Read the post again. I never said I can smell it.

...this is Slashdot, so I guess it's ridiculous of me to expect people to read my post before flexing their e-nuts.

Cute. But, I never said I can smell buried crap; I can't.

Some animals can. Which is where reading the part where I said, "to most wildlife" might have helped - of course, then you wouldn't have any material to fire off half-assed attempts at wit.

I have had a couple of camping trips unpleasantly interrupted at night by bears because someone didn't properly bury their shit. And no, neither time had anything to do with food scent; after both ordeals we tracked the bears paths back to someone's badly covered shit the bears had dug up.

Also, how is stopping at the store to pick up some of these bags "great pains in their outdoor activity's preparation and costs"? You're going to have to go to the store for normal supplies, anyway, and the bags are only supposed to cost a few cents, each.

I really don't have a problem with animal crap. It rarely causes problems when camping or hiking. My problem with human crap is that people rarely cover it well enough.

Poorly covered human crap has some annoying side effects not seen with everyday animal poop. First, the slippery splat factor which, while pretty rare even in heavily trafficked areas, is just disgusting; not usually a problem with animal dung unless you really aren't paying attention to where you're going. Second, to most wildlife human crap doesn't smell like it belongs, which can bring some really unwanted visitors.

6-8" isn't a deep enough hole to completely eliminate the smell of human poo, and I'm not advocating for people to crap in biodegradable bags and leave them around. I am advocating for people to crap in biodegradable bags and then bury them 6-8". Sanitary disposal which better masks the scent of human spoor and leaves the ground more fertile - where is the downside?

Speaking as another hiker/camper/climber/yuppie, the idea that you are going to leave poorly covered piles of unsanitized excrement in the same areas others choose to hike/camp/climb, just because you either don't want to spend a few bucks on an environmentally sound product or feel you are above crapping in a bag, is ri-goddamn-diculous.

Someone comes up with a cheap way to make your shit literally not stink (figuratively, anyway), and you aren't going to buy it? Turn in your yuppie ID card. And don't take yourself so seriously - you'll never get out of this alive, anyway.

Most (if not all) SAS controllers also support SATA disks. Dell, HP, and Sun/Oracle all sell 1U/2U x64 servers with 2.5" SATA disks - plain laptop hard drives. Dell and Sun/Oracle in particular are real dicks about bending you over for the upgrade to SAS.

That's a pretty terrible analogy.

The automobile industry supplanted the horse/buggy combo (except in Amish country, I guess) because it introduced a product with greater utility, mass reproducibility, economy of scale, and value than the average horse. On the other hand, a counterfeiter introduces a "product" which has no purpose but a one-way transfer of value to the counterfeiter through the reduction of value of legitimate goods.

How is that not theft? You've been asked that question by three different people and have yet to provide any other answer than a very wordy "because I said so." Come up with a real answer, or quit trolling.

engineering (which has a lot of training but minimal compared to IT)

What kind of engineering, exactly? I'm an old CS guy, and my wife is just finishing her BS in Mechanical (Mechatronic) Engineering. The amount of training - initial and ongoing - she has had and will continue to have as long as she's working is phenomenal.

I'm back in school for medicine, and that is the template for continuing education professions. Well, medicine and law. Anyway, I believe the continuing education needs of IT professions are really pretty lightweight. Unlike doctors (and some engineering fields [and lawyers?]), there are no formal CE requirements for working in IT. It's not like you'll lose your right to practice software engineering if you don't clock 40 hours of CE every year or two.

per program

Um, per program, or perl programmer?

The VA does use exposure therapy, but it's applied on a case-by-case basis. They had me do a trial of pretty simple exposure, watching news reports on Iraq, and we found out right away that it was not a good idea for me. At least, not yet.

I do know some other vets, mostly from the Korea/Vietname era, who have had great success with it. Great success in this case being the ability to be in public for short periods, drive a car, begin relearning self-care, etc. Unfortunately, after a relatively short time, chronic PTSD imposes physical changes in brain chemistry and structure that can't be reversed (yet, fingers crossed). The same is true of repeated, related stressors, and every day on tour is a stressor after an initial trauma, so even for service members who seek help immediately after redeployment, it is ofter too late to do anything more than just mitigate the worst symptoms. At any rate, some relief is better than none.

My wife is in her final semester of a ME degree, specializing in mechatronics. There is simply no apt comparison between mechatronics and computer science - it's a multidisciplinary field consisting of electronic, electrical, computer, control, materials, and mechanical engineering. It would certainly kick my ass, and I'm not dumb; my first career was ("real") systems and software engineering, and I am back in school for a change to emergency medicine.

I think, at this point, recommending mechatronics to someone would be like recommending CS right around the time kt started to think about a followup to Multics. It's a pretty new field, with a lot of exciting work going on, and has decades to go before it becomes as commoditized as CS.

I think it was George Carlin, and I disagree with the idea. What has happened is that the condition has moved from gross recognition into a well-described psychiatric diagnosis. It's the same thing that's happened with pretty much every other disease ever recognized. We no longer call AIDS the "gay disease", so why should different rules apply here?

This is a point which is often brought up when discussing PTSD. It's absolutely true that automobile accidents are the foremost cause of PTSD, but (and IANAPsychiatrist, I'm just repeating information related to me by the ones I've seen) most cases of PTSD from accidents are acute, not chronic. Long-term PTSD seems to be dominated by combat veterans, police officers, coasties, and the like.

Again - just what I've been told. If anyone knows of any studies confirming or disproving this, I would love to read them. I suffer from severe, chronic PTSD, and I am always interested in learning more about it.

This is the truth. The Army provides "Combat Stress" teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, both on a regular rotation to the different patrol bases and FOBs, and after any direct-fire engagement or enemy action resulting in the loss of life. In my experience early in the Iraq war, these teams of councillors(sp?) were visited mostly by support - mechanics, S2 guys, etc. The guys who (arguably) needed it most, because of their repeated exposure to the worst of war, only rarely visited. We needed it most (subjective, I know, but we lived outside the wire while it was still a shooting war) and we blew it off.

Why? Because it was an admission of weakness. Because you didn't want to be labelled "crazy". Because when life gets hard, you put on your game face and complete the mission. Because if you've got an owie, you rub some dirt in it and drive on. Because if you can't sleep, you just have more time to get your shit wired for the next patrol. Because you're there for your battle buddy, and if you've lost friends before you'll be damned if you lose one again. Because if you get a shit sandwich, you just pour on two scoops of hooah and start chewing.

The stigma attached to mental health problems in the military, especially in combat arms, is a big reason PTSD doesn't get diagnosed early, and anything that can help soldiers, Marines, airmen, or sailors avoid slipping through the cracks before they ETS is solid gold.

( I am in no way disparaging the experience of non-combat arms SMs. We can't fight a war without you guys, and believe me when I say we appreciate you, but we'll always have a chip on our shoulder because of the job we do. That's just the way it is.)

I'm with you. It has only been five years for me, but a more objective assessment would have helped me a great deal.

I had a four-year fight with the VA to get service-connected for PTSD. After indisputable records of many, many combat stressors, four years of the VA mental health clinical team regularly putting full, five-axis PTSD diagnoses in their chart notes, and my career devolving from well-paid Solaris systems engineer to unemployment, my claims and appeals were denied by bureaucrats who had never seen me in person.

I did finally get the service connection, but the years of bureaucrats telling me I had no problems made my symptoms worse, and my life is a shambles because of it. This technology could have been a near-literal life-saver for me; I hope it proves to be so for future veterans.

p.s. - if you haven't already, try a symptom management group with the VA. The class I attended was very helpful for me. The seven or eight Vietnam vets and the two WWII vets in the class said the same after the last session.

City streets are a government-provided service, funded by the public and built for the public good. While your streets may very well be shitty, you have legal rights and recourse to make the government un-shitty your streets. No such luck in dealing with a corporation, even when their approach of squeezing every penny out of customers and neglecting to actually support services they are selling causes unreliable access to a bona-fide public service, 911.

AT&T's bottom-line mentality is what is irresponsible here.