Chinese have developed and are testing the Dong Feng 21D missile, capable of accurately targeting and hitting a moving navy Aircraft Carrier from 2000 miles away. US experts are scared. Since capabilities of this missile are not fully known to US Navy, their strategy to combat it currently is SM-3 interceptor rockets launched from Aegis destroyers and cruisers that escort Aircraft Carriers.

Problem with that is that the reloading capacity of these Aegis equipped ships isn't fast enough to protect against a volley of Dong Feng 21Ds. So they are pretty much screwed. Currently Aircraft Carriers are the most effective way of projecting current US air superiority anywhere in the world. Imagine the implications of a bunch of US carriers being sunk.

This laser defense system may be Navy's answer to this new missile threat.

Solution:

1. Buy 2nd hard drive.
2. Get good at swapping them (can be done in under a minute with practice).
3. Install identical OS/software on both (or just clone the original).
4. Let your work's IT guys do whatever they want with one hard drive (put a big red label saying WORK on it).
5. Use the one labelbled WORK at work, and unlabeled one at home (green label saying HOME is optional).

I agree though, most places won't allow you to connect your personal machine to their network. However again, most places will let you bring in your own machine as long as you don't connect it.

I just had a great experience with Ubisoft DRM a few weeks ago. I decided to replay Farcry 2, which I really didn't play that much when I bought it a year or so ago. I'm military, I move a lot, can't find the stupid booklet with CD key, so being a legitimate customer who BOUGHT the damned game I go on their site and ask for help. Game apparently needs a CD key that activates itself online and requires registration and account creation (which I did create, and logged in with that account...). Their reply summed up is "Send us 5$ + S&H and we'll send you a new CD key. Check/cash/money order will do". My reply was taking 5 minutes to find a 24k cracked .exe file that allowed me to skip through all their BS. That was the last game I buy from Ubisoft. This new DRM scheme is even worse. For me for example, I deploy, I don't have internet everywhere. Which means I can't play an uncracked version of Settlers 7. I've never even played Settlers, I don't know what it is, nor will I ever get exposed to it because I know of their retarded DRM schemes. I imagine that this will turn away a lot of other paying customers from Ubisoft franchises. PS: Farcry 2 sucks, no wonder I played it for an hour when I bought it a year ago.

Common or not I still think a much better experiment would involve a student who happens to look arabic and a professor in the university who happens to have an AK-47. Give AK to the student and let him walk around campus screaming "Allah Akbar" see how many people talking on cell phones would notice that.

Or it's a lot of high school kids who are in the process of getting their college degrees. Army pretty much pays for you to go to college while you are in. Civilian education is worth promotion points to advance in rank in all branches as well. Also count in those enlisted that finished their degrees, often end up becoming officers. Enlisted to officer is a nice pay increase.

The way things are right now we can't communicate directly from Iraq for example to US over satellite due to satellite footprint being too small. So it would go something like this: Iraq >>> Sat1 >>> Kuwait >>> Sat2 >>> Germany >>> Sat3 >>> US (Probably Maryland Fort Meade or Belvoir or something). Each >>> represents a satellite hop adding roughly 50 to 150ms delay. This is not counting in other delay added by other earth based equipment. This makes for a very crappy/laggy WoW connection out here :) Now with these new satellites that they are not just dumb boxes that retransmit everything you send to it back down to earth it will look something like this: Iraq >>> Sat1 >>> Sat2 >>> US. Shorter path with less hops means that my level 80 shaman will have a little better chance of killing your level 80 paladin. Oh and the reason for the hop to Kuwait is Kuwait has actual Step Sites (Big sites with large dishes built into the ground) as opposed to Iraq and Afghanistan being seeded with tactical vehicle mounted crap-ware equipment. So this whole router being built into Intelsat satellite is a very good thing IMHO.