There is no "war holiday" in the UK, just ceremonies on 11.11, and also the nearest Sunday. I agree that a holiday does not sound appropriate.

If there are annual commemoration rituals on a day, ipso facto it's a holiday, at least in American usage of that word. For example "Mother's Day" is a holiday, though no businesses shut down or anything. (See, e.g.,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Founding_.28US.29 ) Perhaps UK usage differs?

That issue is not raised in the UK ceremonies; it entirely about remembering the dead

It's meaningless to remember the dead without remembering why they died: a war between exploitative colonial powers to see who would get to fuck over which group of non-industrialized nations. We ought to honor the dead by working towards a world where people don't die and kill for the glory of the ruling class.

That's apparently another job that burns people out fairly quickly, despite the greater amount of non-drill activity.

Perhaps the more tractable question is whether single-purpose nuclear delivery systems can be eliminated.

Unlike, say, submarines and bombers, which have other purposes to keep the crew busy; but can deliver nuclear payloads; or nuclear weapon research and maintenance, which is single-purpose but involves a lot of potentially interesting work in physics, materials engineering, etc. watching over the ICBMs is pure grind.

It's hard to imagine how you could keep morale up when the job is 'nothing but drills, in a hole, until doomsday'; but ICBMs are too expensive(and far too likely to cause itchy trigger fingers) to have a conventional role, and it's not exactly in anyone's interest to edge closer to a situation where missile crews have reason to feel that they are preparing for a job they'll be called upon to perform.

Colossus always struck me as having real leadership potential. Sure, a bit on the utilitarian-evil side; but not overtly sadistic and probably the most competent technocrat ever to take office...

Unfortunately, it's tricky to imagine how you could make the job more attractive (short of a "Yeah, it's hell; but we pay you so much you can retire in two years" type approach, which would markedly increase churn and cost without necessarily much improving the day-to-day quality of the workforce.

It's a fairly shit job (Hey! It's time for work! 99.99% chance says it'll be a long stretch of pure boredom in some unpleasant bunker with a few instances of my superiors fucking with me as part of a 'routine drill'. Failing that, I get to be responsible for a few million deaths!) and doesn't have a terribly large overlap with the most desireable jobs(depending on how similar the UIs are, it may or may not be good practice for other parts of the air force that involve hunching over screens and coordinating stuff; and the people doing maintenance and inspection of ICBMs are probably picking up skills applicable to maintenance and inspection of other weapons systems). It's also hard to hide the fact that, while it isn't quite useless enough to eliminate, it's not exactly a job where you'll feel like you are doing anything of value, which won't help your morale.

How would you make doing a job like that not burn people out?

When I pointed my browser at that story about net anonymity, michaelgeist.ca tried to set about 20 cookies in my browser. Kinda ironic, huh Ren? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

You also need to make Ma and Pa Clueless more or less bulletproof somehow.

The state of security for assorted online services is so dreadful now that much of the defense that a lot of users have likely comes from being essentially worthless, rather than from being difficult to crack.

In the event that anonymity is forbidden, there will be quite a rush to pick up the previously worthless accounts of hapless users to do all your more nefarious communicating through.

That only works if you're not going to later need the smart quotes. It also doesn't work on a cut and paste from a newspaper.

I tried Lo, its lack of full justification was a show stopper. Have they fixed that yet?

The strip club doesn't care who dances as long as money comes in. At least with licensing you can have some sort of auditing.

If licensing is supposed to keep "underage" women from performing at these venues, then you have to send people out to check the licenses. And if you're going to do that, you can check other documents instead of a license. A license introduces nothing additional into the situation.

There's also the obvious interest(above and beyond the privacy considerations anyone would have about information pertaining to them) raised by the fact that sex workers getting murdered by their more unhinged customers is a fair regular occurrence.

If I saw a public records request like that I'd tell the cops to check on the cadaver dog; because it is going to be real busy in the near future.

I'd say that anyone more competent than the youtube comments section can probably afford to snipe at the WSJ editorials now and again.

Shh. It's not polite to say that so bluntly. Please try to use a more acceptable phrase like 'law and order', 'broken windows/quality of life issues' or, if you must, 'need to keep those animals off the streets'...

If it makes you feel any better, odds are pretty decent that the first remote-controlled cybernetic insects to actually hit the field will be military. The fact that they'll be hunter-seekers or looking for targets to sink their autoinjector mandibles into won't improve your situation; but it will make your fear and loathing a great deal more justified!

It's their problem, I'll just link to S/N when I have an entry that might be in a book until they fix it. I'm not going to take extra effort because of someone else's lack of competence.

The problem you or I can't fix is quoting a newspaper in a comment, seeing it's fine in preview, and having /.'s garbage generator shit on it; you can't edit a comment.