Common usage certainly agrees with you, and indeed, generically speaking of people who carry weapons in the military service of their nation, soldier is probably the least worst term. I think the point, so indelicately stated, is that within the United States military community, soldiers are always service members of the Army. The Marine Corps has marines, the Air Force has airmen, and the Navy has sailors.

After #2 was born around 0100, I passed out completely. My wife was wide awake, did her all-important FaceBook postings, did some writing, even got up and walked around. This was in stark contrast to #1, where she was virtually bed-ridden for the first week.

(and, hey America, what happened to all men created equal when it comes to who can be president? Or does that "rule" only apply if you're American, born in America, never set foot outside the borders?)

Erm, actually, yes, for the first two. It's in the Constitution. You can presumably visit other countries, but you do have to be a natural-born citizen:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

I think the traditional mass media has done plenty to damage their own credibility. Why blame the internet?

I'm the full time admin puke for my National Guard company. Until recently, my main machine was a P4 with 256MB of RAM. I have a new laptop now with XP and Office 2007 (separate rant), so I'm semi-modern.

But the program I use to put my soldiers in for pay after their proverbial one-weekend-a-month? DOS-based. The program for submitting requests for orders to send them to schools, etc.? It opens in a browser window--some kind of Oracle app server solution--but other than that, looks just like the DOS-based one.

But hell, it's the National Guard. We just traded in our muskets last year.

My older brother dropped his AP courses in high school and took as much auto shop as he could fit in, despite "counseling" from the administration. He worked as an auto technician for 12 years, picking up an AA in Toyota along the way, and was the head diagnostic tech for his shop the last few years.

But where to go from there? He didn't want to open his own shop, and he didn't want to contemplate doing the same thing for another 30 years.

So he went back to school and now he's a licensed practical nurse, with lots of career progression options available, and he's much happier at work doing something that is challenging and working with people.

I would happily have hired him--who knows next to nothing about computers--as a desktop tech over most of my coworkers at any of my jobs. You can teach computers, but some people cannot seem to grasp cause and effect and customer service. I could have made him a fantastic computer tech in a few months.

On the other hand, I threw away a viable (if unexciting) career in IT to become a soldier, so maybe I'm the wrong guy to offer perspective.

Sadly, I read too fast and saw this as "3rd level" human beings, and wondered immediately what game was being played.

Ah, mea culpa, I read too fast.

I could have swore that law enforcement was the most important part of their jobs... Do you honestly believe that safeguarding the right to privacy is more important than protecting lives and property, or did you just get caught up in your self-righteous hyperbole?

FTFSummary: "The SDK update is also due for release this spring, and is free of charge to all owners of L4D on the PC." That does seem imply that it won't be free for 360 players. I wonder what they think an appropriate cost would be.

In all fairness, I don't think the system designers who picked out the Toughbook expected us to be using it out on top of a hillside while people were shooting at us. The cumbersome and heavy nature of the rest of the equipment bears that out; it was "nominally" man-packable, but really designed (I suspect) for someone to use from a nice hotel somewhere... The Toughbook was probably just a scheme to add a few Gs to the overall price. The software interface WAS designed for touch screen, unfortunately, which meant that it was very difficult to use with a keyboard.

We used a Panasonic Toughbook in Afghanistan in some pretty nasty places, and it held up very well. Never had any problems except for the screen, which just couldn't take the dust contamination and the scratches, and even that could have been alleviated somewhat by not using the stylus.

We had an adapter that allowed us to charge the thing off one of our standard 5590 SINCGARS radio batteries. Even batteries too discharged for the radio would power the laptop for a few more hours; a fresh one would run the laptop for 24 hours or so.