Idle gives the idiots a place to go, the rest of us can on the mainpage.
I'm sure slashdot doesn't want to lose the idiots -- they are the ones that pay the bills. So instead, they are given a place to drool and mouthbreathe, while the rest of us can have the "enlightened" discussion we are accustomed to.
Do you honestly think the other services are incapable of "thinking different", especially when it comes to airpower? I have to call BS on that, especially since it's so often that USAF's different thinking involves the idea that airpower can win wars all by itself. That kind of "think different" we can do without.
You make the case for me right there. You dismiss an external logical path from your own... even if that path is problematic, there are valid points to consider. You seem to be a willing participant in groupthink, which is exactly the problem that having the AF as a separate branch helps solve.
That's silly. When the Air Force builds an aircraft carrier, get back to us on that argument.
That has nothing to do with my point, so I'm not going to address it.
In the history of jet aircraft, when a service needs to adopt another services jets, the Air Force usually adopts a Naval design, not the other way around.
That also has nothing to do with my point, but I'll address why it isn't relevant. Regardless of where the designs are coming from, the intended use of the craft varies from branch to branch. There is nothing wrong with saving design costs by reusing designs from another branch. The Navy has long been determined to ensure that they have control of the support for their ships, including aircraft. They have long worked to increase their responsibility by having long-range airstrike capability from their carriers, so they can both attack and provide support far inland, as well as on the seas. I think it's quite valid to argue that the Navy's capability in this area is driven in part by the Air Force's capability to do the same. The last thing Navy brass wants is budget reductions (or lack of growth) due to Air Force dominance in providing these things.
The Navy has expanded its scope in the past thirty years, especially in air capability. Whether you feel that this means the Air Force should be subsumed into the Army and Navy because of this example has little to do with the fact that a separate chain of command for the Air Force does, in fact, lead to increased input into the decision-making chain. Seems to me that you're a Navy homer when discussing the military turf/budget war, but I could be wrong.
I, on the other hand, think you just came up with a fantastic idea for a new event. All female swimmers have to wear bikinis and group-swim. It's a requirement.
Hmm, now I'm intrigued. Perhaps if we renamed it slightly, to "grope swim for the fun of swimming" then we'd be in business. Sounds very marketable to me.
I just figured that if someone was getting all pedantic on me, I'd up the ante and out-pedant them. It would be useful if every grammar pedant out there remembered that there's always a bigger pedant waiting around the corner... and that just because I choose not to bother with perfect grammar doesn't mean that I'm not capable of it.
Sabre went electric in NJ my senior year of HS (1994) but only for the state individual championship... paid $550 for gear I used in one tournament before I donated it to the school (we had one underclassman the same size as me). I probably would have used it if I took one of my fencing scholarship offers, but I decided to go the academic scholarship route instead.
My experience was that there were a lot of issues with the capteurs... lost the championship due to capteur failure to allow stop cuts in my final bout of the round-robin (IMO, anyway... the director said he would have awarded the two touches to me, but he could not override the electrical equipment... my fault for not adapting my strategy when the first stop cut did not register). Oh well, that was ages ago & of little import in the long run.
I guess I should go observe some competitions to see how sabre fencing has changed... I heard a terrible rumor that fleching has been disallowed, even for USFA events. It wasn't allowed in NJISAA events when I was a kid, but USFA was open game.
Have you ever just dominated a little kid at checkers? The last thing they do before throwing the board at you is to try to cheat. People like winning.
Yes, I have dominated a little kid at checkers, and I enjoyed every moment of my victory, including the precious look of frustration moments before he threw the board and started crying. As a matter of fact, before we even started playing, I super-glued the board to the table to make sure he couldn't even throw the board. *THAT* was a priceless look of frustration, let me tell you.
I also made sure I got to play the black side, and I put needles in the red pieces, so every time he tried to move a piece, I got to see him wince -- and once, when I let him make a move that would king him, he got so excited he gripped the piece hard -- whoo boy, the screams and the hint of blood on his finger just cracked me up.
Seriously, who dominates a little kid at checkers? If you're going to win, at least make it close. Present the kid with options of multiple decent moves, and let him experience the ramifications of choosing the better move, and the ramifications of choosing the worse move. Use the game to reward strategic thinking, to reward planning ahead.
Aside from your checkers example, though, you make a very good point. The system in which the athletes perform rewards winning, and it rewards cheating without being caught. It does not reward honest play directly.
The tissue sample taken doesn't have to be large. And if the splicing is done via retrovirus, then I would imagine (since I'm not a molecular biologist with gene-splicing experience, imagining will have to suffice:)) that the splicing would be non-selective enough that sampling could be done in a relatively non-intrusive manner.
Or, since all the athletes are sampled, they all are hindered the same way, which makes it a level playing field... which is what we're after, correct?
I definitely get where you're coming from, as a former avid fencer (sabre, from before it was electric). I was always frustrated by the rampant cheating by judges who trained at the same academy (the most egregious I encountered was the Masters' Academy in northern NJ)... I used to get in trouble with my teammates for acknowledging touches I felt were wrongly awarded to me:)
Out of curiosity, what weapon did you fence?
That said, I have the advantage of fencing not being very prominent in modern sports culture, and I honestly hope to god it stays that way
Heh heh, I understand completely... both for the purity of the sport and for the ease of being a big fish in a little pond. Out of all the sports I played competitively (football, lacrosse, fencing at the high school level), fencing was the only one where I could compete at the highest level, and while some of that had to do with work and athletic ability, a lot of it had to do with the shallowness of the athletic pool, I think (sorry for the mixed metaphor). If I had the funds and time to devote myself to fencing year-round, like most of the people I competed against, I think it would have been easy to place in the top 1 or 2 in the state, instead of the top 5.
What region do you live in now? I'm looking to get back into fencing, simply as a good way to get into shape, and am looking for a club to train with (North/central NJ).
As for the existence of sportmanship in professional sports, I agree it is there in different degrees... and the fans are part of the problem, but I really feel it's systemic. From ownership (some of the worst abusers, since *profit* is usually their primary motive) to officials, from fans to athletes, sportsmanship is barely rewarded at the professional level. Who cares if you won the "good sport" award if you lost the championship?
They say the gene splicing will be untraceable so it will be a moot point to attempt to screen athletes.
Nonsense. They'll just have to show the genes of the ancestors of the athlete, to prove that the genetics of the athlete are *possible* given the lineage.
Read a decent short story about this once... a pyramid-shaped greco-roman wrestler and a flipper-handed swimmer with gills were allowed into the Olympics because their genes were *possible* from the genes of their ancestors. It was a metaphor for the arms race and nuclear anti-proliferation treaties, but still very applicable to the present discussion.
Weird. Second time today a short story I read in the 80s applied to the discussion at hand.
Doping, the lack of sportsmanlike conduct, and all the other problems in high level competition--the way I see it these things all stem from such a strong emphasis on winning over simply playing the game for its own sake.
Well, first off, the reason to play a competitive gamre is to win, not to play the game. That's why it's called a competition. I, for one, do not relish the thought of a "group swim for the fun of swimming" event at the olympics:)
That said, I recently read a piece in NJ Monthly about the Special Olympics, where a young girl with Downs Syndrome & some other issues was winning a race, and slowed down to hold hands with a competitor to cross the finish line together. Somehow I can't imagine that happening at the regular Olympics, but boy would that make me start to view the world with a little optimism.
another example is of a softball player who hit a home run, but blew out her knee, in her last college appearance. Members of the opposing team picked her up and carried her around the bases, since the rules forbade members of her own team from doing so.
Sportmanship is hard to find in professional sports (and yes, for the most part, olympic athletes are professionals), but it exists at other levels. Sometimes it even exists at the professional level, like in soccer... an example would be when a player is injured, and the other team kicks the ball out of bounds to give a stop in play... and then the favor is returned whenthe injured player's team gives the ball back when play resumes. I just wish it were publicized better, and given attention at the professional level.
Well, the robot in this case performs two functions: one is to provide the stimuli, one is to measure the response. It's a machine capable of locomotion.
The reason for the bluetooth is because the braincell broth needs to be maintained at a certain temperature and kept stable, and wireless is probably the best way to make sure the robot doesn't damage the brain cells or upset their alignment, say by jerking on an electrode tether.
I see your point, it does seem awfully gimmicky... but the nice thing about it is that it is modular. Their "sensory" system can be swapped out easily for additonal experiments.
Am I the only one who fails to see how these rodent zombie robots have anything to do with Alzheimer's?
Perhaps you could try RTFAing, then applying some logical thought.
They're studying how disassociated nerons make new connections and can be trained to reliably respond to stimuli, and how that response can be used to create predictable behavior.
Now go ahead STFW for the pathophysiology of Alzheimers, and it's pretty easy to see how this could be useful in understanding Alzheimers, and perhaps in (eventually, with a lot of steps inbetween) help either prevent it, delay its onset, or reverse it.
It was the whoosh of grant money going down the drain.
This work will hopefully contribute to our knowledge of how brains work, but its potential should not be exaggerated, says Potter. "This system is a model. Everything it does is merely similar to what goes on in a brain, it's not really the same thing. We can learn about the brain - but it may mislead us."
What? Is he serious, making a statement like that? Does he think grants grow on trees, that he can so blithely disregard the opportunity for sensationalistic coverage and the resultant exposure to those who issue private grants? Sure, Alzheimer's is mentioned, which is a nice hook, but he needs to make ridiculous claims in order to break through the wall of grant-deniers.
Sheesh. What is the academic world coming to, that they make responsible statements regarding their research?
It just ads more bureaucracy and as a result more overhead and costs to the taxpayer. I don't see any reason to keep the Air Force as a separate branch anymore. It should be folded back into the Army.
Well, I stated my reasoning in another post in this thread, but did not explain it well or clearly, so apologies for some repeated material...
The military, as an institution, is pretty resistant to divergent thinking. People complain about the groupthink here at slashdot, but I imagine anyone with military experience would snigger at what gets called groupthink here.
The one thing that the Air Force provides that cannot be done by another branch of the military is an external thoughtline. The extra branch of the military creates more opportunity for different opinions, different strategies, and different analyses of strategies. It allows the high command an extra input for decision-making.
The downside of having the Air Force conatained within other branches is that it risks being a bastard stepchild, neglected for surface vessels and ground units. The Air Force has been a deciding factor in a lot of engagements, and I question whether the Navy's air capability would be anywhere close to what it is now without the Air Force looking over its shoulder. Having the Air Force as a separate branch has allowed, and will continue to allow, lots of focus on ensuring we use our air capability effectively, and continue to develop new capability.
We just don't need them anymore. We have better missiles, and better drones.
Reminds me of an old short story I read in the 80s...
The premise was that two superpowers, in a state of constant war, launch programmed missiles at eachother, since it was decided that manned craft were not necessary, and it was not worth risking pilot lives. However, the defenses for the superpowers were able to adapt quickly, and therefore very few missiles ever got through the defense systems.
Eventually, one of the superpowers decided to make the missiles human pilotable, in order to defeat the defenses; they lost many pilots on their suicide missiosn, but obliterated their opponent and won the war.
The point is, human action is less predictable, and harder to defend against.
Of course, remote piloting and drones provide the capability of human piloting without all the mess of needing to carry meat, but the air force as a separate command is a different issue.
The Air Force will, IMO, always be needed, if only as a balance to the other two major forces. An additional chain of command leadin to the top means that a different insititionally biased way of thinking comes into play, and it is more likely that a dissenting (but not necessarily wrong) opinion will be heard at the highest level.
Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking, which, IMO, would hamper the ability of the military to come to the best solutions to problems it faces.
The reason that everyone has been waiting for the last couple of months is for the system to cool to less than 2 K.
Less than 2K what? Two thousand Centigrade? Fahrenheit? Damn n00bs and their lack of units, don't you realize that's the kind of mistake that swallows worlds in a fit of microblackholish pique???
Or they need to understand labor laws. Regardless of whether you are salaried or hourly, employers must pay you overtime if you are non-management. This does vary by state, but it's pretty common across the board in the US. No contract can supersede the law; that part of the contract becomes null and void.
Note that a lot of non-management people are classified as management to get around this... but this classification can be overturned by the court, and often is when tested.
Your state laws may vary... but you should be aware of the law, and what your rights are. If you don't feel it's a big deal, and don't want to push, that's fine... but I know several people (myself included) who have used this to justify an above-average salary adjustment at review time.
Most employers are aware of the law, and will follow it if pressed. The punitive damages for blatantly ignoring the law, the cost of replacing an employee, all put it in the employee's favor should things come to a head.
Using some form biometric system that seems to be implicitly trusted is even more dangerous, since if you can get your bogus identity trusted then people aren't ever going to question it.
It's like gaining root access.
But really, do we really want infallible digitalized security? Seriously, hear me out.
There are undesirables that we want to catch if they try to cross a border. Fine.
There is also an enhanced ability to deny people travel for less-than-good reasons. I don't like the possibility that a few remote keystrokes can render someone incapable of travel. There's far too much room for abuse, and far too little citizen oversight of the process. Most Americans just don't care, since they don't travel internationally. But even without the slippery slope analogy, we have a serious problem that you mentioned.
When border agents trust their automated clearance system, it becomes *easier* to game the system, because there is little emphasis placed on human validation. We all know that any security system can be broached with enough resources, via brute force, exploit of security hole(s), or social engineering. Is our security really enhanced when the fail rate is low enough that people inherently trust the system? Or would we be better off with a system that is known to be insecure, so that operators take proper measures to prevent abuse?
There are a lot of contingent statements in the above paragraph, and maybe I'm getting more worried than I should be, but I have to wonder: how long will it be until spammers, scammers, and other low-grade shits ruin the Internet for everyone?
I'd be more concerned about the internet being ruined by net partisaniality (for lack of a better term -- what exactly is the opposite of net neutrality?). The internet ceasing to be a content-agnostic delivery system for bits would be the real tragedy.
As far as spammers, phishers, scammers, etc -- the world has always been full of them, and the internet has just made them more efficient. We will always have people who are not "netsmart" just as we have people who are not "streetsmart". The public at large has always born some of the cost of these people getting suckered, be it through having to pay for security (police, etc), or lost or misdirected productivity.
It all depends on whether or not the company does MATCHING. If you have access to a MATCHING 401K you should ALWAYS contribute up to the matching amount. That's a guaranteed 100% return on your investment. No private plan can come close to matching that.
Otherwise, they are basically useless.
Not necessarily -- they are also tax-deferred, which is a huge bonus for those in higher income brackets. If you plan well for retirement, you can make sure that your effective tax rate is lower than when you are earning. That way, instead of paying 35% (or whatever rate you're paying), you'll end up paying far less when taking distributions from the 401k. Yet another way to increase the net value of the investment.
Also, with a 401k, you *can* invest in dividend bearing stocks. You just need to pick the right funds, and make sure your employer (if it's an employer-administered fund) uses a good company for their 401k. The dividends are reinvested into the fund. This is also great, since it reduces the net tax load.
Another thing to note, which tells me he's not as clued in as he'd like to be -- he does not mention the Roth IRA. Earnings from a Roth IRA are completely tax-free. EVERY person who expects to be working 20 years or more should be contributing as much as possible to a Roth, preferably the limit. Then there is no capital gains tax, no income tax on the distributions, nothing. It won't compete with startups that average a 30% return... but if he thinks he can reliably pick startups that yield a 30% return with a 2-yr delay, then he's got a secret many people would kill to have. Frankly, I think it's BS, as with much he writes. He has claimed that 90% of the companies he invests in succeed, and pay him 20%-50% dividend annually.
Unless he's involved in a pyramid scheme (which I wouldn't be surprised) he's full of shit or ridiculously lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the great thing about idle.
Idle gives the idiots a place to go, the rest of us can on the mainpage.
I'm sure slashdot doesn't want to lose the idiots -- they are the ones that pay the bills. So instead, they are given a place to drool and mouthbreathe, while the rest of us can have the "enlightened" discussion we are accustomed to.
Why, so he can throw it while screaming he's going to "fucking kill Apple"?
Oh... Steve Jobs... sorry.
Honest mistake.
You make the case for me right there. You dismiss an external logical path from your own... even if that path is problematic, there are valid points to consider. You seem to be a willing participant in groupthink, which is exactly the problem that having the AF as a separate branch helps solve.
That has nothing to do with my point, so I'm not going to address it.
That also has nothing to do with my point, but I'll address why it isn't relevant. Regardless of where the designs are coming from, the intended use of the craft varies from branch to branch. There is nothing wrong with saving design costs by reusing designs from another branch. The Navy has long been determined to ensure that they have control of the support for their ships, including aircraft. They have long worked to increase their responsibility by having long-range airstrike capability from their carriers, so they can both attack and provide support far inland, as well as on the seas. I think it's quite valid to argue that the Navy's capability in this area is driven in part by the Air Force's capability to do the same. The last thing Navy brass wants is budget reductions (or lack of growth) due to Air Force dominance in providing these things.
The Navy has expanded its scope in the past thirty years, especially in air capability. Whether you feel that this means the Air Force should be subsumed into the Army and Navy because of this example has little to do with the fact that a separate chain of command for the Air Force does, in fact, lead to increased input into the decision-making chain. Seems to me that you're a Navy homer when discussing the military turf/budget war, but I could be wrong.
Hmm, now I'm intrigued. Perhaps if we renamed it slightly, to "grope swim for the fun of swimming" then we'd be in business. Sounds very marketable to me.
I just figured that if someone was getting all pedantic on me, I'd up the ante and out-pedant them. It would be useful if every grammar pedant out there remembered that there's always a bigger pedant waiting around the corner... and that just because I choose not to bother with perfect grammar doesn't mean that I'm not capable of it.
Sabre went electric in NJ my senior year of HS (1994) but only for the state individual championship... paid $550 for gear I used in one tournament before I donated it to the school (we had one underclassman the same size as me). I probably would have used it if I took one of my fencing scholarship offers, but I decided to go the academic scholarship route instead.
My experience was that there were a lot of issues with the capteurs... lost the championship due to capteur failure to allow stop cuts in my final bout of the round-robin (IMO, anyway... the director said he would have awarded the two touches to me, but he could not override the electrical equipment... my fault for not adapting my strategy when the first stop cut did not register). Oh well, that was ages ago & of little import in the long run.
I guess I should go observe some competitions to see how sabre fencing has changed... I heard a terrible rumor that fleching has been disallowed, even for USFA events. It wasn't allowed in NJISAA events when I was a kid, but USFA was open game.
Yes, I have dominated a little kid at checkers, and I enjoyed every moment of my victory, including the precious look of frustration moments before he threw the board and started crying. As a matter of fact, before we even started playing, I super-glued the board to the table to make sure he couldn't even throw the board. *THAT* was a priceless look of frustration, let me tell you.
I also made sure I got to play the black side, and I put needles in the red pieces, so every time he tried to move a piece, I got to see him wince -- and once, when I let him make a move that would king him, he got so excited he gripped the piece hard -- whoo boy, the screams and the hint of blood on his finger just cracked me up.
Seriously, who dominates a little kid at checkers? If you're going to win, at least make it close. Present the kid with options of multiple decent moves, and let him experience the ramifications of choosing the better move, and the ramifications of choosing the worse move. Use the game to reward strategic thinking, to reward planning ahead.
Aside from your checkers example, though, you make a very good point. The system in which the athletes perform rewards winning, and it rewards cheating without being caught. It does not reward honest play directly.
To be completely pedantic, that should have been "perhaps you could try to RTFA", since it preserves the conjugation of "to read" in RTFA.
The tissue sample taken doesn't have to be large. And if the splicing is done via retrovirus, then I would imagine (since I'm not a molecular biologist with gene-splicing experience, imagining will have to suffice :)) that the splicing would be non-selective enough that sampling could be done in a relatively non-intrusive manner.
Or, since all the athletes are sampled, they all are hindered the same way, which makes it a level playing field... which is what we're after, correct?
Out of curiosity, what weapon did you fence?
Heh heh, I understand completely... both for the purity of the sport and for the ease of being a big fish in a little pond. Out of all the sports I played competitively (football, lacrosse, fencing at the high school level), fencing was the only one where I could compete at the highest level, and while some of that had to do with work and athletic ability, a lot of it had to do with the shallowness of the athletic pool, I think (sorry for the mixed metaphor). If I had the funds and time to devote myself to fencing year-round, like most of the people I competed against, I think it would have been easy to place in the top 1 or 2 in the state, instead of the top 5.
What region do you live in now? I'm looking to get back into fencing, simply as a good way to get into shape, and am looking for a club to train with (North/central NJ).
As for the existence of sportmanship in professional sports, I agree it is there in different degrees... and the fans are part of the problem, but I really feel it's systemic. From ownership (some of the worst abusers, since *profit* is usually their primary motive) to officials, from fans to athletes, sportsmanship is barely rewarded at the professional level. Who cares if you won the "good sport" award if you lost the championship?
Nonsense. They'll just have to show the genes of the ancestors of the athlete, to prove that the genetics of the athlete are *possible* given the lineage.
Read a decent short story about this once... a pyramid-shaped greco-roman wrestler and a flipper-handed swimmer with gills were allowed into the Olympics because their genes were *possible* from the genes of their ancestors. It was a metaphor for the arms race and nuclear anti-proliferation treaties, but still very applicable to the present discussion.
Weird. Second time today a short story I read in the 80s applied to the discussion at hand.
Well, first off, the reason to play a competitive gamre is to win, not to play the game. That's why it's called a competition. I, for one, do not relish the thought of a "group swim for the fun of swimming" event at the olympics :)
That said, I recently read a piece in NJ Monthly about the Special Olympics, where a young girl with Downs Syndrome & some other issues was winning a race, and slowed down to hold hands with a competitor to cross the finish line together. Somehow I can't imagine that happening at the regular Olympics, but boy would that make me start to view the world with a little optimism.
another example is of a softball player who hit a home run, but blew out her knee, in her last college appearance. Members of the opposing team picked her up and carried her around the bases, since the rules forbade members of her own team from doing so.
Sportmanship is hard to find in professional sports (and yes, for the most part, olympic athletes are professionals), but it exists at other levels. Sometimes it even exists at the professional level, like in soccer... an example would be when a player is injured, and the other team kicks the ball out of bounds to give a stop in play... and then the favor is returned whenthe injured player's team gives the ball back when play resumes. I just wish it were publicized better, and given attention at the professional level.
Well, the robot in this case performs two functions: one is to provide the stimuli, one is to measure the response. It's a machine capable of locomotion.
The reason for the bluetooth is because the braincell broth needs to be maintained at a certain temperature and kept stable, and wireless is probably the best way to make sure the robot doesn't damage the brain cells or upset their alignment, say by jerking on an electrode tether.
I see your point, it does seem awfully gimmicky... but the nice thing about it is that it is modular. Their "sensory" system can be swapped out easily for additonal experiments.
Perhaps you could try RTFAing, then applying some logical thought.
They're studying how disassociated nerons make new connections and can be trained to reliably respond to stimuli, and how that response can be used to create predictable behavior.
Now go ahead STFW for the pathophysiology of Alzheimers, and it's pretty easy to see how this could be useful in understanding Alzheimers, and perhaps in (eventually, with a lot of steps inbetween) help either prevent it, delay its onset, or reverse it.
What? Is he serious, making a statement like that? Does he think grants grow on trees, that he can so blithely disregard the opportunity for sensationalistic coverage and the resultant exposure to those who issue private grants? Sure, Alzheimer's is mentioned, which is a nice hook, but he needs to make ridiculous claims in order to break through the wall of grant-deniers.
Sheesh. What is the academic world coming to, that they make responsible statements regarding their research?
Well, I stated my reasoning in another post in this thread, but did not explain it well or clearly, so apologies for some repeated material...
The military, as an institution, is pretty resistant to divergent thinking. People complain about the groupthink here at slashdot, but I imagine anyone with military experience would snigger at what gets called groupthink here.
The one thing that the Air Force provides that cannot be done by another branch of the military is an external thoughtline. The extra branch of the military creates more opportunity for different opinions, different strategies, and different analyses of strategies. It allows the high command an extra input for decision-making.
The downside of having the Air Force conatained within other branches is that it risks being a bastard stepchild, neglected for surface vessels and ground units. The Air Force has been a deciding factor in a lot of engagements, and I question whether the Navy's air capability would be anywhere close to what it is now without the Air Force looking over its shoulder. Having the Air Force as a separate branch has allowed, and will continue to allow, lots of focus on ensuring we use our air capability effectively, and continue to develop new capability.
Reminds me of an old short story I read in the 80s...
The premise was that two superpowers, in a state of constant war, launch programmed missiles at eachother, since it was decided that manned craft were not necessary, and it was not worth risking pilot lives. However, the defenses for the superpowers were able to adapt quickly, and therefore very few missiles ever got through the defense systems.
Eventually, one of the superpowers decided to make the missiles human pilotable, in order to defeat the defenses; they lost many pilots on their suicide missiosn, but obliterated their opponent and won the war.
The point is, human action is less predictable, and harder to defend against.
Of course, remote piloting and drones provide the capability of human piloting without all the mess of needing to carry meat, but the air force as a separate command is a different issue.
The Air Force will, IMO, always be needed, if only as a balance to the other two major forces. An additional chain of command leadin to the top means that a different insititionally biased way of thinking comes into play, and it is more likely that a dissenting (but not necessarily wrong) opinion will be heard at the highest level.
Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking, which, IMO, would hamper the ability of the military to come to the best solutions to problems it faces.
In communist Russia, man makes joke of $ECONOMICSYSTEM?
Makes sense, since in capitalist America, the economic system makes a joke of man.
*shudder*
A mustachioed goatse is incomprehensibly terrifying.
Now I'm going to have to set myself on fire to remove that image which has been branded into my skull.
Less than 2K what? Two thousand Centigrade? Fahrenheit? Damn n00bs and their lack of units, don't you realize that's the kind of mistake that swallows worlds in a fit of microblackholish pique???
Or they need to understand labor laws. Regardless of whether you are salaried or hourly, employers must pay you overtime if you are non-management. This does vary by state, but it's pretty common across the board in the US. No contract can supersede the law; that part of the contract becomes null and void.
Note that a lot of non-management people are classified as management to get around this... but this classification can be overturned by the court, and often is when tested.
Your state laws may vary... but you should be aware of the law, and what your rights are. If you don't feel it's a big deal, and don't want to push, that's fine... but I know several people (myself included) who have used this to justify an above-average salary adjustment at review time.
Most employers are aware of the law, and will follow it if pressed. The punitive damages for blatantly ignoring the law, the cost of replacing an employee, all put it in the employee's favor should things come to a head.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Perhaps they need a new Chef Engineer.
That's what they get for launching in the dessert.
I could go on... but it's probably best if I don't.
It's like gaining root access.
But really, do we really want infallible digitalized security? Seriously, hear me out.
There are undesirables that we want to catch if they try to cross a border. Fine.
There is also an enhanced ability to deny people travel for less-than-good reasons. I don't like the possibility that a few remote keystrokes can render someone incapable of travel. There's far too much room for abuse, and far too little citizen oversight of the process. Most Americans just don't care, since they don't travel internationally. But even without the slippery slope analogy, we have a serious problem that you mentioned.
When border agents trust their automated clearance system, it becomes *easier* to game the system, because there is little emphasis placed on human validation. We all know that any security system can be broached with enough resources, via brute force, exploit of security hole(s), or social engineering. Is our security really enhanced when the fail rate is low enough that people inherently trust the system? Or would we be better off with a system that is known to be insecure, so that operators take proper measures to prevent abuse?
I'd be more concerned about the internet being ruined by net partisaniality (for lack of a better term -- what exactly is the opposite of net neutrality?). The internet ceasing to be a content-agnostic delivery system for bits would be the real tragedy.
As far as spammers, phishers, scammers, etc -- the world has always been full of them, and the internet has just made them more efficient. We will always have people who are not "netsmart" just as we have people who are not "streetsmart". The public at large has always born some of the cost of these people getting suckered, be it through having to pay for security (police, etc), or lost or misdirected productivity.
Not necessarily -- they are also tax-deferred, which is a huge bonus for those in higher income brackets. If you plan well for retirement, you can make sure that your effective tax rate is lower than when you are earning. That way, instead of paying 35% (or whatever rate you're paying), you'll end up paying far less when taking distributions from the 401k. Yet another way to increase the net value of the investment.
Also, with a 401k, you *can* invest in dividend bearing stocks. You just need to pick the right funds, and make sure your employer (if it's an employer-administered fund) uses a good company for their 401k. The dividends are reinvested into the fund. This is also great, since it reduces the net tax load.
Another thing to note, which tells me he's not as clued in as he'd like to be -- he does not mention the Roth IRA. Earnings from a Roth IRA are completely tax-free. EVERY person who expects to be working 20 years or more should be contributing as much as possible to a Roth, preferably the limit. Then there is no capital gains tax, no income tax on the distributions, nothing. It won't compete with startups that average a 30% return... but if he thinks he can reliably pick startups that yield a 30% return with a 2-yr delay, then he's got a secret many people would kill to have. Frankly, I think it's BS, as with much he writes. He has claimed that 90% of the companies he invests in succeed, and pay him 20%-50% dividend annually.
Unless he's involved in a pyramid scheme (which I wouldn't be surprised) he's full of shit or ridiculously lucky.