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."

Seeing how it was a civilian airliner, I would suspect that they couldn't and didn't.

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the TBD-1 losses at Midway were the result of attacking Japanese battle ships without fighter escorts and by the outdated torpedoes that couldn't be dropped at high speed without breaking up when hitting the water.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".