Note to copywriters working for the DoD, or trying to appeal to a military audience: "soldier," "sailor," and "airman" are not proper nouns. "Marine" is a proper noun, because it happens to be part of the name of the service, United States Marine Corps. (Or, for that matter, the Royal Marine Corps on which the US version was modeled.) This does not mean that Marines are any more special or heroic or elite than members of the other services. (Marines, of course, will disagree, but that's part of their shtick. The rest of us just smile and nod.) It's an accident of language, no more.

Also not proper nouns: "military" and "veteran." Capitalizing any of these words, when they do not appear at the beginning of a sentence, does not emphasize how Special and Heroic and Elite our Brave Fighting Men And Women are for Making Sacrifices to Defend Our Freedom. It just makes you look illiterate. Now, you may not particularly care about literacy -- you're in the advertising business, after all -- but by God and the Constitution, I fought specially and heroically and elitely to defend your right to speak freely, not to sound like a moron doing so!

Thank You, and Have A Nice Day.

It's a tablet, it's a netbook, it's the best of both!

Not.

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Microsoft seems to be making the mistake that tablets are going to fully replace PCs. They aren't. They, like phones, are going to compliment them. Each is a different tool with different strengths and weaknesses.

There is a reason people don't use iPads and the like for serious spreadsheet and keyboard-based work. They aren't designed for it. Slapping a keyboard in the cover isn't going to change the fact. You can already get keyboards for the iPad and Android tablets.

Yes, they work in limited scenarios, but that doesn't mean people are going to give up full tactile respone and 27" monitors when doing long typing sessions. You think people have issues with carpal tunnel syndrome NOW, wait until they're doing all their typing on one of those things!

Most typical office tasks involving the classic Office suite of products aren't going to change. Those tasks still need to be done, and spreadsheets, word processors and heavy data entry aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

It is the software that drives the hardware. Microsoft knows it. Ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" chant is proof of it. Apple knows it, too. This is why they continuously tout the number of apps available for the iPad. And it is why, despite my dislike of Apple's walled-garden approach, I'm getting an iPad. There are apps there to support private pilots that just don't exist on Android (or Windows 8). LOTS more.

Microsoft pushed tablets for over a decade. They didn't sell. Microsoft's interface and applications don't work well in touch format. Windows Metro may change the OS interface, but I fail to see how data-entry heavy applications like Word and Excel are going to work any better than in the past.

Microsoft will sell a bunch of these, simply because they'll most likely dump a wad of cash into promoting them. But, unless they come up with more compelling reasoning that "you don't have to give up Office" for these, I can't see them passing Android or Apple on the sales charts.

TSP stands for Thrift Savings Plan. This is the 401(k)-equivalent that gov't employees can utilize. It is popular.

In April of 2012, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informed the FRTIB (FEDERAL RETIREMENT THRIFT INVESTMENT BOARD) and Serco that in July of last year, a computer belonging to Serco, a third party service provider used in support of the TSP, was subjected to an unauthorized access incident. This incident resulted in the unauthorized access to the personal information of 123,201 TSP participants and payees. When the TSP learned of the cyber attack, we took immediate steps to investigate and notify our participants and other affected individuals.

The TSP notified their customers on June 1 of 2012 of the hack that occurred on July of 2011, but they only learned about sometime in April of 2012.

So off I go to change my password and what to my wondering eyes should appear? The following constraints:

1. Contain exactly 8 characters
2. Contain both letters and numbers
3. Not match any of your last four passwords
4. Not contain special characters.

And for "security tips" they have:

1. Create words or phrases by combining letters and numbers (golf4fun)
2. Substitute letters for numbers (5 for S or 3 for E)

Screencap of password page: https://plus.google.com/photos/108320036461391153047/albums/5752480492680965105

TSP announcement: https://www.tsp.gov/whatsnew/plan/planNews.shtml#pii

I'm on a password changing kick, using 12-20 character snippets from GRC's Perfect Passwords. Needless to say, TSP choked -- and so did I.

It sounds to me like it is tied directly to an old mainframe account, but there is no excuse for this level of sloppiness.

I thought you all would find it entertaining -- or frightening if this is where you have a chunk of your retirement funds set up.

Yay! I passed the FAA written Private Pilot exam! Now to get some hours in and solo!

I'm on my way to telling the TSA to GFY and still be able to fly somewhere!

Most people have read "1066 and all that: a memorable history of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates" (one of the longest book titles I have ever encountered) and some may have encountered "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody", but these are the exceptions and not the rule. What interesting - but accurateish - takes on history have other Slashdotters encountered?

Dozens of workers at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu, China were arrested this week after a clash with security staff, according to a report.
Taiwan-based Want China Times (WCT) reported that the clash broke out Monday night at a male dormitory for Foxconn workers. Security guards had attempted to stop a thief, when several employees with grudges against the officers forced them away.
The situation rapidly escalated, and up to 1,000 workers eventually joined in.

How long before the Chinese workers form real unions and clash with the gov't? That would be ironic. A communist gov't fighting a union.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2405383,00.asp

In case you missed it, and don't want to wait a bit more than a century to see the next one, NASA took some pictures of the recent transit of Venus across the Sun.

Using the Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in 2010, NASA captured multiple-spectral video and has put together a fantastic montage.

YouTube has a quickie version for the impatient, but if you want to see the really beautiful stuff, check out NASA's Goddard Multimedia site. The videos go up to 1280x720, 59.94 fps and clock in at up to 2 Gb in file size. There are also high definition stills galore.

The videos are all in the public domain. Share and enjoy.

Long rant condensed down for posterity.

Upgrading a working Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 broke the USB wireless and refuses to install the AMD proprietary driver. No, I'm not the only one with this problem. No, I can't use the OSS drivers because this is a flight simulator computer and I need 3D screen updates faster than I can draw them by hand.

Canonical has flat out neutered Linux. The penguin has lost his mojo.

1. The tool to modify the boot config has been removed in 12.04. And for the life of me I can't find the menu.lst file for grub. In order to allow me to boot to a different kernel I had to add a repository and install a 3rd party grub editor.

2. The Gnome terminal has horrible usability. The right, left and bottom borders are 1-pixel thick. You need to be exact with the mouse to grab the edge to expand it. And, to make it more of a challenge, if you move the mouse to the right edge a mini scroll bar pops into existence and takes over.

3. For some reason the linux-headers file is marked as x86/64. I didn't know source code was different for x86 and 64-bit! (Hint: It isn't) Since it is, the modules for fglrx (AMD graphics card) won't rebuild because the source installed doesn't match the running kernel! From what I can tell, this is a 32-bit specific issue. Thus I can't easily fix the graphics driver issue without re-installing the entire OS in 64-bit mode.

Since the software (X-Plane) is 32-bit and all I have is 4 Gb of RAM, I didn't bother.

I understand why at the last three places I worked (all 5,000+ employees) the only Linux in use was Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with Fedora for testing or playing around. QA at Canonical is a fucking joke.

A perpetual problem with scientific software is that much of it starts out as one-time scripts written to analyze a specific piece of data, and then it gets released into the wild as The Way To Analyze This Type Of Data. A closely related problem, which affects repositories of scientific software, is that a kind of informal API develops among the developers and users (who are initially the same people) of packages within the repository, without ever being really documented in a way that makes sense to people who have not been involved in the development. What documentation there is tends be rather ... self-referential, shall we say, and assume a whole lot of background knowledge about how the software works which new users will, in almost all cases, not have.

Not to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I have to say that my years of industry experience in writing end-user applications, and managing a development team made up of people who had all joined the team at different times and had to understand what was going on, taught me a lot about how to write good documentation. Industry programmers could learn a lot from academia about how to make software run better, because scientific users have to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of every processor cycle. Academic programmers could learn a lot from industry about how to write documentation that allows people to use that performance without wanting to tear their hair out.

... I have to admire the Republicans for their ability to stick to their predefined narrative, even when it's the exact opposite of reality. The purpose of CISPA is "creating this monster here in Washington to control what we would see and not see on the Internet." Obama's veto threat is aimed at preventing the creation of such a monster. But that doesn't fit with Boehner's definition of The Way Things Are, so ...

Boehner rebukes W. H. on CISPA veto threat

... because you know, James Lovelock. And somebody lost his temper in an e-mail once. And haha, Al Gore is fat.

Antarctic ice melting from below, reveals satellite

50 States, that is. He is the first of the Republican candidates this year to get on the ballot in all 50 States. Paul was also on the ballots of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa.

While it is expected Mitt Romney will match this easily, neither Rick Santorum nor Newt $50-for-a-snapshot Gingrich can.

While RP has a whelk's chance in a supernova of winning, I believe this is another show of "I have enough resources to hamstring you people if you jerk me around".

Might as well go out with a bang!

http://www.huntingtonnews.net/27524

This is just a quickie only because I can't believe the price.

I've been wanting an M-Disc drive ever since I saw the Slashdot article last August.

I was looking for a replacement DVD-RW drive for one of my machines last week when I saw the LG internal SATA version of this drive on NewEgg for $18!

I've ordered discs separately, with a 10-pack costing me $35. And here is why I think this drive isn't going to sell well (and thus is basically on clearance at NewEgg). Most of the discs I burn are disposable. I need to move something to a non-network computer, or need a start-up disc.

A 10-pack of the "forever" discs should last me, well, forever. There are only 3 or 4 CDs/DVDs that I've burned over the years that I've kept over the last decade. Things like tax records, scans of medical records, family history records, etc.

Once the discs show up next week, I'll burn a disc and post a little more in-depth review. But for now, if you ever wanted something like this, NewEgg can't be beat. This drive is still $80 over at Amazon as of today.

Ron Paul has a snowball's chance in Hell of winning the Republican nomination. But he's fighting hard for those delegates. Here is a little speculation as to why.

The Republican Party doesn't like Ron Paul. They've tried their best to marginalize him in the House, to the point of violating their own rules on committee chairmanships. Everything in the House and Senate is done by seniority. Ron Paul is way up there in service years and seniority, but is consistently given non-prime appointments. So Ron is going to flex a little muscle.

Ron Paul has an ace that Newt, Rick S. nor any other Republican wannabe can play. He can take his base and run Independent. He has the organization and can get the money. The rest do not.

Can he win? No. But that isn't the point. He can most likely pull enough Republican voters to cost Willard victory and send President Obama back for a second term.

That is the muscle he'll flex. Give me a substantial concession or I'll pull the plug on the Republicans for 2012. (Turn your head an cough while I just give these a little squeeze, says the Doctor."

And yes, he'd do it. He sees absolutely no real difference between the two major parties, so Mitt would be no better or worse than Barack.

Of course, this is all idle speculation. I have no knowledge of what Congressman Paul is thinking or planning.

But I do find it interesting that the Libertarian Party website on their 2012 candidates was recently changed to simply this:

Things that make you go "hmm...."

http://www.lp.org/blogs/staff/2012-libertarian-presidential-candidates

This has garnered lots of comments along the lines of "Great, now schoolkids in TN can give answers based on Islam / Buddhism / Hinduism / FSMism and get full credit and there's nothing they can do about it! Be careful what you ask for, fundies! Hah hah hah!"

It does not work that way. Here's how it will work. Religious answers which will be acceptable, and more generally, religious challenges to school authority which will be acceptable, will be those based in Christianity, specifically fundamentalist Protestantism. And students who profess other beliefs will be even more ostracized than they already are. This is what the sponsors of the bill wish to achieve, and if the bill becomes law and survives the inevitable court challenges, it is what they will achieve. To think anything else is naivete of the highest and most dangerous order