My experience in the military was different. My squadron had a policy that only 5% of each job type could take leave at any given time. There were about 45 people who had the same job as me. Do the math: at most we could only use about 16 of the 30 days paid leave. If you include the four month deployments every two years when nobody could take leave, that drops to an average of just 14 days.

Those 14 days are not the same as the civilian world: if your leave went over the weekend then that counted towards your leave time. At the end of the year we were getting effectively the same 2 weeks of vacation I get now my civilian job. Only now I can take the days off I want rather than scheduling a year in advance.

Good for morale? Not in my unit.

But he runs an amateur website. Darn Rob I thought you were making money at this. Linux mag must have been wrong back in 2000 when they discovered you and said you were doing quite well. I will write them a notice so Linux Mag can print a retraction.

By the by, the reason I read blogs, main stream media is so watered down I can't even taste it.

Take for example the recent piece in C|Net about why the FCC should go away. Gosh I wish I could sh*t words on paper / html and be called a reporter. I want a real newspaper!!

Not only that, but many of those custom batteries do not react well in field conditions. They have a tendency to explode when wet. The semisealed lithiums are just not safe. I don't want to have to worry about carrying a small bomb when I'm wearing an AERPS kit.

For Air Force aircrew this seems to be changing. Most of the gear I've been issued in the last year runs on AA or AAA. GPS, NVGs, lip lamps, all commodity batteries.