These things tend to make their way into industry, but it'll take a while. ARO funding university work is usually a first step in the process, but at the end, if it works out, it gets transitioned to industry in one form or fashion. For example, flexible display research started out with Army funding and there was a consortium with universities and industry. Here's a story. You can see they started working on it in '04, the article is from '08 and they're not at Best Buy just yet. Full disclosure: The Army Research Office is part of the Army Research Lab, which is part of the command I work in, the Research, Development and Engineering Command. We taxpayers fund a lot of research.
I know it might seem trifling, but we are still engaged in active combat operations halfway around the world. If we still had a draft I think you'd be acutely aware of that.
And if you look into technology that transitions from Defense into the civilian economy, you'll find quite a bit. Right now we have defense employees working on quantum teleportation, neural computing chips, all kinds of power and energy technologies and so on. Companies come in, or start up, and do good business making products and services off things the government paid for. ENIAC was an Army program to figure out artillery azimuths. GPS, the internet, etc. It still goes on all the time.
" Though, even SS isn't so bad, since, in theory, it is already paid for."
Your largess is stunning.
On another note, social security becomes a de facto retirement plan because the economy needs people to spend pretty much all their damn money to fuel the ever-upward corporate spiral. Then government raids the social security pot to pay for the other side of the ever-upward spiral. The problem is we can't settle for a sustainable reality. If you owned a company employing 10, 20 or 30 thousand people turning $500 million in profits with a solid outlook for that to continue -- but not grow -- for the next 50 years, Wall Street would ignore you. It's all about potential for growth, not actual performance. Then they tie executive pay to stock performance and boom! Stupidity is mandatory.
Just because it's DARPA doesn't mean government employees don't do the work. I work at the Army's RD&E command, and we have people who do research for DARPA or run their projects. I'm not at work, so I can't be sure, but we have a CRADA (cooperative R&D agreement) with UDel, so I'm guessing we're involved in this. And our Communication-Electronics center does work in solar, as does our research lab. So don't bet that no government folks are working on this or responsible for it. It's not unusual for our CRADA partners to publish their results and neglect to mention the contributions of the Army folks involved. Again, not sure in this case, but I really wish I had a magic HTML stamp so I could mark every story done by a university or industry touting something they've done that relies on something that started with the Army.
As I've noted elsewhere, it's complicated, much more complicated than you're representing it here. Nobody else researches specific areas that the military has to. Elsewhere I used the under-body explosion example, but there are many others. Let's say, RPGs. They hit a vehicle in a very specific way. Who is going to research materials and construction methods to best defend occupants against RPG strikes? Who is going to have a person on staff with a doctorate who is a, if not the, world expert on uniforms and how they interact with the human body, equipment, vehicles, etc.? Only the Army (with benefit to the other services, of course).
I'm not saying earmarks don't happen. It's not my area (I do public affairs for the Army RD&E command, not budget), so I couldn't say without doing some research that I'm not going to do on a Thursday night while on vacation. However, we have several systems set up to respond to requests from the field, requests from doctrine writers (who write how the Army should work, hence what capabilities it will need), and others. We even take troop designs and get them manufactured. We now have a shop in Afghanistan where soldiers can pull up and get things made for a specific purpose. And we have guys researching things that might be needed 10 or 20 years from now.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but the Army RD&E command has thousands of engineers. I work in the command, but I'm not working this week so I can't quote a good number. However, the usual statistic we put out is something like more than 10,000 scientists and engineers.
Not true. Air superiority keeps them on the ground. Weapons superiority keeps them out of a lot of force-on-force engagements. If we showed up with similar technology, they'd take us on more directly. But the obvious answers are not available to them, so they improvise.
Full disclosure: I work for the Army.
Just one example. There are others, but I'm not at work to have easy access to anything. Power and energy in general is a major push for the Army, and they've worked on hydrogen, solar, better batteries, etc.
Full disclosure: I work for the Army R&D command in public affairs.
Full disclosure: I do public affairs for the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
I can't speak for the other services, but the Army created RDECOM about 8 years ago to make RD&E work better for Soldiers. One big task is having what they call a balanced portfolio that spans basic research through engineering work. The command has more than 16,000 people, more than 10,000 of them civilian engineers or scientists. A lot of smart people put a lot of thought into this. It is not transparent, even to me, for a lot of reasons. Some of it is secret, but some of it is just so particular to the military, or even one part of the Army. For example, under-body explosions. There's a lot of research into head-on collisions, etc., but who else would need to study how to protect people from an under-body explosion? And how transparent is that, and should that be, to people outside the military? And who else is going to work on a material that might be suitable for that kind of thing? And how, pre-Iraq/Afghanistan, do you see that coming as the next big threat or design a research program that can respond to something like that which no one sees coming?
Which is not to say none of our research transfers into the civilian economy, for example flexible display technology, robotics and nanotechnology. We're working on moving our basic overview onto the web, but it shows we have more than 1,000 partnerships of one kind or another with everything from universities and foreign defense agencies to individual researchers and at least one time two guys in a garage.
As it happens, the Army just finished another study on how RD&E should work. The results should be out soon and may mean some level of reorganization. Stay tuned if you're interested.
"With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost."
I think you stated the solution as a negative fact. Newspapers can be local. In fact, they need to be local, because local is a value they can add to the equation. They can still gather and arrange facts better than anybody, and they can still get access and sell the product of that access. People will still pay for that.
What they can't do is all compete as national/international publications anymore. They could do that when there were only a few choices, first, the two or three local big papers, and later the one big local paper and the national papers flown or satellited in: NY Times, USA Today, etc. So Muncie or Syracuse could have a national/international publication with what they did supplemented by the news services.
The internet kills that by putting all those pseudo-national publications in the same market, and there's just not a market for that many national papers. And the Muncies and Syracuses can't compete with the NY Times and the Washington Post at the national and international level.
The market I think we need to look at is magazines. The old truism was that there was a market for three major publications on any subject: Road & Track, Car & Driver and Motor Trend. Usually there were two biggies and a third guy trailing and doing things differently. After the big three you went niche: magazines dedicated to Porsches, local or regional mags, British roadsters, muscle cars, etc. They all did fine, but they didn't challenge the big guys.
So if that's the model we're headed for, you'll get your big three -- NY Times, Washington Post and one other one, take your pick from a half dozen -- and a bunch of niche papers: Wall Street Journal, papers smart enough to be very local, maybe a Kansas City paper or a Mountain states paper for their regions, that kind of thing. I can envision a tier, actually: your local paper that will sit through the town hall meetings and catch the locals in graft and corruption; the state or regional paper that has resources the locals don't and knows its area better and will cover grain prices or water rights issues, and has access the NY Times doesn't and doesn't want to provide; and a national paper.
They just need to figure out a model quickly and kick the bean counters the hell out of the office suites. In gradual school I read a study about the second papers in major cities and how they died. In every case they weren't making enough money, so they cut staff and/or pages (or color, or paper quality, whatever) to protect the profit margin. The readers noticed they were getting less value and defected, which made advertisers go and/or rates drop, and so the papers made cuts to protect the profit margin. It was a death cycle that they didn't figure out and eventually the big paper in town bought them out. The exception that proved the rule was one paper run by the heir to the family tradition who said to hell with it and added reporters. The readers noticed and sales went up and that paper ended up devouring the one that had been bigger. But bean counters will never get it. It's what they did to GM (cut costs and therefore quality to increase margins and be amazed when nobody wants to buy your cars). You see it day after day in corporate America. Bean counters don't know what you do, they don't know quality when they see it, but they can count and they know everyone in business is supposed to bow to the great god of profit.
It's not that I'm against profit, but you've got to make money doing a good job at what you do. If the recurring financial bubble fiascoes teach us anything, it should be that bankers, accountants and these all-purpose managers aren't the answer to anything in particular, even banks.
Disclaimer: I am a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command as well as a long-time Slashdot reader & member.
The Army does accomplish a lot of the work through universities and businesses, but we also employ somewhere around 9,000 civilian scientists and engineers in RDECOM, many of whom are working on what we call wearable power. I invite all of you to check out our web site at http://www.army.mil/info/organization/unitsandcommands/commandstructure/rdecom/index.html. You'll see a couple of partnership stories about what we're doing with Microsoft and a NASCAR team, but we have thousands of partnerships and more than 300 international agreements. We also do a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) educational outreach. Check out eCybermission https://ecybermission.apgea.army.mil/, though that's not our only effort.
We are the headquarters and have subordinate commands that do the actual research and development. So check out our subordinate elements page, http://www.rdecom.army.mil/pages/rdecom_elements.html, to see more about what they do. Basically, we do everything from basic research through places like the Army Research Laboratory and the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, right through to prototyping and even some production at our Product Integration Facilities. Probably the most well-known of our subordinates is the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, which does things like MREs, uniforms, helmets, tentage, etc.
I'll apologize up front about our web page. The front page has been transitioned to the new Army.mil look and feel, but we're just beginning to convert our other pages. We're also making baby steps into social media, so we're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. The YouTube channel includes a handful of videos from our scientists and engineers talking about what they do. Links are on our home page.
And I guess I should mention that the other services have similar commands. I'm sure Google will be glad to help you find them.
I have fought this battle for years, first as a Mac user, and now as a Linux user. It's partly just another aspect of MS co-opting the whole ecosystem. Many Army IT people are MSCEs, and they predictably find Microsoft solutions for pretty much every problem. But there is a good reason this plays so well in the Army.
The thing is, you have to understand what a huge undertaking we're talking about. Bases all over the world, large and small, techs who transfer from one base to the next all the time, bases having to compete for techs in the open market (are there enough Linux techs for the Army to hire out there? Can it retrain its whole IT corps in Linux?), acquisition laws that limit what you can buy and how you go about it, interoperability with the rest of the government and allies, and so on. Also, if you look at the user base, one of the DoD's concerns is that so many people are nearing retirement age. You think they'd be easy to get to use something new? Even that MSCE certification plays a legitimate role, in that verifiable certifications/degrees/etc. play well in government bureaucratic hiring processes -- and those rules are good things to have for fairness reasons. The Army thrives on interchangeable, interoperable parts and bureaucratic solutions that can work in many settings, so breaking into the system is not easy. A company that digs into the process and figures out how to make it work for them does well. Long-hairs bent on revolution don't.
Believe me, it irks me to no end to be told they're locking down another function on my machine because of security, and occasionally I'll remind them that if they were actually interested in security I'd be running OpenBSD or SELinux. Mostly I get the 1000-meter stare at that point. Once in a while I get surprised agreement, and that's the guy I call from then on to keep my box in good order.
But there are cracks appearing. It's just going to be slow given the nature of the beast.
We have a saying about the futility of trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Pick whichever role you prefer. My point is there very likely no hope of engaging someone who is obviously anti-American and writing from a.fr domain in a decent discussion. Oh well.
The fact is you raise some good points, then you ruin it by working them hard to make the U.S. sound like the sole force for evil in the universe. Like both ends of the the U.S. political spectrum, you seem to need to demonize the other side. That's unfortunate, as it betrays either a lack of intellect or a lack of intellectual honesty. Or maybe you just can't resist a good dig and didn't feel like going on forever with qualifications and analogies and whatnot. Slashdot is hardly a good medium for psychoanalysis.
The U.S. does what it needs to do in what it sees as its own interest, just like every other sane nation on earth. France is certainly a good example of that. In fact, the last Frenchman I talked to (I realize I don't know that you're actually French) explained that the French knew the U.S. was going to lose in Iraq because they had already tried and failed to do what the U.S. was trying (after a lengthy period of colonization, no less). Unfortunately, every major nation and most of the minor ones can point to the same behavior at some point in their history. And while I'm sure many claim enlightenment now, history shows that such enlightenment doesn't survive long when people see what they define as their national interests being threatened.
I hope Iraq is the last war we get involved in, and that once we're out of there that's the last shot fired in anger in the world. While we're waiting for that to come true, why don't you go visit Seoul and then Pyongyang and then write me about the mistakes we've made. I've woken up to the North Korean propaganda coming across the DMZ and seen the 90-pound soldiers who washed across the river into the South and threatened suicide rather than be taken by the South Korean forces (the bastards gave them their first good meal in months and repatriated them). My first wife grew up an orphan because she was separated from her family during the exodus from Seoul in 1950. Hangkook mal chokum ha say yo. So while I'm tempted to go point-for-point with you, I know that you know dick about the Korean War, and yet you didn't let that stop you from weighing in with a very strong opinion. So I doubt your knowledge of current events is any better, or that your lack of knowledge would stop you from writing another broadside against the U.S. So I'll resist the temptation and go back to reading tech stories on Slashdot (love that Zenwalk, btw). You can sit back and wait to see how universally noble and law-abiding everyone is when the non-Europeans in France outnumber the actual French and start telling them how to run the country.
Somebody should look into the Korean war, and I believe it's you. The sticks you're talking about were tanks (even if the U.S. had been there in any appreciable numbers it wasn't ready for tanks because it had believed the terrain made using tanks impossible) and other Russian equipment. The U.S. military had gotten fat, dumb & happy after World War II, which is why Task Force Smith was wiped out. We had also all but abandoned the country militarily. But once we saw the threat and marshaled our forces, we drove the North Korean troops all the way to the Yalu -- which is what prompted the Chinese to invade with a couple-three hundred thousand troops. Then the poorly equipped Chinese did do well against the U.S., if by "well" you mean sacrificing themselves in almost inconceivable numbers to drive the U.S. and South Koreans back south. Then we fought them back to the border and sat around for a while negotiating.
As somebody noted about another conflict earlier, this too, was a failure of political will -- or the willingness to use only a judicious amount of force, take your pick. Truman fired the successful military commander -- MacArthur -- for refusing to listen when he told him to do things (or stop doing things) for political reasons. And then we stopped. The Army isn't good at stopping. Traditionally, it wants to flatten everything between point A and point B and get home by Christmas. For a variety of reasons, other scenarios are a problem.
As for the overall thread, I was in the Army for 28 years. I've been around several other militaries. I think that U.S. soldiers and U.S. units are as good as the soldiers and units of any armed force in the world. But the U.S. has size and/or technology over almost everybody else, even if man-for-man they're equal.
As for the bit about the rules changing, others have pointed out they haven't. Anyone who is willing to cheat enough can usually find a tactical advantage. Some just ignore the old military rules, which is one thing. Others abandon all human decency, which is something else. Either way, being successful at it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them right. And when it gets down to using civilians as shields and so forth, I'd argue it certainly doesn't make them the kind of people you want to end up in charge of your country.
IT stuff is voodoo to most upper management, and I'm convinced IT shops get away with things they never would if the upper management understood IT as well as they understand, say, supply. I was upper management in two government organizations heavily dependent on IT. As a fairly competent computer user who likes to keep up with current events, I fought with our IT folks endlessly -- at least the management.
The first problem is IT quickly forgets that -- like everybody else except the people actually doing the core functions of the organization -- they are a support organization, not a control organization. They latch on to their ability to throw out security and voodoo computer terms to persuade the upper management to let them set policies. Upper management doesn't understand the policies at all, and often has no choice but to side with the IT pros no matter what the actual users want or need. As often as not, they then set policies that are purely for their convenience (for instance, wanting to standardize on Windows and a strict set of programs even though they support 25 or 30 different sections, some of which have been doing things like digital photography, desktop publishing and design on Macs for years). From the users' perspectives, IT makes using the actual IT resources as painful as possible to make their lives as simple as possible, and the fact that they're hampering actual mission accomplishment doesn't bother them.
Next, they have a sweet deal going where they set a bunch of standards that require certain certifications or skills, so they hire people who perpetuate those standards, and only buy things that are compatible with those standards. This then requires getting on an endless treadmill of more training, more personnel, more software, more hardware, etc. And all the while they make it clear that it's lunacy to buy anything that doesn't have vendor support because if it actually breaks they can't be expected to get it going again using only the training, hardware, software and people that they have brow beat management into paying for using money that *every other part of the organization* was crying for and could have put to good use, too.
Lastly, on a day-to-day basis, far too many of them think that, because they're IT, it's their right to be arrogant, socially or organizationally inept, or just plain weird -- and sometimes it's a combination, so you get a organizationally inept weird guy being arrogant. How many of those does it take to ruin a shop's reputation? (IT certainly has no corner on that market, I'll grant you).
I could go on here, but I'm sure I've pissed off enough people already. I came from the internal communications side of things -- journalism and later PR. In my field management always thinks they can do your job better than you can because, hey, it's just writing and talking. Eventually, I got promoted into management and in dealing with IT I saw that their best defense is that almost nobody in a position of leadership (being mostly older guys, half of whom had never launched a program that wasn't sold by Microsoft) understood what they hell IT did or what it took to get it done. So all it took was a good talker or somebody who learned to cite vague security mandates from higher headquarters to get much more of what they wanted than anybody else did.
Of course, it also left IT open to being weaker when their leadership was weaker (or less smooth). But I didn't run into that. I ran into IT shops that got more of their resource requests approved than anybody else, but didn't really realize it and kept whining for more even though their support curiously never got better no matter how much you spent on them. And for every new capability you read about on Slashdot, they came up with two new security policies that made using it impossible.
Now I'm back in the trenches and don't get to go to the meetings where the IT guys try to talk the boss into banning the USB drives everybody has taken to using because the e-mail
Take a look at the iAudio M5 or M3. I have an older iAudio and just got us some newer flash-based ones at work (for digital voice and line-in recording). They sound excellent and support a lot of formats. They're not as easy to navigate as an iPod, but they do a lot more. Unfortunately, the M5 doesn't do FM, which the other ones do.
I'm looking to pair one of the FM-capable ones up with a nice pair of multimedia speakers (like the Swans I have at my home desk) and do away with my old CD/cassette/FM radio box at work. Then I can listen on the way in to work through headphones, plug in, listen at work, pull the plug and home I go. Kind of like a laptop for audio.
Here's the official links: http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/m5/ and http://www.jetaudio.com/products/iaudio/m3/.
You might want to check out the iAudiophile fan site: http://www.iaudiophile.net/.
Have fun and watch out for tinnitus.
Does it strike anybody else as odd that the article quotes the prediction of doom for the telcos made by the very people who are suing said telcos?
"Businesses accused of aiding the Bush administration in wiretapping could also be in for a legal bruising, say civil liberties groups that have sued telecom providers AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth for allegedly helping the NSA.
I mean, the quote pulled from TFA is from the ACLU's lead attorney. Sounds like a severe case of somebody saying exactly what you would expect them to say -- about they only thing they can say without looking like they've filed a frivilous lawsuit. So, whatever you think about the merits of the case, the merits of the prediction are clearly too underwhelming to get worked up about.
As for the merits of the case, scared people do dumb things. We had Japanese internment camps in WWII, and the system righted itself. I'm guessing that after all the thrash and bluster, it will this time, too. Of course, I didn't start saying that until I took off my tin foil hat.
Yes, RSN, but that's news for Slackware because...
on
Slackware 11 is Coming
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...it doesn't have a PR machine (even a volunteer one) behind it cranking out a steady stream of news. Look at Distrowatch Weekly's upcoming releases and announcements, and you see release roadmaps, schedules, plans, estimates and pre-order information going all the way out to December. Slackware is nowhere on there.
Even on userlocal.com, supposedly the Slackware community site, and the top items are from February and April (and the latter's about Zenwalk). Other distros start work on their next release before the current one is final, and we hear about it from one release right to the next. Hell, we heard about the Suse and Ubuntu delays for what would seem like forever if we didn't have all that "when is Debian going to release" and "Vista delayed again" coverage to compare it to. So Slack gets a RSN item on Slashdot. Seems small in comparison to all the coverage of alpha flights, umpteen betas, RCs and golden masters some distros get all over the web.
Personally, I'm happy to be using a distro done by a guy more interested in getting a solid product out the door than getting a good press release out the door.
There are a couple of slack-based AMD64 systems besides SLAMD64. I liked SLAMD64, but haven't found it as trouble-free as some others apparently have. Frugalware claims to be pretty much Slackware with Pacman bolted on, and I liked it a lot. I also just downloaded something called Bluewhite 64 Linux, another unofficial port. That goes on my testing partition this weekend (replacing STX Linux, another Slackware derivative I was testing for installation on a friend/potential convert's older laptop).
So if Slackware is a niche player now (which I don't believe), then one part of that niche is as a base for new distros -- the excellent Zenwalk (which I run on my laptop), STX, Frugalware, Voltalinux (Slackware with pkgsrc?), Slax and Vector, just off the top of my head. Not as many derivatives as Debian, perhaps, but certainly a healthy number and probably indicative of a healthy distro.
I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.
And text, of course. As soon as I boot up and people see text instead of a pretty splash screen I see that sphincter-tightening look come over some of their faces.
But beyond the entertainment value it's probably a bad thing.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but they're making a pretty big claim when their test group was a bunch of undergraduate students. I mean, it's a cliche that college students are clueless, hung over, self-involved, etc., etc., etc., and cliches get to be cliches for a reason.
More seriously, like any other skill, you get better at communication the more you do it (if you have any brains, and care at all what's going outside your own skull, that is). So I'd venture to say that a bunch of 30-year-olds would do better than those college students because they have moved out into the world and gotten smacked around because they didn't understand what people were really saying. 40-year-olds would do better and so on, up to some point at which the improvement would stop (probably when people started to think they know it all).
And there's the writing skill component. College students are learning to communicate, and from what I've seen of college grads their success rate is pretty spotty. It would presumably be easier to parse the tone of an e-mail sent by somebody who has more communications skill.
I could go on, but I think this is just confirming the experience of too many people, blinding them to the study's weaknesses.
Let me start by saying I like the site, think you're doing a good job and don't care if you change it based on what I, or anybody, says. That said, I have been an editor of one sort or another for 25 years or so, and I must take exception to how you're defining your job if you're calling yourself an editor. You are, in fact, the first editor I've ever heard of who thinks spelling and grammar aren't of primary importance. I don't want to sound snippy, but if you're going to say spelling and grammar are of secondary or tertiary importance, you need to come up with a new title. It's as simple as that. Perhaps article aggregator.
In editing (and maybe in everything) you have functional obsessions and dysfunctional obsessions. Spelling and grammar are functional obsessions because they speak to clarity, which is central to good communication. They also help define how much credibility you have, which your readers use to decide everything about your site. As someone else already noted, if you can't catch to vs too, humans who know the difference will inevitably start to wonder what else you didn't understand or chose to overlook. There's no way around it. It's human nature. It's like asking someone to not question a meal served up by a short order cook with cigarette ashes on his shirt or snot dripping from his nose. You just have to wonder what else is going on.
Your obsession with link wording, on the other hand, sounds like a dysfunctional obsession to me. Unless you think your readers are reading the link text without reading any of the surrounding text, it doesn't matter much what the link text says (as long as it remains coherent and relevant, of course).
Think about how readers approach a story. They read the headline, which should tell them at least half of what they need to know. It certainly puts things in context. Then they read the lead sentence. I doubt anybody's clicking links before at least getting through those two things (OK, unless they're easily outraged and the headline is "MS disses Linux again!"). By the time they've read the headline and lead, they have enough context to know what to expect when they see the word "here," or "at CNN," or whatever as a link. It doesn't matter a whit nor a tittle if relevant words are used as link text or the phrase "the article" is. None. Not to the reader. It matters to you, so you spend time fixing that problem when you could be spending that time fixing the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes. So it's dysfunctional. It robs you of time you could be using to do things that matter more to the quality and health of your publication.
Sure, it's a matter of opinion, and hey: it's your site. But if you want to be an editor and a professional, and you want your site to be as respected as possible, you'll value the fundamentals of communication over a pet peeve that most of your readers won't notice either way.
Now, all that said, I certainly agree there's almost always a better way to construct the sentence than to have it end "the article," or "here," or whatever, just so you can have something to link against. But to spend time rewording sentences because of the link text while ignoring glaring spelling and grammar mistakes is a poor use of your time.
Again, nice site. I'll be refreshing a dozen times a day either way.
Yeah, you're right of course. I don't talk that way in real life, but like any other specialist, I lapse into the lingo when I get going. But considering this is Slashdot, a favorite of geeks, who are known to use as much jargon and lingo as anybody, I'm only going to own up to the weakness, not apologize for it. It's karma, after all, to get back some of what you give.
Slashdot Mirror
The Army's already working things to work in GPS-denied environments. Here's a story. Full disclosure, I work at the Army's R&D command.
These things tend to make their way into industry, but it'll take a while. ARO funding university work is usually a first step in the process, but at the end, if it works out, it gets transitioned to industry in one form or fashion. For example, flexible display research started out with Army funding and there was a consortium with universities and industry. Here's a story. You can see they started working on it in '04, the article is from '08 and they're not at Best Buy just yet. Full disclosure: The Army Research Office is part of the Army Research Lab, which is part of the command I work in, the Research, Development and Engineering Command. We taxpayers fund a lot of research.
I know it might seem trifling, but we are still engaged in active combat operations halfway around the world. If we still had a draft I think you'd be acutely aware of that.
And if you look into technology that transitions from Defense into the civilian economy, you'll find quite a bit. Right now we have defense employees working on quantum teleportation, neural computing chips, all kinds of power and energy technologies and so on. Companies come in, or start up, and do good business making products and services off things the government paid for. ENIAC was an Army program to figure out artillery azimuths. GPS, the internet, etc. It still goes on all the time.
I work for a DoD R&D organization, and this is very true. We create a lot and we do it well and relatively cheaply.
" Though, even SS isn't so bad, since, in theory, it is already paid for."
Your largess is stunning.
On another note, social security becomes a de facto retirement plan because the economy needs people to spend pretty much all their damn money to fuel the ever-upward corporate spiral. Then government raids the social security pot to pay for the other side of the ever-upward spiral. The problem is we can't settle for a sustainable reality. If you owned a company employing 10, 20 or 30 thousand people turning $500 million in profits with a solid outlook for that to continue -- but not grow -- for the next 50 years, Wall Street would ignore you. It's all about potential for growth, not actual performance. Then they tie executive pay to stock performance and boom! Stupidity is mandatory.
Just because it's DARPA doesn't mean government employees don't do the work. I work at the Army's RD&E command, and we have people who do research for DARPA or run their projects. I'm not at work, so I can't be sure, but we have a CRADA (cooperative R&D agreement) with UDel, so I'm guessing we're involved in this. And our Communication-Electronics center does work in solar, as does our research lab. So don't bet that no government folks are working on this or responsible for it. It's not unusual for our CRADA partners to publish their results and neglect to mention the contributions of the Army folks involved. Again, not sure in this case, but I really wish I had a magic HTML stamp so I could mark every story done by a university or industry touting something they've done that relies on something that started with the Army.
True about the lack of planes, obviously. I was speaking more generically, which always gets me in trouble.
As I've noted elsewhere, it's complicated, much more complicated than you're representing it here. Nobody else researches specific areas that the military has to. Elsewhere I used the under-body explosion example, but there are many others. Let's say, RPGs. They hit a vehicle in a very specific way. Who is going to research materials and construction methods to best defend occupants against RPG strikes? Who is going to have a person on staff with a doctorate who is a, if not the, world expert on uniforms and how they interact with the human body, equipment, vehicles, etc.? Only the Army (with benefit to the other services, of course).
I'm not saying earmarks don't happen. It's not my area (I do public affairs for the Army RD&E command, not budget), so I couldn't say without doing some research that I'm not going to do on a Thursday night while on vacation. However, we have several systems set up to respond to requests from the field, requests from doctrine writers (who write how the Army should work, hence what capabilities it will need), and others. We even take troop designs and get them manufactured. We now have a shop in Afghanistan where soldiers can pull up and get things made for a specific purpose. And we have guys researching things that might be needed 10 or 20 years from now.
Not sure where you're getting your numbers, but the Army RD&E command has thousands of engineers. I work in the command, but I'm not working this week so I can't quote a good number. However, the usual statistic we put out is something like more than 10,000 scientists and engineers.
Not true. Air superiority keeps them on the ground. Weapons superiority keeps them out of a lot of force-on-force engagements. If we showed up with similar technology, they'd take us on more directly. But the obvious answers are not available to them, so they improvise. Full disclosure: I work for the Army.
Just one example. There are others, but I'm not at work to have easy access to anything. Power and energy in general is a major push for the Army, and they've worked on hydrogen, solar, better batteries, etc. Full disclosure: I work for the Army R&D command in public affairs.
Full disclosure: I do public affairs for the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
I can't speak for the other services, but the Army created RDECOM about 8 years ago to make RD&E work better for Soldiers. One big task is having what they call a balanced portfolio that spans basic research through engineering work. The command has more than 16,000 people, more than 10,000 of them civilian engineers or scientists. A lot of smart people put a lot of thought into this. It is not transparent, even to me, for a lot of reasons. Some of it is secret, but some of it is just so particular to the military, or even one part of the Army. For example, under-body explosions. There's a lot of research into head-on collisions, etc., but who else would need to study how to protect people from an under-body explosion? And how transparent is that, and should that be, to people outside the military? And who else is going to work on a material that might be suitable for that kind of thing? And how, pre-Iraq/Afghanistan, do you see that coming as the next big threat or design a research program that can respond to something like that which no one sees coming?
Which is not to say none of our research transfers into the civilian economy, for example flexible display technology, robotics and nanotechnology. We're working on moving our basic overview onto the web, but it shows we have more than 1,000 partnerships of one kind or another with everything from universities and foreign defense agencies to individual researchers and at least one time two guys in a garage.
As it happens, the Army just finished another study on how RD&E should work. The results should be out soon and may mean some level of reorganization. Stay tuned if you're interested.
"With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost."
I think you stated the solution as a negative fact. Newspapers can be local. In fact, they need to be local, because local is a value they can add to the equation. They can still gather and arrange facts better than anybody, and they can still get access and sell the product of that access. People will still pay for that.
What they can't do is all compete as national/international publications anymore. They could do that when there were only a few choices, first, the two or three local big papers, and later the one big local paper and the national papers flown or satellited in: NY Times, USA Today, etc. So Muncie or Syracuse could have a national/international publication with what they did supplemented by the news services.
The internet kills that by putting all those pseudo-national publications in the same market, and there's just not a market for that many national papers. And the Muncies and Syracuses can't compete with the NY Times and the Washington Post at the national and international level.
The market I think we need to look at is magazines. The old truism was that there was a market for three major publications on any subject: Road & Track, Car & Driver and Motor Trend. Usually there were two biggies and a third guy trailing and doing things differently. After the big three you went niche: magazines dedicated to Porsches, local or regional mags, British roadsters, muscle cars, etc. They all did fine, but they didn't challenge the big guys.
So if that's the model we're headed for, you'll get your big three -- NY Times, Washington Post and one other one, take your pick from a half dozen -- and a bunch of niche papers: Wall Street Journal, papers smart enough to be very local, maybe a Kansas City paper or a Mountain states paper for their regions, that kind of thing. I can envision a tier, actually: your local paper that will sit through the town hall meetings and catch the locals in graft and corruption; the state or regional paper that has resources the locals don't and knows its area better and will cover grain prices or water rights issues, and has access the NY Times doesn't and doesn't want to provide; and a national paper.
They just need to figure out a model quickly and kick the bean counters the hell out of the office suites. In gradual school I read a study about the second papers in major cities and how they died. In every case they weren't making enough money, so they cut staff and/or pages (or color, or paper quality, whatever) to protect the profit margin. The readers noticed they were getting less value and defected, which made advertisers go and/or rates drop, and so the papers made cuts to protect the profit margin. It was a death cycle that they didn't figure out and eventually the big paper in town bought them out. The exception that proved the rule was one paper run by the heir to the family tradition who said to hell with it and added reporters. The readers noticed and sales went up and that paper ended up devouring the one that had been bigger. But bean counters will never get it. It's what they did to GM (cut costs and therefore quality to increase margins and be amazed when nobody wants to buy your cars). You see it day after day in corporate America. Bean counters don't know what you do, they don't know quality when they see it, but they can count and they know everyone in business is supposed to bow to the great god of profit.
It's not that I'm against profit, but you've got to make money doing a good job at what you do. If the recurring financial bubble fiascoes teach us anything, it should be that bankers, accountants and these all-purpose managers aren't the answer to anything in particular, even banks.
Disclaimer: I am a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Army Research, Development & Engineering Command as well as a long-time Slashdot reader & member.
The Army does accomplish a lot of the work through universities and businesses, but we also employ somewhere around 9,000 civilian scientists and engineers in RDECOM, many of whom are working on what we call wearable power. I invite all of you to check out our web site at http://www.army.mil/info/organization/unitsandcommands/commandstructure/rdecom/index.html. You'll see a couple of partnership stories about what we're doing with Microsoft and a NASCAR team, but we have thousands of partnerships and more than 300 international agreements. We also do a lot of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) educational outreach. Check out eCybermission https://ecybermission.apgea.army.mil/, though that's not our only effort.
We are the headquarters and have subordinate commands that do the actual research and development. So check out our subordinate elements page, http://www.rdecom.army.mil/pages/rdecom_elements.html, to see more about what they do. Basically, we do everything from basic research through places like the Army Research Laboratory and the Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, right through to prototyping and even some production at our Product Integration Facilities. Probably the most well-known of our subordinates is the Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center, which does things like MREs, uniforms, helmets, tentage, etc.
I'll apologize up front about our web page. The front page has been transitioned to the new Army.mil look and feel, but we're just beginning to convert our other pages. We're also making baby steps into social media, so we're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. The YouTube channel includes a handful of videos from our scientists and engineers talking about what they do. Links are on our home page.
And I guess I should mention that the other services have similar commands. I'm sure Google will be glad to help you find them.
I have fought this battle for years, first as a Mac user, and now as a Linux user. It's partly just another aspect of MS co-opting the whole ecosystem. Many Army IT people are MSCEs, and they predictably find Microsoft solutions for pretty much every problem. But there is a good reason this plays so well in the Army.
The thing is, you have to understand what a huge undertaking we're talking about. Bases all over the world, large and small, techs who transfer from one base to the next all the time, bases having to compete for techs in the open market (are there enough Linux techs for the Army to hire out there? Can it retrain its whole IT corps in Linux?), acquisition laws that limit what you can buy and how you go about it, interoperability with the rest of the government and allies, and so on. Also, if you look at the user base, one of the DoD's concerns is that so many people are nearing retirement age. You think they'd be easy to get to use something new? Even that MSCE certification plays a legitimate role, in that verifiable certifications/degrees/etc. play well in government bureaucratic hiring processes -- and those rules are good things to have for fairness reasons. The Army thrives on interchangeable, interoperable parts and bureaucratic solutions that can work in many settings, so breaking into the system is not easy. A company that digs into the process and figures out how to make it work for them does well. Long-hairs bent on revolution don't.
Believe me, it irks me to no end to be told they're locking down another function on my machine because of security, and occasionally I'll remind them that if they were actually interested in security I'd be running OpenBSD or SELinux. Mostly I get the 1000-meter stare at that point. Once in a while I get surprised agreement, and that's the guy I call from then on to keep my box in good order.
But there are cracks appearing. It's just going to be slow given the nature of the beast.
We have a saying about the futility of trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig. Pick whichever role you prefer. My point is there very likely no hope of engaging someone who is obviously anti-American and writing from a .fr domain in a decent discussion. Oh well.
The fact is you raise some good points, then you ruin it by working them hard to make the U.S. sound like the sole force for evil in the universe. Like both ends of the the U.S. political spectrum, you seem to need to demonize the other side. That's unfortunate, as it betrays either a lack of intellect or a lack of intellectual honesty. Or maybe you just can't resist a good dig and didn't feel like going on forever with qualifications and analogies and whatnot. Slashdot is hardly a good medium for psychoanalysis.
The U.S. does what it needs to do in what it sees as its own interest, just like every other sane nation on earth. France is certainly a good example of that. In fact, the last Frenchman I talked to (I realize I don't know that you're actually French) explained that the French knew the U.S. was going to lose in Iraq because they had already tried and failed to do what the U.S. was trying (after a lengthy period of colonization, no less). Unfortunately, every major nation and most of the minor ones can point to the same behavior at some point in their history. And while I'm sure many claim enlightenment now, history shows that such enlightenment doesn't survive long when people see what they define as their national interests being threatened.
I hope Iraq is the last war we get involved in, and that once we're out of there that's the last shot fired in anger in the world. While we're waiting for that to come true, why don't you go visit Seoul and then Pyongyang and then write me about the mistakes we've made. I've woken up to the North Korean propaganda coming across the DMZ and seen the 90-pound soldiers who washed across the river into the South and threatened suicide rather than be taken by the South Korean forces (the bastards gave them their first good meal in months and repatriated them). My first wife grew up an orphan because she was separated from her family during the exodus from Seoul in 1950. Hangkook mal chokum ha say yo. So while I'm tempted to go point-for-point with you, I know that you know dick about the Korean War, and yet you didn't let that stop you from weighing in with a very strong opinion. So I doubt your knowledge of current events is any better, or that your lack of knowledge would stop you from writing another broadside against the U.S. So I'll resist the temptation and go back to reading tech stories on Slashdot (love that Zenwalk, btw). You can sit back and wait to see how universally noble and law-abiding everyone is when the non-Europeans in France outnumber the actual French and start telling them how to run the country.
Somebody should look into the Korean war, and I believe it's you. The sticks you're talking about were tanks (even if the U.S. had been there in any appreciable numbers it wasn't ready for tanks because it had believed the terrain made using tanks impossible) and other Russian equipment. The U.S. military had gotten fat, dumb & happy after World War II, which is why Task Force Smith was wiped out. We had also all but abandoned the country militarily. But once we saw the threat and marshaled our forces, we drove the North Korean troops all the way to the Yalu -- which is what prompted the Chinese to invade with a couple-three hundred thousand troops. Then the poorly equipped Chinese did do well against the U.S., if by "well" you mean sacrificing themselves in almost inconceivable numbers to drive the U.S. and South Koreans back south. Then we fought them back to the border and sat around for a while negotiating.
As somebody noted about another conflict earlier, this too, was a failure of political will -- or the willingness to use only a judicious amount of force, take your pick. Truman fired the successful military commander -- MacArthur -- for refusing to listen when he told him to do things (or stop doing things) for political reasons. And then we stopped. The Army isn't good at stopping. Traditionally, it wants to flatten everything between point A and point B and get home by Christmas. For a variety of reasons, other scenarios are a problem.
As for the overall thread, I was in the Army for 28 years. I've been around several other militaries. I think that U.S. soldiers and U.S. units are as good as the soldiers and units of any armed force in the world. But the U.S. has size and/or technology over almost everybody else, even if man-for-man they're equal.
As for the bit about the rules changing, others have pointed out they haven't. Anyone who is willing to cheat enough can usually find a tactical advantage. Some just ignore the old military rules, which is one thing. Others abandon all human decency, which is something else. Either way, being successful at it doesn't make them good and it doesn't make them right. And when it gets down to using civilians as shields and so forth, I'd argue it certainly doesn't make them the kind of people you want to end up in charge of your country.
IT stuff is voodoo to most upper management, and I'm convinced IT shops get away with things they never would if the upper management understood IT as well as they understand, say, supply. I was upper management in two government organizations heavily dependent on IT. As a fairly competent computer user who likes to keep up with current events, I fought with our IT folks endlessly -- at least the management.
The first problem is IT quickly forgets that -- like everybody else except the people actually doing the core functions of the organization -- they are a support organization, not a control organization. They latch on to their ability to throw out security and voodoo computer terms to persuade the upper management to let them set policies. Upper management doesn't understand the policies at all, and often has no choice but to side with the IT pros no matter what the actual users want or need. As often as not, they then set policies that are purely for their convenience (for instance, wanting to standardize on Windows and a strict set of programs even though they support 25 or 30 different sections, some of which have been doing things like digital photography, desktop publishing and design on Macs for years). From the users' perspectives, IT makes using the actual IT resources as painful as possible to make their lives as simple as possible, and the fact that they're hampering actual mission accomplishment doesn't bother them.
Next, they have a sweet deal going where they set a bunch of standards that require certain certifications or skills, so they hire people who perpetuate those standards, and only buy things that are compatible with those standards. This then requires getting on an endless treadmill of more training, more personnel, more software, more hardware, etc. And all the while they make it clear that it's lunacy to buy anything that doesn't have vendor support because if it actually breaks they can't be expected to get it going again using only the training, hardware, software and people that they have brow beat management into paying for using money that *every other part of the organization* was crying for and could have put to good use, too.
Lastly, on a day-to-day basis, far too many of them think that, because they're IT, it's their right to be arrogant, socially or organizationally inept, or just plain weird -- and sometimes it's a combination, so you get a organizationally inept weird guy being arrogant. How many of those does it take to ruin a shop's reputation? (IT certainly has no corner on that market, I'll grant you).
I could go on here, but I'm sure I've pissed off enough people already. I came from the internal communications side of things -- journalism and later PR. In my field management always thinks they can do your job better than you can because, hey, it's just writing and talking. Eventually, I got promoted into management and in dealing with IT I saw that their best defense is that almost nobody in a position of leadership (being mostly older guys, half of whom had never launched a program that wasn't sold by Microsoft) understood what they hell IT did or what it took to get it done. So all it took was a good talker or somebody who learned to cite vague security mandates from higher headquarters to get much more of what they wanted than anybody else did.
Of course, it also left IT open to being weaker when their leadership was weaker (or less smooth). But I didn't run into that. I ran into IT shops that got more of their resource requests approved than anybody else, but didn't really realize it and kept whining for more even though their support curiously never got better no matter how much you spent on them. And for every new capability you read about on Slashdot, they came up with two new security policies that made using it impossible.
Now I'm back in the trenches and don't get to go to the meetings where the IT guys try to talk the boss into banning the USB drives everybody has taken to using because the e-mail
Take a look at the iAudio M5 or M3. I have an older iAudio and just got us some newer flash-based ones at work (for digital voice and line-in recording). They sound excellent and support a lot of formats. They're not as easy to navigate as an iPod, but they do a lot more. Unfortunately, the M5 doesn't do FM, which the other ones do. I'm looking to pair one of the FM-capable ones up with a nice pair of multimedia speakers (like the Swans I have at my home desk) and do away with my old CD/cassette/FM radio box at work. Then I can listen on the way in to work through headphones, plug in, listen at work, pull the plug and home I go. Kind of like a laptop for audio. Here's the official links: http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/m5/ and http://www.jetaudio.com/products/iaudio/m3/. You might want to check out the iAudiophile fan site: http://www.iaudiophile.net/. Have fun and watch out for tinnitus.
Does it strike anybody else as odd that the article quotes the prediction of doom for the telcos made by the very people who are suing said telcos?
"Businesses accused of aiding the Bush administration in wiretapping could also be in for a legal bruising, say civil liberties groups that have sued telecom providers AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth for allegedly helping the NSA.
I mean, the quote pulled from TFA is from the ACLU's lead attorney. Sounds like a severe case of somebody saying exactly what you would expect them to say -- about they only thing they can say without looking like they've filed a frivilous lawsuit. So, whatever you think about the merits of the case, the merits of the prediction are clearly too underwhelming to get worked up about.
As for the merits of the case, scared people do dumb things. We had Japanese internment camps in WWII, and the system righted itself. I'm guessing that after all the thrash and bluster, it will this time, too. Of course, I didn't start saying that until I took off my tin foil hat.
...it doesn't have a PR machine (even a volunteer one) behind it cranking out a steady stream of news. Look at Distrowatch Weekly's upcoming releases and announcements, and you see release roadmaps, schedules, plans, estimates and pre-order information going all the way out to December. Slackware is nowhere on there.
Even on userlocal.com, supposedly the Slackware community site, and the top items are from February and April (and the latter's about Zenwalk). Other distros start work on their next release before the current one is final, and we hear about it from one release right to the next. Hell, we heard about the Suse and Ubuntu delays for what would seem like forever if we didn't have all that "when is Debian going to release" and "Vista delayed again" coverage to compare it to. So Slack gets a RSN item on Slashdot. Seems small in comparison to all the coverage of alpha flights, umpteen betas, RCs and golden masters some distros get all over the web.
Personally, I'm happy to be using a distro done by a guy more interested in getting a solid product out the door than getting a good press release out the door.
There are a couple of slack-based AMD64 systems besides SLAMD64. I liked SLAMD64, but haven't found it as trouble-free as some others apparently have. Frugalware claims to be pretty much Slackware with Pacman bolted on, and I liked it a lot. I also just downloaded something called Bluewhite 64 Linux, another unofficial port. That goes on my testing partition this weekend (replacing STX Linux, another Slackware derivative I was testing for installation on a friend/potential convert's older laptop).
So if Slackware is a niche player now (which I don't believe), then one part of that niche is as a base for new distros -- the excellent Zenwalk (which I run on my laptop), STX, Frugalware, Voltalinux (Slackware with pkgsrc?), Slax and Vector, just off the top of my head. Not as many derivatives as Debian, perhaps, but certainly a healthy number and probably indicative of a healthy distro.
I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.
And text, of course. As soon as I boot up and people see text instead of a pretty splash screen I see that sphincter-tightening look come over some of their faces.
But beyond the entertainment value it's probably a bad thing.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but they're making a pretty big claim when their test group was a bunch of undergraduate students. I mean, it's a cliche that college students are clueless, hung over, self-involved, etc., etc., etc., and cliches get to be cliches for a reason.
More seriously, like any other skill, you get better at communication the more you do it (if you have any brains, and care at all what's going outside your own skull, that is). So I'd venture to say that a bunch of 30-year-olds would do better than those college students because they have moved out into the world and gotten smacked around because they didn't understand what people were really saying. 40-year-olds would do better and so on, up to some point at which the improvement would stop (probably when people started to think they know it all).
And there's the writing skill component. College students are learning to communicate, and from what I've seen of college grads their success rate is pretty spotty. It would presumably be easier to parse the tone of an e-mail sent by somebody who has more communications skill.
I could go on, but I think this is just confirming the experience of too many people, blinding them to the study's weaknesses.
Or maybe I just missed the point...
Let me start by saying I like the site, think you're doing a good job and don't care if you change it based on what I, or anybody, says. That said, I have been an editor of one sort or another for 25 years or so, and I must take exception to how you're defining your job if you're calling yourself an editor. You are, in fact, the first editor I've ever heard of who thinks spelling and grammar aren't of primary importance. I don't want to sound snippy, but if you're going to say spelling and grammar are of secondary or tertiary importance, you need to come up with a new title. It's as simple as that. Perhaps article aggregator.
In editing (and maybe in everything) you have functional obsessions and dysfunctional obsessions. Spelling and grammar are functional obsessions because they speak to clarity, which is central to good communication. They also help define how much credibility you have, which your readers use to decide everything about your site. As someone else already noted, if you can't catch to vs too, humans who know the difference will inevitably start to wonder what else you didn't understand or chose to overlook. There's no way around it. It's human nature. It's like asking someone to not question a meal served up by a short order cook with cigarette ashes on his shirt or snot dripping from his nose. You just have to wonder what else is going on.
Your obsession with link wording, on the other hand, sounds like a dysfunctional obsession to me. Unless you think your readers are reading the link text without reading any of the surrounding text, it doesn't matter much what the link text says (as long as it remains coherent and relevant, of course).
Think about how readers approach a story. They read the headline, which should tell them at least half of what they need to know. It certainly puts things in context. Then they read the lead sentence. I doubt anybody's clicking links before at least getting through those two things (OK, unless they're easily outraged and the headline is "MS disses Linux again!"). By the time they've read the headline and lead, they have enough context to know what to expect when they see the word "here," or "at CNN," or whatever as a link. It doesn't matter a whit nor a tittle if relevant words are used as link text or the phrase "the article" is. None. Not to the reader. It matters to you, so you spend time fixing that problem when you could be spending that time fixing the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes. So it's dysfunctional. It robs you of time you could be using to do things that matter more to the quality and health of your publication.
Sure, it's a matter of opinion, and hey: it's your site. But if you want to be an editor and a professional, and you want your site to be as respected as possible, you'll value the fundamentals of communication over a pet peeve that most of your readers won't notice either way.
Now, all that said, I certainly agree there's almost always a better way to construct the sentence than to have it end "the article," or "here," or whatever, just so you can have something to link against. But to spend time rewording sentences because of the link text while ignoring glaring spelling and grammar mistakes is a poor use of your time.
Again, nice site. I'll be refreshing a dozen times a day either way.
Yeah, you're right of course. I don't talk that way in real life, but like any other specialist, I lapse into the lingo when I get going. But considering this is Slashdot, a favorite of geeks, who are known to use as much jargon and lingo as anybody, I'm only going to own up to the weakness, not apologize for it. It's karma, after all, to get back some of what you give.