Because he did something which many people believe was a great service to the nation -- and other see as a betrayal. The consequences of that act are of interest to both sides.

I happen to think we as a people are better off for Manning's actions, but I also see a certain recklessness in them. It raises interesting questions about how such a person could have got access to so much sensitive information. Clearly Manning was a deeply alienated young person -- didn't that show up in his (then ... "her" now) background check?

I wonder whether the military ought not be looking to fill these kinds of positions with older workers, people who've lived through the most volatile phases of their lives. It's not like twenty years ago when people over thirty had no knowledge of computers. These days someone who his fifty might well know more about how technology actually works than a twenty year-old.

I don't think being transgendered is a security risk per se, but being wracked with secret fear, uncertainty and shame certainly is. If Manning had been, say, forty years-old; had she already gone through the hormone therapy and surgery, and had come out as a transwoman to her family and associates; then she certainly would have acted differently. Maybe not with different intent, but certainly with more care and deliberation. Older people are less inclined to dramatic gestures, which has its good and bad points, but surely is a good thing in someone entrusted with access to huge volumes of sensitive data.

It would make a lot more sense to deploy, say, ice-capable military ships

These kinds of criticisms seem to assume that Canada is doing this because it plans to base its entire defense on fleets of stealth snowmobiles. Canada is still acquiring new ships, attack aircraft, AFVs and the like. In fact it's spending billions of dollars on such programs. The question is whether spending a few million mre to investigate the potential of a stealth snowmobile makes sense given the marginal contributions such a weapon might make toward the nation's defense.

The Canadian Army already uses snowmobiles, presumably because it finds them practical for the missions they must prepare for and the conditions they must operate in. A few million dollars to test the potential of a quiet snowmobile seems very reasonable to me, and I'm a left-winger with little tolerance for corporate welfare for defense contractors.

A unit cost of $620,000 for a custom-designed, hand-built engineering prototype just doesn't seem all that extravagant to me. That might be too high for a production vehicle, but when you add up the cost of a team of engineers, mechanics and artisans it'd be very easy to spend a million dollars apiece if you're only building two or three.

I was surprised Mississippi even had researchers.

That was a *woman*?

If you're concerned about political correctness making it's way onto Doctor Who, that tardis has long since sailed. It's not only gay-friendly to a fault, it's eco-friendly and anti-militarist. UNIT doesn't count -- our brave boys in berets represent a military reduced to its proper scope: gamely attempting to repulse cheesy alien invaders while someone with more brains figures out what to do about them.

In Dr. Who the military isn't some kind of awesome war machine, it's more like occupational therapy for the incurably dunderheaded.

Those would be the *interesting ones*. The ones who are happy going with the grain pretty soon become part of the grain.

There wasn't a SWAT team involved, just three SUVs and six lightly armed detectives in casual street clothes. If anything that shows that old-fashioned police work is effective.

I see no evidence that the police are immune from epic fails in judging character, or are indeed better at it than anyone else. But they do have a lot of experience with *investigations*, and that counts for something.

If you folks on the right had asked one of us *liberals* back in '08, we'd have told you Obama wasn't one of us. He's essentially what would have been a centrist Republican thirty years ago. These were people, like Bob Dole, that we liberals didn't agree with, but could respect and work with. In fact, "Obamacare" pretty much follows the private sector oriented reform plans of Bob Dole. If Obama were a liberal he'd have gone with single payer, and negotiated tough price concessions with pharmaceutical manufacturers (which is the source of America's runaway heath care spending). You'd have seen banks regulated or broken apart, and criminal investigations in response to the financial crisis of '08, not an attempt to put the system back together again the way it was before the crash.

In fact Obama is very much the kind of president Dole would have been: an economic pragmatist, a diplomatic multilateralist, and an aggressive user of military force where he perceives an imminent threat to national security.

If you want to stop state intrusion into private affairs, you've got to stop being afraid, and convince others around you to stop being afraid. The more fear there is in the political climate, the more impunity the government has in its actions.

Liberals got behind Obama in '08 for the same reason we got behind Obamacare: we backed the best alternative achievable in a climate of fear -- a climate, by the way, that makes the state internal security apparatus feel empowered to do anything it wants in the search for terrorists.

I don't think much of your marketing strategy -- after all, do we have any *evidence* that people want [note 1] to run their desktop windows apps on a tablet? That said, I think it's better than Microsoft's strategy. If you enter a crowded market, you've got to offer something other vendors don't have. Dumping money on advertising in an attempt to generate excitement seems hopeless when people are already divided into two camps; iPad or Android. Plus, you don't want to further confuse customers by giving them too many choices to make in your own line.

For years Jobs showed the industry how to do this: streamlined product introductions that focus on stand out features.

note 1: By "want" I mean "are willing to pay for", not "think is a pretty neat idea". Years in business have taught me the neat ideas are common as muck, but ideas that people pull out their checkbook for are very rare indeed.

Available here.

A quick scan indicates it does not say exactly what news reports are claiming it does. The title gives a hint: "TSA Could Strengthen Monitoring of Allegations of Employee Misconduct".

The media (including /.) has seized on one fact out of the report, that the number of misconduct investigations has increased about 27% (not 26% as reported), and erroneously concluded that the rate of misconduct at the agency has increased by 26% (e.g. the title of this /. piece). This conclusion is not necessarily *wrong*, mind you, but the data in the report simply doesn't give us any basis for drawing it. For one thing, one of the main criticisms of the report is that the TSA is not tracking the *outcome* of investigations. For all we know the increase is the result of a higher rate of investigation, or even the increase in the agency's head count.

The whole point of the report is that the TSA has been so slapdash at tracking investigations of employee misconduct it doesn't know the degree which employees are violating policies or even the law. Consequently nobody really knows whether the rate of misconduct has gone up or down. That's damning enough to be going on with.

School does not exist as a vocational training facility for industry. It should train people to be productive citizens. Over the long term that means fundamental skills. By "fundamental" I don't mean "introductory", I mean skills upon which *other* skills can be built: to analyze, to imagine, to communicate and *to learn*.

In terms of computer skills, students should be used to adjusting to doing things different ways, because changes in the software on the market will force them to do that. They should be able to create a problem-solving strategy and execute it with the tools at hand, rather than let the tools at hand dictate their capabilities.

After all, which Windows should they train to use? Windows XP? Windows 8? By the time they hit the market Windows 10 might be the current MS standard, and people may well be using operating systems targeted to non-desktop form factors as much or more than Windows.

But this is aviation, so the instruments are probably all calibrated in some domain-specific units, like "nautical furlongs per kilojiffy.

We're narrow-minded wimps.

Like anything else, the gustatory qualities of an insect depend on how the insect is prepared. You wouldn't care for a raw shrimp, and you wouldn't care for a raw silkworm either. For that matter you probably wouldn't like raw chicken.

Crunchy ants straight from the mound is a taste many people might never acquire, but it doesn't mean you can't use your culinary skills to transform them into something else. For example there are forest people in India who grind stinging ants into a paste and make it into a spicy chutney. You wouldn't know that you were eating insects if you weren't told. For that matter the crunch of a big ant might be just the thing in a confection where you'd otherwise use puffed rice.

Then there is just getting used to the texture and the fact that you're eating bugs. I know people who are researchers who eat handsful of live crickets as a snack because they've got hundreds of pounds of them in their lab, and they like the crunchiness. A lot of people have exactly the same kind of difficulties you are reporting the first time they try raw shellfish, but once you get used to it there are few things tastier than a raw oyster on the half shell with a squeeze of lemon.

Trust me, a raw oyster doesn't have the texture Americans associate with meat.