I find that the rifle simulation systems are quite good and can even give information that is extremely hard to see on a live range. The computer can track every tiny movement of the laser shining through the barrel resulting in a "Mr Squiggle" which gives a massive insight into your breathing, trigger manipulation, position and hold, etc. Expended ammunition stoppages and others can be simulated too, which is very valuable. For rifles and some other weapons (grenade launchers etc.) 20 or so people can be trained in a single room at a time, each with their own lane just like a real physical range. Wooden structures can even be placed in the rooms in order to practise alternate positions useful for urban combat drills.

The tactile experience of holding a weapon that is almost exactly the same as the real thing simply cannot be replaced by headsets, keyboards, mice or non-realistic controllers because if they are not exactly the same there is little or no training value.

Keyboard and Mouse type simulations still have a purpose though as missions can be run in order to create realistic scenarios that leaders can use to practice leadership stuff. I happen to know an ARMA mod is used for this in a particular place.

Where's Campus 1?

Absolutely. I forgot to mention the points you bought up.

Not being able to hear instruction is really frustrating in training too when you're not really sure what you're supposed to do.

An advantage of the earplug style is that you could probably have your SPR and/or radio headset over the top of the earplug.

It takes ages to get foam plugs into my ears (I have to roll them to get them small enough first, then use two hands to get them in) so under the pump I have no chance of using them.

The amount of batteries (all AAA thankfully) you need already is ridiculous. You need one for your NAD, a number for your night vision, two or so for your night-weapon sight (if rank say you must have one of the bloody things), two for your SPR, two for headlamp (just in-case), plus any extra for backup and other devices. Batteries for Peltors on top of that... Yay.

I thought they were talking about some sort of cutting edge tech. Nope. Just active hearing pro. The Australian army has used 3M Peletors for years - I don't think they are issued to individuals, but the Q-Stores hold them for use on ranges and they're included (2 pair) in the newer Carl Gustuv 84mm recoiless rifle trunks too.

Guys buy their own knock-offs from Amazon so that they don't have to use ear-plugs while doing fire and movement (as they're not usually handed out for this). I hate the plug style shown in the article - the last thing I want to do when living in the dirt is start shoving stuff in my ears. Ears, eyes and hands need to be treated well or you die, or are a burden to your team.

We'll pay for it. No worries mate. We just paid for Telstra's so we're clearly willing to piss away billions of dollars on hopelessly broken, unmaintainable and un-upgradable copper networks!

FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling - squirting out hot plastic) that the majority of traditional 3D printers use is not what you want because although they offer large build areas their resolution is not so great and the materials for extrusion suffer from a lot of shrinkage and warping.
SLA (Stereolithography) printing on the budget end of the market offers around 10cm x 10cm build area - which is fine for your use and very high resolution. The cured resin does not shrink and warp like the thermoplastics do so it is a lot easier to replicate and interface with those tight LEGO tolerances. Further more I think the resin cures into an extremely tough, and rigid plastic with just a little flex which is reminiscent of official lego.

I don't pretend to be an expert by any means... But I'm fairly sure what you're looking for starts at about $1200 USD for a Form1 clone or a $1500 for a XYZ Printing Nobel. If you happen to have a DLP projector laying around then you're in luck because there are sub-$1000 kits to turn it into a SLA printer.

Use something like Nikola or Pelican with [favourite python template system here] to hit the sweet spot between hand-coding/frameworking and CMS. You can adjust any part of the look, feel and templating easily and you can enable customers to have a very easy/cheap way to get the site up, running and maintainable.

Because it is a static website there is no security maintenance needed. You don't have to be a programmer to work with a lot of these static site generators and the time investment to learn them is quite low in my experience.

Also, you can always just drop a PHP script (or embed snippets that are compiled in) with the static site to do any dynamic stuff you may need.

SystemD is not replacing iptables, all they have done is integrate with iptables. Systemd's approach to configuring init "scripts" is superior (no really, it is) but it means that you can't just issue a straight "iptables -t nat..." command and instead have to call it via IPForwarding=yes and IPMasquerade=yes - unless of course you want to start a script with a unit file but then are you sure that iptables is up? Is the filesystem for the script up?

I don't know why I even bother reading the Slashdot comments about SystemD as they always lack critical thinking and instead prefer to cite hyperbole and FUD.

People have inadvertently found while trying to make their computers look like aquariums that introducing bubbles (via a normal aquarium pump) reduced temperatures. The theory is that some of the heat is transferred into the air which rises to the top and allows it to escape the system faster.

The good news is that there's an actual university degree for his interest - greating games and game mechanics, as opposed to just playing them. Games design deals with creating game mechanics (among other things, probably of some interest to him). I used to live with some game designers and both have been employed for the last 5 year so I guess they've had success with the career so far.

Is there possibly any open course-ware for Games Design floating around?

So the question people should be asking is *where* is yahoo still popular? Is it actually popular (and what services) in some countries/languages?
Any insights?

The same approach could be applied to a SCARA or Delta design for better results again - and likely still be cheaper.

A cartesian (like RepRap Mendel or this HYREL) based design always rattles itself apart and has very high stress on parts which increases as print speed increases. A SCARA (RepRap Morgan) or Delta (RepRap Rostock) have far lower stresses involved and shock from head movement is shared among multiple axis which decreases resistance/absorption problems and allows for higher print speeds.

They go on about design, and yet they failed to analyze what was the root cause of the faiures and opted to apply bandaids instead.

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Price and availability. If you buy a Titan or a Quadro then you pay for that. If you just need a lot of CUDA cores, but not an insane amount, you can buy a cheaper gaming card from your local PC supplier.