I apologize for being unable to cite these properly, I've lost my citations and don't care enough to look them up now. Don't take my word for it, do your own research, but a couple of interesting things to think about BEFORE you get entangled with the military:

To apply for the Marine scholarship program costs a large sum of money, in the area of $1,000. You have about a 1-in-3 chance of being awarded a scholarship. The marines actually make money on their scholarship program by giving out less than they take in (according to the Marine Corps themselves). This is akin to going to a casino in order to help pay for college.

A study by Ohio State U found that a very small percentage of veterans--12% of males and 6% of females--learned skills applicable to their non-military careers.

Don't just take the military's propaganda at face value. It is unlikely that a stint will earn you money for college, or give you skills you'll use all your life.

Yes, because doing things differently from how we do them in America (or whichever country you find yourself in) is dumb!

Japan's education system is very different from most Western ones, and often more strict. It's not ours to say what they should/shouldn't do.

BadAnalogyGuy is a troll/tongue-in-cheek comedian (depending on your viewpoint). His analogies are deliberately bad. Look at his post history and you'll see.

Not to mention that what's benevolent to you may be seen as malevolent by others.

Communism born out of world-wide strife and led by insane, megalomaniacal, and/or politically/economically idiotic leaders didn't work.

The good-looking thing is widely noticed, and I've attributed it to the allure of the exotic. Sure, 20 years ago asian women got drooled over cause they were exotic, but now that all (most) of the white nerds have calmed down a little bit, asian women just aren't that exotic.
What is exotic is someone whose race you can't identify, who has characteristics or a mix of characteristics that're completely new to you.

Or solving the cultural/social problems that cause there to be so many criminals in the first place, though obviously that's a harder nut to crack.

Funny, I had one of those myself as a kid, and it lasted a good six years before it got lost in a move. Though perhaps mine was treated somehow?

Believe it or not, but there are other methods of negative reinforcement that don't involve beating your child.

I don't know about that. Something about a chitinous, hairy, fast-moving critter that lurks in dark areas and may or may not bite you seems like a natural fear for a human--at the very least, for a human child, when fears tend to be the most important.

It'll be Sourceforged soon. This is my first large C++ project in a few years, and I'm still in that "parts of my code look like a dog might have made it while drunk, and I am embarrassed to show this to the world" phase. And I'll announce it on rec.games.roguelike.development once things are cleaned up and something approaching a beta is finished.

I'm working on a roguelike that's based on a wilderness map rather than a dungeon map--meaning you can move as far as you want in the four cardinal directions, but not up or down levels. It features regular roguelike play nearly all of the time, but if you come close to another player on the same server, it enters a timed mode that's more similar to Diablo, and lasts as long as the two players are nearby each other.

Oh no! A yeti, floating eyeball, giant ant, dwarf, ooh look a scroll! wight, another floating eyeball, a couple of leprechauns...

Not only are you kept from cheating, it also frees up a lot of resources. When a program isn't storing landscape data, character models, textures, etc. in memory, and using at least some processor time in keeping track of them, it means you can have much more complex AI/more instances of the AI, larger areas in memory at one time, and a wide range of ongoing effects all at once.

Or is popcorn with Sno-Caps thrown in the tastiest snack ever invented?