*ahem* You realize that every aircraft manufacturer releases pie-in-the-sky speculative drawings every single year, don't you, Diaz? I've got a book from the mid-1980s that predates the F-117, the C-17, the B-2...it's filled with forward-swept wings, hypersonics, fighters the size of the Blackbird, and more. These…

Yes, we are. Fighters like the Russian Su-35 give Air Force and Navy planners heartburn because they're big, maneuverable, carry a shit-ton of weapons, and have the range and radar performance to make life very hard for strike aircraft to get to a target. No matter how good the F-15 has been over its 30 years of…

GPS Status needs to be on your phone. :) That function that Whitson mentions in the article fixes the GPS hang without needing to reboot.

I don't know if it's "widespread" but I do know that it's much more handy to have this tool and knowledge than it is to wait, wonder, and bitch about it. I used to run a non-assisted GPS in a Dell PDA; it could take forever to lock on.

If it makes you feel better, it's based on a real story where there were no cartoon wheels to save the gunner.

The Alien Conquest sets have lots of bubble canopies like that, although in different shapes and sizes. My 7yo has all of the current AC sets, and I have to say they're bloody awesome. The big 10-wheeled rolling headquarters is just shot through with fun little details and tricks.

Same here. I'm expecting this to get rescinded.

Really, it was War Of The Words. It was devastating in terms of an alien invasion film. We'd never seen one where the invaders were so destructive and seen only from one character's point of view (everything you see in the movie is through Tom Cruise's perspective). I remember seeing it in the theater on opening…

Beautiful. I especially love the second to last one. That's a "WHOOPEEE" moment if ever there was one.

It's that, plus the move into an all-volunteer force that both exemplifies the notion of "citizen soldier" and disconnects it from the idea of soldiers being the "everyman" that they were in the 1940s. Military service is now seen as a specialization, not a duty, and in the industries that turn out the most public…

No, I'm assuming it's contempt for the military.

Same here. Chrome/Chromium makes the web browser consistent across different hardware, and Gmail fits into that plan as neat as a pin. Plus you can run Gmail in offline mode (in Chrome, at least) so connectivity interruptions aren't much of an issue (especially since that's so rare now), and I'm automatically synced…

"According to a friend of mine who was at the New York critic screening of the movie, everybody burst into laughter during that scene — which is a response I can totally understand." Because they're douchebags.

What this reminds me of is how pilots in fighter squadrons form certain affinities or aversions to particular birds. In "Palace Cobra" by Ed Rasimus (an F-105/F-4 pilot in the Vietnam War), he writes about certain jets that tended to have certain peculiarities, like one jet that just couldn't fly straight. It had such…

Yep. Very sophisticated radio controlled car.

And the possibility of this being your backyard.

Well, it's Alaska. They grow up faster up there.

That might not be related to the data service. There's a utility app called "GPS Status" that you should install. When you enable your GPS and run it, it shows you what's going on with your GPS receiver and pulls down GPS assistance data. I've seen it lock on in mere seconds. If this works, then you at least know your…

Yeah, Moriarty really got kind of scary once he started to get more physical. It's like, the teeth started to show, and I wasn't entirely sure he wouldn't bite someone's face off like he was part Hannibal Lecter.

Both of you really made me go back and "re-view" that scene in my mind, and damned if you're not right...there was some really great stuff going on there that I didn't even pick out on first viewing.