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If you read the transcript of the engineer's call, and then identify where the bridge broke, it's a pretty fucking safe bet

Cool bet bro, I'll leave it to people who actually reviewed the engineering design along with the cracks: https://news.fiu.edu/2018/03/f...

Like every engineering disaster, somebody found the problem, and failed to communicate its severity. In this case, they decided it wasn't a safety issue (cracks in a brand new bridge!) and left a voice mail with somebody else who was out of the office for a few days.

There's no substitute for risk assessments by fully qualified engineers, of course. But those engineers also need communication skills â" including persuasive skills. Engineers who can find somebody in authority and convince them to take action save lives.

A recent press release reports that there was a meeting the morning before the collapse in which engineers and persons in authority concluded that the cracks did not compromise the structural integrity.

So no, I don't think there was a problem with "failure to escalate". Really, the big message here is that one needs to reserve judgement until the facts have a chance to surface. There is an official investigation underway. Amongst other things, It will determine if the analysis of the cracks was accurate and it will also determine if an appropriate escalation process was followed.

While waiting, we should be asking if other "civilians" are at risk due to the lessons we have not yet learned from this collapse. For example, we may temporarily decide to prohibit "civilians" from being underneath active construction sites until we better understand how to protect them.

Ok, if it is a known practice, cite it.

Originalism. It's not hard to find.

Find me some supreme court decisions that disregarded amendments in favor of what the Founders thought. Or appeals court decisions. Or circuit court. Or traffic court.

Oh, you want to see it in an American legal context? Most especially you'll want to look at the criticism of the Dred Scott decision for the most infamous example.

More recently, well, there other sources of information as to the patterns and practices of your average self-proclaimed originalists.

It's a bankrupt and destitute moral philosophy.

This is a myth. The majority of Cubans in Florida are against the US blockade of Cuba (what the US calls "embargo") and for free travel to Cuba.
http://cocodriloazul.bloguea.c...
https://cri.fiu.edu/research/c...
miami.cbslocal.com/2014/06/18/fiu-poll-shows-shifting-attitudes-among-cuban-americans/

http://web.eng.fiu.edu/npala/EEE6397ex/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf

That's the original paper, plus an interview. Anyone who even says Moore's law should read it.
AC was wrong about the marketing aspect, but they are correct regarding the illustration.

Moore's Law ended about 5 years ago.

Bcache (merged in 3.10, btw) has one very big drawback for me. To prevent writing to the backing partition (your 'multi TB storage') outside of bcache you have to convert your those partitions to some bcache format that writes a custom superblock. As far as I can tell this conversion is one-way only and the tool to do it in-place (as opposed to format-and-restore-from-backup) is not supported by the bcache folks, although I may be wrong here.

This is precisely why I have not even tried to implement it, even just to see if it's good. This requirement is a complete non-starter, and I have never heard any technical reason why it is a necessity. Indeed, if the idea is to cache blocks, then you should be able to cache any kind of blocks. If that is unworkable within this architecture, the project should be thrown away and reinitiated by someone with some standards. Forcing a new format on users that won't be back-compatible with older kernels and distributions when it's not necessary is completely unacceptable.

Sad, though, because I really want what it does. Perhaps someday dm-cache will make it into mainline. It does what we want it to do, but it's not mainlined and it only appears for some kernel versions - looks like 3.0.8 is the latest.

http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/hackethic.html

In a case like this, I'd trust the statements of anyone who didn't have a motive to lie... which to me means anyone but George Zimmerman we can assume to be completely honest with what they believe they saw or heard. Mr Zimmerman's statements must be corroborated by facts.

Regarding the injuries to Mr Zimmerman, police and medical reports indicate a broken nose and gash on the back of his head. Video can be seen of officers examining the back of his head, and images released by abcnews seem to confirm that. Unless completely destroyed, a broken nose could very well be hard to see in that video. Nothing seems to contradict the injury claims in my opinion.

Regarding the voice fingerprinting claiming that the voice was not Mr Zimmerman, I find those claims suspect at best. The results show a 48% match based on background noise in 911 calls vs 911 calls made by Mr Zimmerman himself. A more apt comparison might be made by setting those results side by side against results from samples of Mr Martin's voice. But given the distortion in both sources of audio, the level of background noise, the distance from the event, the types of speech (screaming vs speaking... note the trouble voice identification software when it comes to identifying singers) and the state of voice wreckognition, I doubt we can pull meaningful evidence from computer recognition results.

Regarding the girlfriend of Mr Martin's phone conversation, I believe her factual statements are credible. She basically says that Travon saw a guy following him, lost him, and there was a confrontation where Trayvon asks "why are you following me?" and Zimmerman asks "what are you doing here?", followed by the start of a fight. There obviously is no clear way to determine who threw the first punch from those tapes.

Regarding the eye witnesses to the fight, one eye witness couldn't see much because it was so dark, but he thought he saw a man in red on the ground (zimmerman was wearing red). Media reports are sketchy, but a possible second eye witness in the same story backs Zimmerman's version of events. The bodily injuries, police reports indicating that Zimmerman appeared to be wet with grass stains, like he had been lying down with his back on the ground, and limited witness accounts seem to support the Zimmerman version, at least at some point during the confrontation.

What can we say with some level of certainty? Zimmerman called police to report a suspicious person, and began to follow him. At some point, Trayvon recognized that some random guy is following him, tells his girlfriend as much, and loses him around a corner. This is also confirmed on the police tape of the call that Mr Zimmerman made. Zimmerman is heard telling the police where to meet him, and he doesn't want to give out his full address while he doesn't know where Martin is. Martin tells the cops to call him when they arrive. At some point, Martin asks the guy why he is following him, and Zimmerman asks him what hes doing around there, and a fight breaks out, ending the call with Martin's girlfriend. The background audio in a 911 call picks up, we can hear a

Anybody remember the Evel Knievel pinball table? The first two tables i got to play on was this and the spirit of 76 table which is another great classic, my local hangout burger joint had both tables and i used to hang out there for hours drinking shakes and pounding quarters into the tables. Rest in peace pinball man, you filled many a childhood with great memories and there are very few that can say that.

I'm slightly surprised that they didn't go with something like ZFS's L2ARC, with maybe 20TB of flash and 100TB of slower disks.

So do you suggest they go with Oracle, which is fucking evil, or with FreeBSD, which implies a whole FreeBSD support infrastructure inside your organization?

a big flash cache would give them almost the same performance at a lower price.

ARRRRRRGH I WANT DM-CACHE NOW ARRRRRGH. Urgh. Sorry, involuntary reaction.

rsync is only one way. You can run it twice to do a 2 way sync, but you also have the issue of deleted files reappearing.

I give to thee rsync --delete. You have to sync down before you sync up; when doing the pull (or so I shall name it) you use the -u flag ("skip files that are newer on the receiver"), then you do your file deletion, then you do the rsync -a --delete.

If only someone would revive dm-cache then you could do it with a remote mount (on Linux-based platforms anyway) which would be hilarious.

Caching isn't some mysterious arcane technology, why has it taken so long for them to make a hybrid drive like this?

Piss on the magic PCIE drive, you can do the caching without any special hardware. You could even do it on Linux if someone would pick dm-cache back up. (Please?)

I simply do not have a good answer. I really don’t see what we can do (practically) at the college level to make Computer Science more accessible to the majority of students who don’t already have either programming experience or a strong aptitude.

To Prof. Kurmas: The problem is that most universities only have CS1 and CS2 before sending students down to Analysis of Algorithms and the like. From personal experience, my first two years were not in a 4-year college, but in a community college (Miami-Dade College in 1991 to be precise.) This is what I went through:

100x-level courses: Introduction to Micro-Computers, BASIC (that included a discussion to Bohn-Jacopini's Structured Program Theory right of the bat), Introduction to Turbo Pascal (with discussion on pass-by-value and pass-by-reference, pointers, differences between the stack and the heap and addressing modes) , Introduction to C (pointers up to the wazoo);

200x-level courses: Intermediate Turbo Pascal (first run into Object-Orientation), Intermediate C, A full 15-week course in x86-Assembly, C++, Delphi Programming, Introduction to Expert Systems.

This was the common way of doing things among us CS students at that community college at the time. To be honest, we were just required to take half of those courses, but the fact was that we had a variety to choose from (which we did to our everlasting benefit.)

When I transfered to a 4-year college, I was shocked to see students having just two meager programming courses when going their first junior-year programming course. I mean, you gotta be kidding me. There is no sufficient practice to ensure the student will focus on the actual subject matter (instead of still struggling with basic control structures and problem analysis.)

It doesn't help that universities now don't even teach a full-assembly language course (see here for exhibit A). We have universities that are teaching C++ and Java within the same course!

Yes, indeed CS1 and CS2 are not sufficient, but then again, what else does your university (and universities in general) provide? Do they provide 1000-level courses in 3 different programming languages? Does your university provide a full 15-course in Assembly language? Do they still teach C? And do they teach Python/Ruby and/or Lisp once a year, or at least, say every other year? I mean, do you provide variety for your students to sink their teeth and flex their programming knuckles before moving on to harder subjects?

Or is your school a predominantly Java workshop? Using BlueJ to top it off? Speaking of BlueJ, no other language requires an ed-taylored platform for teaching it. Do you see one in Python? Do you see on in C? I've been working in Java for 12 years now. It is an excellent tool for doing work.

It is also an atrocious language for teaching programming. It is a great language to introduce at the junior and senior level, in particular if used in the context of teaching enterprise computing (an excellent 4000-level topic.)

But for introductory/intermediate programming? It is stupid. Plain and simple. Yes, there are people out there teaching it like that and writing books on it since it came out Gosling's mind. It is still stupid. It does not make it the right tool. It is a disservice to use it in Academia like that.

And it is even a greater disservice when schools are predominantly mono-lingual at 1000/2000 course level. If a student is not exposed to a multitude of programming languages - both Algol and non-Algol like, and within the Algol family, both C-like and non-C like (.ie. Pascal or Ada), that student is not being served right.

That is the root of the problem, and anything short of fixing that is simply fidgeting around. Like trying to cure cancer with ibuprofen.

I still just want dm-cache so that I can have block-level caching of network filesystems to local, or from slow storage like optical to fast scratch. Why does Linux still not have this? :(

Sure, planes back into mountains all the time.

You can hit tail-first without backing up. Try a 90 degrees change in pitch or yaw.

After all, no plane would ever crash if it were on a perfectly controlled flight. One of the reasons for a plane crash is if it suffers, for any reason, a big change in orientation ("attitude" in aeronautical terms).

Liberal Arts is not about Theatre, Liberal Arts at the core is about thinking. This country needs more people who can think before they do, not more doers whose educations become obsolete before the ink on their diploma is dry.

there are many good essays on exactly what Liberal Arts is, you should try reading a few of them before penning ignorant rants.

This is one of them, http://www2.fiu.edu/~hauptli/MyViewofTheNatureofALiberalArtsEducation.html
This is a page that describes the expectations of a student that has graduated with a degree in Liberal Arts (please note that I did not say Theatre or Art Appreciation, those are part of Liberal Arts, but They are not all of Liberal Arts [if you don't understand why this is so, then you should review your logic]).
http://www.evergreen.edu/about/expectations.htm

I'll think about that whilst wiping my ass with your degree.

Sorry, there are UF, FSU, FAU, and FIU, as well as universities of Central, North, West, and South Florida. But no FU. GP is safe wrt Floridian institutions.

Please play again.

It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...

I love when people decide their definition of a phrase is the right one and that the rest of the world is wrong.

Word!

http://www-vrl.umich.edu/intro/index.html#NonImmersive
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1029964
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/VR.html
http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/virtual/37/chapter2.htm
http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/uir/publications/items/UIR-1993-07-Robertson-Computer-NonImmersive.pdf

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/rocket3.htm

Rocket folk call them diamond patterns. This article gives a good explanation.

He is possibly correct. At high altitude, the temperature drops and the speed of sound drops off. However at very high altitudes, there is an increase in atmospheric temperature that reverses the results from the formulae. At 25 miles the temperature can be up to 18 degrees Celsius that places sound speed at 336m/s. All depends how fast the drop-off is versus his speed/acceleration and atmospheric density.

Mach Calculations. Temperature v Altitude.

Revisionist history a little?

There is no revision of history when someone points out hackers ARE NOT criminals nor that they intentionally damage systems. The first tyme "hacker" was used derogatorily was in the 1980s, before then Hacker meant "simply referred to a person who was capable of creating hacks, or elegant, unusual, and unexpected uses of technology."

The concept of hacking entered the computer culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s...
But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form a standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit around all night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair. It can be telephones, or railroads (model, real, or both), or science fiction fandom, or ham radio, or broadcast radio. It can be more than one of these. Or it can be computers.

Steven Levy has written a good book on what and who hackers are, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

I know, I know, it's counter to the popular Religion of Man-Created-Climate-Change, but maybe, just MAYBE there's something else at work? I mean, the magnetic field, solar cycles, and lots of other things should be factored in there, too...

And who knows? Maybe, just MAYBE the current climate is not the "right" climate? Maybe we're supposed to be a LOT warmer, like say 800 years ago? Why is today's climate determined to be "right"?

You might wanna check the altitude again.

While your point in general is correct about VFR flight, this guy was cruising at FL400 - Class A airspace.

He would definitely had to have an IFR plan on file, otherwise he'd get a message from the tower to call a phone number when he landed... and that would be the end of his days as a pilot. That's assuming he didn't have a fighter come along to say hello beforehand.

I would have liked to hear DEN Center asking wtf they were up to when it came time for that little loopy bit and back-track for the bottom of the "G"

Ok, I might be not completely correct, but a simplified summary for the lazy people: the actual concept is that air is blown downwards, pushing the plane up.

The mechanism is air viscosity: Flow speed at a surface is always zero(*), the further you go from the surface, the faster the flow speed can be(**). Via this principle, flow will direct itself parallel to any surface it flows along(***). If you take an airplane wing at normal flight, the bottom side of the wing is parallel to the earth, so not much happens there. The top, however, is pointing downwards from front to end and therefore directs the air downwards towards to the earth, like this: http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/AERO/images/sav10a.gif . They also mention how this solves the question how airplanes fly upside down, as long as the wing can direct air downwards it will work.

Now spread the world to your children(****), and your children's children, so we can eliminate the incorrect picture out of the world!

(* this is actually also an approximation) (** Until you reach bulk flow spead) (*** as long as you don't create turbulence, probably, I'm not a flow expert, though) (**** Oh, I forgot, this is slashdot ;) )

I agree. Im 29 and consider myself to be pretty bright, yet I only discovered that misconception a year ago. Both the education system and mass media repeat "popular" junk science, and it was only by accident that I drilled into a deeper explanation on lift and was suprised with the real science.

This site has a pretty good explanation. My favourite sentence is this:

Students of physics and aerodynamics are taught that airplanes fly as a result of Bernoulli's principle, which says that if air speeds up the pressure is lowered. Thus a wing generates lift because the air goes faster over the top creating a region of low pressure, and thus lift. This explanation usually satisfies the curious and few challenge the conclusions. Some may wonder why the air goes faster over the top of the wing and this is where the popular explanation of lift falls apart.

The only reason most XP malware is so simplistic is because the defenses are so piss poor.

There have been some incredibly sophisticated rootkits out there in the past. One can easily fathom malware that _cannot_ be detected without booting from known good media, and performing a scan without excuting any on-system code.

there really only are a few different ways in which a bug can operate on the system. They all need startup access, (and there are only really two ways that they can get that, one being a standard location in the registry) and they're all going to leave a RAM/CPU footprint.

You're really incredibly wrong here. While this has been the rule so far, there is no reason that this will remain true. Most likely, it won't; the only reason current malware is dumb is because it can remain dumb and _succesful_.

Unix breakins are far, far more difficult to deal with then Windows breakins

This is not because Unix sucks. This is because Unix doesn't have a vast number of crappy script kiddies out there; the Unix black-hats are the real deal. And it happens in the Windows world, too; remember when Valve's source repository was stolen? (Valve produced Half-Life 2. There was a custom crack job into their systems.)

Its a fuzzy memory, but I remember reading one story where a rootkit was introduced into a compiler at an early stage in some system design. The rootkit'd compiler was used to compile the base system's binaries, and then was used to build future revisions (and a more complete version) of the compiler. I can't find the exact story, but here's a link to an attack experiment that does just that. Click
Basically, an attacker changes a compiler binary to produce malicious versions of some programs, INCLUDING ITSELF. Once this is done, the attack perpetuates, essentially undetectably. Thompson demonstrated the attack in a devastating way: he subverted a compiler of an experimental victim, allowing Thompson to log in as root without using a password. The victim never noticed the attack, even when they disassembled the binaries -- the compiler rigged the disassembler, too.

Of course, the nightmare scenario hasn't happened, and most likely won't. Imagine if someone seriously infiltrated the Windows development process; including Visual Studio. Don't snicker; GNU's development systems have been compromised, as has Valve's source repository. Both of these organizations have admin-level software running on many, many machines worldwide. Sure, someone would eventually find out if MS was rooted that badly, but imagine if there was a patch release, or an service pack, or something.

A vast number of systems worldwide would need to be manually booted from clean media in order to be restored. Scary.

Anything is possible, but an accusation is ceratinly easy to cook up.

Yes, I agree. Especially with sources like this, this, and this. The first one I turned up in a Google search, and the other two came up in a Yahoo search for "shi tao" and "yahoo". Kind of ironic, eh?

The FAs I read on the Yahoo sites said the "state secret" he was convicted of disseminating was a notice sent by the Chinese gov't to Chinese newspapers. Duh!

But the last one brings to mind a stupid question: How is it that one repressive, corrupt government that jails its citizens for speaking out is a favored trade nation of the U.S., while another (to pick from a long list) is not?

Other questions:

• Isn't this the logical conclusion of the Patriot Act?
• Doesn't /. have a section, "Your Ethics Online"? All of us may face choices like these someday.

Calling it hacking is the same as saying that clicking on the link to the story above is hacking.

In no way is this hacking. I get on people and media often about thier use of the words "hack" and "hacker". Most people when they use the word hacker most of the tyme really mean cracker or script kiddie. If they must use hacker then say "black hat hacker" or some such as these people don't follow the hacker ethic . If it weren't for hackers we wouldn't have computers on our desktops or sitting in our laps. For those who don't know what a real hacker is I strongly recommend they read Steven Levy's Hackers .

> jet aircraft, and RADAR are only a few of many
> war-time inventions.

The first Jet aircraft flight was the Heinkel 178 on August 24 and 27, 1939, which happens to be prior to the outbreak of WWII.

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/HEINHE-178.htm

RADAR was developed from the mid 30s and by the start of the war was already installed in several CHAIN HOME sites.

"""1937 May
The first air defence radio location (radar) station at Bawdsey Manor is handed over to the Royal Air Force (RAF)."""

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/milestones-of-flight/b ritish_military/1937.html

Even airborne radar was pre-war:

"""1937 March
The first airborne radar is fitted to a Handley Page Heyford based at Martlesham Heath."""

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/milestones-of-flight/b ritish_military/1937.html

"""1939 August
The first airborne interception (AI) radar sets are fitted into 30 Royal Air Force Bristol Blenheim aircraft."""

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/milestones-of-flight/b ritish_military/1939.html

Maybe Argentina has reformed. Their history is such that I wouldn't count on it though.

As we learned in the Navy, brittle fracture requires all three of these to happen:
1. Pre-existing flaw
2. Susceptible material
3. Tensile stress

If I were in charge, and I had an opportunity to knock out one of the causes of BF, I'd do it. Check this out:
http://www.fiu.edu/~thompsop/liberty/photos/schene ctady.jpg

Oy! Hasn't someone revoked her author's license yet? I would have thought that her credibility went down the drain with her ludicrous "Time of the Assassins", detailing her theory of the fictional KGB/bulgarian plot to kill the pope in the early eighties.

Too many people have short memories...

I can't find a web reference with a big name on it, but this is a good rundown:

Certainly, the "plot to kill the pope" became big grist for the Reaganite propaganda mill. (A book during this time, Claire Sterling's Terror Network , drew a vast web of conspiracy, suggesting the KGB controlled terrorist groups ranging from the IRA in Ireland, to the ETA in Spain, to the PLO in Lebanon, to the FMLN in El Salvador. Why the Communists would support terrorist groups espousing such ideologies as nationalism, ethnic or racial separatism, or Islamic fundamentalism was never made clear. For Sterling, it was alI simply a matter of their united hatred for the "West" and its foul values of democracy, liberty, and justice.) The plot was used as a classic case example of the so-called Soviet "web of terrorism", and was one of the main justifications for a whole series of recriminations, 'anti-terrorist' legislation, and crackdowns on domestic groups.

Here's an old picture of my office with that phone in it. It sure looks out of place in a modern geek habitat. }:)

Der Phone

Whats to keep their planes in the air?

The Bernoulli Principle.

Not so much. Read the next page at the site you linked.

You know, I have my OWN reservations about flying on an airline when they have no backups and can't keep their computers from crashing. Whats to keep their planes in the air?

The Bernoulli Principle. And I don't think computers crashing are going to affect it. This isn't the Matrix, after all.

Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a straight popular vote is a bad thing because it eliminates the representation from small populations.

Even if small states have more votes per-capita, it doesn't necessarily mean they have more influence on the election. The winner-take-all system tends to benefit large states (which have a tendency to have closer elections) more than small ones. It's better to win a few hundred votes in Florida than to win the entire state of Montana.

And it could be even worse for the small states. Suppose that the population had be so unevenly distributed in 1788 that Virginia had 44 of the representatives in the House (perhaps because of a larger slave population, 3/5 of whom would have counted towards the electoral vote despite the fact that they weren't voters). If this were the case, then every election would be completely decided by whoever won Virginia's election. The other 12 states wouldn't matter

Let me repeat: The Electoral College makes it possible for small states to have zero voting power. Fortunately, this isn't the case; there are plausible situations in which there can be a 269-269 tie, so every state's vote could matter. But the fact that the EC provides no guarantee of voting power should be enough to worry us.

In fact, this is precisely what doomed the "electoral college" of Nassau County, NY: In 1964, only 3 of their 6 districts had any voting power.

The Founding Fathers were not stupid.

What I WOULD recommend is working on a better way to handle multi-party elections such as runoffs, etc.

The Electoral College is constitutionally defined as a plurality election, and therefore Duverger's first law guarantees that it entrenches a political duopoly. Only by aboloshing the EC, and instuting a spoiler-resistant election method, will there be viable multi-party elections.

Remember that the United States is NOT a Democracy, but a Federal Republic. To change that is to change the fundamental foundations of this country.

Another fundamental foundation of this country is "all men are created equal". As long as my vote for President is meaningless because I happen to live in Texas instead of Florida, this is not the case.

We are drifting closer to the sun and the governments of the world are hiding this from us. We have less than 75 years before the Earth moves within range to cook avery living thing on the planet.

I mean Scientists are being killed to keep this quiet!

During the past few months I've been creating a 3d model of my current/future house in AutoCAD. Easy access to arial photography has allowed me to add a bit of realism to the rendered drawings concerning ground color, tree positions, road, etc. I've also added the neighbors houses to see how the my house will look in the setting.

To the point, these arial photos brought me to the realization that a garage would be better suited to the east side of the house rather than the west, where the driveway is currently... There's more space between me and my eastern neighbor which will provide a more balanced perception of property lines. This isn't a decision that benefits me as much as it does the neigborhood. Granted, I probably could've realized the imbalance without the arial shots, but would I have? Is it usefull for a local government to release information that may allow citizens to make better decisions concerning their property? Nice neigborhoods attract business and residents (aka people to steal tax money from ;) after all.

I started the project with shots from http://terrafly.fiu.edu but later upgraded to some fancy hi-res color shots from www.globexplorer.com despite the price. And on the subject of local governments releasing aerial photos this one has released all of theirs... Unfortunatly I'm just outside of their field of view.

Here's the product if you're interested. It's hardly finished, but better than nothing.

A site I've enjoyed in the past is Terrafly that lets you view / visually fly over satellite maps of the United States using a Java applet.

To anyone interested in the subject, Romania (pre- fing WW2 and fing communism) has had potential for a strong position in the aeronautic industry. Henri Marie Coanda, known for the Coanda-effect and the first jet aircraft, was Romanian. More info about Coanda can be found here

I think airplane's work due the fact that boundary layers and the trailing edges shed wing vortices. Bernoulli's principle (aka the "principle of equal transit times"), which holds only in inviscid fluids (and thus utterly invalid in the presence of a boundary layer), is a convenient lie, told to people who don't have enough maths to understand the real reason.
Here is a pretty good explanation of the real reasons planes fly.

I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.

I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.

I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.

When the Columbia went down, I made it my goal to find out what went wrong. Ultimately I decided that the Space Shuttle was a dated piece of equipment that needed to be replaced. Endeavor should have never been built, instead a new 2nd-gen shuttle should have. (The program existed, but was later canceled) The lack of funding by the Clinton administration is what led to its ultimate demise. The Venturestar Program was the 3rd generation space shuttle (called the Space Launch Initiative), and the X-33 was the prototype. Actually, it wasn't even that, it was a "technology validator". So it makes sense to test the components that had been built already (like the linear aerospike engine, which is revolutionary due to its efficiency and the composite fuel tanks would be a boon to any launching system, shuttle or otherwise) The program was cancelled because too many things had gone wrong and NASA under Clinton appointee Daniel Goldin had shifted focus to small, unmanned probes (faster, better, cheaper) so they were unwilling to tough it out. You can find out all about the X-33 at ALLSTAR or NASA itself.

Whoops, forgot to link that. Sorry!

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was a lot of fun, even if the Priory of Sion has turned out to be a fraud.

I'm looking forward to his next book which will be about Freemasonry.

Well, there was this Romanian dude called Henry Coanda who kind of invented the aileron in 1910, together with a couple other nifty things such as the reactive engine, the gas tanks in the wings, the "sesquiplan" layout (double wing with the lower one shorter and hanging behind to improve aerodynamics) as well as discovering what is known as the "Coanda Effect".

http://www.allstar.fiu.edu/aero/coanda.htm

Denmark also has the second highest rate of suicides in the World.

i want more arial photos terrafly has realestate info, demographics, it's an info orgy for christsakes! don't care much for the "fly quota" but i recon they gotta protect their interests. terraserver is good too, but the navigation (and all that info) makes terrafly way better.