We bought a 10" RCA tablet for $100 ($50 off normal $150 price on Walmart.com). The screen isn't super responsive sometimes and it can be a little sluggish but it easily does the 90% and comes with a keyboard.

You're thinking of 2nd Lieutenants. They are the fresh faced ones with the gold bar ("butter bar"). Generally by the time one becomes a 1st Lieutenant (after 18 months commissioned time), one has things figured out for the most part. I have held these ranks myself and my first Platoon Sergeant was old enough to be my father had I been a 20 something straight out of college (but I'm prior enlisted and commissioned at the age of 30). Fortunately for both of us, I respected his experience and judgment when I made decisions. Upon promotion to 1LT, he said that I had "graduated from the bottle to the sippy cup". A reminder that I had learned something but I still didn't know it all. I still value the input of NCOs as I have progressed in my career. Any Officer worth his salt would tell you the same. It's an odd relationship in the military but it seems to work.

I don't think you can correlate it to the civilian world. Many Senior NCOs have college degrees if not master's degrees. They have no interest in becoming Officers because it would mean an actual decrease in authority and prestige (despite the increase in pay). Note that all this applies to the Army. YMMV with the other services but I imagine it's similar if not the same.

'whom' is the indirect object of 'give', which is a verb that can take three arguments. Those who understand that don't need to be careful at all as it is natural speech. But nice try, arm chair grammarian.

The idea that Google hands over email addresses from searches is absurd. I've been using my current GMail address for 8 years and barely get any spam. I do plenty of searching with Google too. You simply have to be careful about whom you give your email address.

It's an evolution story: survival of the fittest. Eventually morons leaving their loaded firearms lying around and their progeny will die out.

Everyone knows you can't be racist or sexist against white men.

Besides the Minnesota Vikings' biggest crime is perpetuating the myth of horned helmets.

The key pair is embedded on a chip in your ID. The circuitry does the decryption, so the private key is never exposed to any computer that it is used with. This is also the point of the passphrase/PIN. The chip won't decrypt without it. This is how the smart cards used by DoD function and they double as a military ID (which is supposed to be kept on the owner at all times practical). They really are Idiot Resistant.

The drawback is that most computers these days do not have a smart card reader. USB would be better but doesn't not fit nicely into something as thick as a credit card.

It's a good option for small companies who don't want the administrative overhead of maintaining source code repositories. Yes, it's not hard but it's one more thing when IT is a limited resource. A previous employer of mine (for whom I still do some contract work) moved all their source code to the cloud after I left. I think they should value their product more than that but I understand their logic. Unfortunately, they are not using GitHub but rather a competitor (that also offers SVN as they weren't using git at the time).

All my personal projects, public or private, are self hosted.

If you're bringing up CVS in a conversation about Git, you still have a lot to learn.

Given your mention of Canvas, my guess is you probably work IT in higher ed. I do (as of more recent years) and my general impression is that everyone is stuck on decades old technology that wasn't even that great when it was new (i.e.: COBOL reports, SQR, Pro*C, etc). I don't even know what half the crap is, to be honest. However, I'm doing my damndest to drag us somewhere close to state of the art and I'm the only one who uses revision control at all. The heel dragging and resistance to change is incredibile. In fact, at this university the amount of paper still involved in IT of all things is just stupid.

So, if guns were not generally available people would stop committing suicide and drunk rednecks would stop having accidents?

Actually, we highly prefer them to be mature, educated, and capable of independent and reasoned thought. Why? Because it's not a Good Thing when PVT Joe Snuffy misplaces an encrypted radio set, rolls a million dollar armored vehicle full of troops, or discharges his weapon at the wrong time. Naturally we still get a lot of knuckleheads and young or not, they are probably the most difficult to "mold" and most in need of doing exactly what they are told and nothing more.

Of course, you and those that modded you up are in no danger of finding yourselves anywhere close to a battlefield (or a multitude of infinitely less exciting places), so you wouldn't know that.

I reckon an active shooter standing in a crowd becomes a clear target very quickly as the people around him either 1) get shot and fall down, or 2) run away. There's a lot more than "zero chance".

Though not quite the same situation, my personal anecdote is of an incident a few years back at my local grocery store where a man went on a knifing spree at the exit. He only managed to stab two people before being stopped by a shopper carrying a concealed pistol. Although in this case, the assailant was not shot and surrendered instead. I would say there were many people grateful for the armed shopper that day.

How about we not have a war on inanimate objects and instead focus on preventing mentally disturbed people from committing random acts of violence?

Unfortunately the death rate is sky rocketing because of the plummeting maritime pedestrians.

It is high time the abuse of the Social Security Number ended. SSNs should be used for one thing: Social Security. Using a single "secret number" is an archaic system that for increasing numbers of people is no longer secret. Let's not forget all your other details which are used to identify you but aren't really that secret (your full name, your birthday, etc).

This information is used for identifying a person or proving identity so it's an authentication problem. We can do better! We have public key encryption. The government issues you a key pair (say, embedded into a photo ID, which we all have already) and now you can prove your identity without giving someone an irrevocable secret.

Authentication is also two factor: You have an ID and you know a PIN (or passphrase). If you lose your card, then your identity is not immediately compromised because it is protected by your PIN. This gives you time to have the gov't revoke your old key pair and issue you a new one.

In the case of the credit bureaus (I think we can all safely assume credit isn't going away any time soon), they associate your credit history with your public key and nothing else. If the key is revoked (by the gov't), then they move your file to the new key. No one can take out credit using the old key. In fact, any attempt could be reported to law enforcement.

The entire US Department of Defense has been using a system like this for years now and has by and large done away with things like passwords and hand signatures, especially for the things that matter most.

Is this completely foolproof to prevent someone impersonating you? No, but it is much better than having your SSN and other PII out on some forum where just anyone can use it for nefarious purposes and would be well worth its cost and complexity. The greatest obstacle is the credit bureaus having nothing to gain in actually protecting their "customers'" data because then to whom will they sell credit monitoring?

Does it really matter how long the data is being stored when it's being actively stolen over the course of two fucking years?