel development for their army or in the production of more armor units or the development of better automatic rifles, or even the construction of better fortifications or anti-aircraft weapons. Unfortunately for any nation's consideration, these kinds of things aren't sexy like something new, so they tend to be easy to ignore. Germany might have done better if they hadn't diverted so much money to things that were not terribly effective.
More generally, if your glasses are not helpful when using a computer, then, while using a computer, TAKE THEM OFF.
I wish I'd been smart enough to have figured this out during my teenage years. Got glasses at twelve for being barely nearsighted, but kept wearing them when doing up-close tasks like reading and using the computer. I think my eyes got lazy with the correction and I made my vision worse. In the last few years I've started taking them off when indoors when I'm going to work on an arms-length task and I've found that my distance vision seems to also be improving a bit.
In really bright light I can see further without my glasses than in dim light, and I'm starting to wonder if I could pass a driving eye exam without my glasses. Haven't had a whole lot of desire to try, but it would be nice, in case I break or lose my glasses and need to get home without them.
CD is compressed compared to the full possible range of reproduction from an analog source, such that extremely high and low frequencies are left out of the recording. It is possible to get better sound out of vinyl than a CD in the right circumstances. Admittedly, this requires one to shop at Bang and Olufsen and to spend ten to twenty times more for all of the equipment than one spends at Best Buy or Fry's Electronics, but having listened to the B&O system that my aunt and uncle have, I don't doubt that it's true.
I have a fairly large Laserdisc collection, over 500 titles. I have probably twice that many titles on DVD and Blu-Ray, but there is something special about carefully removing the sleeve from the cardboard, removing the disc from the sleeve, and loading it into the player. Sure, it's not on-demand where I can pick up one remote to do everything needed to watch the content, but turning on the projector to let it warm up, starting the motor to roll-down the screen, and turning on all of the rest of the equipment just makes me happy, and I find that I actually put down the laptop and the phone when I've gone through my little ritual to watch something on disc in general down on that entertainment center, as opposed to the on-demand features available to me on the normal TV-watching setup upstairs. Watching DVD, Blu-Ray, and even VHS tape gives a similar feeling compared to on-demand content.
My wife has similar feelings; her movie collection and mine merged on getting married, and she was happy to start using the separate components and surround sound that our setup has. While we don't expect everyone to agree or to get the same feeling from it, but I suspect that those that listen to vinyl get something out of a similar ritual too, where the act of making the choice to listen and the motions entailed in doing that help with the experience.
I need to get a new cartridge for my record player; I've got maybe fifty records that I could play if I did, mostly new-wave stuff from the eighties, with a smattering of my folks' records from the sixties and seventies...
Inconveniencing gaming is minor no matter how many thousands of people or businesses are affected. I know that people and businesses spend millions on it but still, Its Just A Game.
So is professional sports. Yet, someone that disrupts a game is likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Someone that disrupts a broadcast through malicious or intentional act even if the game itself continues will also be arrested and prosecuted.
You know, back during an election season several years ago, I considered getting a bunch of people to wear all black and guy fawkes masks, with signs saying something like "politics leave you soured? lemonparty dot org" on them or something like that, and going to one of those tea party rallies where all of the national news crews were filming.
Figured it'd be both too tacky and possibly have too many consequences if caught, but it sure amused me to think of raging political buttheads all over the country pulling up that site because they saw it prominently displayed on FOX News...
If they DDOSed and took-down gaming sites at their peak load, then they caused harm to all of the customers of those sites by making them inaccessible. They have also damaged the company that ran those sites if customers have discontinued using the service because of that outage.
I don't really give a damn if they've started to repent after-the-fact. As far as I'm concerned, if they'd been in a room with a whole slew of gamers and had taken down the gaming servers and been outed, and the gamers had beaten them to pulp, that would have been justifiable. It at least would have offered a legitimate target for the anger that they gave those people through denying them a service that they paid for.
It's complicated. von Braun was the foremost rocket scientist of his time, and possibly of all time. Had there not been a war he probably would have continued to push rocket technology. Assuming he was just as nationalistic for his country as you are for yours, would you find it wrong to join professional associations that would allow you to pursue your career interests or to advance your military through your professional capabilities in support of your country against its foes? Remember, the Nazis didn't start killing Jews and other civilians en-masse right away, and my guess is that by the time Jewish slave labor was being applied to projects this technical he really didn't have a choice but to continue if he wanted to remain alive.
It's very easy, in hind-sight, to judge people for decisions or actions they took when they didn't know what the outcome of that decision, or of combined decisions and outcomes several combinations later, would be. Did von Braun get off easy? Yes. Could he have been prosecuted for his participation in an entity that engaged in war crimes? Probably. Would he have had a defense much better than, "just following orders," or, "I would have been killed if I didn't continue," or such? Probably not. Had the Soviet Union not gotten their hands on their own slate of Nazi rocket scientists he probably would have been prosecuted rather than embraced, but once the decision was made to embrace him, that was that. He did go on to make the most historic and arguably significant human achievement possible.
von Braun's legacy will always be complicated. His name will probably only be applied to celebrate things that are related to his field, as his name is forever tarnished by his Nazi past and unsuitable for celebration as any kind of hero outside of his field.
"Hacker" was a poor choice of term from the beginning if one didn't want it to become a pejorative. Think of all of the other actions that the word hack gets applied to:
Hack saw - a saw to make rough or nonprecision cuts in material
to hack at a problem - to inexpertly attack a problem through excessive trial-and-error rather than to approach with experience
a hack - an individual that may achieve results, but through coincidence or through excessive uninformed stumbling through the problem, often selling themselves as an expert anyway
hack and whack - a melee, a free-for-all with little skill or planning or strategy, relying on brute force or quantity
That's the legacy of "Hacker", and it's already a negative. It's worse now, but it was never a positive thing to start with.
That said, I don't understand why the police would even want to arrest him. I mean, he is a script kiddie, not a dangerous criminal.
Just because he's a 5cr1p7 k1dd13 doesn't mean that he can't cause significant harm, making him a dangerous criminal. He could simply disrupt important batch processes like bank financial transfers and worker payroll direct-deposits or realtime processes like aviation communication and control or the civilian telephone system if the vulnerabilities discovered by others are exploitable by his scripts, which can have significant real-world consequences for individuals. That's not even getting into disruptions for corporations whose Internet-connected businesses are a revenue source, that are not generating revenue when they're not accessible.
Did they actually pad the pension system, or did the revenue from the tickets simply make up the state's obligation to the pension system, allowing the state to spend the money previously allocated for the pension system out of general-fund to now be used for something else?
I bet the pension system still had the same amount of revenue directed to it, just now earmarked as opposed to a portion of the general-fund.
But to have a whole group of 'different' Army folks - not such a good idea.
How about an entirely different branch of service then? We already have the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the US Public Health Service. The first five are part of the DOD, the other two aren't. Simply create a new branch, in the way that the Air Force was spun-off from the Army. Decide if there will ever be forward-deployed personnel, and if there won't be, don't put them through basic.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. My wife's MIT Alumni club brought Dr. Peter Diamandis in for a discussion on the X-Prize Foundation, and it was fully catered with open bar at the local science museum, which was partially open for exploration. Good time. Good enough that Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson crashed the party, with a couple of attractive grad students in-tow.
Have you read Dallas' rules governing livery?
Transportation Hire Regulations
It's pretty interesting stuff. While there appears to be a regulated cap on the number of taxis in Dallas, they have a lot of other regulations that are much more important, like age of the vehicle, condition of the vehicle, minimum insurance requirements ($500,000!), and the driving history of the operator.
Taxis with conventional drivetrains cannot be more than six years old. This means they're forced to be fuel efficient (though most drivers seem to want more fuel-efficient cars as they rent the car from the taxi company, so that's less of a problem than it used to be), less bad on the environment, and probably safer for passengers as newer cars generally perform in collisions better than their predecessors. Taxis also have their rates defined by the city, so that passengers aren't screwed over and can take any cab and get the same rate.
Uber might be able to operate as a Limo service, but would have to use vehicles that qualify as limos per Dallas' requirements, which must be luxury vehicles to qualify, and has otherwise most of the same insurance and driver record rules.
Laws covering things as mundane as public-interacting business are usually reactionary. Such high insurance limits are probably necessary to protect passengers, and fares defined by the city are designed to both keep customers from being screwed and to keep drivers earning a living wage.
Except that it's easy to ignore the telephone, e-mail, text messaging, and software-based chats, especially when one is out shopping or playing video games or working on personal stuff out in the workshop.
I'm starting to wonder if maybe more employees, rather than less, need to be made hourly and not exempt from receiving overtime. Employees that do not supervise less than four other employees, for example, regardless of what they actually do for a living, that personally own, not as a retirement fund, less than 10% of the company. If the point of being salaried originally was that the salaried employee had a stake in the company itself and could write their own hours as they managed how the company operated, then the entire point of being salaried is shot to hell nowadays.
More people talk a great game without producing than talk a great game and actually produce.
That 'system' is only present in the old downtown and strip areas, and the reason for limited pickup and dropoff points in those areas is due to Vegas' limited-access city streets in those areas. They've erected Jersey barriers along most of the Strip now, to keep people from wandering out into the street and to try to force people to use the overhead walkways, and as a consequence it's tougher to get from the street to the sidewalk now too. I had to take a cab in Vegas because of a vehicle breakdown and it was no worse an experience than any other time I've taken a cab, it met me at my hotel and took me to the rental facility, no curb attendant, no weird pickup or dropoff areas.
You live in a suburban city, not an urban city. Your city was designed with with the automobile in mind, and the vast majority of residents of your city drive themselves. That goes a long way to explaining why you can't easily grab an unscheduled cab ride except from certain hubs of activity, as there's no profit in hanging out in the suburbs to wait for a fare that may or may not come.
I expect that you'll find taxis waiting at the airports, at busier hotels, at the sports venues during activities, at the convention centers during activities, at the more popular shopping centers, and possibly any of the higher-density downtown-type areas. Part of the reason you have to wait for a taxi in the suburbs is because they're going to pick you up after another fare into that part of the suburbs needs to be dropped off, so they can justify the trip out there.
The taxi services don't owe you anything. The taxi services are also operating within the law as the state, the counties, and the cities require, with commercial insurance, commercial vehicle inspections, and probably with extra screening for their drivers and their licenses. Uber, by claiming to be a ride-sharing service where the driver is supposedly already going your way and you're supposed to be reimbursing him for your portion of the drive, is cheating when the drivers are just picking up and dropping off fares without the drivers themselves having their own destinations to attend to along the route. Those drivers don't have the same insurance and don't have to have their vehicles inspected to commercial levels, and probably don't even have their drivers' licenses scrutinized.
Last time I took a taxi was in SF. Worked fine. Hailed one on the street and took it the few blocks I needed to go. That's a high-density city. I could have hailed one in London or in Paris, but I didn't need cabs in those cities. Either way, it would have been an easy option, where the population density was high enough to make it cost effective to have cabs roaming looking for fares.
Yep. I spent a year with the new computer and reading heavily before needing glasses.
The trend toward homogenization is based on communication as well, and since the goal seems to be encouraging everyone, everywhere to be able to communicate with everyone else, everywhere else, that will only help make everyone sound more similar to each other than before.
In Europe, already a large portion of the population speaks English, technically as a second language, but almost as effectively as their first. Numerous European pop music groups have sung just about the entire body of their work in English even though they're not from English-speaking countries (ABBA, Aqua, Rednex, etc) and are most popular in countries that never were established by the British Empire.
French could have had this level of expansion, but French has been intentionally held back as language, new words are basically forbidden. This has meant that large combinations of words to describe new things have been necessary when English simply creates new words or appropriates words from other languages as needed.
...so they can keep an eye on you, so they can 'manage' you.
There's a whole lot of BS in this world, and many of the people that sling the BS best can't really do much else. They talk a great game, but they produce little to nothing. The problem with this is some endeavors, like writing software in a collaborative setting, make it difficult to measure the contributions of the individuals that are supposed to be applying themselves. It's not so easy as simply counting lines of code or commits or functions written when there's distinct possibility that flaws in those contributions will require extensive rewriting or will end up being orphaned code, and further complicating matters, there's no good way to measure how only slightly flawed code, easily corrected by another, contributes to the project. Either a project maintainer must keep on top of all of the code all of the time, which is a daunting task, or they must keep on top of the people, to see what they're doing, to measure how much they're applying themselves and how much time they actually spend working.
I'm sure I'll be flamed for this perspective, but given the sheer number of distractions around us these days, it's very easy for someone to do anything besides their paid job.
I guess that also explains why some need glasses to drive at night, but not during the day...
There's also an argument that chasing fantastic superweapons with high development costs and fairly low return on investment was bad economic deal for a country whose defacto borders were all battle fronts. Initial V-2 attacks were horribly inaccurate, and by the time a degree of accuracy was achieved the Germans were headed for defeat by boots on the ground and conventional bombing by aircraft. It makes one wonder if the vast sums of money spent developing the rockets would have been better applied to winter materiel development for their army or in the production of more armor units or the development of better automatic rifles, or even the construction of better fortifications or anti-aircraft weapons. Unfortunately for any nation's consideration, these kinds of things aren't sexy like something new, so they tend to be easy to ignore. Germany might have done better if they hadn't diverted so much money to things that were not terribly effective.
I wish I'd been smart enough to have figured this out during my teenage years. Got glasses at twelve for being barely nearsighted, but kept wearing them when doing up-close tasks like reading and using the computer. I think my eyes got lazy with the correction and I made my vision worse. In the last few years I've started taking them off when indoors when I'm going to work on an arms-length task and I've found that my distance vision seems to also be improving a bit.
In really bright light I can see further without my glasses than in dim light, and I'm starting to wonder if I could pass a driving eye exam without my glasses. Haven't had a whole lot of desire to try, but it would be nice, in case I break or lose my glasses and need to get home without them.
CD is compressed compared to the full possible range of reproduction from an analog source, such that extremely high and low frequencies are left out of the recording. It is possible to get better sound out of vinyl than a CD in the right circumstances. Admittedly, this requires one to shop at Bang and Olufsen and to spend ten to twenty times more for all of the equipment than one spends at Best Buy or Fry's Electronics, but having listened to the B&O system that my aunt and uncle have, I don't doubt that it's true.
I have a fairly large Laserdisc collection, over 500 titles. I have probably twice that many titles on DVD and Blu-Ray, but there is something special about carefully removing the sleeve from the cardboard, removing the disc from the sleeve, and loading it into the player. Sure, it's not on-demand where I can pick up one remote to do everything needed to watch the content, but turning on the projector to let it warm up, starting the motor to roll-down the screen, and turning on all of the rest of the equipment just makes me happy, and I find that I actually put down the laptop and the phone when I've gone through my little ritual to watch something on disc in general down on that entertainment center, as opposed to the on-demand features available to me on the normal TV-watching setup upstairs. Watching DVD, Blu-Ray, and even VHS tape gives a similar feeling compared to on-demand content.
My wife has similar feelings; her movie collection and mine merged on getting married, and she was happy to start using the separate components and surround sound that our setup has. While we don't expect everyone to agree or to get the same feeling from it, but I suspect that those that listen to vinyl get something out of a similar ritual too, where the act of making the choice to listen and the motions entailed in doing that help with the experience.
I need to get a new cartridge for my record player; I've got maybe fifty records that I could play if I did, mostly new-wave stuff from the eighties, with a smattering of my folks' records from the sixties and seventies...
Sure I have! I saw The Outer Limits episode, "Demon with a Glass Hand," too...
So is professional sports. Yet, someone that disrupts a game is likely to be arrested and prosecuted. Someone that disrupts a broadcast through malicious or intentional act even if the game itself continues will also be arrested and prosecuted.
Just because you're acquitted in the court of law, doesn't mean that you don't still have consequences to face in your life or career.
You know, back during an election season several years ago, I considered getting a bunch of people to wear all black and guy fawkes masks, with signs saying something like "politics leave you soured? lemonparty dot org" on them or something like that, and going to one of those tea party rallies where all of the national news crews were filming.
Figured it'd be both too tacky and possibly have too many consequences if caught, but it sure amused me to think of raging political buttheads all over the country pulling up that site because they saw it prominently displayed on FOX News...
If they DDOSed and took-down gaming sites at their peak load, then they caused harm to all of the customers of those sites by making them inaccessible. They have also damaged the company that ran those sites if customers have discontinued using the service because of that outage.
I don't really give a damn if they've started to repent after-the-fact. As far as I'm concerned, if they'd been in a room with a whole slew of gamers and had taken down the gaming servers and been outed, and the gamers had beaten them to pulp, that would have been justifiable. It at least would have offered a legitimate target for the anger that they gave those people through denying them a service that they paid for.
It's complicated. von Braun was the foremost rocket scientist of his time, and possibly of all time. Had there not been a war he probably would have continued to push rocket technology. Assuming he was just as nationalistic for his country as you are for yours, would you find it wrong to join professional associations that would allow you to pursue your career interests or to advance your military through your professional capabilities in support of your country against its foes? Remember, the Nazis didn't start killing Jews and other civilians en-masse right away, and my guess is that by the time Jewish slave labor was being applied to projects this technical he really didn't have a choice but to continue if he wanted to remain alive.
It's very easy, in hind-sight, to judge people for decisions or actions they took when they didn't know what the outcome of that decision, or of combined decisions and outcomes several combinations later, would be. Did von Braun get off easy? Yes. Could he have been prosecuted for his participation in an entity that engaged in war crimes? Probably. Would he have had a defense much better than, "just following orders," or, "I would have been killed if I didn't continue," or such? Probably not. Had the Soviet Union not gotten their hands on their own slate of Nazi rocket scientists he probably would have been prosecuted rather than embraced, but once the decision was made to embrace him, that was that. He did go on to make the most historic and arguably significant human achievement possible.
von Braun's legacy will always be complicated. His name will probably only be applied to celebrate things that are related to his field, as his name is forever tarnished by his Nazi past and unsuitable for celebration as any kind of hero outside of his field.
That's the legacy of "Hacker", and it's already a negative. It's worse now, but it was never a positive thing to start with.
Just because he's a 5cr1p7 k1dd13 doesn't mean that he can't cause significant harm, making him a dangerous criminal. He could simply disrupt important batch processes like bank financial transfers and worker payroll direct-deposits or realtime processes like aviation communication and control or the civilian telephone system if the vulnerabilities discovered by others are exploitable by his scripts, which can have significant real-world consequences for individuals. That's not even getting into disruptions for corporations whose Internet-connected businesses are a revenue source, that are not generating revenue when they're not accessible.
Did they actually pad the pension system, or did the revenue from the tickets simply make up the state's obligation to the pension system, allowing the state to spend the money previously allocated for the pension system out of general-fund to now be used for something else?
I bet the pension system still had the same amount of revenue directed to it, just now earmarked as opposed to a portion of the general-fund.
Then by that definition, there is no such thing as civilized society and pretty much never has been.
How about an entirely different branch of service then? We already have the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and the US Public Health Service. The first five are part of the DOD, the other two aren't. Simply create a new branch, in the way that the Air Force was spun-off from the Army. Decide if there will ever be forward-deployed personnel, and if there won't be, don't put them through basic.