And Debian is French for "I can't configure Slackware." :)

I can remember my parents laughing when that happened, and I can remember the news (for some reason, ABC News REALLY sticks in my mind) was REALLY offended and angry.

Which may have been part of the reason my folks were laughing so hard.

Actually, I was agreeing with you. It's unfortunate that the illiterate folks doing the interpreting right now are doing it in a silly, stupid way. And it's actually Congress that's the bigger problem. They're the ones that are writing these laws. I'm surprised more of them aren't challenged than they are.

But then, when they ARE challenged, the appellate courts turn a blind eye to it, so in that case your comment about the courts is on point.

Frankly, I agree with you, but there's that pesky old Eighth Amendment:

"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

Frankly, I don't think that a few days in the stocks (as opposed to 10 years in prison) would be cruel. In this day, however, it would be very "unusual".

And yeah, I know that they weren't using "unusual" in that sense. The problem in this country is that the 8th Amendment has been the most pesky of the amendments to work with. When it first came out, they were trying to ban things like breaking someone on the wheel.

Unfortunately, its got to the point now that people complain that capitol punishment using the same anesthesia used during surgeries is "cruel and unusual", because the condemned might suffer a tiny bit of discomfort somewhere.

I'm sure at this point, Franklin and Jefferson are looking down at us and sadly shaking their heads.

I'd very much like you to use the real Constitution. Either you skimmed my post and misread what I said, or are misreading the Constitution yourself. Start with Article 1, section 8. That section very clearly delineates what CONGRESS can do, and Congress very clearly did not have the authority to give the handouts out the way they were given. That's why Congress appropriated the money and gave it to the President. Unfortunately, Article 2 (which governs the Executive) is not nearly as specific. So, in this instance, everything that was done was "Constitutional" in that Congress didn't appropriate the money and give it directly to everyone with their hat out. They used the Executive branch as a cutout to do it.

However, if you read Article 1, sections 8 and 9, you'll get a sense of where the founding fathers expected the Federal government to take the country. Heck, even read the 10th Amendment while your at it. Arguably, those three items together should produce a much weaker Federal government than we have now. But instead, folks like you, and your Congressmen and -women, have managed to convince youselves (and enough of the Supreme Court) that "[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people", along with "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;" to get a situation where we have people fined under the interstate commerce clause because the grew too much wheat for their own use.

To a certain extent, I'll admit that the example above was a bit of a straw man in that it didn't deal directly with case at hand. But it's an example of the abuse that the Constitution sees on an ongoing basis. And while the bailouts didn't violate the word of the Constitution (due to the unregulation of the executive branch), I maintain they violated the spirit.

Well, I'm glad you think that actually holding the government of the U.S. to the concepts expressed at its founding is "sheer stupidity."

Regardless of what you think (and frankly, regardless of what has happened historically with any of the active parties going back to the Whigs and Democrats), it is not the business of the government to invest, or to make a profit based on any perceived return on investment. There are several reasons for that:

1: It ain't Congress' job. See the Constitution (but we've covered that).
2: Once the government (in whichever branch) starts doing things like this, it's going to, by definition, be picking winners and losers. Let's say Larry Ellison decided to start up a new electric car company. Do we give him money as well? If we do, how far down the chain do we go when Bill Gates and the ghost of Steve Jobs show up with their new companies as well? If not, then we've given one (or more, depending on how far down the chain we got) an unfair advantage over the have-nots at taxpayer expense. Given all the squawking about making sure government is "fair" these days, that seems a bit counterproductive.
3: As romanval said, "traditional investors stayed away from" Musk. Why? Because it was a very risky investment. Great. We got our money back (and some profit to boot). In theory (this was just the press release: Musk hasn't actually paid us back yet). It does not strike me that loaning money to an entity that traditional investors are avoiding is being a good steward of taxpayer dollars.

Frankly, this is like a mother frog-marching her son back into a store to return the candy he stole, and then try to say, "It's all okay now. You got it all back, and here's a dime for your trouble."

Yep. You're entirely correct. And the Federal Government had no business bailing out the banks and the rest, either.

The US Government has no business playing venture capitalist to Elon Musk or anyone else. The power to act give loans to business ventures is NOT in the powers enumerated in Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution. So, they went to the executive branch instead, and managed to get some money from DoE's slush fund. If they want money, they should be doing it the old-fashioned way: going to REAL venture capitalists, selling common or preferred stock, or raiding Elon's piggy bank. I'm happy that they're gonna pay back the loan 5 years early, but that doesn't change the fact that the loan should never have been made in the first place.

China wasn't really that interested in saving Kim Il Sung's hiney back in the '50's. China got involved in the Korean war because 1) they felt they needed a buffer zone between a US-sponsored South Korea and their borders, and, perhaps more to the point, 2) Mao Zedong didn't just hold grudges. He cherished them, and he was still nine kinds of annoyed at the US for backing Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese Civil War. Yeah, Koreans fought during the Chinese Civil War, but Mao was never one to be grateful enough for someone to do something against his interest in thanks.

The irony of this post, along with your signature about DRM, is absolutely staggering.

As you state, we can't come with a technology that effectively prevents unlawful use of a frigging MP3 while not overburdening the lawful licensor thereof, and yet you turn right around and think you can do the EXACT SAME THING with a firearm?

No thanks. I'll keep my 110 year old design.

That comes with caveats as well. The service member CANNOT do so in an official capacity or in uniform (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_Act_of_1939 for more information). Political speech is even more restricted by tradition. Technically, as long as the service member is on his own time, in civvies, and not attempting to attach his/her political work to his/her office or station in the military, everything is okay.

For enlisted service members, that's what generally occurs.

For officers, there's an unwritten code (and, like most unwritten codes, fairly rigorously - if unofficially - enforced) that the officers' corp should be apolitical, to the extent that there's a pretty strict inverse correlation between the grade of officer and the likelihood that they even vote. Civillian control of the military is drummed in from the first to the last, and, for an officer, voting comes uncomfortably close to having the military take control of itself.

All of which is beside the point, of course. PFC Manning's right to free speech stopped when he publicly leaked classified information. If he had problems with the morality of what he was doing, he should have addressed them through the chain of command. If that failed, he should have addressed them through his local congresscritter. If that failed, then maybe he should have realized that he was a PFC in a war zone, and maybe not privy to all of the information required to make an intelligent disposition of the classified data of which he was a custodian.

You are both correct and incorrect. Service members do relinquish SOME constitutional rights. Most notably the right to free speech. In some circumstances the right against double jeopardy does not apply either (you can be tried in a civilian court (or foreign court), and then be tried under the UCMJ for the same offense if the military chain of command feels it is warranted). Granted, USUALLY the chain of command will not press charges against a service member if that service member is already charged with the crime in another jurisdiction.

In this case though, you are correct. PFC Manning has a right under Article 10 to "... inform him of the specific wrong of which he is accused and to try him or to dismiss the charges and release him.", along with an Article 13 right against "... be[ing] subjected to punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against him, nor shall the arrest or confinement imposed upon him be any more rigorous than the circumstances required to insure his presence, but he may be subjected to minor punishment during that period for infractions of discipline."

I do not know PFC Manning, and am unfamiliar with his case other than what I've read and seen in the news. I do not know if the Army is guilty of the allegations PFC Manning has brought or not (unfortunately, a good chunk of the media is demonstrably anti-Military in that they love soldiers, but hate the institution), so expecting evenhanded coverage here is, in my opinion, expecting too much. I hope that the Army is not guilty, as I'd like every 'i' to be dotted and 't' to be crossed when they lock him up for the rest of his life for what he's done.

I actually work (both then and now) with the guy that wrote the first iteration of VA's BCMA system in Topeka back in the mid-'90s. The original was a VA class 3 product that used handheld laser scanners with built-in VT220 LCD screens.

Second System Effect took over, and we ended out going from a handheld laser to a pushcart with a permanently mounted laptop with a laser scanner (as the next version was a Win 3.1/Delphi client that used the Broker). At that point, Central Office got a whiff of it and the rest, as they say, is history.

VA's stuff has always been public domain (since taxpayers pay for the development), and anyone can file a FOIA request for the software. It will be interesting to see how well the current push to truly Open-Source VistA actually works, though.

Um...

I typically don't respond to AC's, but someone may read this and actually decide you know what you're talking about. Apache pilots do NOT use image intensifier night vision devices. They use the TADS (Target Acquisition and Designation System) and PNVS (Pilot's Night Vision System), which are both mounted in turrets in the front of the aircraft. These turrets contain true IR sensors, which display the image in a mini-Heads Up Display known as the monocle, which clips to the right side of the pilot's/CPG's helmet.

Other helicopters in the army's inventory use image intensification, but the Apache doesn't (NB: I'm not sure about the Super Cobras, but IIRC, those are all used by the USMC at this point).

Actually, if you look at a tank in thermals, the hottest thing you're gonna see is the roadwheels. The engine isn't nearly as hot. Those roadwheels get a metric buttload of friction from the tracks (which is the main reason that tank tracks have such a limited life expectancy: you'll get something like 5-10 TIMES the wear out of your car tires than an M1 does with its tracks).

However, tankers prefer to operate head-on with their enemy. All of the armor on a tank is thickest/most protective on the head-on aspect. And, with that aspect, cloaking the heat wouldn't be that bad a problem (and yes, I know the TFA showed it on a Challenger's skirts).