Cars built today will outlast most of the old Beetles. There is a big survivorship bias at work. A percentage of them were built to slightly tighter tolerances and quality than all the others off the same line. A percentage of those will end up in the hands of owners that are meticulous about maintenance, never get in a major accident, and keep it going for decades. The handful you see left are the ones that went through several rounds of small percentage chances. There were a bajillion of those old Beetles made, so a few were bound to get through.
What cars have problems with today are things that rarely have to do with making the wheels go. They get into accidents. Their auto-dimming back windows no longer work. The GPS doesn’t get updates and thinks you’re three counties away. The engine and transmission, however, will probably go to the junkyard in perfect working order, even with shitty maintenance on the part of the owner.
TCP/IP does not have a concept of Presentation or Session. Everything above it is just “Application”, which is more sensible. There isn’t much criticism to be had of layer 4 down, but when they got to layer 5 and 6, they were telecom people sticking their nose in software architecture. You can write networked applications with those layers if you like. I’ve seen it done, and it’s fine. There are also plenty of other ways to architect it that also work just fine.
That would mean Obi-Wan lied. Not only that, but he apparently didn’t bother looking for Luke on his birth planet. This whole theory is a mess and I hope it’s not true.
(Dropping the act, I really do think it was a mistake for Lucas to pull this trigger. Made for a great moment in movie history, but sets up a whole lot of problems in the larger plot.)
I don’t think even a purely defensive military could be that small for the US. We have a lot of coastline on two oceans, plus distant holdings in Alaska and Hawaii. Even discharging Guam and the like would still be a lot of ground and ocean to cover.