Very little useful learning goes on in school. And the top students need time outside of school to visit libraries, pursue intellectual hobbies, do independent reading, and generally do all the academic stuff that will actually matter in their lives later on (and matter to society later on).

By continually extending the school day and the school year, we increasingly ensure that we lock our best and brightest into mediocrity by tying up all of their time in institutionally managed busywork designed to ensure they don't deviate from the mean, which is pretty piss-poor.

I don't think the great-grandparent grasps the degree of specialization the various sub-components of and individuals in the services have.

It's more that I don't see how the Army can have the level of generalisation enough to have an air corps, and an engineering corps, but somehow running their own A-10 division is suddenly out of scope. The division seems arbitrary.

Like I said... you don't grasp the level of specialization. Army engineers (which isn't the same thing as the Corps of Engineers) are specialists in battlefield engineering. The aviation corps (like the tank corps) is specialized to Army needs (and isn't quite the same thing as the TAC air groups of the USAF and USN).

As far as the A-10 goes, yes, the division is somewhat arbitrary and dates back to the Key West Agreement (and subsequent updates) that split the various roles and missions of the armed services up to prevent duplication. Any system is going to have edge cases, and the A-10 is one of them.

Seriously, though, as long as the combined size is about the same and the respective size of the service branches (or "specialty branches") stays the same, all you will have done is to (slightly) rearrange the deck chairs.

Indeed. And your warfare specialists will still be specialists... an infantryman will still be an infantryman, and you'll still need differently trained techs to work on the gas turbines in a tank or on the gas turbines of a tin can or a cruiser. A land based pilot still won't be a carrier based aviator. Etc... etc... You *might* save little bit on the aviation side by only having one school for some of the subsystems on the JSF, or only one basic electronics school, but that's about it.

I don't think the great-grandparent grasps the degree of specialization the various sub-components of and individuals in the services have.

Well, sure, you can pay them to work from home in India, but if the point is to get that work back into your GDP then ...

If you capture over half of the traffic that moves over Tor haven't you for all practical purposes taken control of the network?

That's a lie for good programmers, for mediocre ones, it might be true.

And, NAICT, it only applies to "tech industry" jobs. Every time I see a picture of a team working the Shuttle software, or the flight control software for a major civil airframe, etc... etc... it's older programmers. The "kids" are the minority.

IBM / Rational, Forrester research, GE. I could keep going.

Google uses multiple container systems and a lot of their infrastructure isn't Linux but Docker is a key component of their containerization strategy. If it were even 10+% Docker you talking well in excess of 100m Docker containers in production.

Unless they're contractors who file tax on the foreign country's equivalent of form 1099.

The truth of it is that significant outages are rare considering the size of the Microsoft ecosystem.

The geek posts his rant to Slashdot in the hope that his story will make the front page before service is restored.

Given the first word is "whereas" it's stating the opposite of the post it is replying to.

Same place NFL and NBA get their players: college.

If they come to the US, the US can tax their income. If they work remotely, their home country gets all the income tax.

The brown ones remind Van Halen of a shoddy set builder.

Consoles have long since ceased to be video game players alone.

That is why Xbox Live Status posts a breakdown by services and apps.

It is perfectly possible for activation and content management services to be up while multiplayer gaming is down.

The geek needs to remember that he pays a high price for these attacks.

"The Lizard Squad" is a perfect fit for the popular stereotype of the eternally-adolescent-and-irresponsible geek, aka the malicious practical joker, the hacker. Each hack chips away at the geek's credibility and political effectiveness where he needs it the most.