Yamato was deployed at Midway. She was part of the body of surface combatants (with one light carrier as escort) kept out of range for the surface action that Spruance wisely declined to permit. The deployment at Midway was a Rube Goldberg contraption that personifies everything that was wrong with IJN thinking in WW2; multiple formations scattered too far apart for mutual support and a requirement that the enemy do what you expect for victory to occur.

Neither ship was used at Guadalcanal for the same reason that the old American battleships weren't used: Neither side had sufficient tanker assets in theater to keep the old battle-wagons fueled. The USN deployed new design battleships (USS South Dakota, North Carolina, and Washington) but kept the Pearl Harbor survivors on the West Coast. The IJN used two older battle cruisers (Kirishima and Fuso) that weren't as fuel hungry as their bigger/newer cousins.

The biggest flaw with the IJN was their inferior fire control technology. This is evidenced both in surface actions (Samar being the best case study) and in the anti-aircraft role. The USN had radar directed fire control in 1942, for both surface targets and aircraft. The Japanese paid an extremely heavy price when attacking our ships with aircraft, the two carrier battles in the Guadalcanal campaign (Eastern Solomons and Santa Cruz) were Pyrrhic tactical victories at best, with most of the Japanese aircraft losses coming from AA fire.

Straw man; better one! Bonus points for absolutism.

When you've finished with Atlas Shrugged do yourself a favor and Google "compelling state interest", "strict scrutiny", and "case law." If you're going to rail against the system you might as well understand how it works in the real world.

You'll brook no argument from me on civil forfeiture. The reporting requirements are trickier; they were put in place because ongoing criminal enterprises were using cash to launder the proceeds of their ill gotten gains. There's a history there and if you want to drill down deeper into Constitutional Law the reporting requirements pass a strict scrutiny test. The State has a compelling interest in preventing criminals from laundering money and the policy is narrowly tailored. It does not represent a significant burden on or intrusion into your daily life.

I can see the philosophical objection, but in the hierarchy of infringements (real and imagined) on my personal liberty this ranks pretty damned close to the bottom. Such are the tradeoffs you make for being a member of civilization and I doubt that there are many people in the political mainstream (or even within Libertarianism) that think we should make it easier for criminal enterprises to launder money.

I liked, "A Walk Among the Tombstones".

Here is the difference. Windows 8 no one really bought it besides Joe six packs whose computer just broke and he needs another.

Windows 10 will be like Windows 7 was to Vista. ... err 10.1 as Windows 7 was very rock solid and usable at this stage sadly where 10 still is pretty rough. Maybe an XP repeat :-)

Users with 8 always stayed on the desktop so no point of porting either. With 10 it is the desktop so your app will be there for your user. Windows 10 or 10.2 or whatever if I read the material correctly as 10.x = macosx.x where corporations buy the slow ring (even releases) while home users get all releases. So this means it will take 100% of all Windows marketshare eventually. Windows 7 EOL will come sooner than we think as the years go by.

In essence the situation is totally different. Your Windows Phone will run all your pc apps. It will have the full office. It will have spotify, it will sync your settings, cortana, and your Spartan web browser (finally killing IE) etc.

So I think MS might have a decent chance and it is growing but small right now.

Here is the kicker. Metro are not phone apps!

Infact you would need to have one app for Windows 8, another for Windows RT, and then make another for WIndows Phone. Meanwhile you write for IOS and you get both tablet and phone. Same with Android.

So if they make a fat binary like Apple did you target all unless you have specific assembly code or calls to some old api tied to win32 or x86.

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

What choice does Microsoft have at this point? If they simple cede the mobile market, they risk Google marching right up the middle with a series of devices that come to resemble a full computing platform. And that most certainly is Google's intent. That's why they're putting considerable resources into Google Docs; they want it to be good enough, and once it is good enough, then suddenly that Chromebook looks like a pretty decent competitor to a more expensive Windows laptop.

At the end of the day, Microsoft has to at least gain some market share or it will begin to see its most valuable market; Exchange-Office, begin to leak away.

Neither does saying "it is the greatest next thing", apparently.

I'm not so thrilled that large cash transactions must be reported to the government, but that strays off topic.

That's actually his chief complaint if you read between the lines.

As much as I need to access such documents on my phone, I can. I can't conceive of actually wanting to work on such documents on a smartphone, but to view them, Google Docs seems to a reasonably good job, and when I had an iPhone, Apple's ability to view Office files was good enough in most cases.

That's always been MS's problem, they bring nothing to the table that isn't delivered by Google or Apple, and the things that they could bring to the table, like AD integration, they don't. Coupled with an absolutely miserable app store that is a laughably stunted entity compared to the major Android and Apple markets, it's little wonder they've had such a problem.

So your chief complaint really is the fact that the Government doesn't make it easy for you to cheat^Wlive outside the system?

Yawn.

I suppose you could try your luck at living off the land in Alaska. They're still doing homesteads up there and you'll find a ton of parcels that can be had for <$10,000. Property taxes are pretty low, albeit a non-zero amount. It's probably as far away from the man as you can get and still be on planet Earth.

So we need the Dr. Pepper of cell phones?

It's a pretend asset. :)

Fixed it for you.