The purpose of basic training is to turn civilians into soldiers (not warriors, soldiers.) Prior to the modern army (as deployed by the Romans), battles were fought by a combination of highly-trained elite units (cavalry, well-trained melee combatants, etc.) and cowed peasants forced into battle at sword point. (As you might imagine, other than as a meat-shield vs. other peasants, this was not particularly useful.)

Starting with the Romans, Western Armies took conscripts (or volunteers) and trained them, first and foremost, to follow orders as a unit without question (as in, not prod them in the back with a spear all the time). At the same time, they were taught basic combat skills. Such soldiers were certainly more effective than cowed peasants, and in many situations more effective than independently trained elite warriors, since they could function as a cohesive team.

Nothing hackers do requires orders to be followed in seconds. Their orders do not involve putting themselves in the way of personal harm, so they don't need indoctrination/brainwashing to work against their natural survival instincts.

Certainly you DO need them to follow orders, and a cohesive unit can be good for morale (this doesn't just apply to the military), but there have to be better ways to do it vs. basic training, and you'll needlessly exclude those with perfectly usable skills unsuited for traditional basic. (I will note that Army Basic, while tough, is not actually that hard to pass, physically. You need to be in decent shape by the end, yes, but not an athlete. It's the mental demands that causes the most flunk-outs.)

I'm sorry, but I don't see a problem here... Amazon has made participation in KU completely optional. If Amazon, say, made KU mandatory in order to have your book available on Kindle at all, there might be something to complain about.

But since there IS no such requirement, if you, Author or Publisher, feel you'll make less money via KU vs. only offering stand-alone copies, then don't participate.

The movie industry hardly seems to be dying despite the fact most movies aren't available on NetFlix streaming.

I totally agree that the Fed's ability to CREATE drug laws is legally tenuous. But that's really irrelevant here. A state has no right of action to force another state to conform their laws to this or that federal law. If the feds have a problem with it, it'll be between the feds and that state. It's simply not a matter for one state to go after another.

While the prosecution will probably have to cough up the goods after a hearing ordering them to do so, I'm pretty sure not dotting the proverbial i's during pre-trial briefing doesn't qualify as "blatantly criminal".

Attn Border States:

The Interstate Commerce Clause. Read up on it, and how it means you can't do jack about what a neighboring state does or does not legalize. The feds certainly can, and do, have anti-drug laws, but states have no jurisdiction over federal law enforcement priorities.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay The Same.

It's my general impression that the cost of any given IT resource has gone down at roughly the same rate the consumption of said resource has risen. This means that IT capabilities rise at the same rate as advances in storage/programming/processing power/etc., but the total complexity (and amount of IT resource to manage that complexity) has stayed roughly level.

I remember fifteen years ago, the "rule of thumb" for managing Enterprise Storage was approx. two administrators per Terabyte. (This was when a terabyte storage array was about the size of a pair of commercial refrigerators and took 4 3-phase power feeds.) Nowadays, the company still has two administrators, but they now have a Petabyte to manage, and their company makes productive use of every last scrap of that Petabyte.

Very true, and that didn't change as a result of judicial action, it took legislative action to fix that.

The major legal concept that makes a corporation different from a jointly-owned partnership is the idea that the corporation exists as a separate entity from the shareholders. This confers benefits, such as insulating shareholders from liability for things an "arms-length" corporation they happen to own shares of might do. But if corps want to retain that benefit, they should not expect to be treated as having the same rights as their shareholders. If they are truly "arms length" then the rights their shareholders do or don't have should be irrelevant when determining the rights of the corporation itself. Certainly the constitution has nothing to do with it, as corporations are not citizens (nor residents) and therefore cannot have constitutional rights in and of themselves. They have only the rights we choose to grant them.

How much rights animals should have is certainly a worthy discussion to have. Do some animals deserve more rights than others? Which ones? How many rights? What makes one animal more "worthy" than another? All interesting questions.

But the law is pretty clear: Animals are property, not people. Under the law, they have no rights. We already grant them the special privilege (vs. say, a car) in that they cannot be treated with gratuitous cruelty (and that's highly flexible... I can do a lot of things to, say, rats, that would get me arrested if I did them to a dog.) But those protections are explicit in the law. If you want to grant animals further rights, the courts are not going to be able to do it, it's going to have to be done through the legislative process.

Simple X-Y robots (that have been around for years) that pick regularly-shaped items off of shelves (usually decent-sized boxes) and drop them onto conveyors are pretty standard, and not that difficult. Picking up objects of an infinite variety of shapes and sizes, many of which are quite small, is something it's not possible for robots (at least not reasonably priced ones) to reliably do at this time.

This system (which brings the shelves to the workers, as workers are MUCH better at plucking small, irregularly-shaped items out of boxes) has fascinating challenges all of it's own, mainly related to traffic control, safety, and where to put the shelves after you are done. (A fixed location is very inefficient, but neither do you want to stick the shelf in the first available space.)

Plenty of companies (including manufacturers) have Amazon storefronts. Some of them use Amazon for fulfillment, some just use Amazon as a storefront. I don't see why MSI can't.

While Amazon's site for computer parts isn't nearly as good as NewEgg's (Amazon's spec search capability is pitiful), I've never had any difficulty telling who the seller for a particular product is. In your case, if it said "Sold By: MSI", you can be pretty sure that's who it was.

As far as not getting a shipping quote until checkout? That's pretty normal for lots of web stores. If you are going to charge for shipping at all, per-item shipping is certainly a choice, but plenty of web retailers do it differently. They can go by actual shipping cost, a rate based on total order size, etc. In Amazon's case, if the item is fulfilled by Amazon, you either go with the free shipping (or prime), or you pay according to their published shipping rate tables. If it's not fulfilled by Amazon, they just do whatever the retailer tells them to.

Personally, I find NewEgg's shipping to be the most confusing: depending on the individual item, shipping is either free (and slow), free (and less slow), per-item, or total-weight. And it's never clear which shipping rates are going to apply if your order contains items in multiple shipping categories.

A tape library arranged in a straight line with one or two picker robots does not, in any way, even resemble the issues involved with an army of independent transport robots picking things from an entire warehouse. Other than the word "robot", the two really don't have anything to do with each other.

A tape library requires lighting speed, and a very high degree of precision. The issues with this system revolve around route planning, collision avoidance, queuing speed, and battery longevity.

But while you are talking about tape libraries: The IBM 3495 library was a conventional tape library for cartridges. However, development problems with the new robotics assembly led to IBM using a general-purpose welding robot, of the sort you'd see on an automobile assembly line. This was, needless to say, an utterly absurd application of such a robot; using a robot with about 8 degrees of motion in a task requiring only 3.

Hilarious true story. During product test, a bug in the x-axis software led to one of the robots driving right through the end of the frame at top speed, falling over, and crashing through the raised tile. This led to a requirement for a dedicated cabinet on each end of the chain having nothing but large hydraulic/spring bumpers of the sort you might see at the bottom of an elevator shaft to keep mutinous robots from trying to crush their human masters.

The French also obsess about silly and ridiculous stuff, they just do it in a different way. It's not all politics and news, that just happens to be what gets shared on social networks.

Look at the following phrase at the end of TFS: "...it does make you wonder how long organizations can afford to continue promoting incompetent bosses in today's very dynamic and competitive business world."

Any editor with a nicely-sharpened red pencil would cross that right out. The first thing that pops into my head was "As opposed to some world in the past that was neither competitive nor dynamic?" When exactly was this, 'cause I don't know when it was. Being hide-bound and slow has never exactly been a recipe for business success, even if other factors meant you didn't go bankrupt right away.

No matter which "side" you are on, you have to admire how well it worked; doing exactly what it was designed to for quite a while before being discovered. I'd put it on a level with the legendary DirectTV "Black Sunday" program.