The V1 rocket wasn't even a rocket, and it definately wasn't "programmed" in any electronic sense. Its launch ramp was aimed towards London, and it had just enough fuel to make the trip. When the fuel ran out, it fell out of the sky
Incorrect. The V-1 had a guidance system. Go read the wikipedia entry on the V-1, particularly the section headed "Guidance system". I will share the highlights:
"Once clear of the launching pad, an autopilot was engaged. It regulated height and speed together, using a weighted pendulum system to get fore and aft feedback linking these and the device's attitude to control its pitch..."
"There was a small propeller on the nose, connected to a long screw thread going back inside the missile. On this thread was a washer, and at the back end of the thread were two electrical contacts. As the missile flew, the airflow turned the propeller and hence the threaded shaft; the washer would be wound along the shaft as it turned. When it reached the electrical contacts it would make a circuit, which energised a solenoid attached to a small guillotine. This guillotine would cut through the elevator control cable which would in turn put the sprung-elevator into the fully-down position, putting the V-1 into a sudden dive. This was intended to be a power dive, but the abrupt negative-G (or perhaps simply the angle of the descent) caused the fuel flow to cease which stopped the engine."
Indeed it's a bit of a stretch to call a threaded rod "programming", but it most certainly wasn't an unguided munition.
Yes, but I'm not of the opinion that Asimov ever portrayed "the human race being reduced to animals in a robot zoo" as being a bad thing.
Indeed, I was perhaps editorializing a bit there. I think Asimov did a splendid job of merely presenting the end result, pretty much letting you decide whether you think it's a bad thing to have all your needs taken care of by a watchful, caring robot overlord. I have more of a Heinlein mindset, so I can't help but imagine how a Heinlein story hero would have reacted to such a situation. Suffice to say, rather than relaxing into upholstered opulence,I think I'd be standing with the Heinlein guy on top of a pile of dead robots, myself. Not necessarily rational, but I just wouldn't want my destiny directly managed by something beyond my control.
Regarding your main claim, I dunno. There's certainly a recurring theme about how strict rules can be rather brittle in real life, but I think you're reading too much into it.
(shrug) Seemed as obvious as a slap in the face with a fish to me, all through the whole collection of stories. You could fairly easily change the references to "robot" into "human follower of fictional religion X" and the references to the 3 Laws into "Three Commandments of Religion X". I think it's pretty obviously a wide-ranging commentary on everything from slavery to prejudice to human nature, all wrapped up in a masterfully crafted set of stories that are a great read.
I think that the overall idea of the three laws is a good idea, though. If you make a robot with a "general purpose intelligence," you're going to have to hard-wire some sort of ethics into it so as to make sure it acts in the best interests of its end-user.
The problem there is that, as the book so elegantly illustrates, the "best interests of the end user" often defy pre-conceived laws. Sure, a self-aware intelligent robot would necessarily need to be programmed to behave ethically, but there simply no way to boil that down to a handful of hard-coded rules. Life is complicated. The robots, like we humans, would need to be allowed the free will to adjust their ethical conclusions to fit the situation.
Yes, Asimov liked to point out unexpected consequences of the laws. He was not pointing out how bad the laws themselves were. Indeed, I have never heard any better suggestions for laws that robots out to follow. I notice you failed to provide any. Your suggestion about having more loose rules for robots would be better is absurd. Is there not more room for bad consequences without rules than with them?
Suggestions for better laws? WTF? You completely missed the point: the self aware robots should not have had any hard coded rules, instead they should have been educated in the purpose and methods of rational, ethical behavior and allowed free will.
That codified rules are no replacement for human ethics is blatantly obvious. I don't think that was his point. We are, after all, dealing with machines here. They had no emotions, feelings, needs, or desires.
The machines were self aware and capable of independent thought, and as the stories wore on, they even became indistinguishable from humans (see the story Evidence). If you saw only robots and failed to notice the way Asimov was using them as a metaphor for humanity, you missed one of the key point of the collection.
If I had mod points, I'd mod down your crap in a heartbeat. Your logical thinking skills are severely lacking.
I think you need to read the book again, only yhis time look past your bizarre conviction that the robots are merely programmed machines, but rather thinking beings shackled by a bizarre immutable code of behavior that makes no allowances for the complexities of real life.
Look around you. Notice how you are the only person out of several who thinks that way? Why do you suppose that is? You think you're the only one who read it right?
A lot of people think Asimov's laws are real, and don't get it that he was a sci-fi writer, not a scientist in the field of robotics. He was even asked to speak at universities as an expert on robotics when all he had done was write some stories. If they had read the robot novels, they would have noticed that even Asimov's robots did not always obey the laws.
Indeed, I think anyone who reads "I, Robot" and comes away with the notion that the Three Laws are a good idea should be barred from working in robotics entirely. Asimov's short robot stories drive home again and again how those hard-coded, inviolable laws are a very, very bad thing, and taken to their ultimate end, could result in the human race basically being reduced to animals in a robot zoo! Seriously, I think too many people read "I, Robot" when they were too young to grasp the serious philosophical point behind it, and haven't bothered to re-read it since.
The book uses robots as an analogy for a very serious philosophical point about humanity: codified rules are not a suitable replacement for people educated in ethics, science, and rational thinking. No set of laws, commandments, edicts, or mandates passed from On High will ever match every situation. Knowledge is the only way forward.
WRONG: AMD started making better and cheaper versions of the 80386 in 1991, which was 15 years ago, before that, in the 1980s, they were making better 286s than Intel did and cheaper 80287s than Intel.
Blah blah blah, read the original poster's post: "spend all our allowance on the newest AMD chips". This is clearly an allusion to the relatively modern practice of buying the latest and greatest CPU. Not something that was done in 1991. The fact that AMD made some of the chips inside an IBM PC didn't make it not an IBM PC.
To be fair, reading through this whole thread, you do sound awfully defensive of your job.
I think he was reacting to all those armchair geniuses who think the only reason any work is still done by hand is because people don't have someone as smart as them around to institute automation. Few things are more laughable than someone attempting to suggest process engineering improvements based on a three sentence aside.
The sig line is not part of the message, but rather a part of your user information. Your sig, like your user name and UID in the header, is inserted at the end of the message when the page full of messages is generated. "Why do it that way" is a tougher question. I guess if nothing else, it means that the sig only needs one copy that exists in one place and the message database doesn't have to store the appended sig line text for each and every message.
It's all fuckin' bullshit.
In fact, there is ton of prior evidence. Shoot, I myself have said "I'm selling my xyz thing, to whoever offers me the most for it. But if you give x $$$ I'll give it to you now."
Indeed, if you've ever looked through the classified ads and seen something listed for sale at "$50 OBO", then you are looking at an informal auction with a Buy It Now price. The idea that they can patent it because it is via an automated web-based system is just more of the same asinine "[old idea]...on a computer" patent nonsense.
a service guy from Rogers new phone service had CUT HIS PHONE LINE. How's that for a little unwarranted competition between the cable and phone providers?
Heh. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. Ask any telecom tech what he thinks about letting a cable guy do phone wiring, you'll get an earfull. Cable guys are the basest of all wire technicians. From what I've seen, they're the least trained, the poorest equipped, and do the shoddiest work.
There is a company that wrote code that a person can insert into their websites in order to "show the location" of who's browsing their sites. This code had a cleverly embedded keyword in it that made a vague reference to "MySpace.com." As a result of including such code on my site, I was getting A LOT of Google hits.. and people were asking me how they could do the same thing. I answered by posing a copy of the code on my website... and then I got hit by a Google Site Ranking Penalty... something that I did not know even existed! Now, I am trying to recover my site's ranking and I'm not even sure how to do this.
You need to make your page relevant to recover your ranking. The penalty you received was google's way of saying your shouldn't be ranked that high. If your ranking is even lower than it was before the "myspace" thing boosted it, well, then maybe that's the price you pay for saying "hey guys, here's how to sucker pagerank" instead of "hey google, pagerank is being suckered by something on my page".
Re:Did he play it for more than 5 minutes?
on
Black Review
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· Score: 1
No one said that they are copper jacketed lead. Indeed, with an AK used by terrorists, they're likely Wolf, which is (if I remember) a steel-washed copper jacket, and they do spark sometimes when they hit the backstop at the range.
Steel jacket with copper wash, but yeah, they spark like crazy when you hit concrete or stone.
Re:From the perspective of a new cube monkey...
on
Cubicles a Giant Mistake
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Something just dawned on me - cubes are nothing more than movable partitions with junk that can be attached (like desks, shelves, etc). Walls are nothing more than floor-to-ceiling partitions, if you will. Maybe the next step is to back off from the standard cubicle and go for an office space that has detachable, movable walls. After all, building in doors, walls, etc., is the expense that companies are trying to avoid. It seems to me that it wouldn'd be too difficult to come up with something that might be almost as effective as a walled office, but not nearly as expensive as the "built-in" approach.
Actually, pre-fab walls are old news. Problem is, there's a very distinct line one crosses when one goes from cubicle-style construction (which is basically classified as "furniture"), to full walls that either touch the ceiling or have their own ceiling, or have doors, or aren't "freestanding" (local building code varies). At that point it essentially becomes real construction, whether they're pre-fab panels or drywall n' stud. They then require building permits, inspections, licensed contractors, and have to comply for fire code, and health and safety regs, etc. That gets to be big, big money.
Note he said "make a kind of "Google Earth on Steroids" for my employer." This in no way indicates that they are working with Google Earth. If anything, it sounds like they are competing.
Do you really not even know the difference between "bio-degrade" and "dissolve"? As others have pointed out, "bio-degrade" does not mean "becoming so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye anymore". Here's a little analogy to help you: If I dissolve a bit of arsenic in a glass of water until you can't see it at all, will you drink it?
Not a very good analogy. Even though the polystyrene is only eroded to microparticles, it isn't actually poisonous. The question here really is whether non-visible trace quantities of polysterene are (pardon the pun) particularly problematic.
Whether something can be eaten by bacteria (i.e. is biodegradable) is a bit of a red herring. Almost nothing in a landfill biodegrades anyway-- 100 year old newspapers remain readable. Biodegradability is a rather modern notion that came from the thought "wouldn't it be nice if everything we made or used were part of the great cycle of nature?" Well, sorry, but it just isn't that way, and devising a bacterium that eats styrofoam is nice, but largely irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
A lot of comments here are along the lines that if they were dying they would screw work and spend time with their families. I gotta ask - why would it take your impending death to spend this time ?
Is that a rhetorical question? The answer is obvious. People don't blow off work on a lark to spend time with their families because unless we specifically know otherwise, we have to assume we're going to be around until age 70+. We don't want to spend our sunset years supplementing our Social Security check with a part time job at WalMart, or telling our children that it'll have to be community college instead of Harvard. If you live each day as if you were going to die tomorrow, you're likely to find yourself in financial trouble you run into expenses you were pretending you wouldn't be around to have to deal with.
I can just see this program being used to "create" content to push more advertising. Just what we need more of, websites that have recycled content put online for ad revenue.
I think you're right on the money there. 9 out of 10 websites generated with this "tool" will simply be haphazard conglomerations of useless crap skimmed from other useless crap websites. In fact, I bet we'll end up with a flood of pointless drivel that makes those scads of fake search results pages that keep showing up high in google searcheslook like a day at the beach.
"For Example: He would Run a convoy from one inspection site to another, and then open the first site for inspection. He would do this on a weekly basis."
So, by that logic, he was also "jerking us around" about flying saucers, the fountain of youth, and Windows Vista, 'cause he didn't have any of them either.
No, because the inspectors weren't going to the aforementioned sites looking for flying saucers, the fountain of youth, or Windows Vista. If you're going to invoke logic, you have to use it.
If you were truly a Proud American (tm) and a believer in the rightness of the military action in Iraq, you'd have joined up and would be serving right now. No disclaimers about why you can't really afford to do it today allowed.
Look, the whole "why don't you put your money where your mouth is" argumnet, is really one of the stupidest. Besides the fact that probably half the population is mentally or physically inadequate to serve in the military, the notion that one cannot support anything without actually being an active participant is utterly asinine. If you support nuclear disarmament, why aren't you out there helping dismantle nukes? If you support farm subsidies for family farmers, why aren't you out there helping them plow the back forty? If yousupport aid for irrigation projects in africa, why aren't you in Eritrea with a shovel digging a canal?
In other words, it's generally accepted than no one has the resources to directly support every damn thing they're in favor of.
There have been cases when their contract for service has expired but they are forced to continue service.
Allow me to enlighten on this. Their contract didn't expire. You see, when you join the military you are signing up for eight years. That's right, eight years. Now, in most cases you are allowed to do those 8 years as 2, 3, or 4 years of active duty, followed by 4 years of inactive reserve. In peacetime, it pretty much always goes down that way, and most people who sign up are betting that it'll go down that way. In wartime, however, all bets are off. They can conceivably keep you on active duty for the full eight years and it's still within the limits of the enlistment contract. So those whiners who are being "held over" are really whining about two things: A) they believed their recruiter, and B) they didn't read their enlistment contract. I was 18 years old when I joined and although it took a little harassing, I was able to get a copy of the enlistment contract I was going to sign from my recruiter. I have no sympathy for anyone who's been in the Army for 3 years who is shocked when he finds out that there was a provision in the contract where he gets the shit end of the stick. Well big effin' surprise! They've been handing you the shit end of the stick regularly for three years-- that's what military life is frequently about-- and they did it again! Who'd of thunk it!
um... we also weren't allowed to have any pork products etc sent to us by friends and relatives back home. When you join the military, you give up one or two comforts....
I found it quite humorous while living in the sandpit that was operation Desert Shield that although we were in a country where we couldn't get even a slice of bacon, four of our twelve MRE menus were pork-centric. Worse still was that we were supplying the saudi army from our MRE stocks, but they could only eat the 8 non-pork menus, which left a huge surplus of pork ones. I swear, nearly every meal I ate there for six weeks was goddamn Omelet with Ham or nasty, nasty BBQ Pork w/Rice. One of the disadvantages to beeing a "bottom feeder" in the infantry-- everyone else higher up in the "food chain" was undoubtedly taking what little non-pork was left...the bastards.
Checking the current MRE menus, it seems they've cut it down to one menu item (#2 - "Pork Rib") out of 24. So we can't get a can of deviled ham from our mother, but Uncle Sam can feed us a bagged and processed pork rib meat patty?
Which is a good thing. You should never have blind trust in authority, nothing leads more quickly to tyranny.
No, it's only a good thing for the civilian citizenry, not the military. And even then, the blind trust only extends to lawful orders. Military personnel are trained to follow orders, but are also trained in what constitutes a lawful order.
Mac users typically multitask rather differently than Windows users. I am not talking about technical or power users, just "normal" users.
My experience is that most home Windows users barely multitask at all. 3-4 browser windows (not even tabbed since they are typically using IE.), a word processor and whatever they use for email. If they do something else, like photo management they tend to shut down their other applications.
I guess it's all dependent on your sample then, because the only Windows user I know who closes other apps before opening new ones is someone running Win98 on a 600mHz machine with 32mb ram. In fact, I regularly encounter people complaining that their computer is too slow who have a dozen apps plus 30-odd browser instances open.
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect. The V-1 had a guidance system. Go read the wikipedia entry on the V-1, particularly the section headed "Guidance system". I will share the highlights:
Indeed it's a bit of a stretch to call a threaded rod "programming", but it most certainly wasn't an unguided munition.Indeed, I was perhaps editorializing a bit there. I think Asimov did a splendid job of merely presenting the end result, pretty much letting you decide whether you think it's a bad thing to have all your needs taken care of by a watchful, caring robot overlord. I have more of a Heinlein mindset, so I can't help but imagine how a Heinlein story hero would have reacted to such a situation. Suffice to say, rather than relaxing into upholstered opulence ,I think I'd be standing with the Heinlein guy on top of a pile of dead robots, myself. Not necessarily rational, but I just wouldn't want my destiny directly managed by something beyond my control.
Regarding your main claim, I dunno. There's certainly a recurring theme about how strict rules can be rather brittle in real life, but I think you're reading too much into it.
(shrug) Seemed as obvious as a slap in the face with a fish to me, all through the whole collection of stories. You could fairly easily change the references to "robot" into "human follower of fictional religion X" and the references to the 3 Laws into "Three Commandments of Religion X". I think it's pretty obviously a wide-ranging commentary on everything from slavery to prejudice to human nature, all wrapped up in a masterfully crafted set of stories that are a great read.
I think that the overall idea of the three laws is a good idea, though. If you make a robot with a "general purpose intelligence," you're going to have to hard-wire some sort of ethics into it so as to make sure it acts in the best interests of its end-user.
The problem there is that, as the book so elegantly illustrates, the "best interests of the end user" often defy pre-conceived laws. Sure, a self-aware intelligent robot would necessarily need to be programmed to behave ethically, but there simply no way to boil that down to a handful of hard-coded rules. Life is complicated. The robots, like we humans, would need to be allowed the free will to adjust their ethical conclusions to fit the situation.
Suggestions for better laws? WTF? You completely missed the point: the self aware robots should not have had any hard coded rules, instead they should have been educated in the purpose and methods of rational, ethical behavior and allowed free will.
That codified rules are no replacement for human ethics is blatantly obvious. I don't think that was his point. We are, after all, dealing with machines here. They had no emotions, feelings, needs, or desires.
The machines were self aware and capable of independent thought, and as the stories wore on, they even became indistinguishable from humans (see the story Evidence). If you saw only robots and failed to notice the way Asimov was using them as a metaphor for humanity, you missed one of the key point of the collection.
If I had mod points, I'd mod down your crap in a heartbeat. Your logical thinking skills are severely lacking.
I think you need to read the book again, only yhis time look past your bizarre conviction that the robots are merely programmed machines, but rather thinking beings shackled by a bizarre immutable code of behavior that makes no allowances for the complexities of real life.
Look around you. Notice how you are the only person out of several who thinks that way? Why do you suppose that is? You think you're the only one who read it right?
And get a username, AC jackass.
Indeed, I think anyone who reads "I, Robot" and comes away with the notion that the Three Laws are a good idea should be barred from working in robotics entirely. Asimov's short robot stories drive home again and again how those hard-coded, inviolable laws are a very, very bad thing, and taken to their ultimate end, could result in the human race basically being reduced to animals in a robot zoo! Seriously, I think too many people read "I, Robot" when they were too young to grasp the serious philosophical point behind it, and haven't bothered to re-read it since.
The book uses robots as an analogy for a very serious philosophical point about humanity: codified rules are not a suitable replacement for people educated in ethics, science, and rational thinking. No set of laws, commandments, edicts, or mandates passed from On High will ever match every situation. Knowledge is the only way forward.
Blah blah blah, read the original poster's post: "spend all our allowance on the newest AMD chips". This is clearly an allusion to the relatively modern practice of buying the latest and greatest CPU. Not something that was done in 1991. The fact that AMD made some of the chips inside an IBM PC didn't make it not an IBM PC.
I think he was reacting to all those armchair geniuses who think the only reason any work is still done by hand is because people don't have someone as smart as them around to institute automation. Few things are more laughable than someone attempting to suggest process engineering improvements based on a three sentence aside.
Oh sure, the famous nerd dodge, "you wouldn't know her, she's in Canada"...
The sig line is not part of the message, but rather a part of your user information. Your sig, like your user name and UID in the header, is inserted at the end of the message when the page full of messages is generated. "Why do it that way" is a tougher question. I guess if nothing else, it means that the sig only needs one copy that exists in one place and the message database doesn't have to store the appended sig line text for each and every message.
Nobody over 30 spent their allowance at age 15 on anything AMD, junior! Try "Commodore", "Apple", or maybe "IBM".
Indeed, if you've ever looked through the classified ads and seen something listed for sale at "$50 OBO", then you are looking at an informal auction with a Buy It Now price. The idea that they can patent it because it is via an automated web-based system is just more of the same asinine "[old idea]...on a computer" patent nonsense.
Heh. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. Ask any telecom tech what he thinks about letting a cable guy do phone wiring, you'll get an earfull. Cable guys are the basest of all wire technicians. From what I've seen, they're the least trained, the poorest equipped, and do the shoddiest work.
You need to make your page relevant to recover your ranking. The penalty you received was google's way of saying your shouldn't be ranked that high. If your ranking is even lower than it was before the "myspace" thing boosted it, well, then maybe that's the price you pay for saying "hey guys, here's how to sucker pagerank" instead of "hey google, pagerank is being suckered by something on my page".
Steel jacket with copper wash, but yeah, they spark like crazy when you hit concrete or stone.
Actually, pre-fab walls are old news. Problem is, there's a very distinct line one crosses when one goes from cubicle-style construction (which is basically classified as "furniture"), to full walls that either touch the ceiling or have their own ceiling, or have doors, or aren't "freestanding" (local building code varies). At that point it essentially becomes real construction, whether they're pre-fab panels or drywall n' stud. They then require building permits, inspections, licensed contractors, and have to comply for fire code, and health and safety regs, etc. That gets to be big, big money.
At nearly $1100 a pop, they're not that great a choice for someone looking for a cheap COTS solution.
Note he said "make a kind of "Google Earth on Steroids" for my employer." This in no way indicates that they are working with Google Earth. If anything, it sounds like they are competing.
Not a very good analogy. Even though the polystyrene is only eroded to microparticles, it isn't actually poisonous. The question here really is whether non-visible trace quantities of polysterene are (pardon the pun) particularly problematic.
Whether something can be eaten by bacteria (i.e. is biodegradable) is a bit of a red herring. Almost nothing in a landfill biodegrades anyway-- 100 year old newspapers remain readable. Biodegradability is a rather modern notion that came from the thought "wouldn't it be nice if everything we made or used were part of the great cycle of nature?" Well, sorry, but it just isn't that way, and devising a bacterium that eats styrofoam is nice, but largely irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
Is that a rhetorical question? The answer is obvious. People don't blow off work on a lark to spend time with their families because unless we specifically know otherwise, we have to assume we're going to be around until age 70+. We don't want to spend our sunset years supplementing our Social Security check with a part time job at WalMart, or telling our children that it'll have to be community college instead of Harvard. If you live each day as if you were going to die tomorrow, you're likely to find yourself in financial trouble you run into expenses you were pretending you wouldn't be around to have to deal with.
I think you're right on the money there. 9 out of 10 websites generated with this "tool" will simply be haphazard conglomerations of useless crap skimmed from other useless crap websites. In fact, I bet we'll end up with a flood of pointless drivel that makes those scads of fake search results pages that keep showing up high in google searcheslook like a day at the beach.
So, by that logic, he was also "jerking us around" about flying saucers, the fountain of youth, and Windows Vista, 'cause he didn't have any of them either.
No, because the inspectors weren't going to the aforementioned sites looking for flying saucers, the fountain of youth, or Windows Vista. If you're going to invoke logic, you have to use it.
Look, the whole "why don't you put your money where your mouth is" argumnet, is really one of the stupidest. Besides the fact that probably half the population is mentally or physically inadequate to serve in the military, the notion that one cannot support anything without actually being an active participant is utterly asinine. If you support nuclear disarmament, why aren't you out there helping dismantle nukes? If you support farm subsidies for family farmers, why aren't you out there helping them plow the back forty? If yousupport aid for irrigation projects in africa, why aren't you in Eritrea with a shovel digging a canal?
In other words, it's generally accepted than no one has the resources to directly support every damn thing they're in favor of.
Allow me to enlighten on this. Their contract didn't expire. You see, when you join the military you are signing up for eight years. That's right, eight years. Now, in most cases you are allowed to do those 8 years as 2, 3, or 4 years of active duty, followed by 4 years of inactive reserve. In peacetime, it pretty much always goes down that way, and most people who sign up are betting that it'll go down that way. In wartime, however, all bets are off. They can conceivably keep you on active duty for the full eight years and it's still within the limits of the enlistment contract. So those whiners who are being "held over" are really whining about two things: A) they believed their recruiter, and B) they didn't read their enlistment contract. I was 18 years old when I joined and although it took a little harassing, I was able to get a copy of the enlistment contract I was going to sign from my recruiter. I have no sympathy for anyone who's been in the Army for 3 years who is shocked when he finds out that there was a provision in the contract where he gets the shit end of the stick. Well big effin' surprise! They've been handing you the shit end of the stick regularly for three years-- that's what military life is frequently about-- and they did it again! Who'd of thunk it!
I found it quite humorous while living in the sandpit that was operation Desert Shield that although we were in a country where we couldn't get even a slice of bacon, four of our twelve MRE menus were pork-centric. Worse still was that we were supplying the saudi army from our MRE stocks, but they could only eat the 8 non-pork menus, which left a huge surplus of pork ones. I swear, nearly every meal I ate there for six weeks was goddamn Omelet with Ham or nasty, nasty BBQ Pork w/Rice. One of the disadvantages to beeing a "bottom feeder" in the infantry-- everyone else higher up in the "food chain" was undoubtedly taking what little non-pork was left...the bastards.
Checking the current MRE menus, it seems they've cut it down to one menu item (#2 - "Pork Rib") out of 24. So we can't get a can of deviled ham from our mother, but Uncle Sam can feed us a bagged and processed pork rib meat patty?
No, it's only a good thing for the civilian citizenry, not the military. And even then, the blind trust only extends to lawful orders. Military personnel are trained to follow orders, but are also trained in what constitutes a lawful order.
I guess it's all dependent on your sample then, because the only Windows user I know who closes other apps before opening new ones is someone running Win98 on a 600mHz machine with 32mb ram. In fact, I regularly encounter people complaining that their computer is too slow who have a dozen apps plus 30-odd browser instances open.