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Are you suggesting there's meat in their products now? When did that happen?
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There's a channel on YouTube about military rations.
I watched a 1 or 2 of the videos, instructional at best.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Ate MREs for 4.5 years. No biggie. Infantry. Came with the job. A little Tabasco sauce, and they were just fine. Not as bad as most people make them out to be.
The videos you are talking about, I think, are the super old rations from WWI, WWII, Korean war, and I think Vietnam wars. I have seen a lot of those vids and they are funny, if anything.
Here is a little known fact about field rations/MREs/etc. They are designed to keep you from having frequent BMs. Can't be going potty all the time when you are hunkered down in a firefight. 
modified 19-Oct-18 16:35pm.
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Eight years. No biggie. Luftwaffe. Came with the job. Hung around with our unit's cook. Not as bad as most people make them out to be.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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CodeWraith wrote: Luftwaffe. Came with the job. Hung around with our unit's cook. Not as bad as most people make them out to be.
The cooks or the Luftwaffe?
I have known a couple of cooks who can do wonderful things with army rations. Most, however... 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I remember when my family first moved to Alaska (1959) my dad was part of the Air National Guard unit and acquired expired C Rations periodically. We used to take them when we went hunting for moose, bear and caribou. Actually pretty good once you figured out what the codes meant on the cans (DO NOT pick the 'potatoes' and try for the canned peaches)
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, navigate a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects! - Lazarus Long
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It'll be better than C-Rations...oh wait a minute dog sh*t is better than C-Rations!
I may not be that good looking, or athletic, or funny, or talented, or smart
I forgot where I was going with this but I do know I love bacon!
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I love the children's novel The higher power of Lucky[^] by Susan Patron. (I'm not the only one - it won the Newbury Medal award for 2007)
I wrote the author an email, asking if that ridiculing of the army surplus food rations (distributed to low-income families) were real - there is a hillarious discussion in the book about whether that stuff really is meant to be cheese or something else than food!). She returned a very enjoyable answer, confirming that the stuff is indeed real, and as described in the book.
I will higly recommnend "The higher power of Lucky". Your children may love it, but as an adult you will see a lot of aspects that most likely goes over the head of the kids. And you will chuckle all the way while reading it, most certainly when it comes to the description of those army surplus food rations.
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We're having Cassano's[^] pizza, a Friday favorite in our household. Mrs. Wife usually has a cheese & onions pizza, while I go for pepperoni, onions, and black olives or pepperoni and anchovies. Yes, I like fuzzy fish / sea roaches, etc. etc. Put the strait jacket down. Stop that. Let me go you cossacks!...
Software Zen: delete this;
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This new lappy has a bluddy Calc key where the Delete key goes!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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That just doesn't add up 
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Perhaps not, but the sum of it is that he is minus one delete key! 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
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You can count on vendors to add multiple "enhancements" - sum of them may be useful.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I love that key!
When I bought a new keyboard I explicitly wanted a keyboard with that specific key.
I really do miss it when I'm on a keyboard that doesn't have it (like at work).
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At least my current keyboard (Microsoft 600) doesn't have the "hibernate" button my Logitech one did. The cat was damn good at finding that one...
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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101 keys ought to be enough for anybody.
modified 19-Oct-18 13:43pm.
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I don't think even the windows calculator can calculate 922!. That's a decent size number.
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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For being sort of serious: When we were student, long ago, someone picked up a claim that with our latin alphabet, it would in principle be possible to create 20,000! different English words. To find out what that meant, one of my fellow students wrote a small routine on his calculator, while I wrote a program using 64 bit precision.
When we compared the results, he was proud that his calculator differed only by a factor of three. Now, that wasn't a linear factor of three, compared to the huge mainframe computer. In fact, it was the magnitude of the exponent of the result... The exponent of his calculator result differed by about 2000, compared to the mainframe. The error in the exponent was of magnitude three. That's about a factor of three, isn't it?
Now, even 64 bits of precision is far from sufficient to hold 20,000! without loss. So I cannot claim that my result was "correct" - but my fellow student accepted it as such. Unfortunately, I didn't save the program code (nor my fellow student's calculator program), so I can't verify which is most correct. Maybe his program came closer to the correct value!
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How long did it take to calculate?
Everyone is born right handed. Only the strongest overcome it.
Fight for left-handed rights and hand equality.
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I don't have a memory of it, but consider: It is just 20.000 multiplications. That shouldn't take to long!
double fact(int i) {
double result = 1.0;
for (int factor = 1; factor <= i; factor ++) result *= factor;
return result;
} ... or something like that. (I didn't run this through a compiler, but I think it is reasonably obvious code.)
Now that I look at it: The IEEE 754 format would not be able to handle 20,000! even in 64 bit format. When we did this calculation, in 1977-78, IEEE 754 was not established, so we used whatever format was available at that CDC mainframe. I cannot recall the details of that format, or whatever workaround we used to overcome the range limitations.
Neverhteless: Even if I were to repeat the experiment, using one of the many infinite-precision packages available today, it still would requre only 20,000 extended precision multiplications. Even in arbitrarily extended precision, a multiplication won't take that much time. Actually, I suspect that if your extended precision package is binary based, converting the result to an ASCII digit stream would be more time consuming than doing the 20,000 multiplications. Maybe even doing the multiplications in decimal, digit-by-digit format, would be time-saving, compared to the lengthy division operations required for the printout.
bonus chatter:
As students, we wrote an extended precision package for a fellow student in "Theoretical Physics" working on a model to simulate two colliding waves. His initial model displayed some rather unlikely artifacts, such as resulting waves having 90 degrees corners. So we made him a library which, by 200 decimal digits, gave him the precision to model these waves properly.
In the process, we realized that he had no understanding whatsoever for the importance of adding the elements of a series expansion from the smaller to the larger. He was in theoretical physics, where the order of the addends has no importance, theoretically. He was completely unable to understand that in practice, there is a difference. ("In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is" ...) Most likely the native 72 bits precision of the Univac 1100 mainframe computer would have been more than sufficient if he had only learned to add the series from the other end!
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A good way to approximate large factorials is Stirling's Formula:
ln(N!) ~ N*ln(N) - N
Using my trusty Windows calculator, 20000! is approximately 1077,334. You definitely could not have calculated it by simple multiplication...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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You're holding it wrong! ~Steve Jobs
If you hold it properly, it'll delete.
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Do you need to lick it first?
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Only if it is a fossil.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Mynewkeyboardhasabiglongkeyatthebottomwithnowritingon.Godknowswhatitdoes
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