Except, of course, for the original UNIX team, which wasn't a thing like this. Thank God. And thank god I don't have to deal with brain-damaging interpersonal relations like those shown here these days. Retirement is good.

Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al. were much nicer people to work with.

Some of us need the Socratic Dialog. I was driven to learn about mathematics. I had real drive and read a LOT. I was smart. Yay me. I managed to mis-learn a heck of a lot that way. It wouldn't have been so bad later on but I mis-learned some basic things. It was unpleasant and time consuming to go back and edit out what I got wrong and I needed someone outside my own head. I couldn't see what's wrong in my own head alone. Sadly, even in college, that kind of teaching isn't available so much but it's golden.

As funny as that is: "I'm Autistic" seems a more powerful social excuse than "I have Aspergers". In any case: most of us whatever-we-ares still need to do our limited best not to be jerks. If we want a social life: Labels are more of a tool to find strategies to be less of an asshole than an excuse for being one. ...and pathetically, getting all pedantic on a funny joke is probably itself an example of assholery. Sorry dmomo.

If you co-ordinate with people in different countries this gets to be pretty annoying. Seattle PST/PDT doesn't change the same days as in, for instance: Victoria, Australia. Which aren't the same days as say, London, England. This makes co-ordination a bit of a drag. The deltas shift around every Spring and Fall: not once, but several times. UT makes it manageable but it still grates.

Further, the few farmers I know couldn't care less.

I liked Archer and much of the series (except the theme) because the ship was so limited. By definition almost every spacefaring race they came across was more technologically advanced and they had to deal with that. He was often ignorant, if well meaning, because humans just hadn't been around that much. He had to clean up some of his own messes (not a common theme for Kirk) and actually live with the Prime Directive; leaving a whole species he could save...but doesn't. He had to deal with the Vulcans, who were not entirely wonderful in Archer's experience AND had to ask for their help.

In short: Archer had to successfully play with the big kids in a toy ship.

OK, many people involved are probably retired or dead by now, but way back in the early eighties there was the ISO networking standard which was to replace TCP/IP and it was HEAVILY pushed by ITU. It had it's charms but man it was heavy.

"ISO will replace TCP/IP in 5 years" was a real thing. After 10 years the phrase became a joke. Now it isn't even that.

Ever wondered why the L in LDAP stands for "Lightweight"? It started as a radically simplified version of ISO directory services.

Almost nobody used ISO (including ITU, which at the time preferred paper over networks internally) but ITU really pushed it over that toy internet thing. They also charged a lot of money to buy the bookshelf-meters of ISO documentation...only available on paper for the most part.

It is probably completely unfair to the ITU of 2012 but I find myself worried whenever they are mentioned in the same breath as "internet".

I believe the Soviets had a "hatch-back" earlier. I expect it makes suiting up quite a bit faster and simpler.

The Internet was "commercialized", in the sense of being opened up to commercial entities and anyone else who was willing to pay the freight, in the early 1980s. Of course, there weren't many such people then, since most people had never heard of the Internet, and the societal infrastructure to make it worthwhile for ordinary folks to use it just wasn't there. The government, by which I mean just about everybody concerned in running the ARPANET and designing and building the nascent Internet, knew it would have to be a self-sustaining commercial enterprise in order to succeed, and that the government just doesn't do that sort of thing, and terrible things happen when it tries. So, a very delicate balancing act was necessary.

The CSNet Project, aka the Computer Science Research Network, was an NSF-funded project run through NCAR to see if it was possible to sell access to a TCP/IP-based Internet, and turn a profit doing it. There were four institutions involved: The University of Wisconsin, The University of Utah, The RAND Corporation, and BBN. The Network Operations Center was at BBN. By special dispensation, CSNet and its users were legally allowed to use the ARPANET as a backbone transit net (had to, it was the only national TCP/IP net around at the time). So, commercial traffic on the ARPANET was allowed, starting in the early 1980s...as long as the traffic came from CSNet. CSNet also came up with its own method of encapsulating TCP/IP packets in X.25 packets, so that people could buy commercial X.25 access (which was available) and run TCP/IP over it, communicating with the ARPANET and the rest of the nascent Internet using gateway machines run by CSNet.

CSNet was a success. Not a huge one, but they proved it could be done, and with all the inefficiencies of a government project, too. At that point, commercial entities were willing to stick a toe in the water, and some of CSNet's customers turned around and became Tier 1 providers. NSFNet followed on, CSNet was rolled into BITNet and eventually rolled up entirely.

In 2009, CSNet was awarded the Jon B. Postel Service Award by the Internet Society.

(Full disclosure: I worked on CSNet almost from the beginning.)

I stuck a much more modern GPU into my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1, but I bet the 32-bit firmware won't be supported by Mountain Lion anyway. A pox on them all. For the first time I'm seriously considering gutting a Windoze box I don't use any more and turning it into a Hackintosh. Anything future editions of OS X don't like about THAT box, I can upgrade away from piecemeal. Including the mobo.

If you are asking these questions (they are good questions) this is likely WAY above your pay grade. You need to find the people that know the regs and tech and get them involved. Now. Slashdot is nice but it's nowhere near sufficient and much posted will be simply wrong if you care about your career even when technically correct (and a lot won't be).

The number of ways to screw this up (assuming it is even allowed) are mind boggling and there are at least three major categories of ways to screw up: Military, Technical and Political.

Please note you may be opening a can of worms not just with the Navy but the country you are berthed at! There are places where encrypted internet traffic is not looked upon kindly.

The trade offs are non trivial. Having on-ship access means devices are more likely to stay on board, which is a very good thing. Installing high speed internet access can make any data leaks go faster, not a good thing. If you do this you need every t crossed and every i dotted.

This must come up a lot and I guarantee the Navy has a stack of rules somewhere. If you are lucky: self-consistent ones.

...and a random thought: Would setting up WiFi be "interesting" in compartmentalized steel ship?

Have you had statistics training? If not, please get a little.

I may be the only mathematician who had this problem (I wasn't all that good) but Statistics threw me for a loop at first (I was briefly fairly competent eventually). Statistics isn't calculus; calculus is a big part of classical statistics.

A pure mathematician hitting statistics cold may have almost as big a problem a student with little mathematics. Mathematics knowledge can actually get in the way at first.

The big breakthrough for me was realizing a random variable isn't much like the variables I was used to. That I had to think differently. Once past that, I was at an advantage again because I had gotten through undergrad calculus and linear algebra but until then, I was MORE confused than the soft science majors around me.

Programs compatible with KeePassX (or ports of KeePassX) exist for pretty much everything: Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Android, iOS but they often have slightly different names (e.g. the program I use on iOS is KyPass) which makes it seem less available than it is.

..and I lose.

I understand the AA Book, "Pass it On" (which I haven't read darn it), mentions Bill W being one of those who did LSD in a research medical setting. Interesting guy. If I have that wrong, PLEASE correct.