JCT

Not without revamping or trashing the current acquisition laws. The laws and regulations governing government purchasing are mind boggling and prevent anything from happening cheaply or quickly. You can't just hand it off to industry as they'll just suck up the money and then hold out their hand asking for more.

They are already doing lots of serious planning on how to reduce the force and people have been talking about it for about a year. I saw a Marine Times article the other month, they are expecting to cut loose a third of the Lieutenants right around their 4 year service mark. It will almost be as bad as the early 90's 'peace dividend'.

From that site, I'd definitely recommend downloading the CutePDF app. Once installed it shows up as a printer. If you want to convert a web page or document to a pdf file, select the CutePDF 'printer' and it will 'print' your file into pdf format. I have the full Adobe 7 suite at work and CutePDF does a better job of creating a pdf of a web page or word doc. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of Adobe 7, but it will create a basic pdf document. Very useful app.

Gas was considered for use on Iwo Jima, but was denied. The gas shells would have had their yellow banding painted over so that the gunners would not know what they had been firing. LINK

Ahhhh! My eyes!! I'm stuck in a pre-Milestone C decision process and this is why we can never field a new weapons system...

A somewhat similar tale was told while I was at The Basic School: A Turkish officer attending the school failed to graduate and was returned to Turkey. He was subsequently executed. From that point on no foreign officers were failed out of the school. This was the explanation given as to why the two Saudi officers in the class (who had been kicked out of the previous class for weapons safety violations on the range) were allowed to graduate, with one going on to Infantry Officers Course.

I always liked the term 'data dink' as applied to database specialists.

I saw the same thing, the smallest guys in the squad packed the SAWs.

The service packs are probably failing to install due to a lack of disk space. I wouldn't install anything new until you get that new hard drive installed! From the small hard drive you mentioned, I'm assuming that you are using a laptop. I'd find my manufacturer's restore disk, swap out the hard drive, then restore Windows to the new hard drives. You can buy a cheap ($20) USB to hard drive kit to connect your old hard drive and then transfer your data across. Or buy an external hard drive kit and put your old drive into it - its a bit more permanent than the other way. Good luck!

Be careful of using Dazzle as some of the lower end versions suck. I had a lower end version (still cost $50+!) and was completely unsuccessful in ingesting data from a VCR. Not sure what the issue was other than I had the low, sucky quality version. I was too discouraged to try getting video from my DVR.

Taking off is the easy part, landing the bird is a lot harder. A simple Return to Base command doesn't work if your base is moving. There have been several attempts to navalize fighters in the past. The undercarriage and fuselage would have to be strengthened considerably for carrier launch and recovery, eating into payload and range. A arresting hook must be integrated and the entire airframe modified for additional corrosion control to account for the constant salt air. So lots and lots of developmental dollars, making General Atomics very happy. The USMC & US Army RQ-7 Shadow is already catapult ready (although not CVN steam catapult) and is capable of using arresting gear for short field (carrier) operations. An upgrade that has been initiated will provide a laser designator. The Shadow is too small to handle large munitions and has a much shorter range and loiter time than the Predator.

Yep, does sound like a RAM issue. I had a similar problem, it wasn't the RAM itself as they tested fine when I moved them around, but one of the RAM slots was flaky. If that doesn't work, probably the power (or graphics card or...) Basic computers are cheap now, might be worth to spend a bit more and just get a new computer and reuse the monitor, etc. Slap in the old hard drive and you have a built in back up unit.

I have a Panasonic Lumix camera for almost 3 years and have been very satisfied with it. I know 2 other people who have them and like them a lot. Image quality, responsiveness, and battery life are all very good. They tend to have a very good optical zoom.

Generally, digital phone service uses a cable modem of some sort to send/receive your telephone lines over your cable tv lines. From there they hook the modem into your house's internal phone lines so that you can use a regular phone in any phone jack. It should be pretty transparent to you. HOWEVER, if your cable modem loses power, like through a neighborhood power outage, your phone service is dead. Through the old style phone lines, a normal corded phone would still work if the power went out. I have digital phone service through AT&T (although DSL service, not cable) and they provided a small UPS to provide continuous power in case of a power outage. Of course all my phones are of the cordless type, so I'd still be screwed if the power went out.

More pictures can be found here: http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010/04/26/military-units-near-moscow-city/#more-12725