My wife got hers at 14 1/2. That was the legal age in Maine until the late 1980s.

This is the oath you take when joining the US Army:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

The important part there is the mention of the UCMJ, which states that orders cannot be illegal, violate the Constitution, violate international law, etc.

This is exactly the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard what happened. I still clearly recall the WPRI news video of the fire mentioned in the Wikipedia article. That news crew had just shown up to report on the band that was playing, and they got clear footage of the nightmare. You could see bodies stacked up at the door as hundreds of people pushed to get out of the inferno… You can probably still find the video on smaller video sharing sites if you dare to go looking for it.

Good. The more the Republican voting block is fractured the better.

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Does anybody else miss Compuserve, Delphi, etc?

Gary Plauche is another person who took justice into his own hands over the kidnapping and rape of his son back in the 1980s.

Plauche learned that the suspect was being flown back to town in police custody, and figured out the flight he was on. He waited at the airport, pretending to be using a pay phone. As the suspect was escorted past him he walked up and shot him in the head at almost point blank range. A local TV station caught it all on camera and I think you can still find it if you search for it.

Plauche was ultimately convicted of manslaughter but was given a suspended sentence, probation, and community service. No jail time.

Patel wants to keep using FBI coffers for perks though. He’s reportedly flying all over the place on FBI jets, made an FBI SWAT team act as a security detail for his girlfriend, etc.

Paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/Ext7p

I managed a research cluster for a university for about 10 years. The hardware was largely commodity and not specialized. Unless you call nVidia GPU’s or InfiniBand “specialized”. Linux was the obvious choice because many cluster-aware applications, both open source and commercial, run on Linux.

We even went so far as to integrate the cluster with CERN’s ATLAS grid to share data and compute power for analyzing ATLAS data from the LHC. Virtually all the other grid clusters ran Linux, so that made it much easier to add our cluster to its distributed environment.

20 years ago I worked on the top floor of a 5 story office building. We wanted to build out a server room with a pretty hefty UPS for backup. The amount of steel reinforcement we had to install in the ceiling of the 4th floor was pretty insane…

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

You would do well to go read up on the 1990 AT&T long distance network collapse. A single line of changed code, rolled out months earlier, ultimately triggered what you might call these days a DDoS attack that took down all 114 long distance telephone switches in their global network. Over 50 million long distance calls were blocked in the 9 hours it took them to identify the cause and roll out a fix.

AT&T prided itself on the thoroughness of their testing & rollout strategy for any code changes. The bug that took them down was both timing-dependent and load-dependent, making it extremely difficult to test for, and required fairly specific real world conditions to trigger. That’s how it went unnoticed for months before it triggered.

Hopefully somebody leaks the full unredacted version.

Or better yet they do the stupid PDF editing where a simple copy/paste retrieves the full text.

Pretty soon the title of Professor will be meaningless…

I’m guessing it was actually something internal. If you look at their status page you’ll notice the outage occurred smack in between some sort of maintenance work they seem to be rolling out to most/all of their edge locations. As soon as they resolved the outage they continued with the regional maintenance updates.

Those sound like the sorts of issues that could easily be addressed by well thought out legislation. I have a nephew that recently got a digital nomad visa so that he could work for his US employer while traveling around Europe. Some of those countries require you to prove you have health insurance or buy insurance from their national health network. Those countries also regulations regarding taxes, etc. that the visa holder is responsible for.

So Canada should pass laws to close the loopholes you describe. They would need regulations similar to digital nomads that apply to foreign exchange students etc.

My current employer is headquartered in Austin, TX. We have software engineers, QA engineers, and other technical people working remotely all over the world, including Germany, Ukraine, India, Australia, and elsewhere.

20k is a drop in a bucket when it comes to boats. The maintenance, etc. is a significant ongoing expense. And if it’s the kind of boat you keep at a marina and not on a trailer in your driveway then that’s another huge expense. There’s a reason people call boats a hole in the water that you throw money into…

And chances are these sorts of attacks will continue. That means less and less manufacturing capacity, etc.