BobApril

I've been unable to access www.military.com for about a week. Firefox tells me "The connection was reset." IE says "cannot display the webpage." Chrome didn't work either. A traceroute gets through my ISP (Mediacom Cable), bounces around half a dozen att.net routers, and times out. I even checked with my son at college, since he's going through a different server - he can't get there, either. I've rebooted my system, my wireless router, and my cable modem. Unsurprisingly, considering where the traceroute died, none of those worked.

I can reach forums.military.com...but can't log into it because that calls for a connection to the www site. I'm not having any trouble with other web domains. I don't know offhand what other prefixes might exist in the military.com domain, so haven't tested them. Is anyone else experiencing this? Anyone have any ideas on where or what the problem is?

I'm not talking about people who make mistakes once in awhile - I mean the type of people who show up late three times out of four, skip a shift without calling in a few times a month, argue loudly with the manager in front of other staff or even customers, hide in a stock room when they should be working...that sort. You've worked with them, I'm sure.

In this economy, there's probably a dozen people asking even for a minimum wage job - so why do managers keep useless, unreliable employees on instead of getting rid of a few of them as examples to the others, and trying new people who might be better?

President Obama has issued orders to begin releasing military detainees that cannot be prosecuted, due to lack of evidence, tainted evidence, whatever. In some cases, though, the country they came from is likely to be unwilling to accept them back. For a few, a third country will take them, but in many cases, nobody wants them. That includes us, of course - any of them who weren't terrorists before certainly have reason to be angry at the U.S. by now.

What's the law on this? If we determine the citizenship of the person, how can their own country refuse to accept them? What do we do with a person that no country will take? Could we legally take them to our embassy in their home country, then kick them out the front gate? If no one else will accept them, do we have to keep them and, since we can't prosecute, release them as permanent residents of the U.S.?

To all of you who are about to post a rant about how wrong the President was to decide this, I'm not interested. It's been decided - now the question is how the implementation works.

If you ever listen to an oldies station, you've heard them lead into a song with a very brief recording of a small group singing/speaking the year of the song they're about to play. Anybody know where I could find a copy of such sound clips?

I don't intend to insult my Airborne brethren - and I acknowledge the value of tradition, esprit de corps, and the sense of being one of the elite. But in this modern era of radar, night vision, and more accurate ground-to-air and air-to-air combat, jumping into a battle is far more dangerous and far less likely to result in surprise than in the Airborne's WW2 heyday. I see the benefits and advantages for Special Forces and other small-scale invasions - but is a large-scale Airborne combat jump still a useful and reasonable tactic in modern warfare?