A big part of the Zero's reputation came from racking up kills in China against a lot of second-rate planes with poorly-trained pilots. After all, there was a reason that the Republic of China hired the American Volunteer Group to help out during the Second Sino-Japanese War – Chinese pilots had a hard time cutting it.

The Wildcat was deficient in many ways versus the Zero, but it still had superior firepower via ammo loadout. The Zero carried very few 20mm rounds, most of it's ammo was 7.7mm. There are records of Japanese pilots unloading all their 7.7mm ammo on a Wildcat and it was still flyable. On the flip side, the Wildcat had an ample supply of .50 cal.

Stanley "Swede" Vejtasa was able to score seven kills against Japanese planes in one day with a Wildcat.

Yes, the discovery of the Akutan Zero helped the United States beat this plane. But MilitaryFactory.com notes that the Hellcat's first flight was on June 26, 1942 – three weeks after the raid on Dutch Harbor that lead to the fateful crash-landing of the Mitsubishi A6M flown by Tadayoshi Koga.

Marine Captain Kenneth Walsh described how he knew to roll to the right at high speed to lose a Zero on his tail. Walsh would end World War II with 17 kills. The Zero also had trouble in dives, thanks to a bad carburetor.

We were behind in technology for many reasons, but once the Hellcat started replacing the Wildcat, the Japanese Air Superiority was over. Even if they had maintained a lead in technology, as Russia showed in WW2, quantity has a quality all of it's own. We were always going to be able to field more pilots and planes than Japan would be able to.

As far as Soviet rockets, once we were stunned by the launch of Sputnik, we kicked into high gear. You can say what you will of reliability, consistency, and dependability, but exactly how many manned Soviet missions landed on the moon and returned? Other than Buran, which was almost a copy of our Space Shuttle, how many shuttles did the USSR field?

The Soviets did build some things that were very sophisticated and were, for a while, better than what we could field. The Mig-31 is a great example. We briefly lagged behind but have a much superior air capability now. The only advantages the Mig and Sukhoi have is speed, they can fire all their missiles and flee. If they are engaged however, they will lose if pilots are equally skilled.

As @newtboy has said, I am sure that Russia and China are working on military advancements, but the technology simply doesn't exist to make a Hypersonic missile possible at this point.

China is fielding a man portable rifle that can inflict pain, not kill, and there is no hard evidence that it works.

There is no proof that the Chinese have figured out the technology for an operational rail gun on land, let alone the sea. We also have created successful railguns, the problem is POWERING them repeatedly, especially onboard a ship. If they figured out a power source that will pull it off, then it is possible, but there is no concrete proof other than a photo of a weapon attached to a ship. Our experts are guessing they might have it functional by 2025, might...

China has shown that long range QEEC is possible. It has been around but they created the first one capable of doing it from space. The problem is, they had to jury rig it. Photons, or light, can only go through about 100 kilometers of optic fiber before getting too dim to reliably carry data. As a result, the signal needs to be relayed by a node, which decrypts and re-encrypts the data before passing it on. This process makes the nodes susceptible to hacking. There are 32 of these nodes for the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link alone.

The main issue with warfare today is that it really doesn't matter unless the battle is between one of the big 3. Which means that ANY action could provoke Nuclear conflict. Is Russia going to hypersonic missile one of our carriers without Nukes become an option on the table as a retaliation? Is China going to railgun a ship and risk nuclear war?

Hell no, no more than we would expect to blow up some major Russian or Chinese piece of military hardware without severe escalation! Which means we can create all the technological terrors we like, because we WON'T use them unless they somehow provide us a defense against nuclear annihilation.

So just like China and Russia steal stuff from us to build military hardware to counter ours, if they create something that is significantly better, we will began trying to duplicate it. The only thing which would screw this system to hell is if one of us actually did begin developing a successful counter measure to nukes. If that happens, both of the other nations are quite likely to threaten IMMEDIATE thermonuclear war to prevent that country from developing enough of the counter measures to break the tie.

Oh, I see you got one of those fancy high speed printers there!

Seizure warning! Very cool, but wow, please don't shoot high-speed video under flickering fluorescent lights.

TL;DW! I jest, I jest! I remember I used to read metric (yes, METRIC) tons of books during my formative years. Novels, fiction, non-fiction, comics... I read Times & Maclean's (Canadian equivalent of Times) magazines front-to-back... like over 90% of all articles every week. But high-speed internet & smartphone happened then I don't read prints very much anymore. Still read/watch news too much though, but it's now more depressing than educational with the stuff I read online. The journalistic standard is way down.
Much harder to find really enlightening long-form reporting these days.

I'm waiting for someone to copy my idea of using high-speed drones for police to follow fleeing motorcycle riders. Possibly with mounted tasers...

I don't care what side of the idea you're on, you KNOW it's coming.

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If the documentaries are focused on the dead bodies like this one is, probably.

The girl seemed to be in a lifestyle of unthinking foolishness. She will only not drive drunk again because she probably won't ever legally drive again. I doubt even this will teach her, some people simply cannot learn.

These films did little when they used to be the norm in drivers training classes, that's why they stopped using them. They simply weren't effective.

I can deny that this film made me think about being more cautious, because I'm not a moron that doesn't understand the outcome of a bad wreck, having seen a few in person, so beating me over the head with 'wrecks can kill you' is just boring. When I saw these as a teen, while learning to drive, I was titilated by the gore, but not effected otherwise. Most teens don't fully grasp that dangerous things are dangerous to them, and a large percentage are actually drawn to the dangers.

If humans were rational and only irresponsible by accident out of naivete, you would be right, but they just aren't. You have to be pretty brain dead to not grasp that high speed car wrecks can kill without a filmstrip telling you.

I am surprised he just went right back up to high speed, many years ago while on a motorcycle on a freeway a car in front of me didn't respect the lane being closed and went through a bunch of cones which scattered all throughout the lane: this was basically a couple of seconds in front so nothing I could do but hope that 1) I would hit no cones and 2) that if I did I wouldn't fall down and be run over by the rest of the traffic. Luckily I missed all the cones but I had to stop in the emergency lane afterwards to calm down from the adrenaline...

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

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I've actually been on one of these in Thailand at Hanuman World, near Phuket.

I was the only person riding it that day, and the staff were looking at me and asking if I was ready to use it with a touch of incredulity - as though not many people did, or people had backed out when they saw it.

It was as you'd expect, fast, extreme and terrifying/terrific, and about 1/3rd of the way down it i realised i was completely out of breath. The corners and drops and stuff were so extreme and at such high speed I was having to tense every muscle and hold my breath - it was exhausting just to sit on it. I had to take very deep very determined breaths to recover. I don't think i'd have second thoughts about skydiving or bungee jumping after riding that thing. It was insane, and i'd love to do it again. However rough it looks on the video, it feels about 10x more violent when you're on one.

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McSweeney's and high speed Internet? Sign me up.

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

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