Think I'll fly extra flags today. Because giving more honor to those that put their lives on the line for us... and those that have lost it for us... has the dual benefit of being both a great thing to do... and the right thing to do... and annoying the likes of you. You're right in that too many people focus on the holiday aspect of this day, and not enough on the "memorial" part. You're pretty much wrong about everything else.

Butler came to hate his own country. I can see your attraction to him. And the so-called "business plot"? Even the New York Times... certainly no friend of big business even then... called Butler's whole story a wild fantasy.

Go live elsewhere then. If you think the United States is so bad, why do you stay? Find yourself a nice country somewhere that you think is morally superior, and go there. We'll certainly be happier for it. I don't think you will though, because I think you're the kind of person that's going to bitch and moan about how rotten things are wherever you go. Regardless, go somewhere else and be their problem if you hate it some much here. You're not going to "redeem" us, after all.

There was nothing great about Bill Hicks. He was simply a bitter man that hated everything. What's funny is that he would despise people like you that deify him now that he's dead.

This from the same man that described humanity as "a virus with shoes"

Hicks was no different from any other bi-polar leftwing cynic: swinging wildly from visions of utopia to expressing the deepest hope that a giant meteor would come and end humanity once and for all. Yes, that's some voice in the wilderness you follow.

We already do that to a great extent. The United States in particular gives away more aid in food, medicines, and money than anyone else in history. We do it on a massive scale. And it'll never bring about this utopia you seek. Because humanity is flawed, and despite Gene Roddenberry's own utopian ideals, human nature will never "evolve". It is what it is. The are inescapable consequences to this truth. "For the poor will always be with you", as Jesus put it, is one of them.

We could totally and completely devote our country to doing nothing but feeding and caring for the rest of the world. We could completely stand down our army and become the biggest welfare state anywhere. And it would change nothing. Because there will always be people that, no matter what you do for them, will want to kill you and take what you have, or simply kill you because they don't like what you're thinking. The ramblings of "if we just embraced peace" from people like Hicks are the ramblings of fools. We're not perfect by any means, and there's a lot of room for improvement, but I'll take having a military defend our interests while trying to help others as we can... over simply laying our arms down and hoping for the best. The former is prudent. The latter will end you, with some other guy killing you and taking your stuff.

Why is that 'politically correct' BS always is imposed over strict rationality?

I dunno, some of us have an instinctual aversion to totalitarian social engineering imposed in the name of "strict rationality"... might have something to do with the 20th century.

...it does publish great papers, but does require something of a personal connection to get into... Same for The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Actually, this isn't so true of PNAS any more. One of the previous editors decided in the late 1990s to raise the quality prestige of the journal by accepting more papers through a traditional peer-review route, as opposed to NAS members "communicating" or "contributing" articles (which would often have minimal peer review). This was very successful, and now most articles in PNAS get in through the front door, and they're slowly eliminating the back doors. The overall quality is pretty good - not as high-impact as Science or Nature or some of the top specialty journals, but it's definitely a journal that researchers are excited about publishing in if they can't get into the top tier. The fact that they're not part of Elsevier or one of the other big commercial publishers, and their open-access fee is very reasonable, is an added bonus. (Disclaimer: I've published there, so I'm not entirely unbiased.)

Now, as with any journal, knowing the right people always helps - sadly, this is true at any level.

In other words you are too lazy to learn. If you are an 'end user' who is just getting things done that is acceptable, for you the computer is just a tool. If you are in the IT game you are worse than useless and should be kept from any position of responsibility, certainly never allowed to make any decisions.

This is a fast moving industry, and if you are posting on slashdot odds are you aren't just a random gamer, you work in the business. That means that it is your job to KNOW stuff about NOW, not blindly just keep reinstalling the exact same junk you learned a decade ago. Even on windows. That is what seperates the ones who got into computers because they thought it was a good job and those who see it as a career choice. What have you tried this week? What have you learned this week? These skills become obsolete damned fast, you better be replacing them.

And once you adopt that mindset of constant learning it just makes sense to broaden your knowledge to more than one platform. I have Win7 on this laptop to play games on, Fedora for everything else, Debian on my Mythtv, OpenWRT on my gateway, etc. That forces me to keep up to date on most of the major streams of development. Except for Apple, and frankly I could care less about wearing those chains.

...recent Western culture has shown that a higher percentage of men have become fathers in the past few generations than before that.

As more and more males become adjusted to the instant high of popular culture, we'll just return to the times when a tinier percentage of men were having all the babies.

Marriage is already on a decline, in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies, and the powerful men won't stop spreading their seed.

Does it matter to me if the weak male class doesn't have kids? Hell no -- and they make good employees, too. Maybe better ones.

Correct, the US uses HY 80 rated steel on most of it's subs (rated for 80K lbs per square inch). The Seawolf class used HY 100 rated steel, but was so expensive that, IIRC, we went back to cheaper HY 80 on the Virginia class (which, as a result, can't dive as deep as a Seawolf).

Speaking of the Thresher, after years of investigation... including surveys of the wrecks of both the Thresher and the Scorpion, it's almost certain that neither sank because of reactor problems, but instead sank because of welding quality control in other areas of the boats. IIRC, it's thought that the garbage disposal on one of the subs had a line burst which caused flooding. This was traced back to the contractor during the construction period. The propulsion plants themselves operated exactly as designed.