Not only did it happen before, but allowing blacks to be fully integrated occurred during a time of war. The Korean. With no effect on the units' ability to fight, other than now the military was promoting the best person for the job and making the job more attractive to a huge number of US citizens.

There is always time to fight for human rights - after all, isn't that what the military is fighting for? Freedom? So the logic people use that "we're at war" is kind of bogus. Of course we are (and we will be for the next 10 years at least) - we're fighting for the freedom of the Iraqis and Afgans. Unless of course we're not, and we're fighting for oil and ego, in which case we probably don't have time for human rights...but I'd like to believe this isn't why the US went to war.

All that said, I would love to see the Navy at a LGBT event singing "In the Navy" by the Village People to try to attract gay recruits. :)

Don't pursue is not part of the old (pre-yesterday) law. It was proposed to be, but was defeated in congress, leaving us with just the don't ask and don't tell parts.

The military has strict rules against personal relationships - including heterosexual ones, since many units have men and women - and obviously having a relationship between two soldiers in battle can cause divided loyalties. The problem won't be any different with gay soldiers, and, fortunately, the regulation can handle it. Sometimes these are ignored (STDs are the Navy's biggest health concern - with straight guys who are hooking up at port with "less than honorable" women), but generally the military has a way of "encouraging" compliance with thier rules.

Part of managing a professional organization is to carry the expectation of professional behavior by the members. If you don't expect them to be professional, they probably won't be. No matter how many big-brother laws you make. I personally think the military - who we trust to only kill the "right" people - can probably handle a gay or two in their unit.

Just like other militaries that allow openly gay soldiers. Such as Israel (which I would hardly call non-professional).

Trash it (well, recycle it anyhow). Nobody wants the junk. Seriously.

The idea that some third world country is grateful to get insecure, unstable, junk computer equipment...well, that's offensive. Rather than shipping your toxic (literally) junk halfway around the world, if you want to support computers in third world countries (hint: more than 802.11b access points, they need things like water and sewage), simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things. If education and improving the world is your goal, I'd recommend Unicef.

Also, 802.11b uses radio, which means it needs to comply with whatever country's laws you send it to. US channels are not necessarily the third world's channels, and it's best to actually work with the government rather than assuming "They should be grateful weather or not is compatible with their usage of radio spectrum - Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"

I've worked for non-profits, the other suggestion here. We had lots of people offer us worthless junk for tax write-off purposes. Apparently our mission was not important enough to have reliable computer equipment (we only fed the hungry, so we apparently, unlike business, didn't need a computer with things like a warranty). Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).

Sure, it should not ignore robots.txt. And if that's true, there's a problem - but I'd like MS's side of the story before assuming that it ignores robots.txt - who knows, maybe the robots.txt is malformed.

I'd also like to know what user agent string is the crawler using.

But all that said, this is not exactly news worthy. I've run large, dynamic internet sites for years. I've had problems with many, many different kinds of crawlers, from many companies (including companies like Google). There's a ton of bots out there that do ignore robots.txt (there was a few hundred bots that scanned the site I used to run, back in 2001, that ignored robots.txt). So it's something a programmer really needs to be ready to deal with.

Yes, these bots are rude, abusive, and inconsiderate of the site owners (go figure - most of the companies running them, the small bots, are pretty much unethical anyhow - anything for a buck). But it's on the internet, just like spam and a bunch of other things we all get annoyed with. You have to deal with it.

I suggest applications like mod_bwshare to even out this type of behavior, traffic shaping at the network layer for known abusers you don't just want to block, etc. Those are the tactics I use.