But if they give up their "developing country" status, they can't play that card in demanding concessions from developed countries any more.

Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but I can think of a whole lot of ways where broadcasting what I'm thinking could be highly, ah, embarrassing.

Sup dawg, I heard you like radios...

This man speaks truth. If a USAF officer ever wants to make it past Captain, having a master's degree is virtually required. In addition, there are about four mandatory professional development classes between Second Lieutenant and Brigadier General.

Over on the enlisted side, I forget the exact stats, but I believe something like 40-50% of the USAF's Technical Sergeants (about halfway through the enlisted rank structure) have at least a bachelor's degree. A lot of senior NCOs have master's degrees, and some ever have doctorate degrees. They also have their own professional development courses that they have to go through in order to progress.

Claiming the military is composed entirely of "dumb grunts" is a rather ignorant thing to say.

More accurately, until the next major patch (3.3) comes out in a few weeks and adds more achievements...

If you have your privacy settings set correctly, and the site in question has an adequate privacy policy, they're not going to see anything (like the fact that you even are a member of the site) anyway without a court order.

> and explain certain terms and phrases that can be considered jargon for their community.

Excuse me if I don't take their explanations very seriously at this point, especially given that they have a fairly major motive to downplay the leak.

"No, no, officer, you misunderstand. Yes, I said I was going to kill her, but you see, 'kill' is actually jargon in my community that really means I was going to treat her to a nice seafood dinner and then never call her again."

So if I can pay them in guns, any ideas where I can get some exploding AK-47s?

Anonymous is not a group, etc. etc.

Welcome to language, where words take on new meanings all the time.

In related news, USAF Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command, opined today that the US needs *more* nuclear weapons.

http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/11/airforce_chilton_111909w/

The reason we get excited about these things is because, since there's no reason to think that humankind is going to stop fighting wars any time soon, these kinds of precision weapons make things a lot nicer (or, to put it better, a lot less bad) for the civilians who happen to live in the countries involved.

Put it this way, 60 years ago, if we found out an enemy general was going to be staying in a specific hotel on a certain night, we'd have to send up a lot of bombers, many of which might get shot down, and the remainder had a pretty good chance of missing their target and hitting anything in the surrounding residential areas.

Nowadays, if we find an al-Quaida leader is staying in a specific house, we have the capability to take him out - in the middle of a residential area, even - without touching any of the neighboring houses.

War is hell, don't get me wrong, but the less collateral damage we do when conducting it... the better.

Espousing unpopular viewpoints does not automatically make you or the viewpoints correct.

I know it's cool to bash the US on Slashdot, but that's unbelievably far from true.

Contrast that to the Middle East, where it IS accepted practice and few people see anything wrong with it.

A few years ago, as a student, I got to go visit the UN's Geneva campus, sponsored by one of the various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that has a presence at the UN. While I was there, I got to go sit in on one of the meetings regarding the formation of the Human Rights Commission. (Committee? Council? I can't remember.) During the meeting, representatives from one of the other NGOs in attendance started to hand out flyers encouraging action in Darfur.

The representative from Sudan was not pleased with this, to say the least, and demanded they cease distributing the flyers. The NGO in question was informed that they were not to do that, and that they'd be removed if they continued to do so.

The UN is a farce when it comes to doing anything useful about human rights.