I'm not trying to sound snarky, but the armed forces does have a category of employees who can't be involuntarily deployed: civilians. There are already many civilian employees of the DoD that work in the tech roles discussed in the article.
I've been looking at this personally. It's not stated in the article, but the initiative is known as constructive service credit for cyber direct commissions.
The way it works is basically the same as reserve officer recruiting, but with a higher starting rank.
You'd get in contact with an officer recruiter for the service branch you're interested in, using the normal channels. They have a deserved reputation for ghosting candidates, but they generally spend most of their effort on candidates further down the pipeline. One recommendation I got was to get in touch with an enlisted recruiter who can confirm your eligibility to serve and refer you as a qualified lead to an officer recruiter.
Air Force officer appointments are the most competitive (3-10% of people who meet all application requirements and medical qualifications are selected), and they are stingy on medical waivers.
The Navy is only slightly less competitive but reputed to be the most permissive with waivers.
One thing to know is that waivers for medical issues are issued without regard to your nonmedical qualifications. So if Jeff Bezos had a bad knee, that would disqualify even him.
When I moved and was looking for a new vet and dentist, I specifically asked each one about their ownership structure and didn't choose any that were owned by a PE firm.
Title should reflect that this was published in 2006.
And moreover, I don't think the article's point is true today. Python and JavaScript are both mature languages with massive libraries of online example code for anything you could want to learn about. You can get access to a JavaScript console with a single keypress in any desktop browser- F12.
Teaching kids to understand how to program has benefits, not just for the ones that go on to specialize in computing- I think about a journalist being able to use R or PyPlot to map out crimes in their city based on publicly available police reports, or a lawyer using a script to call the Shopify API to collect their client's records to respond to a discovery request, rather than taking screenshots of the web pages.
Exposure to BASIC doesn't help these people as much as more modern languages would.
There's a bunch of really great talks from Johnathan Blow and GameHut (head of Traveller's Tales) about how it's simply impossible to draw a pixel on a screen in any modern computer language.
For all the endless fancy abstractions we have, the core truth of what must happen becomes lost and so people become slaves to the abstraction instead of masters of the truth.
My understanding is that due to Webb's location at L2, it can never point back at the Earth, because that would basically be pointing directly at the sun.
I read that as meaning "Pale blue dot" in the sense that Carl Sagan wasn't a professional astronomer or a NASA employee, he just said "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you tried taking a photo of Earth from the Pioneer probe" and they did it.
Sagan was a professional astronomer in Cornell's astronomy department, but his rationale for making the pale-blue-dot image was less as a scientific endeavor and more as a way to tell us more about ourselves.
It also can't be pointed as the the optics need to be actively cooled, hence the giant sunshield and cooling pumps, so it'll never point towards earth/sun
I'd say this is essentially an instance of the sequential monopolization problem and imperfectly aligned incentives due to a difference in the shape of each party's cost/demand curve.
The classical example of sequential monopolization is a car manufacturer and a local car dealership. The manufacturer wants to sell a large number of cars at a fixed price, while the dealership would rather sell a smaller number of cars so that they can maximize their margin on each sale.
Airports want high numbers passengers to maximize retail/parking/etc revenue (in which they have a monopoly), but don't directly care which flights are more profitable or how much the passengers pay for airfare as long as they fill the airport.
Airlines are maximizing a different demand curve, in which most of their profit comes from a small number of profitable routes while most other flights are slightly unprofitable. Their biggest incentive is to prevent competition on those premium routes, which they can do by monopolizing flight slots.
Sequential monopolization is a high-energy state for a market; absent other forces/regulations, it would be more profitable for the two companies to merge or otherwise form a partnership that looks more like a vertical monopoly.
All that said, we only care about this because of the negative externalities created by the current equilibrium, both in the carbon cost of air travel and the massive taxpayer subsidies for airport construction that are wasted then that airport's takeoff and landing slots are inefficiently allocated.
So, I'd say one possible solution would be to tax the airlines for the carbon used by all flights, perhaps at a penalty rate for flights above some amount of kg-per-passenger-mile.
The employees (or any group of them, even less than half) are free to join a union and attempt to negotiate with Amazon. However, Amazon would just ignore them.
Union votes like the one described here are about triggering protections of US law that will require Amazon to negotiate with the union.
I'm personally of the opinion that 418 shouldn't be considered a joke response, but would actually useful as 418 "Unsupported Device".
What response should a printer give if you asked it to send a fax, but you have a base-model printer that doesn't support sending faxes. From the perspective of the printer, I know what you want (i.e. not a 404) and you've asked for it correctly (i.e. not 400 or 401 or 403), but I can't do it, and this does not indicate an error on my part (not a 500 or 503). Thus, 418: Unsupported Device.
Perhaps this too much of an overlap with 404 (I don't have that resource) and 501 (I can't do that verb to that resource), which I assume is why there's not a huge need for it. But if we're going to have 418 exist and receive browser support anyway, it might as well have a useful meaning rather than just exist as a joke.
This interpretation is fully in keeping with the non-joke meaning of the original RFC, as a teapot is a device that does not support brewing coffee.
I'd probably use a 422 in that case. I think 422 errors are underused, and can good for communicating errors when a client requests something which doesn't make sense from a business context.
For those that haven't memorized every single HTTP error code, 422 is "Unprocessable Entity": 'the server understands the content type of the request entity, and the syntax of the request entity is correct, but it was unable to process the contained instructions.'
If you throw a 404 to a completely valid GET for a file that doesn't exist for example, how is that a "complete overlap" to something like asking a database REST API to print a PDF? In the latter case, you have the ability to give a more detailed (better) error message, so why shouldn't you?
