I had to look up CGA (no, not Color Graphics Adapter). He means Column Grid Array. Essentially they turn the solder balls into solder cylinders.

Wow, very very slick.. I wish I had mod points to mod you up.

Remember that over 2/3 of the defense budget is operational costs (paying our soldiers, conducting operations).

One thing I have to point out, though, is how much we spend on defense compared to the rest of the world. When doing international budget comparisons, the only real comparisons is by percentage of GDP.
Want to guess where the US places in the rankings? 1st? 3rd?

How about 27th

Considering defense is one of the explicitly layed-out directives of the Constitution, I think we're going about it rather logically.

The reason why it's "scientifically interesting" is:

See: http://tassiedevil.com.au/disease.html

From what I remember, the Sea Shadow was actually mostly a failure, in terms of radar signature. Sure, it was damn stealthy. In fact, too stealthy. Water naturally reflects radar, so when they took Sea Shadow out, all they had to do was look for the hole where they weren't getting any reflection. :-/

In other ways it was a success. It did have a very low noise signature. The hull design did help it greatly reduce the ships wake, keeping it from turning up too much water.

No, not really windows, but more of a hardware issue. The SATA spec doesn't require manufatures support hot-swap, so, some don't fully support it. nVidia's SATAs always have had hot-swap, so thats why you would see the main hard drive in the "safely remove" list. But, for example, my Marvel and Intel controllers don't support hot-swap. My Marvel controller handles the eSATA ports, and I've tried adding a drive while it was powered up. Windows detected it and everything work, but there is no safe method to disconnect the drive (the write-cache buffers need to be cleared out before you can yank it off safely). The best solution I could come up was force the computer into S3 standby, and then pull the drive. That seems to work good enough.