Bravo, Ecuador. Though I do wonder how long he will be welcome once Wikileaks outs something big about Ecuador.

Someone's been watching too many movies.

I was in Iraq way back when it was still a war. I was an infantryman, and got to do all the fun infantry stuff you do in a shooting war (sarcasm intended). My personal weapon was an M249, but I trained and shot with M-16 variants my whole career. In an 18-month combat tour I only ever saw one M-4 jam. That was due to a double-feed because the FNG private liked to practically bathe his magazines in CLP. It's been a long time since the M-16 was introduced, and for some time the weak link in proper weapon operation has been the individual soldiers own PMCS. If you don't take care of your weapon, no shit, it's going to jam.

Except for calves and forearms, I also never saw anyone shot with a 5.56 round just ignore it and keep fighting. Hit someone anywhere near center mass and they all go down. They also tend not to die right away, and the screaming and gurgling definitely has a negative impact on their buddies' fighting effectiveness.

And the Army does still use M-14s for designated marksmen. They're great weapons in that role, and the round does have more energy at range than the 5.56, but they're heavy, unwieldy, and useless in close combat. Which you can't avoid in Iraq. Still, some did prefer it; to each his own, I suppose. Just don't believe the 'M-16s are plastic toys' myth.

[semantic mode]BTW, the 5.56 is a NATO standard rifle round.[/semantic mode]

I know people keep bringing up Mono, but mod_mono and FastCGI are available for hosting ASP applications outside of Microsoft operating systems.

Just try to talk a test proctor into letting you use your netbook instead of an approved graphing calculator.

But it will probably result in a color-screen nSpire sooner than we might otherwise have seen one. Which is A Good Thing (tm) - some of the graphing uses of my nSpire would be much nicer with color to distinguish the plots.

Read the post again. I never said I can smell it.

...this is Slashdot, so I guess it's ridiculous of me to expect people to read my post before flexing their e-nuts.

Cute. But, I never said I can smell buried crap; I can't.

Some animals can. Which is where reading the part where I said, "to most wildlife" might have helped - of course, then you wouldn't have any material to fire off half-assed attempts at wit.

I have had a couple of camping trips unpleasantly interrupted at night by bears because someone didn't properly bury their shit. And no, neither time had anything to do with food scent; after both ordeals we tracked the bears paths back to someone's badly covered shit the bears had dug up.

Also, how is stopping at the store to pick up some of these bags "great pains in their outdoor activity's preparation and costs"? You're going to have to go to the store for normal supplies, anyway, and the bags are only supposed to cost a few cents, each.

I really don't have a problem with animal crap. It rarely causes problems when camping or hiking. My problem with human crap is that people rarely cover it well enough.

Poorly covered human crap has some annoying side effects not seen with everyday animal poop. First, the slippery splat factor which, while pretty rare even in heavily trafficked areas, is just disgusting; not usually a problem with animal dung unless you really aren't paying attention to where you're going. Second, to most wildlife human crap doesn't smell like it belongs, which can bring some really unwanted visitors.

6-8" isn't a deep enough hole to completely eliminate the smell of human poo, and I'm not advocating for people to crap in biodegradable bags and leave them around. I am advocating for people to crap in biodegradable bags and then bury them 6-8". Sanitary disposal which better masks the scent of human spoor and leaves the ground more fertile - where is the downside?

Speaking as another hiker/camper/climber/yuppie, the idea that you are going to leave poorly covered piles of unsanitized excrement in the same areas others choose to hike/camp/climb, just because you either don't want to spend a few bucks on an environmentally sound product or feel you are above crapping in a bag, is ri-goddamn-diculous.

Someone comes up with a cheap way to make your shit literally not stink (figuratively, anyway), and you aren't going to buy it? Turn in your yuppie ID card. And don't take yourself so seriously - you'll never get out of this alive, anyway.

Most (if not all) SAS controllers also support SATA disks. Dell, HP, and Sun/Oracle all sell 1U/2U x64 servers with 2.5" SATA disks - plain laptop hard drives. Dell and Sun/Oracle in particular are real dicks about bending you over for the upgrade to SAS.

That's a pretty terrible analogy.

The automobile industry supplanted the horse/buggy combo (except in Amish country, I guess) because it introduced a product with greater utility, mass reproducibility, economy of scale, and value than the average horse. On the other hand, a counterfeiter introduces a "product" which has no purpose but a one-way transfer of value to the counterfeiter through the reduction of value of legitimate goods.

How is that not theft? You've been asked that question by three different people and have yet to provide any other answer than a very wordy "because I said so." Come up with a real answer, or quit trolling.

engineering (which has a lot of training but minimal compared to IT)

What kind of engineering, exactly? I'm an old CS guy, and my wife is just finishing her BS in Mechanical (Mechatronic) Engineering. The amount of training - initial and ongoing - she has had and will continue to have as long as she's working is phenomenal.

I'm back in school for medicine, and that is the template for continuing education professions. Well, medicine and law. Anyway, I believe the continuing education needs of IT professions are really pretty lightweight. Unlike doctors (and some engineering fields [and lawyers?]), there are no formal CE requirements for working in IT. It's not like you'll lose your right to practice software engineering if you don't clock 40 hours of CE every year or two.

per program

Um, per program, or perl programmer?

The VA does use exposure therapy, but it's applied on a case-by-case basis. They had me do a trial of pretty simple exposure, watching news reports on Iraq, and we found out right away that it was not a good idea for me. At least, not yet.

I do know some other vets, mostly from the Korea/Vietname era, who have had great success with it. Great success in this case being the ability to be in public for short periods, drive a car, begin relearning self-care, etc. Unfortunately, after a relatively short time, chronic PTSD imposes physical changes in brain chemistry and structure that can't be reversed (yet, fingers crossed). The same is true of repeated, related stressors, and every day on tour is a stressor after an initial trauma, so even for service members who seek help immediately after redeployment, it is ofter too late to do anything more than just mitigate the worst symptoms. At any rate, some relief is better than none.

My wife is in her final semester of a ME degree, specializing in mechatronics. There is simply no apt comparison between mechatronics and computer science - it's a multidisciplinary field consisting of electronic, electrical, computer, control, materials, and mechanical engineering. It would certainly kick my ass, and I'm not dumb; my first career was ("real") systems and software engineering, and I am back in school for a change to emergency medicine.

I think, at this point, recommending mechatronics to someone would be like recommending CS right around the time kt started to think about a followup to Multics. It's a pretty new field, with a lot of exciting work going on, and has decades to go before it becomes as commoditized as CS.