The Future Transport Rotorcraft (FTR) is a proposed heavy-lift helicopter capable of transporting the Army's Future Combat System (FCS) family of combat vehicles. The authors review RAND Arroyo Center's analysis of the engineering, operational, and survivability risks and uncertainties associated with the FTR.

The Future Combat System (FCS) is a rapidly deployable, medium-weight family of combat vehicles that will have the lethality of today's heavy armor forces. The use of heavy lift rotorcraft to "vertically envelop" the adversary with the FCS force package has shown significant promise.

Sit down, turn off your cellphone, and prepare to be fascinated. Clear your schedule, because once you've started reading this interview, you won't be able to put it down until you've finished it.

Gray: We have an embarrassment of riches in that we're able to store more than we can access. Capacities continue to double each year, while access times are improving at 10 percent per year. So, we have a vastly larger storage pool, with a relatively narrow pipeline into it. We're not really geared for this.

Gray, on databases: Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home. That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.

In the next decade, disks will replace tapes, and disks will have infinite capacity. Period. This will dramatically change the way we architect our file systems. There are many more questions opened by this than resolved.

Most people agree that computer science will play a significant role in the inofrmation society. But what role will that be? Analyzing the part knowledge played in the agrarian, industrial, and information societies can help answer this question.

... The transition from the agrarian to the industrial society showed that a revolution takes a place whenver a new technology usurps human usefulness in a given field.

... The information society will embed the most precious part of human knowledge in computer software. This approach offers obvious advantages and serious threats.

A main complaint of email users is that they have to waste time every day deleting spam messages from the servers on which they lease their little online garden plots -- but such deleting is only necessary because the industry has its head screwed on backwards.

In our universe (right here, right now), data storage is dirt cheap and getting cheaper. Disk storage per bit is in effect too cheap to meter, so no one should have to waste time deleting anything, unless he feels like it.

No one should ever have to do anything with a mail message except ignore it, read it, or read and respond.

When I see people "cleaning up" their mail files, faithfully stuffing each message into a folder or otherwise file-clerking for a machine, acting as their computer's loyal (albeit menial) employee, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. (Laugh is usually the right answer.)

Ms. Stone, 16, is a lot more Britney than Whitney — that is, until she begins to sing. Husky, preternaturally mature, her voice sounds as if it were bred in a black Southern church ...

Fukuyama examines the impact of culture on economic life, society, and success in the new global economy. He argues that the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms.

In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business.

Accused of killing a 71-year-old neighbor in an unglamorous apartment complex two years ago -- quarters he rented disguised as a woman -- Mr. Durst fled after his arrest only to be apprehended in a delicatessen while stealing a chicken sandwich.

... What is worth noting about the media coverage of Mr. Durst's spectacular tribulations is how little has been made of the effects his actions might have had on his powerful relatives and their business dealings. The notion of family dishonor is absent in part, one must assume, because the notion of family honor itself has become outdated.

Geoffrey Wolff, author of biographies on two fabled black sheep, noted that now the phrase "Oh, my God, the shame you have brought on your family!" goes virtually unheard.

"I was a little surprised, but I knew right away it was a wise choice. It is safer to marry a cousin than a stranger."

Iqbal's reaction was typical in a country where nearly half of marriages are between first or second cousins, a statistic that is one of the more important and least understood differences between Iraq and America. The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate virtually everything Americans are trying to do here, from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women's status to creating a liberal democracy.

... "Liberal democracy is based on the Western idea of autonomous individuals committed to a public good, but that's not how members of these tight and bounded kin groups see the world. Their world is divided into two groups: kin and strangers."