It is completely logical what is happening here. What is valued most by many people in our society? Yes, it's money. So what these people do is simply apply what our culture teaches: go and earn lots of money. In other societies (in the past , now , or in the future , or elsewhere on earth) other values were or could become the most principal ones : knowledge , education , honesty, ... . Apparently we value knowledge , but maybe not enough. If knowledge gathering would be considered as the highest good then our society would have taken measures to associate a very high value with it , easily attracting the best of our minds.

"... GET BACK TO MAKE THINGS"... seems a good advice but is unrealistic. The days that USA had unlimited amounts of cheap oil & gas are gone. Without these huge volumes of cheap energy, it simply is impossible to make things on an industrial scale and stay an important economic power. The economic model that made USA big depended heavily on enormous amounts of cheap energy. Current high oil-prices mean the end of this economic model, so unless USA invent themselves with a totally new model (which I find highly unlikely) , I fear that USA as a world-leading superpower has reached the beginning of its end.

Mod parent up plse. He refers correctly to the type of brainwashing the way the Bush administration has pursuid the last 8 years. Off course there are still a number of elements present that continue this style up to today.

Of course 'they' will write Linux or Mac viruses if DoD switches to one of these!
But because the much better build-in security of both OS's compared to Windows, it will be much more difficult to cause mayhem.

And there is more: Surely loss of human lives is terrible but war inevitably also brings huge damage to infrastructure and ecology. While nature is already pushed to its limits in peace-time conditions, events in Iraq show us that war also means enormous amounts of polution.

With all this new technology brought to production without much consideration (basicly only for profit of course) I honestly doubt that mankind will last any longer than an extra 100 years.