but at least when it comes to Army IT guys, anyone that went to school after 2005 is a coin-toss.

The dumbing down of specialist fields has been ongoing as the military has switched from custom hardware to COTS (Common/Commercial Off The Shelf) systems. This really accelerated in 2003 and the transformation was almost complete by 2005. Troubleshooting down to the component level and resoldering circuit boards was standard procedure in the old days. Soldiers had to really understand how their systems worked and how they interacted with other things. As the equipment has gotten smarter, the requirements for the soldier have decreased.

I watched the knowledge base drain away while I was in the military. I spent my final three years as an instructor/subject-matter-expert (Brigade level) for all things IT and satellite communications. Every year, the students were less and less prepared for the training. This applied especially to my students from a communications career field. This was expected when it came to my students from non-IT careers, but in the end, the students that should have been the most well prepared for my classes did no better that those that had never seen a satellite dish before.

I spent an additional two years as a contractor in Afghanistan. I did everything from convoys out to remote FOBs to troubleshoot and repair systems, to training, to theater wide Tier-3/Engineering Level satellite support. I worked with hundreds of contractors at all levels and over 95% of them were veterans. The quality of work/knowledge level was a complete crapshoot. There were many that I dealt with that should have been fired or at least not had their contract renewed. One of them was my boss(gross negligence/mismanagement), the other was a CCNP that couldn't even create a basic NAT configuration for a 2800 series router(fired for reasons unrelated to his lack of technical competence). There were the occasional superstars (my replacement boss). There was everything in between.

In the end, I honestly see very few advantages to hiring veterans other than that they have a higher chance of being on time/early than a non-veteran. I see a distinct disadvantage in hiring anyone that was a First Sergeant or Sergeant Major(Don't worry, the ones you need to worry about will let you know they were one). Those are the ones most likely to have internalized the military and demand that those around them do the same.

So, they sell tons of goods to US that pay them in dollar. What are they supposed to be doing with all that cash? Change it to yuan, that would be bad for the currency? Buy government bonds, at such a rate, no way! Buy gas to Russia, that's not done in dollar anymore. What's left? Investing all that money in the US maybe, that's still better than leaving idle on a reserve account. Yeah, why not.

That will work well, for some more time, until all roboticists are in turn replaced by robots.

The real question remains: how is the wealth produced by the robots going to be redistributed?

It worked pretty well as long as wealth was redistributed among people that produced it, supporting the paradigm of the "mass market". It lasted until reality came back knocking, remembering us we live in a world with scarce resources. Since then, it's back to the old "only the strong survive" paradigm, a competition for the biggest part of the pie. Unfortunately that doesn't change the fact the pie keeps on shrinking.

We desperately need more cooperation if we want to survive..

Marriage, in the legal sense, is a contract. You are presenting a slippery slope argument where there is none. Man and dog, woman and car, are not valid arguments because the dog cannot consent to a legally binding contract.

If two men and three woman want to enter into a polyamorous contract, that is the legal equivalency of marriage, why should they be prohibited from doing so? Realize that all five persons must sign the same contract accepting all of the other four, so a single holdout screws the entire thing up. Divorce would become interesting as well (you can still only sign a single contract at a time, just like today).

I had this issue back in 2002 on Sprint. My solution was to run a background ping process with 1-byte packets. This kept my connection from stalling out. The disadvantage is that your 3G modem and WiFi will never enter low-power states. So your battery life will suffer as a result.

On the same note, my web browsing greatly benefits from running all my web traffic through a SSH tunnel with compression enabled. When you are dealing with a sub-48kbit GPRS connection that ramps ping times into the 100+ second range (not a typo) and 50% packet loss with high traffic usage, it becomes necessary. (For those wondering, Afghanistan)

Thanks. I happen to live one of those places. The ONLY option here is AT&T 3.5mbps ADSL. Other possibilities are an AT&T EDGE(No VZW coverage here) connection that averages somewhere around 20kbps or satellite. No thanks (this coming from someone that makes a living repairing and fielding enterprise SATCOM systems).

I am fortunate enough that I was able to switch over to AT&T Business Class DSL(No bandwidth caps) for LESS than I was paying for the same AT&T Residential DSL. I get excellent SNRs and am often on FastPath because of that, but AT&T refuses to bump me up to 6mbps. That is even after explaining that I don't care if I actually get 6mbps. I will settle for whatever my modem trains at above 3.5mbps considering my primary motivator is a 768k upload versus a 384k upload and the price difference is less than $3/month.

Microsoft, the company for which the future is what everybody else is doing for more than 30 years.