The article calls a lot of sound aircraft designs failures because they were employed improperly (wrong tactics) or the weapons they were designed to carry weren't ready by the time the war started. An example, the TBD-1 losses at Midway were the result of attacking Japanese battle ships without fighter escorts and by the outdated torpedoes that couldn't be dropped at high speed without breaking up when hitting the water. The Grumman TBF-1 Avenger was "successful" because by the time it entered service, more modern torpedoes were available and military planners knew that torpedo bombers needed fighter escort.

The parallel in Europe is in 1939, both the British and the Germans tried sending daylight bombers without fighter escort into battle. Every time, they suffered unacceptable losses. The point is in 1939 to 1940, aerial warfare was so new that most military planners did not know how to properly employ their air forces, or what the capabilities and limitations of their aircraft were. At the time, Bomber Generals saw fighter production as competition for resources, i.e. aircraft. The Bomber people at the time believed Stanley Baldwin's quote from 1932, "the bomber will always get through."

Let me get the banjo music going... It's like the relationship between your childhood Tonka truck with an up-armored MIL-SPEC- HMMWV.

What, no AOL CDs????

Very upset you shall be my young padawan.

Just curious, is that a 1/4" tape?

A lot of Americans take what they want to hear at face value as well, no matter how absurd it would be to the neutral outsider. The only difference may be that in America, at least there are usually at least two different points of view, each with their own crazy followers. In Russia, it seems it is only Putin's point of view, or at least the point of view he wants to promote. I'm not so sure if all Russians are drinking the Cool-Aid, but those who don't buy into the Propaganda, cannot express themselves openly for fear of being publicly "outed" as some kind of "foreign alien agent".

It's got to be a very large trampoline. If we drop a huge mass on to a trampoline with the right timing, maybe we could propel a small mass into orbit. Time to break out the HP calculator and an old envelope.

It's likely pro-Putin propagandists post provocative comments advocating nuking Moscow, genocide by the CIA in Ukraine, usw. Then they quote those comments in the Russian media as somehow representative of western opinion. Haven't seen it here on /., but it seems to come up on some european online news sites.

The economics of gas and oil are changing. On average, a new house in the U.S. uses only 25% the energy that it would have used in 1990. In western Europe, the trends are even more extreme where carbon-neutral homes are starting to gain mainstream market share. I plan on putting in a solar heating system in my house, for example. Three years ago, I wouldn't have even thought about it. But the tripling of oil and gas prices in the last five years, combined with continuous price reductions in solar modules as suddenly made solar heating cheaper than oil or gas. I'm not even mentioning global warming, because eventually we'll all need to get away from using oil and gas for energy sources. That is what I mean by innovation. Maybe if Putin turns off the gas pipe to Europe, he'll speed energy efficiency along in the same way the Arab oil embargo in the 1970's led to the first ever fuel-efficiency standards for cars in America. In the long run, that could be a good thing even if it causes problems in the short term.

Maybe not trivial, but it doesn't drive innovation. It's like the 16th century Spaniards extracting gold from S. America and transporting it to Europe. Not trivial, but they still went bankrupt. The English innovated in shipbuilding and navigation. The rest is history.

That's the sticking point. I qualify for citizenship in the country where I live, but do not want to renounce my U.S. citizenship. So I stay American. The IRS needs to understand that people live in foreign countries for a lot of reasons besides to not pay taxes. When people hide their money from the IRS, the money is what leaves the country, not the person. When the person leaves, it's usually for other reasons such as a job, marriage, etc.

I'm an American expat. The USA requires me to file a tax return annually, even though I live, work and pay taxes in a foreign country. Because of my expat status, I have to do a paper return, at least as far as I know. I get to do the whole paperwork drill twice, once for my adopted northern-Europen country, with a 50% tax rate. And then again for the IRS, where I list everything out, deduct local taxes (50%), convert it all to US dollars (no official exchange rate given), then at to the bottom of the form cross off that nothing is owed and sign it and mail it. I should probably hire a professional tax accountant to do the IRS return, but cannot afford to do so. It costs around 600€ for a simple run-of-the mill return. It's getting more and more complicated each year.

Honestly, I am considering not filing with the IRS any more, because there's no positive benefit. If I do everything right, I don't get into trouble. If I do it wrong, I get into trouble and might have to pay. If I don't do it at all, no one notices. At least as long as I don't go back to working in the U.S. But that's not really much of an incentive, considering that my home, my job and my family are all here. The IRS should at least offer a raffle to win a prize, like an expenses paid trip for my family to Disneyland or something like that. I guess I would be a candidate for changing my citizenship, as I speak the language perfectly and am very well integrated in the local culture. I was born an American, served in the Marines twice in Iraq, etc., and I don't want to give that up, even if I'l probably never live in the U.S. again. I still enjoy flying the American flag on the 4th of July and grilling hamburgers for my friends. I'm not bitter at the IRS or the U.S. government. I just wish they would make it easier for a working stiff such as myself to stay compliant and "do his duty."

Access more than 4 GB of RAM which is necessary for most modern science and engineering applications. Same goes for video editing, graphics, etc. applications.

If all people did all day was word processing and spread sheets, a vintage 68040 Mac II running System 7 with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 would still be adequate. But try supporting vintage Macs in a productivity environment, I would hope your supply of SCSI hard drives doesn't run out. Same goes for XP, spare parts are getting more and more scarce with time.

I think you're just a troll. Most people on /. would know that Win 7 or a modern 64-bit LINUX compared to XP is more than just eye candy.

Cuba's lucky. A lot of the modems got a busy signal. Otherwise it could have been worse.

What caused the decline of the big three was bad management, not necessarily GREED. First they were too slow to take foreign competition in the U.S. market seriously. Then later on, they were too focused on the American market to make the cars they needed to compete in foreign markets. Especially the ones where the cost of gas is higher, and the roads are smaller... which is most countries.