Or, they'll just go back to what they were before PCs became powerful enough to use -- specially-built workstations that cost an arm and a leg. If the aerospace industry needs them badly enough, they'll pay whatever it takes. I remember the days when graphics cards for CAD workstations cost well over $10k.

Yeah, so the military should stop using weapons because that's what the other guy knows they're going to do?

There will always be a market for a company that caters to the high end of the market as long as they have appropriate products for that market segment. Sometimes even when that market is very, very small (i.e. Rolex, Ferrari) but you can still be very profitable.

On the other hand, if you *do* have tenure, you could make a huge reputation for yourself and could get a job anywhere you wanted if you could prove that climate change was false. And if you can't get a grant from one of the government sources, there are plenty of fossil fuel industry and conservative think tanks that would gladly fund your research.

Probably because none of the LCD manufacturers aren't making very many 4:3 LCDs any more. Now that TVs and computers are using basically the same LCD panels we can get them pretty cheaply, but only as long as you have that enormous economy of scale that dual-purpose gets you. If you want 4:3, there isn't nearly as much demand so the unit costs will end up a lot higher.

Actually, it was the last Bush budget (FY 2009) that exploded the deficit. That year's budget deficit was 1.4 trillion. In the FY 2010 budget (Obama's first budget) it's down to 1.3 trillion.