lucasjung

>millions of flights have been conducted in the cell phone era without an issue.

First of all, this is not true. I have read aviation safety reports that cite consumer electronics as a contributing factor. Second of all, the fact that no major mishap has been attributed to consumer electronics is probably due in large part to the controls in place. There may be a few individuals who don't care about safety who disregard the rules, but as long as the overwhelming majority of passengers comply, the chances of an incident are dramatically reduced.

Aviators are tought a "swiss cheese" model of mishaps: there are safety precautions in place (equipment, procedures, etc.) to prevent mishaps, which you can visualize as slices of swiss cheese, with holes in them. The holes represent things that prevent a particular precaution from working properly: broken equipment, failure to comply with procedures, etc. A hazard might make it past one precaution by slipping through one of these holes, but then get stopped by some other precaution. A mishap occurs when enough holes line up in a row for a hazard to get all of the way through. In most mishaps, there are three holes that lined up to make the mishap happen. For example, bad weather alone would probably not cause a mishap, nor would a hyrdaulic malfunction alone or a slightly low fuel load alone, but when you get all three together, shit gets out of hand and a mishap can happen. On a flight where nothing else goes wrong, consumer electronics alone are not going to cause a mishap, but on a flight where a couple of other things are going wrong, a single cell phone might be all it takes to tip the scales from "a really bad day for the pilots" to "mishap."

>Please stop the fear mongering on this.

I have personally experienced degradation of safety-critical systems in-flight due to EMI from on-board devices, including devices that are not designed to be transmitters. Nothing you carry onto a plane is going to cause it to explode without warning or go completely out of control (which are a couple of straw-men I have seen in this topic). What can, and does, happen, is that safety-critical avionics don't work right. During critical phases of flight (takeoff, departure, approach, and landing), this could be a contributor to a mishap. If your ILS goes haywire when you're in the middle of shooting an approach in actual IMC, you've got a big problem; likewise, if you can't talk on certain radio frequencies in the terminal area due to noise interference, you've got a problem.

>I put it into WiFi only mode about 10 minutes after takeoff when I can't get a signal anymore and just turn it back on when we are a half hour within landing.

If you have a GSM phone, then allow me to speak for every pilot you have ever been a passenger to: fuck you. No, really: fuck you. Put your GSM phone next to a cheap set of speakers: it will periodically make a noise (especially if you are sending/receiving calls or data, or if your phone is searching for the network). The same thing happens with most ILS receivers and with the ICS on many planes. So first, they'll have to use some other approach rather than ILS, which may not have been their primary plan. Then, imagine trying to run checklists and land a plane with that shit going off in your ears.

Even if you have a CDMA phone, there's a good chance you're interfering with something, making the lives of your pilots that much harder at a time when they can ill afford additional distractions.

Apple only pays for things that they expect good ROI for. I doubt very highly if they would recoup the money spent to get their phones FAA-certified, let alone the opportunity costs compared to spending that money on something else.

I have a BS in EE, a masters in Aeronautical Engineering, and fly for a living. I currently work in developmental flight test. Allow me to explain a couple of reasons why you should turn off your cell phone when flying:

1: It is not a "safety charade." See my other posts about EMC in this topic.

2: Even if you don't care about anybody else's safety, or even your own for that matter, it's still in your own best interest to turn off your phone when you go flying: if you leave your phone on, it will spend the whole flight looking for a signal, and you'll land with a dead battery.

I would hesitate to use the term "dangerous failure modes." The danger generally stems from interference with key avionics during critical phases of flight. For example, if your ILS starts acting wacky right in the middle of an approach in actual IMC, you've got a problem. Likewise, if your radios become unusable due to noise anywhere in the terminal area, you've got a problem. Generally, this sort of thing is caught during the EMC SOFT, which is conducted on deck so that there is no immediate danger. Once the interference has been discovered it's basically a debugging process to figure out what the hell is going in (where is the interference originating, and how is it causing the observed effect). The plane doesn't fly again until it can pass an EMC SOFT.

Usually dangerous interference comes through hard-wired connections: a device that feeds back frequencies into the power system, which then disrupts other devices; or a device that puts noise on an avionics bus, disrupting communications on that bus.

However, sometimes a device, even a device not designed to transmit, can create significant RF interference. For example, a device that has an internal power supply or transformer of some sort. If that power supply is not working right, it might generate an oscillating signal. Maybe even the device itself is tolerant of a certain amount of oscillation in its power and so is not affected by this. Then, there just happens to be a wire inside the device, connected to the power supply that's just the right length to act as an antenna at that frequency, and now you've got an RF transmitter on your aircraft that you didn't expect or want. There are bazzillions of wires in most medium-to-large modern aircraft, and some of them are bound to be the right length to act as an antenna and receive that signal, passing interference into who-knows-what.

That example may sound highly unlikely, but it does happen.

As I said, it's not just the different models, it's the different avionics suites within each model (e.g. two aircraft of the same model might have different radios or different navigation equipment, etc.). For each plane, you would need a few hours of testing, which probably costs more than $1000/hour: you have to pay for the plane, the crew (who have to be qualified to perform this type of testing), the ground support equipment, maintenance support, and any fuel burned during testing (e.g. running the APU to provide power during testing will consume a small but not insignificant quantity of fuel).

EDIT: Almost forgot: After the testing is complete, you have to pay to have a test report written up and published, and then you have to pay for the FAA certification process. Probably not cheap.

They would have to test every model of iphone against not only every model of commercial airliner in operation in the U.S. (including puddle-jumpers), but against every major variation in avionics suite among each model. This testing is not cheap. Even for Apple, it would be prohibitively expensive.

I currently work in developmental flight test. Any time we add a new piece of electronics to an aircraft (or replace an existing piece with a new version), be it a radio, a computer, or test instrumentation, we have to conduct an Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Safety of Flight Test (SOFT) to make sure that the new equipment does not interfere in any way with avionics that are critical to safety of flight. Even if it's something that's not being installed per se (e.g. a laptop for collecting test data), it has to be tested. Sometimes there are exceptions, such as very minor upgrades, especially minor software updates.

Generally everything is designed so as to not interfere, but every once in a while something causes unexpected interference. Sometimes it's because the designers screwed up, sometimes it's because a bespoke item wasn't manufactured to the correct spec, and sometimes it's because of something nobody anticipated.

The problem with consumer electronics is that they haven't gone through this process. None of them should cause interference, but we can't be sure because they were never subjected to comprehensive EMC SOFT. Nor would it really make sense to spend that kind of time and money when we can just mitigate the risk of interference by having everyone turn everything off during critical phases of flight.

I'm saying that any government (possibly not some of the more representative governments, but certainly many of the more oppressive ones) could outlaw for unlicensed RF transmitters any encryption they are incapable of breaking.

As to what NSA, et al are currently capable of, I honestly have no idea, but I'm willing to bet some of their capabilities would be surprising (in both directions, depending on which specific capability you were to look at).

One thing the article didn't mention, which I've been considering in regards to this problem: an RF-based internet alternative would be prone to all sorts of other forms of government interference/monitoring. The U.S. government already has serious resources at its disposal for the purpose of intercepting or jamming RF transmissions. For "intercepting," this includes high-power decryption capabilities, and for "jamming" this includes noise jamming but also spoofing and signal insertion. So even if an RF mesh-network of some sort were to be established, the government would be able to:

1: Know exactly where every transmitter is. This means they can find you in meatspace even more easily than they can on the hard-wired internet.

2: Listen in on your transmissions without all of the legal issues associated with wiretapping. To make sure they can do so, they would probably need to pass a law prohibiting the use of many types of cryptography on unlicensed RF transmissions. Such a law would be much easier to sell to the general public "because the terrorists could be using it to coordinate attacks." If you break this law, expect a knock on your door almost instantly because of #1, above.

When you combine #1 and #2, busting "pirates" becomes trivially easy: somebody sees a "suspicious" file in your transmissions, localizes your transmitter, and a few minutes later you get a knock on your door.

There's other stuff, like injecting false traffic, etc.

Does everyone get this free education, or just some people? I grew up in Germany, where only a small percentage of students got into Gymnasium (as opposed to more trade-oriented high schools), and only a small percentage of them got into universities. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, just that it doesn't line up with the idea of a utopian world where everyone gets a free university education.

>Higher education is free...and you get a stipend to pay for food/rent as long as you keep passing courses.

This actually created a huge problem in Berlin when I was living there. Being in the university system was such a good deal that nobody wanted to leave. Students would change majors every few years to avoid graduating for as long as possible, sitting through courses they didn't really care about because it was easier than graduating and working for a living. Classes became terribly over-crowded: when walking around the campus area, you could tell the students apart from people who just happened to be passing through, because the students all carried folding chairs with them because none of the classrooms had enough seats. To compensate, they had to dramatically reduce the quotas for incoming students, so the students who were loitering in the university system were effectively blocking younger students from ever having the opportunity to get a degree.

I don't know if/how they ever fixed this problem, but I'm sure it's very hard to fix short of putting a hard limit (e.g. 4 or 5 years) on receiving the stipend.

>There is absolutely no incentive to lower costs or improve efficiencies.

This is almost never true with cost-plus contracts. There are normally all sorts of incentives and written into the contract. For example, bonuses might be paid if particular milestones are achieved ahead of schedule, or if certain costs come in below estimates. Also, there are usually limits on reimbursement (typically at the level of components rather than the entire project).

If used properly, these incentives and restrictions make it in the contractor's best interest to control costs. I've never seen them used perfectly, but they're often used reasonably well. I've also seen incentives that were designed so poorly that the contractor just ignored them because they weren't worth the effort to try and earn.

I think the main problem is that cost-plus pricing is often used in circumstances where it is not appropriate. Cost-plus should generally be used only for high-risk projects.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. This is pretty much exactly why the government (mostly DOD) uses cost-plus in some cases.

The pendulum in government acquisitions tends to swing along multiple axis: sometimes the trend is towards the government do the integration itself, sometimes the trend is towards contracting out the integration to a prime contractor; sometimes the trend is towards cost-plus, sometimes the trend is towards firm-fixed price. Even though one way of doing things might be more popular at any given time, the other options are always considered and often used.

The choice of reimbursement structure (which is not just binary "cost-plus" or "fixed-price," but rather an entire continuum) is based on risk projections. If you insist on fixed price for a very risky project, contractors will bake that risk into their bids, pricing everything for the worst-case scenario. If you don't get the worst-case scenario, you'll still end up paying for it, in which case you would have been better off under a cost-plus contract. Conversely, if you pick the lowest bidder and they didn't bid conservatively enough, and then you do get the worst case scenario, they might very well run out of money, in which case you have a choice of either granting them more money or cancelling the project and eating the sunk costs when the contractor collapses. So, for high-risk projects, cost-plus is generally the best way to go.

I think that the swinging of the pendulum is due in part to a succession of over-corrections: "We used cost-plus too much and contractors wasted money! Lets use fixed-price as much as possible from now on!" Followed by "We used fixed-price too much and ended up paying too much on most contracts! Lets use cost-plus as much as possible from now on!" and then back the other way. However, I think that it's also driven by cycles of technological development: a lot of technology tends to go through phases where one generation of equipment really pushes the edge of what's feasible, and then the next generation mostly just matures and refines the technology used in the previous generation (e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 7). During those "pushing the edge" phases, risk is higher and so cost-plus gets used more; during the "mature and refine" phases, risk is lower and so fixed-price gets used more.

I think that's the idea, although you could do it either way:

-Plug it directly into the USB port and use cable+adapter to connect to HDMI.

-Plug it directly into the HDMI port and use cable+adapter to connect to USB.

Actually, a third way would be to use cables on both ends, but that just seems kind of silly.

Exactly. My checking account earns interest, but right now it's paltry because rates are so low. I have automatic transactions in place to move part of each paycheck into various savings and investment vehicles. I have calibrated it so that the only money left in my checking account is money that is budgeted to be spent that month. In my mind, that is what a checking account is for. In order to maximize the amount of money that's working for me instead of just sitting there, I have shaved it pretty close on the amount of money I leave in my checking account.

All of my regular bills (utilities, insurance, internet, cell phone, etc.) go on my credit card, and they are mostly clustered in the first part of the month. By using my credit card, I don't have to take that money out of my bank account until the end of the month, leaving me free to put money into savings and investment earlier in the month. If I were paying those bills directly out of my checking account, I would have to postpone my savings and investment transfers until later in the month to avoid going negative in my checking account.

I use my credit card for almost everything. Before I explain why, it's important to state that I pay my balances in full every month. Anyone who has a hard time doing so should not be using credit cards.

There are three reasons why I use my credit card so much (in order of importance to me):

1: It makes my finances much, much easier to manage. If I were using a debit card, I would have to track every transaction to the penny throughout the month in order to avoid overdrafts. Instead, I just keep a rough mental tally of my expenditures to make sure that I'm not living beyond my means. If my spending happens to get front-loaded on any particular month, no big deal: I've got another paycheck coming before the bill is due at the end of the month. With a debit card, I would have to manage my spending by pay period (twice a month) rather than billing cycle (once a month). Also, if I did happen to spend a little bit too much by accident, I'm looking at a few dollars (possibly even just a few cents) in finance charges, as opposed to a $20+ overdraft fee on every subsequent transaction.

2: I have a rewards credit card, so everything I buy gets me points. If you aren't using a rewards credit card, you're helping to pay for my rewards: the credit card companies generally charge the merchants higher transaction fees for purchases made with rewards cards (otherwise they would lose money on people like me who don't carry a balance). Merchants pass those costs on to customers by raising prices slightly. If you're not using a rewards card, you're paying those higher prices without reaping the benefits. Some merchants charge lower prices for cash, in which case I will usually pay cash because the savings are worth more than the points.

3: Because I pay my balance in full each month, I'm getting an interest-free loan from my bank each month. That money sits in my bank account accruing interest for anywhere from 1 to 30 days (depending on when I make the purchase). With interest rates as low as they currently are, I'm only making a few cents each month this way, but that's still money I wouldn't otherwise have.

How many of these reasons would also apply in Europe? I know that #1 does, but what about #2 and #3? There are plenty of reasons for not using credit cards, which I didn't really get into, but are there reasons that apply in Europe which don't apply in the US?

Keep their number in your phone. Hopefully you'll never need it, but IMO it's the second most important number after 911. Even if you have had a little bit of training, helping a suicidal person can be very bewildering and difficult, so if you find yourself unable to act effectively, you can pull out your phone, dial this number, and get help from an expert. I know people who are alive because somebody else (in one case a complete stranger) had this number in their phone:

1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

If you find yourself dealing with a suicidal person and you don't have this number handy, dial 911.

I receive annual suicide awareness training at work. One of the things they train us to do is, if we suspect someone might be considering suicide, to ask point-blank: "Are you thinking about hurting yourself." Most people will answer honestly, and then you can get them help if they need it. So while discussing suicide in the abstract can trigger others to commit suicide, discussing it directly with a potentially suicidal person is a critical first step in preventing suicide. Also, most people don't know what to do when dealing with someone suicidal, and the only way to teach them is to talk about it, which creates a bit of a catch-22 when you combine that with the Werther effect.

That doesn't mean that marketing types won't try to convince people with more money than sense that hand-harvested produce is somehow superior to robot-harvested produce. Even if nobody believes that BS, some wealthy people will pay more for something just because the knowledge that most people can't afford it makes them feel more exclusive.

>There's a difference between believing someone I know and trust (in this case, my mother), and some random guy on HN (who I don't know at all, much less trust) who claims some of his friends (who I don't even know exist) claimed something.

I can play that game, too:

There's a difference between believing someone I know and trust (in this case, my father, uncle, and the fathers and uncles of close friends), and some random guy on HN (who I don't know at all, much less trust) who claims some sociologist (who I never previously heard of) claimed something.

>You must be joking.

If it's as prevalent as you seem to believe, you should have no problem producing some concrete examples.

>Assuming the source of the initial report of the woman getting spat on was the Coast Guard, this might be true. But there is no indication in the FOX story that this was the case.

Since you clearly missed it the first time, I'll repeat myself:

>The first sentence of the story is: "The Coast Guard in Boston confirmed that a woman in uniform was harrassed and spat upon near Occupy Boston protesters."

>These are certainly some significant data points, if what they told you actually happened. I would be interested to know whether they spoke about this sort of treatment in the 60's and 70's rather than waiting until much later -- when the "antiwar protestors spitting on war vets" image has become so much a part of American folklore.

That looks like a fun game to play. Let me try:

So your mother and aunts told you stories about how they were sexually harrassed in the workplace? These are certainly some interesting data points, if what they told you actually happened. I would be interested to know whether they spoke about this sort of treatment in the 60's and 70's rather than waiting until much later -- when the "male-chauvanist bosses hit on their female employees and passed them over to promote less-qualified men" image has become so much a part of American folklore.

>FOX has a long and sordid history of outright lies and incredibly biased reporting.

Please cite examples of outright lies.

>This particular story doesn't even mention the alleged victim's name. Nor does it mention whether there were any witnesses.

The first sentence of the story is:

"The Coast Guard in Boston confirmed that a woman in uniform was harrassed and spat upon near Occupy Boston protesters."

The Coast Guard would be prohibited by the privacy act from naming the woman.

The only point in dispute is whether or not the individuals responsible were part of Occupy Boston. The spokesperson said that they weren't part of Occupy Boston, which is sort of an interesting variatikn on "No true Scotsman:" Those rowdy protesters who do ugly things? No, no, they're not real* Occupy members."

>So the Americans are evil to impose Karzai's regime on Afghanistan and maintain it by winking at massive election fraud?

That situation is actually much more morally and ethically complex than you seem to imply. Let's consider the alternatives:

1: If the Americans had forced Karzai to concede, or otherwise directly interfered in the election process, it would have destroyed the sovereignty of Afghanistan, and been no more democratic than the election fraud it would have displaced.

2: If the Americans had instead withdrawn support completely from Karzai and allowed his regime to collapse, it would not have been his electoral competitor who would have taken power, it would have been the Taliban. And then there would have been no more elections.

The situation there is far from perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was before, and there is at least a chance of a legitimate election in the future, which brings me to:

>No elections were held in South Vietnam because it was widely known in the American Administration that Ho and co would have won hands down.

After the American withdrawal, once the pressure of communist conquest was (temporarily) alleviated, the South had a legitimate election that rejected communism. Then we allowed them to be conquered by the communist NVA.

>It didn't matter.

Then why did you say it?

>And it was sometimes necessary to destroy Vietnamese villages to save them. Or waterboard and torture people to get information. Or drop an atom bomb on civilians to avoid casualties to your own armies in "honorable" combat against uniform wearing (but stubborn) foes. Use napalm against unarmed villagers. etc etc. Rendition and torture innocents. Protect mercenaries from prosecution etc.

You have mixed up a sampling of real war crimes, apocryphal incidents, and legitimate actions. The fact that war crimes are sometimes committed does not invalidate the principle of proportionality.

>By a strict interpretation, everyone from GW Bush down is a war criminal

Only if waterboarding is torture, a point over which there is considerable disagreement. In my profession, everyone must undergo training which includes being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques, up to and including waterboarding. This training is facilitated by individuals who have been subjected to acts that are indisputably torture. The general consensus among my peers is that waterboarding is not torture. YMMV

>All your examples of "dishonourable" fighting serves to illustrate my point that tactics which are effective against the dominant powers of the day are 'dishonorable' and as soon as they are adopted by them they become "honorable."

You obviously missed this point:

>War should be fought between combatants, and acts that either deliberately target non-combatants, or which deliberately make it harder for your enemy to tell you apart from non-combatants are dishonorable.

So I'll elaborate a little bit more: there is a clear and precise factor that distinguishes what I am calling "honorable" from what I call "dishonorable:" whether or not civilians are respected as illegitimate targets. This is completely independent of who happens to be dominant at the time.

>However if it makes you uncomfortable not to think of the US Army as some kind of paragons of honor and virtue fighting the forces of evil, go right ahead.

I have no such illusions. Even the best-run fighting forces include at least a small but significant minority of individuals who do illegal and/or dishonorable things, both on and off the battlefield. This does not mean that we shouldn't honor and respect the overwhelming majority who serve with professionalism and honor. As I said elsewhere:

>[Your] statement also seems to imply that we should judge the merits of military service on the basis of our political views about the particular wars fought, and on the degree of success achieved. In reality, we judge the merits of military service on the basis that these individuals volunteered to make tremendous sacrifices in service to a noble ideal: our Constitution, and the concept it embodies (a self-governed people).

The fact that some individuals fail to uphold these ideals, or that even some entire wars arguably do not serve them, does not change the fact that all members of our military are sworn to uphold them and that the overwhelming majority do so honorably.

I would hardly describe the article as "content-lite." I think that maybe you are not getting the same lessons from this article that others are.

To me, one of the big take-aways that is relevant to HN is that military service, especially in wartime, gives you experiences that you cannot get anywhere else, and that these experiences prove extremely valuable to veterans in the civilian workplace. The first part (unique experiences) is not surprising, but the second part (military experience translates well to civilian work) is surprising or even counterintuitive to some people.

Another reason why this might seem content-lite to you is actually something you got almost right:

>I suspect what Dan really learned from the war will be discussed only over drinks with his fellow soldiers and not on any public forum.

I get the impression that he would be more than happy to share his most valuable lessons with anyone who asks, but the problem is that anyone who hasn't had military experience will not be able to truly understand the full extent of what he's trying to say. Your statement would be more correct if rephrased as:

"I suspect what Dan learned from the war will only be really discussed over drinks with his fellow soldiers and not on any public forum."

The reason being that those are the only people who can really understand what he's saying.

You actually demonstrate this effect in action:

>It doesn't say anything particularly interesting (imo). Other cultures are different and working with a diverse set of people teaches you tolerance? Well duh.

He learned, from the Afghans, a level of patience that most Americans (westerners in general, really) are simply incapable of comprehending. He tried to express this, but to you it just came across as a minimally interesting anecdote about differences in cultures. You can't really understand what he was trying to say unless you have been through a similar experience. Similarly, the military has a level of racial integration that just doesn't exist in most of the rest of American culture. He probably thought of himself as being comfortable in diverse crowds before he joined the military, and then he found out what it's like to work with a truly diverse group of people. He tried to explain this, but to you it just came across as an obvious point about diversity and tolerance. Again, you can't really understand what he was saying until you've been in immersed that kind of environment.

>If that were true, policemen and firemen, who face danger and death every day, and teachers, who have low pay for doing a very vital social task should be getting equal or greater respect. This was precisely my point.

First of all, police and firemen in the U.S. get a similar level of respect to the military. We just celebrated Veteran's day, so the emphasis was on the military, but at other times the police and firemen get the focus (to see an example of this, spend next September 11th in New York City).

That being said, the military experiences sacrifices (which I and others have mentioned) that police and firefighters don't: frequent moves, long time away from home, loss of rights, etc. Also, while I won't comment on the quantitative difference in danger levels between law enforcement and the military because I don't have statistics handy, I will say that there is an enormous qualitative difference in knowing that you are in proximity to an armed organization that exists for the express purpose of killing you and your fellow citizens.

>The assumption that everyone in the US army joined up to serve the Constitution etc and is universally motivated by "sacrifice" is very suspect.

Every single person who joins the U.S. military swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution, so even those who join for other reasons know what is expected of them.

You talk a lot about motivations for military service, but it's clear that you don't understand the U.S. military. The reality is that almost nobody joins for any single reason. For example, the OP gave a very complex and not entirely clear explanation for why he had joined, which included a certain amount of patriotism. There are certainly some folks who join just to get something they want or need, but the overwhelming majority are motivated at least in part by a genuine desire to serve their nation and the ideals it embodies. Also, I never said that anyone was motivated by sacrifice: I said that they accept sacrifice because they are motivated by other factors. (That being said, there probably are some individuals who really do seek sacrifice as an end unto itself.)

However, even those individuals who joined the military for purely selfish reasons deserve respect and gratitude: they did make sacrifices, and those sacrifices did support our nation.

In regards to your example of Japanese soldiers at Nanking: the moral worth of a cause is not completely subjective. If a person believes that spreading totalitarian rule is noble, that person is morally wrong. On the other hand, preserving a system of self-government is morally good. You can certainly argue that a particular war didn't actually do anything to preserve said system, but our service members don't sign up for particular wars, they sign up to serve our nation.

You contradict yourself here:

>The rest, the vows and the sacred oils and the lady’s favors, they’re silk ribbons tied round the sword.

>What distinguishes him from a mafia hitman is that...he is part of an organization subject to socially approved rules and regulations...

Those "vows" that your fictional character dismisses as "silk ribbons tied round the sword" are the same as the "approved rules and regulations." Furthermore, they are not merely "socially" approved. The rules of war as they exist today have been refined over the course of generations for the purpose of making sure that wars are fought between legitimate combatants, with everyone else left out of the violence to the greatest degree possible.

>And a description like, "individuals volunteered to make tremendous sacrifices in service to a noble ideal" would fit a policeman perfectly, if you happen to assume that every policeman chose his job only because he wanted to dedicate his life to justice and protecting his fellow citizens.

Actually, you don't have to make any such assumption because his motivations don't really matter: whatever his reasons for taking the job, he is making sacrifices, and his work directly contributes to justice and the safety of his fellow citizens. It doesn't matter why he chose to take the job, it only matters that he knowingly accepted the sacrifices that come with it and that he diligently pursues his duties.

>And yet we don't expect random people to thank every policemen "for his service".

First, nobody "expects" anyone to thank veterans. Second, I have seen plenty of people thank policemen, firemen, and teachers for what they do.

I agree to a certain extent that the definition of "noble" is subject to a degree of interpretation. However, I reject the idea that it is completely subjective. You might make an argument either way that fighting to impose representative government is noble or not (or effective or not, etc.), but fighting to impose an oppressive regime is always evil.

In regards to fighting "honorably," you set up a huge strawman there. Note that I never said anything about ambushes or roadside bombs. I agree that particular tactics and weapons are, for the most part, orthogonal to the concept of "fighting honorably." When I talked about "dishonorable combat," I talked about the deliberate targeting of civilians. Other examples might include perfidy (e.g. wearing the enemy's uniforms), fighting without any sort of uniform or identifying insignia, using human shields, or fighting from a protected location (e.g. a sniper in a hospital or church/mosque). War should be fought between combatants, and acts that either deliberately target non-combatants, or which deliberately make it harder for your enemy to tell you apart from non-combatants are dishonorable.

As an aside, I doubt very highly if your notional American militiaman had sworn any oath to the King of England.

The closest you get to actually addressing my statements about honor are your examples of collateral damage. One example (the wedding party) is easy to refute: it was not deliberate. The others all involve the destruction of civilian targets in concert with legitimate military targets. This has always happened, and will always happen, in war. Whether or not a particular instance is justified must be judged by the criterion of proportionality[1]. Interestingly, your examples show how, under this concept, acceptable levels of collateral damage of lowered with the improvement of technology in recent history: in WWII, it was sometimes necessary to destroy entire cities in order to achieve legitimate military goals. Today, precision weapons can take out individual structures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)#Internati...

Yes, that's what I meant. Thank you.

Soldiers have always held worthy adversaries in high regard, respecting them even more highly than allies perceived as unworthy (i.e. allies who are craven, weak, incompetent, etc.). However, the key word there is "worthy." I don't see a lot of vets coming back with a lot of respect for the enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. At most, there is the kind of "respect" you give to a dangerous animal: you know it's not just a "dumb" animal, and you know it could strike at any moment without warning, so you have to keep your guard up without fail. I think a big part of this has to do with how they fight: deliberately targeting civilians in order to create terror, killing entire families who are suspected of American sympathies, etc.

So if the question is:

>Do we (or should we) unequivocally respect anyone who risks their lives for a "higher" cause?

I think there are two criteria to consider:

1: Is the cause truly noble? If not, then we might be able to respect those who risk their lives for it, but we do not revere or praise them.

2: Do they fight honorably? If not, then they do not deserve respect (except maybe for the "dangerous animal" kind of respect I mentioned previously). Even if the cause is noble, those who fight for it only deserve respect if they fight honorably.

Others have stated some of the big reasons why service members get so much respect: they risk their lives for their country, they give up some of their Constitutional rights (although they also gain some extra rights, such as Article 31 rights), and they generally accept lower compensation than they might get on the outside (still true, but not nearly as true as it used to be). I would add another reason: they accept the burden of spending many years of their lives away from home, often missing major life events (weddings, graduations, even the births of their own children), as well as the lesser burden of having to move every 2-3 years.

However, there's another side to your question: why is the U.S. like this, and not other countries?

My initial response would be to turn that around: why don't people in other countries hold military service to a higher level of respect, especially considering that some of the reasons given here for respecting the military (e.g. giving up rights or accepting lower pay) are more applicable in some other countries? Just because the U.S. is unique in this regard, doesn't mean we're the ones doing it wrong. There have been others who felt their nations didn't give their troops enough respect: http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/T...

That being said, I think that there are some important differences in U.S. culture that help to explain the difference. One thing relatively unique about the U.S. is that, unlike most nations, we do not have an ethnic identity. For example, Spaniards can feel united in the fact that they are all Spaniards, the Japanese can feel united in the fact that they are all Japanese, etc. Certainly there are ethnic sub-groups within most countries, but for the most part they have a national identity that is rooted in their shared ancestry, and of a shared history that in almost all cases predates the existing government by centuries. Since the U.S. lacks that, we have a national identity rooted in ideals, embodied specifically in the Constitution. There is certainly a great deal of political disagreement about the specifics of those ideals (and of the meaning of the Constitution), but the generalities are largely agreed upon.

So what does this have to do with the regard in which we hold military service? Well, part of it is an awareness, dating back to our war of independence, that our Constitutionally guaranteed rights were underwritten by a lot of individuals who left their homes to fight for those shared ideals which define us. We literally would never have come to exist as a nation if it were not for our military services.

We also have an ideal in this country of "Citizen Soldiers." It is not unique to the U.S. (I believe it originated in ancient Greece, but please correct me if I'm wrong), but I think that the only nations that currently subscribe strongly to this idea are the U.S. and Israel. It's the idea that our military consists primarily of individuals who are not lifelong military professionals: most of the people in our military serve for only a few years, then go back to being ordinary Americans. This means that we have a lot of veterans spread throughout our society, so that almost everyone knows at least one veteran, raising cultural awareness of military life. Conversely, in a nation where the military consists primarily of individuals who make a lifelong career of it, the military tends to be a little less visible to the bulk of the population because they don't have as many veterans to interact with. There are quite a few nations with universal conscription (everybody has to serve for a few years), but with the exception of Israel, I haven't seen this same "citizen soldier" meme in such nations. I think there are two reasons for this. First, the time spent is very short (usually 2-3 years, as opposed to the minimum enlistment in the U.S., which is 4-5 years) and at the end of that time the choice is "get out, or commit to a life-long career," as opposed to the U.S. military, which allows a succession of short re-enlistments. The second reason is most important: in countries with universal conscription, it's just seen as something everyone has to go through, like high school, and the conscripts are not fully integrated into the military: they are given minimal combat training and are used primarily for drudgework, with more thorough combat training coming only after an individual commits to a professional military career.

Finally, I can't end without addressing this:

>America's wars post WW2 are mostly invasions of random third world countries against underequipped,and mostly untrained enemies, and even then the victory/defeat ratio is very mixed.

Our two biggest wars since WWII were Korea and Vietnam. The Korean war was really a war fought against China on Korean soil. The People's Army is hardly something to sneeze at. The NVA was also a modern army, equipped and trained by the Soviets and the Chinese. Our next-biggest war (and longest, by far) was Iraq, which showed that "underequipped, and mostly untrained enemies" can be quite deadly.

This statement also seems to imply that we should judge the merits of military service on the basis of our political views about the particular wars fought, and on the degree of success achieved. In reality, we judge the merits of military service on the basis that these individuals volunteered to make tremendous sacrifices in service to a noble ideal: our Constitution, and the concept it embodies (a self-governed people).

I have several friends and relatives who personally received this exact treatment. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the Vietnam veterans I personally know did. When my father left the service, he went to work for Pan Am and spent his first few years flying troops between the U.S. and Vietnam, and witnessed this sort of behavior on a regular basis. My sampling is hardly large enough to be representative, but I think that the author of this book is completely out of touch with reality.

Also, FWIW, it apparently still happens today: http://www.myfoxboston.com/dpp/news/local/occupy-boston-prot...

The SEALs do both: they are very picky about who gets into BUD/S, BUD/S weeds out all but the best, and then they continuously train to stay the best.

I actually believe that the USMC's formula for success doesn't scale without limit. They are way smaller than the Army, and I'm sure that's a big part of how they are able to maintain the kind of cohesive culture needed to sustain excellence.

Also, even during the draft era, the Marines had another tool that you didn't consider: attrition. I don't mean the combat kind, I mean washing out the people who can't cut it. It's amazing how thoroughly they can transform a young person, but even so there are some people that just aren't good enough, and the Marine Corps has always been the most willing of all services to get rid of dead weight. So it's not selection vs. training, it's a three-way combination of selection, training, and attrition.

>One problem I have personally is that they're very credential-focused; as a high school and college dropout, I'd be kind of screwed.

The military isn't really picky about where your bachelor's degree comes from (as long as it's credentialed), or what it's in (there are some career fields where they require specific majors, but even some of the more technically-oriented jobs don't have any such requirement). It's really just a check in the block. If you have nothing else on your resume, then you probably need something better than a BA in underwater basket weaving from the University of Pheonix, but in your case you could get exactly that degree and then go to an officer recruiter and leverage the rest of your resume to find an appropriate career field.

If you had a high school diploma, you'd still have lots of good opportunities. Most of the truly technical jobs in the military are performed by enlisted personnel. Some officer jobs are relatively technical (engineers and other acquisition-related career fields, aviators, nuclear power officers, etc.), but all officers are expected to be leaders first and foremost. Even officers in technical-sounding career fields (e.g. cryptology) serve primarily in a leadership/managerial/administrative role, with the enlisted personnel under them performing the hands-on work. In the early days of computers, all of the computer programmers in the Navy were enlisted, because their job title included the phrase "technician," and officers don't serve as technicians, enlisted men do. Lately there has been a realization that some technical jobs require a level of knowledge that most high school graduates simply don't possess, and so the Navy recently established a new officer designator for hackers: http://www.informationwarriors.net/showthread.php?t=623

An interesting thing about this designator is that it still preserves the idea that officers are supposed to be leaders, via a very unique and unusual mechanism: any officer with this designator must, after five years, either change designators or leave the Navy. I'm willing to bet that this requirement is based on the idea that this isn't really a leadership job, and that they're willing to have very junior officers in non-leadership positions, but that after a certain point they want them to shift their focus to leadership like all other officers.