Yosemite Sam was an angry Hessian.

Having children early and starting a career at the same time can be very rough, but there's a lot to be said for still having a life to look forward to once they're grown and out of the house. Added bonus is you'll probably be around long enough to enjoy grandparenthood and possibly even great-grandparenthood.

My Herrschaft, German really is such a Biedermeier language and and doesn't fit with the current Zeitgeist. It has a gestalt that is more suited for 19th century expression. After the English-language Blitzkrieg that has taken over most pop culture, any german-language expression is seen as just a lot of flak from a karabiner. I guess we'll have to replace classical german terms such as Herz, Eigen-vector, E-Modul, with a more english ideal; cycles-per-second (so much for brevity). But German is such a beautiful language an sich. I really had my Aha-Erlebnis when I realised that german expressions were no longer associated with übermenschen traveling in U-Boots or flying in Luftwaffe planes. Now the whole world can enjoy rooting for German Wunderkinder on the national team, and at home recreate the best parts playing foosball. Maybe the French feel a bit of Schadenfreude at seeing the significant influence of german Gedanken in the english language. Maybe someday they'll be a putsch and French will take over, but for now, I'm counting on a german-language encore.

It's kind of hard to shock an animal with a Pentium II.

I haven't been following this thread too closely, so maybe repeated somewhere else. I think we agree basically on following the law. What I was trying to say is for most people, downloading an occasional mp3 is the moral equivalent to driving 60 in a 55 mph zone. The problem is when the recording industry tries to turn a minor infraction of the law into a federal crime, on par with armed bank robbery. Or wants to treat all minor offenders the same as the few who actually run a warez site.

When I was in high school, my friends and I all built our music collections by dubbing each others cassette tapes. When I joined the military later on, I don't think anybody would have cared that I had a box of dubbed Def Leppard tapes, other than as an indication of poor taste in music.

So they should never hire anyone who has ever driven faster than the legal speed limit? (55 mph in the not-so-olden days) People bend the rules all the time and usually aren't even aware they are until they're caught. That's normal human behavior. There are so many Federal criminal laws, nobody's even sure how many there are. We probably all violate at least one federal law in the course of a normal day.

It all depends. A 23 year-old veteran who did his four years and got out is more of a citizen soldier than a cog in a machine. Most are highly-motivated and trainable. They show up to work on time and do what they are supposed to do. The Cogs tend to be the Colonels and Generals who get out and use their military rolodex to make a living as lobbyists or consultants. You'll find those types at most major defense contractors, but they won't be working in IT.

For listening to Wagner, it should be salvaged from the deck of the Flying Dutchman. From any other sailing ship, it's just not the same.

Beating a plowshare into a sword.

So you're saying that if we combine a Bose and a Beats headset, we might actually get hi-fidelity sound?

And that's where most of the mishaps originated, misuse of the F-104 in the ground attack role. The F-104 actually had a good safety record when it was operated as intended: a high-altitude, VFR interceptor. The Italians for example had a good safety record. The Germans, not so much.

It's all about the weapons and the sensors to cue those weapons. The airframe is secondary. It just gets the weapons to where they need to be to be launched.

The F-104 had the pilot's eyeballs as the long-range sensor, and a primative gun radar. The weapons were the M61 and AIM-9. The F-35 has an advanced radar system, data-link, probably other sensors we don't know about. Weapons would be the AIM-120, AIM-9, JDAM, and other weapons we probably don't know about. The only debate is those sensors and weapons could have been integrated into a less expensive, more conventional airframe.

And the code is 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. Funny, that's the same code on my luggage.

PPC Macs were awful because Apple wouldn't stop wasting time doing Photoshop shootouts with Pentuim II PCs.

Nope, UNIX was never a factor on the desktop, even ca. 1991. If you had the $$$ to afford a UNIX workstation, you often also had a DOS/Win PC to get real work done. Mac OS wasn't half bad, especially version 6 and earlier. It was when they tried to tack on all the extra stuff in version 7 that it started to fail under its own weight. I feel old now...at my first job I had on my desk, a Mac running version System 6 and a DEC VAX terminal. I think Clinton had just been sworn in.

An old UNIX joke, "What does work do when it arrives at a work station? The same thing a train does when it arrives at a train station."