It's not even that. The biggest difference is by being sworn in, they now have Legal authorities and rights awarded to military personnel, but are also subject to the UCMJ. Depending on how they structure the program they may be able to get Title 10 and 50 coverage and possibly others. This drastically changes what they legally can or can't do on behalf of the USG. There's more to this than people realize. It's also not all that new. In the past they had "Consultants" deeply integrated into agencies to solve the same issues.
Palantir, Crowdstrike, many others pretty much started inside the govt and were built around classified information as a means to get their advantage. It's not right, but It's definitely something that happens. Source: I was there for it with both orgs and even back then everyone though Dmitry formely from CS was a dick. I still have the mousepad that Palantir created for the office in lieu of a training guide (just a bunch of printed shortcuts / commands).
Adding some additional context on most of the above:
Yes, as commissioned US military officers they become subject to UCMJ.
USDS and DDS employees are/were civilian federal employees with capacity for legal authority to act on behalf of the US Government.
DoD and its branches have uniformed service members subject to UCMJ, but they also have many civilian employees with decision making authority and ultimately the services report to civilian secretaries; the ratio of uniformed service members (e.g. enlisted, and commissioned officers) to civilians can vary greatly by service. Another main difference to consider beyond UCMJ would be eligibility to be considered a combatant versus not; not all uniformed personnel should be considered combatants. "Authority" is not exclusive to uniformed personnel.
Many DoD programs can be led or managed by civilians, typically a GS-15 which is roughly equivalent to O-6 (e.g. Army/Air Force/Space Force Colonel, Navy Captain)
If I recall correctly, Palantir's main starting point beyond some of its fraud-tracking origins at Paypal were through its attempts to compete in the DCGS-A / replacement acquisition in DoD.
Crowdstrike had Dmitry, but its main US Government ties were through Shawn Henry, a former director of investigative operations at the FBI; Crowdstrike had a few business lines in its early days, which included its intel/research/analysis services, breach investigation/remediation services, while it was developing its endpoint protection products/platform.
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And to the upstream parent comment:
> The key difference is the DDS folks were not uniformed military. That can make all the difference when trying to sell your product or service to a military decision maker.
A lot of DoD acquisitions, developments, operations decisions end up being materially informed by civilian personnel that are direct employees of the US Government, contractors supporting the US Government via Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations (FFRDCS, labs, etc.), other contractors, etc. In some cases, it seems like the DoD programs are entirely reliant (i.e. dependent) on their contractor support (via FFRDCs, labs, etc).
Some of this comes from the fact that the typical active duty officer's assignment duration in a particular role (e.g. acquisition program manager, chief engineer, etc) ends up being two years or less before a permanent change of assignment (PCA). Having organic civilian staff in these roles can be essential for maintaining continuity and can be a key part of a program/mission's success.
(Also worth noting that in a lot of cases where the head of a program is a civilian employee, it's not uncommon to find that are military retired, prior service but separated, and/or also a reserve officer in the same or very adjacent field)
There are definitely people that collect older media for use in the retro setups.
I constantly buy New Old Stock when I find Floppies, Mini Disc, Cassettes, Zip Disks, hell just about anything. We're a weird bunch of collectors but we're out there.
I still have a box of them somewhere, I have one from early 90's that still has all the circles on vendor ads where I was doing price comparisons. Those were the days.
Motorbikes are much worse in crashes than kei trucks, we are more than happy to make, sell and operate them. I don’t actually buy the “unsafe” reasoning. It’s also perfectly street legal to buy and drive cars and trucks from the 60s with abysmal safety ratings.
They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.
I was hoping to see this too. I regularly travel with my vision pro and it
has been fantastic. It's definitely bulky though. I also tend to carry a couple laptops for work and recently switch my windows laptop to a GPD pocket. While I like it (using right now), the keyboard has many nuances you have to adjust to.
Both of those options end up with me bringing a small keyboard and mouse.
I own a previous gen Xreal set and it just wasn't there for me resolution wise. I may have to try this newer gen and see.
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