That could describe the American electorate in a nutshell, yes. I want X or Y, but make that other guy pay for it.

If businesses were given a choice, they'd have surely vetoed the ribbon interface in Office 2007. But they weren't given a choice. They were told "tough, the ribbon stays". And businesses bought Office anyway.

Conclusion: when they bitch about Metro, Microsoft will say "tough, Metro stays", and sooner or later, businesses will adapt to Metro anyway. Microsoft always wins with these things.

Yes, and while this forced Microsoft to extend XP's life... we've been using it for ten years now...ultimatey, Vista "won". Because 7 is basically just an improved Vista (especially in the 32 bit case). All the people that hated Aero Glass? Tough. 7 kept it.

If there's a lesson here, it's that Microsoft knows that they can wait out any public outrage over Metro. If they insist on customers using it anyway, then customers, sooner or later, will cave and do so. If history is any guide, Windows 9 will still have a Metro interface, after a few years of 8, people will have gotten used to it. Those that refuse to buy 8 because of Metro will surely cave in the future when their hardware gets old, and they need new PC's. They'll almost surely buy 9 with Metro.

Whether or not Microsoft is right or wrong on the virtues of Metro, changing a UI can be a huge innovation if done right. The Mac's whole existence, it's Raison d'Etre was the fact that it's interface was human-friendly compared to the "un-natural" command line. Color had nothing do with it, either. Recall that the first Macs were black and white screened machines.

OS X's first four iterations were faster because of improvements in the code. That ended with Leopard, which ran like a dog on older PPC hardware. And from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, OSX hasn't really been increasingly faster. Apple has been cutting code from the last three releases, and that speeds things up in some cases, but that's not because the code is improving, but because Apple has stopped supporting legacy hardware, as well as adopting a 64 bit only approach. If your Mac is five years old (or older), you're pretty much out of luck if you want to run Mountain Lion. It's not that 10.8 is slow on those machines, its that Apple prevents you from even trying to install on them. Maintaining speed and stability is easy if you force customers to use only recent hardware from a very narrow list. Windows 8, on the other hand, will run on a 10+ year old P4 computer as long as the graphics card meets the minimum requirements (and runs surprisingly well). I'm a Mac user, but when making arguments comparing Windows to OS X, be honest and include the point that Microsoft is much more supportive of a much wider range of hardware. The parent poster was wrong about 8 being "one of the first", but it's certainly one of the first Microsoft OS's to be faster than a previous version on similar hardware. As far as 7 goes, only the 32 bit version was faster than Vista's 32 version, but that's largely because Vista 32 was an unholy mess. Vista 64 performed well out of the gate, and 7's 64 bit version wasn't really an improvement, performance-wise.

The majority support some provisions, not all of them. It's not just a matter of marketing and branding. That same majority is also very much opposed to some other provisions in it.

I very much doubt that. Now, I'm pretty sure that you could shape your questions in a manner that would twist the bill of rights into something like a Marxist screed... polling organizations are rather infamous for "shaping" questions... but if you just read the bill straight out to people, there's no way they're going to see an "antithetical, Socialist manifesto" unless they themselves are deluded. The ten amendments have clear statements about very un-socialist things... religious rights, rights to have weapons, and property rights. So you're either exaggerating or seeing things skewed through your own lens. Considering that your sig line is "The invisible hand of the Market is a pickpocket", I'd bet you're among the later that tends to see things from a red perspective anyway (red in the traditional political sense, not in the recent American red-state, blue state sense).

I understand that the Brits say it differently, but it annoys me to no end when Americans do, because from American mouths, it just sounds pretentious.

Absolutely not. Neither the F-22 nor the F-35 are a "bargain" at close to a quarter billion dollars apiece, flyaway. As an aviation writer put it 30 years ago, "building a fighter with all the electronics of the starship Enterprise will do you no good if you can only afford two of them". We're at that point, budget-wise. We need a fighter that we can affordably build in quantity, or it's useless. Admiral Greenert was right. It's time to ditch the luxury car aircraft acquisition idea and go to flexible, cheaper "trucks" that we can build relatively quickly and in higher quantities. And as there is no proof that either the Russian Pak-Fa nor the Chinese J-20 are anything other technology demonstrators or outright Potemkin frauds to convince the West that "hey, we can do stealth too", we should probably just continue to build teen-series fighter with AESA radars. Nothing that the Russians or Chinese have that are in actual production are any better.

Ah, the conspiracy theory. From the same people that brought you "Israelis flew remote controlled jets into the twin towers. Not a single Jew died there!".

And really? A scare speech on authoritarianism? From the same people that want Chick-Fil-A's closed down because of the owner's religious views? Tell me again about tolerance, Hatta.

And ultimately it was meaningless, as non-stealth Chinooks were right behind them and made a big racket. Stealth helicopters really don't make much tactical (or budget) sense.

Drones can only be a supplement to manned aircraft. Drones are only for situations where you have total dominance of enemy airspace with no threat of losing it. Drones are radio and satellite controlled. What happens when a peer force uses high-powered jammers and takes out your satellites? Oops. No more drones.

I served in the 80's and it was quite a bit different. A lot of the older salts... Chiefs and 1st class PO's that had served in the 70's... relayed a lot of the "hollow force" horror stories to us younger guys. Like the USAF, a lot of the Navy's air fleet were hangar queens for lack of spares and short of money for training and maintenance.

Any surface warfare officer worth his salt could tell him that there's simply no way to make any surface naval vessel truly stealthy with all of the electronic emissions blasting forth from them. Warships are inevitably huge radio transmitters, and there's no way to hide that unless you turn everything off. Even things like spectrum-hopping can't hide the fact that a lot of electrical power is being radiated. Hopefully, the brass is starting to wake up to facts like these when planning vessel design.

The F-22 was supposed to be a complete replacement for the F-15 fleet. Because of its bust-ass cost, we can buy so few of them that we have to keep some F-15's in the inventory. And doctrine calls for the F-22's to be the point of the spear against enemy air forces. It'll be the old Eagles that are hanging back to protect the big heavies, until the Raptors can clear the sky. That's the current doctrine, anyway. If the Raptor does worse than planned in actual combat, well... USAF really doesn't have a Plan B.