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Comment 'onboarding' to learn about the Army? (Score 1) 108

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://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... ) 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....)

Comment What are consequences from no monetization? (Score 1) 48

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?

Comment An anecdote from a while ago (Score 1) 189

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. :-)

Comment Re:Seemed good enough for United (Score 3, Funny) 67

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...)

Comment From "The Department of Making Shit Up" (Score 1) 45

No one ever tracks how well his/her predictions actually pan out, but the track record with respect to Apple's plans and products is generally really poor. Caveat Lector! (And don't forget, Bloomburg is the company that posted the article about Chinese backdoors in servers that EVERYONE denied, but Bloomberg has never retracted that story, either.)

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