On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.

I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...

Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.

This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. But this immediate rush to blame/defend lets rumors fly around while the truth takes its time.

But where will the US get its supply of mutant kangaroos?

..the sale is criminalized in The Netherlands.

My point is that the court's recent decision suggests the above is an outdated, quaint law which no longer reflects the society that The People wish to have, nor which reflects the new way of thinking about reponsibility and the relationship between demand and the victimizing acts which serve that demand.

Thus, I'm sure the Dutch people will soon be revising their kiddie porn laws. Huh? Whaddya mean, "no?" Why not? ;-)

Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:

"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.

"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.

"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"

"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.

"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.

Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.

Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.

Me: That's hard to believe.

Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.

So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.

I worked in public health informatics for many years, and it's a longstanding tradition to use three letter codes. I think this is the legacy of old systems which provided three or four character fields for codes, but it certainly speeds things along when you're keying data into a spreadsheet.

The tradition isn't formalized, and so it's application is somewhat irregular, but it's important in this case to realize that public health surveillance makes a strong distinction between a *disease* (a disorder of structure or function in an organism like a human) and an *infectious agent* (the parasite, bacterium, virus or prion that transmits the disease). That's because you can find the infectious agent without finding any cases of the disease -- for example in an asymptomatic human, in a disease carrying vector like a mosquito etc. Non-specialist use the same terms to refer to either the disease or the agent (this naming by association is called "metonymy", a word every system designer should be familiar with). So of course the abbreviations experts use seem nonsensical to non-specialists.

The abbreviation "EVD" maskes perfect sense -- it is the *disease* caused by the Ebola Virus (EBOV). A non-specialist uses terms loosely and would say things like "They found Ebloa in Freetown." A specialist wouldn't use such loose language. He'd say "We found a human case of EVD in Freetown," or "We had a serum with a positive titer for EBOV from Freetown."

There's only one thing you need to know about the H-1B program to see that it's not about providing skilled labor *here*: after 6-10 years of working the visa holder is kicked out of the country to make room for a less experienced visa holder.

If H-1B led automatically to a green card, then we'd be keeping the *most* expert workers here, rather than replacing them with less experienced ones. Change that *one* aspect of the program, and it's be an asset to the US as a nation.

I went back and got a degree after 25 years. It's not the *degree*, it's the *education* that matters, and I got a lot more out of the education than my younger peers. This was a new perspective on things I was already familiar with, and I was able to connect a lot of dots I wouldn't have been able to when I was eighteen. I could immediately see what stuff was good for, and I discovered a number of things that would solve commonplace problems I'd seen occur over and over again, even with personnel wit advanced degrees.

Then I got out and discovered that the world didn't want to hire a fifty year old who'd been "out of work" (going to school) for three years....

Look, just install the telescreens in our homes already.

Be patient. We're still in the voluntary phase of that, right now. If enough people say no to the unauditable smartphones and smart TVs, we can eventually get to compulsory installation, but for right now, what's the hurry? People are doing it without even being told to.

Though we'll face some risks from our own governments, it's a relief to know at the Dutch government would have no problem with me selling kiddie porn (as long as it was made in America) to Dutch citizens. "No crime happened here, within our jurisdiction," they'd say.

In fact, the Dutch government should tolerate our new businesses even more than this NSA thing, since the victims (whereever their rights were violated) won't even be Dutch citizens. No Netherlander will have any reason to say their government let them down.

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

Well, you are unlikely to be the *only* one who doesn't think this is all that impressive, because you're unlikely to be the only one who didn't read the article or looking up the device on the company's website.

The robot in question is designed to capture energy from surface waves for propulsion. So it is not a deep submersible, it waddles along a six meters below the surface, tethered to a streamlined surface buoy that it drags along and uses to capture wave energy. Making it through a major storm is a significant proof-of-concept for such a system.

The CPU and GPU are fine, reports on battery life seem to vary, with excellent results if you turn the 'dynamic perspectives' thing off and don't firefly much, tepid ones if you actually try to use those features; but the screen is genuinely disappointing for a phone in that price range, although the internal storage is better than usual.

There's nothing offensively wrong with it; but the price tag befits a device that is genuinely compelling in some way, which it isn't.

Unfortunately, while stock android is undeniably Google's little fiefdom, 'FireOS' is a pretty much point-for-point a replacement of hegemonic Google with hegemonic Amazon (somewhat more, arguably, given the 'silk' browser's extensive default reliance on server-side processing).

It is pretty stark how lousy de-googled Android is; but Amazon isn't really here to change the dynamic of effectively closed control of the platform, just who controls it. Getting models with a 'clean' AOSP firmware(typically excluding drivers; because it seems to be blobs all the way down on the mobile side) isn't hard; but using them is fairly grim.