snerbles

> Military service was one way, not the only way

In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.

Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.

I can hear the TTS reading of the second one in my head. The earnestness just borders on saccharine.

They have to be.

When I worked at an industrial integrator, we had a hard requirement for hard-wired e-stop circuits run by safety relays separate from the PLC. Sometimes we had to deal with dangerous OEM equipment that had software interlocks, and the solution was usually just to power the entire offending device down when someone hit an e-stop or opened a guarding panel.

About a decade ago a rep from Videojet straight up lied to us about their 30W CO2 marking laser having a hardware interlock. We found out when - in true Therac-25 fashion - the laser kept triggering despite the external e-stop being active due to a bug in their HMI touch panel. No one noticed until it eventually burned through the lens cap. In reality the interlock was a separate kit, and they left it out to reduce the cost for their bid to the customer. That whole incident really soured my opinion of them and reminded me of just how bad software "safety" can get.

A coin-op vending machine is anonymous too. As were pay phones.

It's for security, like showing your ID at the airport! Airports have public restrooms, after all.

(/s)

It's important that no one can accidentally sideload misinformation.

No different than checking an ID at the airport, really.

Also seizures, personality changes and myriad forms of cognitive impairment.

The 20 years of US adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan led to many traumatic brain injury cases analyzed by modern medicine, and the chronic symptoms are worse than one might think.

For ipv6 you just start nuking /64s and /48s if they're really rowdy.

A balanced diet of hydrocarbons in your carbohydrates!

IIRC the RA1 skirmish mode AIs always had perfect information and resource multipliers based on difficulty. RA2 did it a little differently with "virtual ore purifiers" added for the high difficulty AIs. I'm sure a similar thing was done for the Tiberian Dawn campaign and the Tiberian Sun multiplayer/skirmish AIs.

OpenRA's bots are a bit more clever, and also don't need to magically see into fog-of-war.

It'll be interesting to see what sort of Chewy-equivalents emerge after the pets.com-analogues collapse.

Most current DGX server assemblies are stacked and compression-fit, much higher density and more amenable to liquid cooling.

https://www.servethehome.com/micron-socamm-memory-powers-nex...

Fallback is posting a confidently wrong answer on another forum to bait for angry correct answers.

Then the law is enforced selectively at the whims of the state.

According to the author it was mostly written on the train with his phone, that could explain the terse naming.

The California legislature is already working on forcing operating systems to attest the age of the user at the account level. See the recent gut-and-amend of AB1043 [0], which was a privacy bill [1] just a few months ago:

> This bill would require, among other things related to age verification on the internet, a covered manufacturer to provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder, as defined, to indicate the birth date, age, or both, of the user of that device for the sole purpose of providing a signal regarding the user’s age bracket to applications available in a covered application store and to provide a developer, as defined, who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a real-time application programming interface regarding whether a user is in any of several age brackets, as prescribed. The bill would define “covered manufacturer” to mean a person who is a manufacturer of a device, an operating system for a device, or a covered application store. The bill would require a developer to request a signal with respect to a particular user from a covered manufacturer when that user requests to download an application.

> This bill would punish noncompliance with a civil penalty to be enforced by the Attorney General, as prescribed.

[0] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/2025 [1] https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3134744

If you want to know more about this lovely bait-and-switch tactic used by the Golden State's legislature, see here: https://californiaglobe.com/uncategorized/gut-and-amend-bill...

Sounds more like a Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline - defined as a set of practices that automate the process of building, testing and deploying software. Or rather, fonts in this case.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of geographically scattered servers that speeds up delivery of web content by being closer to users. Most video/image services use CDNs to efficiently serve up content to users around the world. For example, someone watching Netflix in California will connect to a different server than someone watching the same show in London.

I've seen tab restoration fail after those automatic updates, and even when the tabs do restore that doesn't mean that the actual state is preserved. Work is interrupted, and it's a burger full of crap when it happens.

That's why I always update my browsers manually.

Unless you cross mount points, which uv will helpfully warn about.

A Lieutenant Colonel in an advisory role would have to engage in an astoundingly epic screwup to court-martialed under the UCMJ. They'll be counseled behind closed doors long before getting formally charged with Article 90 or 92.

An Article 88 (or 133!) case involving these guys would be a really funny scandal, though.

Having been through both: AFROTC field training is about half the length of USAF enlisted basic. In fairness to the cadets, they attend training throughout their college years before and after Field Traning - the whole experience is more of a slow long ramp of goofy BS that tries one's patience in ways most enlisted troops won't quite comprehend until they're an experienced NCO. It's also much easier to "just be a number" and muddle through enlisted BMT. Try that in officer training, and you'll be ranked bottom of the class with limited career options.

In terms of physical exertion, enlisted BMT is a bit more intense. Job-specific training might be much more intense, for the handful of AFSCs that see ground combat.

> One was a Marine who made a number of landings and was involved in a lot that “I wish I could forget”.

My grandfather landed at Tarawa. He only talked about privately, it to family members that were in the service.

> The doctor ... his description was that doctors, while they had rank, were largely left alone to their own devices to do what they needed to do. Rank wasn't really relevant to their daily lives.

From my experience, military doctors tend to be doctors that happen to wear a uniform. They already have the skills actually needed by the service (unlike most military jobs, where it's assumed that you know little to nothing of the job), the direct commissioning training is mostly so they can function and fit in that environment.

That also strikes me as odd. When I was deployed, we had plenty of contractors/DOD civilians to handle various technical things, and to help maintain continuity while the rest of us rotated in and out of the theater. They didn't need to be commissioned.

If these execs were experienced engineers that needed to be embedded in a unit in the field, maybe, and definitely not at O-5. Usually these sorts of urgently-needed experts become instructors and teach troops the specific technical skills without the need for being enlisted/commissioned/warrant themselves.

Someone more familiar with the political games inside the Pentagon will better understand this decision.

> [...] the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia [...]

Sometimes known as "fork and knife school". I can't speak specifically for the Army, but a particular personal incident comes to mind.

When I attended AFROTC field training at Maxwell AFB, in a lot of ways it was a fairly typical boot camp experience, with roaming enlisted training instructors ready to very promptly and firmly correct any deviations from standard in a memorably expedient fashion (much less swearing than Full Metal Jacket, as it's the Air Force). One day during this fine summer camp I found myself on the receiving end of one such chewing out from a TI, for walking around the wrong side of a table in the dining facility.

It was in the midst of this comically scathing tirade (something about him threatening to crawl up my nose and living in my nightmares if I dared try it again) that this Technical Sergeant abruptly stopped, wheeled around and was about to tear into another hapless cadet that took the same detour I did. But instead, without a whit of the seething rage he was pouring out just a second before, he calmly patiently explained to this trainee that she was to take a different route, punctuating the instructions with a "right over there, ma'am". It was at that moment that I noticed that she did not have cadet insignia on her lapels, but captain's bars. It turns out she was a proper M.D., fresh from med school, directly commissioned and immediately outranking the sergeant that was giving me the what-for and her polite guidance.

So by Direct Commissioning, it is indeed direct.

O-5 isn't that much power - as a battalion commander, that's leading about 300-1,000 soldiers. They wouldn't necessarily be leading troops, but instead be in advisory roles where the rank might have them be taken a little more seriously by flag officers than if they were commissioned as a company grade officer.

Mine was Hyperoid, which was left as a goodie by the local system builder who assembled my parents' 486:

https://archive.org/details/win3_Hyperoid

When I returned to college ~15 years ago, my main laptop was a ThinkPad T60 running some flavor of Debian. I spent a lot of time with a full-screen terminal open in some sort of green-on-black color scheme.

On several occasions some complete stranger would interrupt me - usually with a shoulder tap - and demand to know what I was doing hacking in the library/student union/etc. Never happened in the engineering buildings, though.

There are rank-and-file members of the western intelligence community that watch/read Zeihan just so they know what their own leadership is ingesting.

> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it.

Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.