The PLA has short arms and short legs - meaning that it can't get to where it's going and once it gets there, it doesn't have the logistical tail to fight. The strength of the US Army has nothing to do with our weapons. I served with the US Army in Egypt about 10 years ago at a remote checkpoint in the middle of the Sinai desert. I watched as every day, Egyptian conscripts were given a bag of rice and vegetables as their food for the day. Their only water was from a 55 gallon oil drum which was used for cooking and bathing and the only time they got meat was when they were rotated back to their main base. Meanwhile, I'm on a FOB with satellite TV, air conditioning and more turkey sandwiches that I could possibly eat. That's when it struck me that the strength of the US Army does not come from our weapons - it comes from our ability to move more turkey sandwiches across the globe than the good guys can even move in their own country. An Army marches on its stomach. The problem with a million man army is that you have to feed it and once we cut that off, the Chinese have a million starving, trained men with guns.

The Loc-Nar

I would argue Wolfenstein 3D before Doom. The Apple Newton is important because it introduced the concept of a handheld. The industry learned from Apple. Without Newton's handwriting recognition failure, Jeff Hawkins would not have invented Graffiti, which was a "simpler" way of entering data into a handheld through a stylus. Graffiti worked until the Treo and Blackberry keyboards came along, followed by Apple's adaptive touchscreen.

Yes, but I was doing it on my Treo 600 four years before the first hipster cracked their iPhone screen.

Humm... lose the MacBook Air and toss in the Garmin Forerunner GPS. The MacBook Air didn't exactly revolutionize anything. But handheld GPS has changed the way we drive, walk and find restaurants.

I'm actually surprised that Brazil didn't pick Embraer to roll their own jet fighter more tailored to their own threats. Brazil has the money, the technical know-how, the and the educated workforce to pull it off. Although I suppose a Saab today is better than a less-capable Embraer fighter ten years from now.

Good hunting, Stalker.

+1 that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Although I believe it was also marketed as "Killbots."

There is a very simple reason why more women aren't developers - it's because programmers are geeky and few women want to be associated with that. Think about yourself. You were probably an outcast in high school. Then you discovered computers. And for once in your life you are not judged. The computer does whatever you tell to do. You understand the computer better than people. You fall in with that crowd in high school who host LAN parties and play Doom on a Friday night when everybody else is out dating. Then you get to college and major in Computer Science. Now you meet hundreds of other people just like you! These are people who love Dr. Who and Red Dwarf and know the Hitchhikers Guide in and out. The social deficiencies you had in high school are celebrated here. So you become more and more geeky. Now tell me if that isn't you. If you are a woman, you may be smart, but there is this horrible stigma assigned to hanging out with the guys in the computer club. In America, women are supposed to be pretty, not geeky. So when you get to college you major in Communications or Marketing or maybe Math. You may want to be an engineer, but it just isn't socially acceptable. I'll tell you this: I wish there were more female computer programmers - we are too homogeneous and when you have a homogeneous group, your ideas suffer from groupthink. If everybody is thinking alike - somebody isn't thinking. The real question is how to change it - and I don't have an answer for you. But I'd rather have one Grace Hopper than 10 Mark Zuckerbergs.