The use of Active Directory in TOCs always bothered me. That's a single source product of failure. And a lot of it made no sense. I asked, "What's next, the CAC-enabled rifle? You put your CAC card into the butt of the gun, and if it can't talk to the Bn AD server, it won't shoot?"

All of the above stuff is very insightful.

And a question: Will these startups allow enough Government Purpose Rights to allow the military to repair the commercial product, in the field, and long after the product is no longer sold? And do you really want to have to load 'this week's new version' in aircraft or missiles?

as documented by Tom Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

How will these newly minted LTCs learn about the Army? Who will teach them to wear the uniform and salute properly? (credit to Trump, this is something he actually knows how to do, unlike a lot of actors I've seen portraying officers.) Will they need to do the annual PT test? How about weapons qualification? (Although that's probably not needed if they have no assigned weapon, and a keyboard doesn't count.) Will they learn to march? (If not, how will they participate in next year's Trump Birthday Parade?)

But most importantly, how will they learn what their obligations and constraints are under the Uniform Code of Military Justice? When you join the military, you waive some rights, as established by the UCMJ and related laws. (See the list here, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) A lot of "tech bro" behavior would probably be court-martial offenses.

But I want them to go through "Winter Ranger" (Ranger School conducted over the winter.) If they're really serious about actually being in the Army as officers, this is how they can show it. (And I'll cry no tears if they get hurt, even if it does mean a medical discharge and disability....)

Google, of course, monetizes search data. We can argue about how they've spent that money, but there's no doubt that the money from search revenue has produced a lot of other stuff.

But if AI bots are able to scrape the internet, and then provide the results without the kind of monetization (i.e. without ads/ad revenue), what would happen to "The Internet As We Know It?" Would this actually be A Good Thing? Could an AI mechanism be self-sustaining, without a significant monetization strategy? Or is the idea of "AI free of monetization" an hallucination, there's no way any similar mechanism-at-scale can survive without a major revenue stream?

There was a good chance of 23andme being able to make full-genome sequencing (which they weren't yet scaled up to) a commoditized service with the privacy protections that need to be ensured for all customers. However the business model collapsed along the way.

Now we see the most predictable outcome - someone who knows they can profit from the data is buying the remains of the company (with the data).

Only in the USA is the genomic data that valuable, and there is one sector of the economy who can benefit from it more than any other. Regeneron knows which industry that is, and while they aren't a direct part of it themselves they know they need to serve it.

Regeneron bought the data to eventually sell it to the Health Insurance Cartel. The Cartel was granted effective license to print money with the passage of the ACA, but they want more power. They still own an overwhelming majority of congress - on both sides of the aisle - but they want more power. With the genomic data they can start rewriting the rules on pre-existing conditions. As all other plans go up in price they can start offering plans that are less expensive if you consent to DNA testing, which will lead to treatment for some conditions being denied.

We can't win as long as the system is set up this way. We can't change it when the people who benefit from it control the people who set the rules.

The Trump administration has been largely a copy-paste production. When they initially wanted to "replace" the ACA back during his first term, their plan was to replace the ACA with the ACA - made better by putting his signature at the end instead of the signature of President Obama. When they were finally called out on that, they quietly dropped their efforts to repeal the ACA, instead focusing on various things they can do in the name of "border security" (nevermind that no effort has been made this term for the wall that he used to talk nonstop about).

We had a fancy development environment with syntax directed editor, etc. A couple of us old farts said, "Meh, just give me EMACS and a command line for the compiler." Now a lot depends on the accuracy of your typing, as well as your ability to pound out syntactically correct code. But those of us who were good typists and good 'codeslingers' well out-performed those using the fancy IDE tools.

I ended up in the pre-secretarial typing course in high school, when I couldn't schedule personal use typing. That has served me incredibly well over the years. I'm a bit fussy about keyboards, I want a mechanical keyboard with good key travel, a legacy of learning on an old-fashioned (pre-Selectric) typewriter. It's been a great skill not just for developing code, but also for documentation, composing emails/messages, etc, etc. And when they tried to push a Crackberry on me, I said "Nope. I want a full-size keyboard and a full-size screen." Watching even people who were good with 2 thumbs compose messages on a Crackberry was really painful.

Now, in a speed test between talking/speech dictation and typing, I think I still type faster, even though I tend to make mistakes where I have to backspace-and-correct. That was a penalty in my original typing course, without adjusting for typos I was probably 50 WPM. :-)

They need to teach a tardigrade how to play this, thereby justifying all the memes. (An image search for "tardigrade playing violin" will produce multiple examples.)

As the 'murder capital of England'. I'm sure that raised some hackles in the halls of Oxford, and some giggles in Cambridge.

This store reflects a retail model that is simply dead now. You don't go in to a surplus store looking for something specific, as you likely won't find it. You go in with general ideas and you see what you find along the way.

Unfortunately very nearly nobody shops like that any more. We have a chain of surplus stores where I live, and the last several times I've gone in I've walked back out empty handed as they didn't have anything I wanted. They had plenty of things that other people want, but nothing I was looking for at the moment. 500 feet of rope in 12 different diameters? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Cartoon character umbrellas? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Firewire cables? Yep them have them but I'm not looking for them. Strange animated movies I've never heard of? Yep lots of those too. The list goes on and on but if they don't have anything I'm looking for then they won't get any money from me.

The list of 6 speed manual cars sold in the USA is very, very short. If you drop the ones sold by Porsche you cut that list in half. If you then drop the ones from VW (yes I know Porsche is a part of the VW corporate empire but we'll acknowledge them separately here) after that you end up with about 3 vehicles, and you find that even those only offer manual transmissions in very specific configurations.

The bigger news is that this isn't really news, as the manual transmission has been dying a gradual death for decades here. People don't learn it, and they don't want to drive it. On the plus side it makes it a theft deterrent technology for those who do drive it.

Max Headroom was clearly ahead of his times.

Not well, according to my friends in the Army...

Apparently Delta tried for a couple of years to buck the trend of "everything is about lowest price" but they didn't make enough money to support that model.

I think the thing that's broken about budget airlines is their limited reach. They fly to a limited number of markets, offer a relatively limited number of services, and generally work if they happen to fly where you want to go.

(I remember a trip from Dulles to Detroit. I found a seat on Frontier for $18, the corporate travel agent had to triple check the price as she didn't believe it, either. The problem was coming back, there the flight on United cost me about $300. From that experience I decided the demand for flights to Detroit was a lot less than the demand to escape...)