"Conscription" and "the draft" are synonymous terms. Registering for the Selective Service is not actually conscription. It's registering for the possibility of conscription.

Conscription is an independent topic that has no relevance here, since it can occur whether you're in the militia or not. We already have a regular military into which we can be (and have been) drafted in times of need, and for which every able-bodied male is required to register, so we're just as many steps away from a military police state now as we were before (thankfully, there's more than one step, since you'd have to get rid of stuff like the Posse Comitatus Act first). Whether we're in the militia or not makes no difference.

But, hey, can't resist getting in a "sheeple" dig, I guess?

I don't live in the same areas as "those arrogant egomaniacs [who] achieve stratospheric success", nor do I really have a professional network at all, yet I seem to be doing just fine for myself, despite only being out of grad school (which I dropped out of, incidentally) for about two-and-a-half years. Those things you think matter? I'm living proof that they don't always.

My job doesn't pay extraordinarily well, but it's work I enjoy doing at a company of great people, and the pay is "good enough" (I was offered 50% more at two other companies, a number which was in-line with industry averages for my skill set and experience, but turned them both down for this company, which I liked more). I'm already investing, have a home on which I was able to put 20% down, am tossing extra toward my house payments each month, and have still been able to make somewhat bigger purchases for myself every few months.

I simply live within my means and make sure that the amount out is less than the amount in. I choose carefully what things actually matter to me and then put my money towards those things, while buying budget-friendly items in the categories that I don't care about.

While timing did play a part, I'd suggest it's not so much timing as it is execution that made the biggest difference, in this case.

Android and iOS tablets operate in broadly the same ways as each other and are wildly successful. Windows 8 tablets, which work in much the same way as the Windows tablets that preceded them (i.e. trying to bring the feel of a desktop OS to a tablet form factor), are failing to gain any significant presence in the market, despite having the right timing and loads of marketing. To me, that's a strong indication that the thing holding back tablets prior to iOS and Android arriving was not that people weren't ready for them, but that the tablet concept simply wasn't executed properly.

Same deal with smartphones. Smartphones were around since the '90s, but they only represented an incredibly small portion of the cell phone market. Fast forward a few years, and we get Android and iOS, which, when they first came out, had most of the same features as the smartphones that preceded them, yet they implemented and executed those in a drastically different way that made them much more compelling to users. Blackberry and Palm had the right timing, since they were there from the beginning. What they lacked was proper execution to bring it to the general population.

You're right that there wasn't a market back then, but there wasn't a market because there wasn't a product done right yet. Ideas are cheap. Execution is what matters.

Thanks for the link. To summarize for everyone else, it essentially declares that all able-bodied male US citizens (or men who have declared their intent to become citizens) are automatically members of the militia if they are between 17 and 45 years old, and women are as well if they are US citizens that are members in the National Guard. For vets from the Regular military (i.e. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines), the age limit is extended from 45 to 64.

So, while it doesn't protect the right to bear arms for everyone, it does protect that right for at least a good chunk of the population, which goes a long way towards protecting the purpose of the right.

Whooooosh.

If you just bought a new car and paid $2000 for an upgraded stereo, why aren't you using the Bluetooth connectivity that it doubtless comes with, rather than clumsy dongles that are apparently proprietary?

There is no service or fee associated with this feature. It's not something you subscribe to, any more than you subscribe to Windows or your Sony alarm clock. This product is simply an app that sits on top of Blackberry's QNX operating system that drives a lot of the high-end car stereos, allowing the stereo to interface more easily with iOS products. Nothing more. You're not even locked into using it, since you can exit out to the car manufacturer's QNX interface.

Moreover, suggesting we'd see it in airplanes first makes little sense, given that retrofitting entire fleets costs a HELL of a lot more than adding a new feature to a line of cars that gets updated every single year. Besides which, some fleets actually are testing services where they offer in-flight movies free to iPad users, though that's in no way relevant to this discussion, other than that both involve Apple products.

There are all sorts of reasons why someone might not know far in advance, and if they don't want to micromanage their W-4 they'll end up with a refund at the end of the year.

Using myself as a case study, I'm at the point in my life where a lot of things are changing from year-to-year, and it's not always obvious at the start how things will go. For example, I bought a house this last year, but I didn't know precisely what my budget was going to be for the house at the start of the year, since it depended on a few other things. The year before that, I had a relative die and I donated a sizable chunk of the inheritance to charity, which ended up being a rather nice deduction. I switched to an HSA last year. I began investing a few years ago. I expect I'll be married and have kids within a few more years.

Maybe once things stabilize a bit you shouldn't have an excuse, but I'd rather not go through tax documents multiple times a year to calculate my deduction and adjust my withholding. I have better things to spend my time on. I'd rather just set something reasonable and have an expectation that I'll get back a modest refund whenever I do my taxes at the end of the tax year.

Since when did "not wanting the government to surprise you with unsubstantiated charges for alleged benefits accidentally paid out over 50 years ago" suddenly become an extremist view? Last I checked, that's the sort of thing most people would consider common sense. And even if they are entitled to the money (which I think they should be required to provide evidence of, given how easy it would be to extort money from people if there isn't that requirement), they still should have notified people well in advance so that they could plan for it, rather than springing it on everyone after they had already budgeted around receiving their expected tax refund.

You're arguing against a straw man, I'm afraid, since we're largely on the same page, from what I can tell.

For instance, you're arguing that timezones should be specified, to which I completely agree. You've suggested as well that UTC should be used in cases such as these, and, once again, I strongly agree. Re-read my previous comment, and you should see that I provided no defense for the practice of omitting time zones.

Rather, what I did say was that I believed there were sufficient context clues available to determine what time zone was being used, despite it having not been explicitly stated. By no means am I defending the omission; I'm merely pointing out that despite the omission, a Slashdot reader should have still been capable of determining the time zone. I'm uncertain why anyone would disagree with that assessment, given that the context clues are plainly obvious.

If you're going to re-post someone else's extensive work, A) don't falsely suggest it's "a short list" when it's clearly an exhaustive list, and B) link to your source material so that the original author can get some recognition for their efforts, rather than implicitly claiming it as your own by not providing attribution.

Second, I never suggested he had failed to accomplish anything, though I can see why you might infer that from my post. To clarify, I was attacking the previous poster's notion that Obama was a "dreamer" of sufficient merit to be mentioned in the same breath with the Wright brothers and Woz. To me, that seems like a poor characterization, particularly given his recent track record (none of which is in your copypasta, since your post is outdated by a couple of years), most of which has demonstrated that he's simply more of the same as his predecessor.

Lumping Obama in with Woz and the Wright brothers seems incredibly misguided. Lumping him in with the group making this car though? Probably appropriate.

What about it? As far as I can tell, it's a non sequitur. The one has nothing to do with the other, aside from the fact that they were both car-related things that Steve Jobs is known for. I'm not going to defend everything the guy did or suggest it was all legal (far from it!). I'm merely agreeing with something I once heard reported that I thought was an interesting factoid.

Taken out of context, as it was in the summary, I fully agree that "West Coast" is ambiguous, given the international readership of Slashdot. That's why I made a point of very intentionally establishing context first, by mentioning that it was an LA Times article. I then used an "and" to pair it with the "West Coast" term, indicating that I think you need both to satisfactorily determine the time zone in question, rather than just one or the other.