winner winner chicken dinner! I'm reading Six Frigates right now. Highly recommend.

Oh, a political statement about the actual US document. Ok, I get it.

Huh? She's still very much afloat.

Star for knowing she was copper plated. Bonus if you know who made the plating for her. :)

agree on the 262, because Korea. Look at how drastically different that war's aviation theater was because of the tech this aircraft first exhibited.

You've got to understand what was happening. Something like 80% of the US economy was exporting to Europe and the Indies. The British govn't was at war with France, and took a series of steps that basically had them stopping any American merchant or naval vessel, forcing people aboard to serve onboard their shops,…

Sorry, Chris, but this whole list feels rushed and unresearched. Blatant errors abound.

Few vehicles define the Cold War like the reconnaissance plane and the SR-71 Blackbird was the greatest of them all. A Blackbird set the airspeed record in 1976 clocking nearly 2,200 mph – a record that hasn't been broken to this day.

The Constitution didn't play a huge roll in defeating the British in the War of 1812, but it was one of the first important battleships to use iron armor giving it the nickname "old ironsides." This influence is felt even in today's modern aircraft carriers.

The aircraft carrier made both battleships and naval battle itself irrelevant, allowing armies to bring their air power wherever they want.

He coulda been a contenda!

My dev box is a Windows 7 machine running a bunch of VMs. A huge improvement for me recently was the addition of Clover to handle Explorer windows as tabs, Chrome-style. It's been featured here, but if you didn't catch it, it's worth doing.

If they want to use the new F150 as inspiration, please go right ahead. High strength steel frame, aluminum body, highly capable in its class. No compromise in what that vehicle is; a truck.

I'll refute the "good-for-local" argument somewhat, from my perspective, by telling a story that every town of a certain size has.

Can the cargo area bottom be stripped for more headroom for, say, a large dog?

Leasing an electric car is a smart option. The battery tech is getting better and cheaper too fast to make owning it the best bet in all situations.

They were built for mixed duty. I use mine to haul the family to dinner on Friday night, and to haul the trailer to the dump on Saturday morning. Then I clean her up nice for a night on the town and have the valet park it like it's priceless, because it is to me.

You have to know what to do and when. I swapped the craptastic automatic 01M transaxle from my 1.9L Jetta Wagon TDI w/ the 02M 6-speed, commonly found stateside on the R32. This one came from Europe, where it came off a diesel Golf, so it has really high gears. It's definitely worth more now. Probably not as much…

Are you saying you don't get the author's joke? Or my lackadaisical continuance of it?