mytddu

> Why are not enough people volunteering?

Because these particular wars are pointless and immoral? Your segue from briefly discussing mercenaries on to gender roles, marriage, Trump, the EU, etc. just doesn't follow. It's obvious that your steering the conversation toward a certain set of talking points. The last 3/4 of your comment probably would've been arrived at no matter the topic at hand.

This is so wildly off-topic.

The extent of NSA surveillance was known to thousands, if not tens of thousands of people before Edward Snowden clued the general public in.

I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

Many die. Are you surprised from watching the videos that it's dangerous?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_solo_climbing#Notable_acc...

One of my favorite climbers and free soloists, Dan Osman, also died in an accident but not while free soloing. He was doing a 1000 ft rope jump (jumping from a cliff while connected to a climbing rope and catching oneself while trying not to slam back into the cliff face) when his rope snapped.

Here's two videos of him doing a rope jump and of him free soloing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EilwLq7w1bs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYbwZQ-QnMY (note the "dyno" at 1:09)

Vaporwave is inspired by hollow consumerism and the false promise of technology ("vaporware"). Vaporwave takes it aesthetic from dated software, corporate brochures, etc. of the 80s and early 90s and often takes samples from muzak that would've been heard in a garish shopping mall of that era. The Japanese artist names and song titles originate from, I presume, the tech and manufacturing boom in Japan during the 80s and 90s, a time period when Japanese products constituted a large part of the American consumer experience.

The article says they're not sure if it was volcanic activity that triggered the release, or something else.

> The invasions initial execution was beautiful (first few days)

The initial "Shock and Awe" campaign in Baghdad killed an estimated 6,600+ civilians. [1]

It's stated purpose was to "impose this overwhelming level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on ... [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels."

That is to say, it was terrorism. And what's even more disgusting is that Americans watched it on TV like fireworks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe#Casualties