I just checked the numbers. The US Army is half the size of China's army, but for some reason 3x more expensive.

Funny enough, US Army uniforms are made in China so part of the US military budget actually ends up financing the Chinese army.

Lately I was reading the Invasion America series by Vaughn Heppner (https://www.goodreads.com/series/106530-invasion-america) and it left me with this idea that it's before a great army is needed that it can be built and organized. In those books a natural disaster left many countries with food shortage so they attack America who happens to have a lot of intact farmland, and the army is not big enough to protect it.

I think the problem at the moment is not the size of the army; it's the lack of innovation in its methods and policies. Basically the army is still following principles enacted in the 1800s by Von Clausewitz; this makes the army a great invasion force but very clumsy in every other aspect of warfare.

And innovation does not mean selling tanks to buy supercomputers for the NSA. It means figuring out better ways to protect the country in the physical and virtual worlds.

You must be one of those people who think police is useless because they never got mugged.

Discredit him? Hilarious. Obama could cut the size of the army that protects the country against foreign invaders and increase the powers of the people who spy on American citizens and the people who voted for him twice would still worship him, call him a savior and think that he is protecting their freedom better than the republicans. His marketing team is as good as Apple's.

Altavista is now powered by Bing so the loop is complete!

1973

No, I'm saying that the Google search box is a bad UI. That's not the same thing.

To get that single textbox you force people to filter their query with keywords that have nothing to do with the topic they are interested into: "loc", "site", "near", etc. That's the equivalent of putting a single buzzer on a multi-tenant building and forcing visitors to buzz multiple times following an arbitrary pattern to reach a specific tenant because the architect believe a single buzzer is prettier.

Using "astroturfing" in this context is not only a weak insult, it is also a contribution to the bastardization of the word, which is unfortunate because like parents who claim that their kid is a victim of cyber-bullying because nobody "Liked" a link he posted on Facebook you are making it a little more difficult to discuss actual occurrences of an undesirable behavior.

When you think that a person has a bias regarding a specific technology or company, please use the proper term, such as "fanboi" or "mvp".

If your grandma lives in the USA, you could use screen sharing to watch Hulu during those 2 free hours per month. Or you could ask her to point her webcam towards the tv screen and watch high-quality American tv (like Keeping Up With the Kardashians) live, as long as she does not change the channel.

For some reason you don't want her to know what you are watching? No problem, here is what you could do

1) ask her to setup Dial-Up networking on her Windows XP machine
2) use dial-up over Skype to access her internet connection
3) gain access to US online services in the comfort of your non-NSA surveilled residence

With those 2 hours of free Skype per month, on dial-up you could probably buffer the first 3 or 4 minutes of a HD tv show episode. FOR FREE!

It happens sometimes but Bing has improved a lot lately. The "search within" feature is interesting. Try to search for Slashdot on both engines you will see the difference.

Also Bing maps is immensely superior for proximity search, and with the business name / location split it's more convenient than Google maps, especially when the business name contains a different city name (like Chicago Joe's).

Google is hell-bent on making a magic textbox that "does everything" but that forces people to use additional keywords like "near" or "loc", which basically transforms the "single textbox" in a poorly implemented command-line. This is bad UX, plain and simple.

I didn't get what he meant by "Whyd"; since according to you I'm on the wrong site I tried whyd.com and I'm even more confused because I have no idea why there is a picture of Moriarty listening to music with unplugged headphones on the home page.

Clearly you never tried submitting a ticket in Office365. Within minutes someone is calling or writing back. Obviously at first it's junior helpdesk people but they actually try to solve the problem and if they can't they escalate themselves.

And that's not only for Fortune 500 companies. You get that same service with a $5/month account. They figured out that a lot of people will turn to Office365 to replace their IT team so they do a good job with support for every customer. Unfortunately this is not the case with other services or products at Microsoft, like Azure, where you have to pay for support.

Meanwhile if you have a problem with Google Docs for Business, you have access to community support and to a public blog where latest udpates about major incidents are posted.

If you ask most employers, those skills come from a MBA not a physics degree. That's how the world works.

There is a very limited field of applications for physics, and most of this kind of work is actually done in countries like India and China where scientists are a dime a dozen.

I'm not saying a scientist in North America is doomed to be unemployed, far from it, but a degree in physics is like a degree in English lit, or art history, or religion studies: a passport to work in an unrelated field, at best. Art history people end up in HR, English lit in marketing or HR, and physics people in IT.

Unless they aim for a lifetime in academia, people who register in those dead end programs should instead get a head start and study in a field where they are likely to find employment. Spending thousands of dollars for a meaningless degree is only a way to scream at the potential employers that you have poor judgement.

So many options: teaching *physics, writing books used by *physics teachers, editing *physics books before they are sold to *physics teachers, and working for Elon Musk, following or followed by a stint at NASA. Real jacks of all trades, those *physics people.

Yes, we all get that in the Mad Men era it was all about white males (non-Jewish) and everything else was second-class. But things have evolved and it's not because of idiots fighting yesterday's battles.

Those people look at existing ratios and make the conclusion that the culture or leadership is somehow wrong. This is bullshit.

Why don't they look at the gender ratio at Curves or at the ABWA. Those places thrive on sexist policy and nobody says a thing, but gay bars catering to a specific subset of the gay community (bears/cubs) and old taverns for men only are the target of public outcry and lawsuits. It's the same with race; who would put "White-owned company" on their website? Total hypocrisy.