I agree. I've seen one or two of these things before and it usually seems like it'll turn into more of a social playground than a training environment.

I can understand how this might allow med students to practice diagnosing something, but the OPs point about it being more valuable than resuscitating a dummy in real life seems way off. They will never be able to teach something that requires a specific physical action in a simulated world. For instance, you have to actually practice CPR on something that resembles a human in order to truly understand how to do CPR. You have to actually practice placing the defibrillator paddles on a human form, you can't just right click and select "defibrillate."

Now maybe if we had a Matrix-style brain jack...

This is great! I'm building some home automation hardware and wanted something to serve up control software webpages. For a little over a year I've been putting all my computers into sleep when I leave to conserve power and I was dreading going back to the old mode of operation. I considered modding my WRT54G to have a USB port-serial port, then adding a webserver, but this seems like the perfect solution.

Good timing!

It's a trap!

For everybody taking this seriously, this is a joke about an Internet meme.

http://xkcd.com/467/

I was very impressed by my one major experience with the Marines. They were generally a smart, efficient and professional bunch. My experience with them was in Iraq while I was doing coding/engineering stuff for them. I'm active duty Air Force, in the acquisitions career field (project/contract management), so that is where my opinion was coming from.

I guess, part of the problem with the civilian workforce and the contractor workforce is the way our contracting and incentives work out. I've met some S-H civilians, but I've met some plain S ones too, and I've heard the stories. Perhaps if there was more flexibility in the hiring/firing system, more ability to get contractors other than General Dynamics and the major defense contractors, etc, it'd make more sense (even money-wise) to shift these jobs. As it is, a lot of your points and the other points in this thread make good sense.

Hopefully, we'll see a joint cyber-command here soon, getting together the best geeks from all the services and putting them to work building the tools they need to defend/attack computers.

The fitness level of the Marines was awesome, I wish we could bring more of that to the Air Force, and the rest of the country for that matter.

I get the impression that you think this is an awful shame. Do you think we need programmers that take an oath to support and defend the Constitution? Do you think programmers need to maintain the high standards of fitness required by the Marines? I guarantee you that wearing a uniform makes it harder to code (it's much easier in flip flops and shorts).

It's unlikely that those civilians are actually paid $120k, but you're right that they make more than $14k. I think that (in many cases) it's an awful shame to have folks working in an office who are willing and able to run out into a field in the middle of nowhere and setup comms.

Militaries are built to go out and accomplish a mission. Pay somebody else to stay home and accomplish it.

I wish they'd announce when the next gen HTC device is coming out in America. I've been looking forward to purchasing an Android phone through T-Mobile for a little while but hoped to wait for the next gen. Recently I've been thinking that QWERTY keyboard might be nice, especially with the option of a soft-keyboard supposedly coming out in May.

Does anybody know when Google Docs will get working on Android? Surely they're working on it...

That's how most of them were setup at my school too. The library and one of the engineering labs had the printers hooked up directly to the print monitor... While I never messed with the library print monitors, if I remember correctly the engineering lab print monitors had a non-standard port open and serving CUPS or something. I could print using that port, bypassing the print monitor.

It's very possible that he's talking about a University experience at some point in the past, or in some other country. I'm pretty sure coin-op electricity wouldn't fly at any University in America these days.

I was one of the engineering students at my school that got around the printing quota monitors. Not so much because I wanted to print a lot, just because I wanted to figure out how to get around the quota.

It also came in handy for a prank or two.

I've been wondering about the feasibility of creating a new filesystem driver for Windows. I've used a few, but none work well. If a company (TomTom) poured some money into it, I wonder what could get done... Then they wouldn't have to use vfat, they could use ext2 / whatever.

I bet they could have used UDF or something...

So, you install some software which automatically installs a Firefox addon. Then the next time Firefox runs the addon is automatically enabled? I know that's how plugins are installed. It would be nice if third-parties just didn't do this, but it seems like a change in Firefox must be made to prevent this.

Secure systems must include measures to prevent tampering. Installing code that automatically executes is most certainly tampering, and if my estimate of how this works is correct, I'd call this a Firefox security bug.

It may not be worth it, or even possible with current hardware, to prevent all software from installing addons "under the radar." Still, I'd bet that Firefox could incorporate a more secure way of keeping tabs on enabled addons.

With the Firefox plugin feature, Firefox could keep a list of installed plugins, their md5sums and their filenames. It could then hash this list and store the result somewhere. This would make it easy to detect changes to the installed plugins and prevent programs from simply changing the list of installed plugins. Malware could simply change the list then rewrite the hash, but I'm not sure you could ever get around security through obscurity (in this case) with a normal Linux install and consumer hardware. When different software is run as the same user and without any kind of sandboxing, this is what you get.

Maybe Linux distros need to make a change to enable more sandbox-type security. As Linux's popularity increases, I'll bet we see more of this behavior, just as we see so frequently in Windows. All the software already exists to implement this fairly well, and it's not like disk space is an issue anymore.

Microsoft should be making this change in Windows if building a more secure system is one of their goals.