So if biology is the queen of science, what is the king?

The military never sells war as being "clean" even though modern air warfare is a hell of a lot cleaner than air wars were a few decades ago - the military purpose of precision weapons is to ensure target destruction while minimizing the expenditure of ordinance and the use of resources necessary to deliver the ordinance. A single pilot flying a single aircraft delivering a single 2,000 lb weapon to destroy a single house is much more efficient then using a squadron of aircraft delivering dozens of 2,000 lb weapons to destroy an entire neighborhood that contains the single targeted house. Minimizing collateral damage is a nice but ultimately irrelevant side benefit. Now if you see some civilian pundit or fat commentator on television saying war is "clean" now because of precision weapons and you believed him, don't blame the military - blame your choice of information sources. Anybody with a scintilla of intelligence should know that 2,000 pounds of high explosives detonating in a crowded city, whether precision guided or not, is going to be messy and dangerous. Anybody with a little bit more intelligence should also know that no matter how precise the weapons are, target selection on a hot battlefield is not as precise and there will be mistakes from time to time.

In the conflict envisioned during the Cold War, the purpose of the Soviet Navy was to shut down the sea lanes as much as possible preventing American Reforger (Return of Forces to Germany) operations. The purpose of the American (and other NATO) navies was to keep the sea lanes open as much as possible. This was the exact same scenario that the Allies and Nazi Germany faced in WWII. Hence Germany's and Russia's emphasis on attack submarines and the Allies' and NATO's emphasis on massive fleet formations and projected naval power. So no, the Soviets were not idiots, but they did understand their limitations and their objectives. So does the United States.

With a bit of philosophical reflection on modern human life, I think that's debatable.

Or,

mv --force /political_dissidents /dev/null

An "average user" would have said "Iptables? WTF?? I'm going back to Windows!", not spent two years learning how to make the system work for their needs. I hate to break it to you, but you are smarter than you think.

1. He didn't say they were idiots, he said they were unimaginative and afraid of math and science. BIG difference.

2. His post was not a diatribe, it was a carefully thought out series of arguments and I thought it was remarkably calm.

3. His post was certainly comprehensible, and even with some typos and grammatical errors it was several levels of grammar above a typical internet post. In case you've been living under a rock for the last couple of decades you should know that forum posts don't require the same level of proof-reading as a thesis.

4. FWIW, in 12 years of public schooling (13 including kindergarten) I did not receive much grammar education at all. I didn't realize how little grammar I knew until I began studying a foreign language on my own in earnest. The foreign language classes I took in High School were a joke. I learned FAR more English grammar in one year of studying Spanish on my own than I learned in 12 years of public school. Now whose fault is that?

Bullshit. We always have to teach new people how to do things right and unlearn much of the bullshit they are taught in school. We don't have any "special skills" but then again we also understand what we are doing. It's just a matter of the student picking it up. Some pick it up quick, others take time. We also don't "grade" employees based on whether they learn things quicker than others or not, it's how they perform with what they learn that counts.

Hash is legal there but it ain't 100% legal, like you can't just go walking into a restaurant and start rrolling a joint, they want you to smoke in your home or in certain designated places.

What good is gathering intelligence if it is never shared? Isn't that one thing the 9/11 Commission criticized - the lack of information sharing among the various intelligence bureaus? These analyst's blogs are not open to the public, it's for internal network use like Intellipedia.

Okay, this makes more sense now. We were assuming she was taking real courses and would need a word processor to, for instance, write a report or something. When you are taking such low-level courses as "Introduction To Microsoft Word" I guess I can see how not having Word would be a problem. Then again the simplicity of the coursework here may mean that you could use OO.o for a Word class and the "prof" wouldn't even know.

A few months ago, the company that I work for had several users click on an executable in an email posing as a UPS shipment confirmation and loaded some hard to remove viruses in their workstations. With the viruses running, they couldn't authenticate to AD so they were locked out of doing any work. It took me about 4 hours to get one computer functioning again, but the other three I had up and running in less than an hour since by then I knew exactly how to deal with it (it turned out beep.sys was reloading the virus every reboot). I can't just run down to Best Buy and buy a new computer for the company, they have to be ordered from the approved vendor. If I had simply replaced the computers, we would have had 4 critical employees without computers for 3-4 days, and we would have spent about $2000 instead of 5 hours of my time.

Krytrons. They are used in copiers, lasers, and nuclear weapons. Google it and you'll understand the .gov's concern.