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A laser is more highly focused than lightning, so your theory is problematic. And how many times is lightning aimed a cockpit? http://www.laserpointersafety.... Here is a description of an incident of lighting blinding a pilot, causing the loss of control and 25 deaths: http://avstop.com/news/strikeb...

Except, it happened not 1 time, but 3 times, in a short period of time, to a car thats pretty unpopular simply because they can't produce that many at this point in time (not due to lack of buyers).

Wrong. Do your homework.

Only one was road debris.

The other one in mexico was a high speed crash into a concrete barrier after the car went airborne at over 100mph. The driver walked away.
The Tennessee incident was also a crash, not road debris. Nobody was injured there either.

Most if this is due to improper firefighting technique. Go look a the twitter pictures. Fire fighters are just going to have to learn how to fight battery fires, because the problem is not unique to Tesla, it has also occurred in Chevy Volts.

Baumgartner is (as the article says) Austrian, so is Red Bull... Ah, and by the way. The guy who sued Red Bull for 'prior idea' (or whatever) is named Daniel Hogan. More infos here.

Please be more specific, as you are claiming some fault in my statement, but not even quoting a statement where I asserted anything specific.

The first poster said: "Those 'fees' are not taxed, hence uncle sam is missing out on billions in tax revenue.."

The second poster said "Not taxed?? It's taxed twice, once as corporate profits, and then again on distributions / capital gains."

You said: "Or are you just an anti-corporate tax nutter that chimes in even when your comments are factually incorrect (as in this case, they are essentially untaxed)?"

I asked: "why you think these fees are untaxed, besides from the unsourced statement from a random Slashdotter."

A simple Google search turns up:

"Spirit earned a record $83 million profit in 2009 alone. Spirit's ranking as the most profitable airline by pre-tax margin in the United States in 2009 is based on the Department of Transportation's Form 41 data. Pre-tax margin, which is the profit made by a company calculated as a percentage of sales before taxes, is an important measure of the profitability of a company." http://avstop.com/news_june_2010/spirit_airlines_misrepresent_contract_proposal.htm

So I ask again, where are your "facts" that say these fees aren't part of their taxed income? I don't know if they have capital gains or dividends, but the original poster was clearly the nutter here, and you ended up supporting his unsourced claims without any sources of your own.

If, and I Stress IF, you are right about space weapons having no real advantage you are correct that building them first because someone else might is BS. If you are wrong that makes us second to the party once we realize it was a misjudgement and gives a window of advantage to whoever was right.

In regards to judging the ultimate strategic importance of space? I question many things regarding our armed forces. I do not question their intelligence in identifying that which is of strategic importance. We did not get to be the single most powerfull military force by accident you know. So if the airforce eggheads think the next great form of force application is from space based weapons I say they might just deserve a little benifit of the doubt.

As for a fricken laser??? Well last I checked they were making some serious strides towards creating an airborn laser deffense system mounted in a 747.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/library/news/1 999/n19990811_991496.htm
http://avstop.com/news/747.html
http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldie rtech_ABL,,00.html
http://www.airforce-technology.com/projects/abl/

Oddly enough, alot of the problems facing that system would be easier to deploy on a space platform. For example, being able to utilize a nuclear power source could remove the reliance on large amounts of chemicals to react for the power needed.

Lasers aside, they are also asking to deploy systems to drop rocks (essentially). And the efficacy of that isn't excactly in doubt. Nuclear Level explosions without the ascociated fall out. Rods from God indeed.

True enough the US developed the Pegasus. Launched from an F-15 doing an Icarus impersenation. Its only test was successfull but was against a dumb sattelite with no manouvering capacity. The warhead was a pure kenetic load with limited ability to alter its course once set. The idea was that if we ever needed to deploy them we would expend enough to cause active sattelites to expend their fuel in efforts to avoid the launches highly limiting their usefulness, actual impacts were a bonus. The window of intercept was extremely narrow and it would have been highly impractical if a sattleite had a less limited means of manouevering... or refuleing capacity. Both highly likely attributes of any militarized space platform.

The russians developed sattelites that essentially did the same thing. They would launch them as innocuous commecial loads or something but their true purpose was to intercept targets in orbit to disable them.

Like anything else of that nature its a move and counter move situation. Generally speaking deffense is easier than attack and I doubt that will fail to hold true for space.

Among other things, the Eurcoupe design prevents forward slips. Forward slips can be useful for dumping altitude quickly, especially in emergency descent situations or landing over an obstacle. It was also very difficult to take off in a crosswind, althought landing in a crosswind sounds easier.

There are NO such parachutes...

While I disagree with the original poster, I'm afraid you're wrong. Parachute systems for 747's are on the drawingboard and have been tested on smaller planes.

For instance see this article in AvStop aviation magazine, which even has some pictures.

Some higher resolution pictures of the system in action can be found here; deploying, breaking and decent.

There's an ad for suborbital space flights starting December 1, 2001. Price, $98,000. This has to be an old, bogus site; it's supposed to use the Vela "Space Cruiser", which was never built.