For most people with typical usage a cell phone with a low minute plan (or even a prepaid phone) and a landline for calls at home will be a much cheaper option. I know you said "most", but unless you have kids who will spend hours on the phone before the unlimited night minutes kick in, you probably don't even need the landline. We, parents, and one adult child, have a family plan with rollover minutes, no landline, and we've never had a bill for excess minutes.
At any rate, the laptop was *his* responsibility. IT policy was no doubt explained to him, he no doubt signed off on the training, and he violated it - which is grounds for termination in and of itself. Please show me where his employer's IT policy states that the employee is responsible for ensuring that the software on the laptop that connects to the SMS Server that is used to update the anti-virus software on the laptop, is configured and functioning properly. Next, please show me the training each employee receives to properly perform this function. And while we are at it, please show me the group policy file that is applied to the laptop the ensures the employee has appropriate access to configure the software appropriately.
You can't because none of the above exist. The employee is no more responsible for ensuring that the security software and associated updating software is functioning properly than he is responsible for ensuring that all required maintenance, preventative and otherwise, is performed on his employer supplied vehicle.
Neither of the above are the employee's job. There are other people whose job it is to perform those functions. In this case, someone in the IT department didn't do their job properly with life-altering consequences for the falsely accused employee.
(remember DEC?) DEC was an outstanding hardware company that accidentially developed excellent software. They failed to understand the commodization of hardware until it was too late. Then they sold off their software at firesale prices because they didn't understand the value of their software and were trying to save their "hardware" business.
To summarize, the project in question was in an area considered this company's main focus, and that a lack of correctness in the software could open them up to liabilities. I'm guessing some kind of accounting, legal, or health industry software. Given today's SOX environment, it could be any large public company.
There are a lot of things we don't know about this project, which forces us to make assumptions that may or may not be correct.
For example, there is mention that somewhere along the way they were attempting to implement the Rational/IBM RUP. As someone else mentioned, this would appear to be an insane thing to do during the project. We don't know who initiated this. Was it the client? The consultants? Which consultants? The current ones or one of the many previous ones? Was <obscure language> not supported by the RUP tools being used? If so, that may have driven the decision to do a rewrite in Java. Was <obscure language> so obscure that it's almost impossible to find people with that skillset? Is <obscure language> dying? If so, implementing the new system in <obscure language> could very well have resulted in a system that had to be rewritten in a few years.
My point is that there are simply too many things we don't know about this project to discuss many of the specifics in an intelligent manner.
I never understood the whole hybrid thing, or at least the way it's done in automobiles. Simply replace the drive motor with an electric motor, add a battery bank, charging circuitry and a small 2 cylinder engine to run at optimal efficiency to charge the packs. Trains have done that for years. I forgot to add that this is how the Chevrolet Volt will work, with the addition of being able to be plugged into a household outlet to charge the batteries overnight. It's due out in 2010, but the estimated price has risen from just under U.S.$30,000 to over $40,000 as the engineers try to figure out how to do mundane tasks like run the windshield/windscreen wipers and other electrics.
I never understood the whole hybrid thing, or at least the way it's done in automobiles. Simply replace the drive motor with an electric motor, add a battery bank, charging circuitry and a small 2 cylinder engine to run at optimal efficiency to charge the packs. Trains have done that for years. Where? I know a firm in Canada has such a locomotive available for yard switching use, but in the U.S. all the diesel locomotives use the diesel engine to turn an alternator that generates electricity that is fed directly to the drive wheels and run other electric components in the locomotive. The only batteries on the locomotive are to heat the glow plugs used to start the diesel engine.
I don't recall anywhere in the constitution or federalist papers where they considered the long term implications of the 2nd amendment with regard to technology. You saying we are "supposed" to is about the same as the judges interpreting something. No. The Founding Fathers knew that they couldn't cover every possible situation and made provisions for amending the Constitution. "Supposed to" has nothing to do with it.
Legalities never work for constitutions. You can't make a fusion bomb really illegal because then they find something 99% a fusion bomb that isn't one. Laws can keep up but constitutions become very ugly very fast if they try that approach. Apples and oranges. Legality refers to laws. Constitutional refers to the Constitution. The Constitution wasn't supposed to be tinkered with and this is why changing it is so difficult. If you don't like this, there is a process for changing that too.
Can I make a giant leap here? We are in this mess today because of slavery. While it was necessary to have it abolished, the defeat of the South solidified power/control being stripped at the state level. I blame it on Lincoln, and indirectly, slavery. The confederate states seceded from the union and Lincoln said they couldn't do that. Given that the Constitution defines the powers granted to the Federal government and there is nothing in the Constitution that says a State can't secede from the Union, Amendment 10, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.", applies and Lincoln exceeded his authority, as President, by preventing the confederate states from leaving the United States.
Now if one or more of the former states had later decided they wanted back in, Congress could have said no, and it would have all been constitutional.
Not only that, but the law governs human beings. Human beings change. Society changes, some less, some more, over long periods of time. The constitution, being not law itself but that which is the foundation for all of our laws, should be read according to the society in which it currently represents. ABSOLUTELY NOT! If you do this, there is no foundation at all!
For example, the internet is blurring the line between interstate and intrastate commerce. It is (or not) constitutional for state and local taxes to be applied to sales between a store in California and a customer in Washington, when the server hosting the storefront and processing the sale is sitting in Texas? What if the server is in California? Or in Washington, for that matter? Basically, is this interstate commerce or not? It depends upon where the seller and buyer reside. If both reside in the same state, it is intrastate commerce. Otherwise, it is interstate commerce. Where the transaction is processed doesn't matter.
That's why the Constitution and the bill of rights are about *enabling* the government to perform certain tasks, and the rest of it should be left up to Congress -- to pass laws -- and the states, to whom the default of power is given. Congress is part of the federal government. Its powers are defined in the Constitution.
The SCOTUS haven't respected the Constitution for a long time. c.f. Wickard v. Filburn. The fact that anyone can argue that that is a reasonable interpretation of the interstate commerce clause simply defies belief. I mean, deep down, they have to know that's wrong, right? Correct. If the members of the SCOTUS at that time had bothered to do any reading around the reason for the Interstate Commerce clause, they would have known that while the Articles of Confederation were in effect, the States were charging tarrifs on all sorts of goods coming into their States from other States and it was causing major problems. The intent of the Interstate Commerce clause was to encourage the free flow of goods between the States.
Alltel should have merged with another multi-regional instead, so we could have had a third national carrier. (I would count Sprint Nextel if anyone I knew could reliably get a signal here in the 9th largest MSA.) I live in the 8th largest city in the U.S. and when I changed jobs several years ago, I could no longer get a signal from Sprint in my place of employment and outside was marginal. When my contract was almost up, I surveyed my co-workers and discovered that each one had a different national carrier and AT&T was the only one that provided a signal into our building. So I switched to AT&T. The good news is that I got a GSM phone and as a bonus, the signal at my house went from marginal to strong. The bad news is that for me, there is effectively only one national carrier here.
Not the GP but I can think of a few reasons why you might need a POTS line.
1) Fixed phones are tied to a place, not a person. If someone is home (anyone), then they can pick up the phone. This is great for deliveries, guests, etc. They often also have cheaper long distance plans than cell phones (especially if you buy calling cards, where some cell phone companies charge you a surcharge to call an 800 number). We dropped our landline when the cost of the landline without any long distance was almost as much as our cell bill, 2 phone family plan, with unlimited nights and weekends with nights starting at 19:00, and rollover minutes. Now, this probably wouldn't work if we had teenagers:-)
2) CLEC lines are often more expensive (if they even service your area). They don't.
3) VOIP lines don't handle Fax machines. Guess what? Not everyone uses Email for everything yet. Yes, you can get an eFax account, which is great if you're primarily receiving them (and don't need to send them again), but to send a "quick fax" of something that isn't in the computer (or a form that needed to be filled in and faxed back), you need to scan the item, then send it. With a multi-function printer/scanner/copier the workflow is usually MUCH quicker. Even if we didn't have another source of faxing, we could fax about 30 pages/month at the local Mailbox store and still save money.
4) More reliable, especially in "rural" area that see the occasional power outage. After living in NYC for the past 20+ years the only thing that has consistently worked through almost ANY emergency is my POTS line. 9/11? Pots line kept working (the cell phone could only dial out of city but the POTS worked fine). Blackout in 2003? POTS kept working long after the cell phone and VOIP backup batteries died. It was good to be able to call and check on family members who were also affected. Think of it like this. We talk about redundancy in data centers. Having a POTS line along with a cable modem and a cell phone is the same thing but for the home.
Different providers the ability to work around "damage/outages" if you need to. That's the only advantage a POTS has over our cell phone plan.
Ah yes, AT&T. I'll keep this short:-) I've been waiting for AT&T Uverse to become available in my neighborhood to provide some competition to Time/Warner. I got a flyer in the mail saying that Uverse was was now available to me. I logged onto the web site and tried to order it. It took me several tries to actually place an order because I followed the instructions that said that my driver's license expiration date had to be entered in mmyyyy format. The day before the install date, I had to reschedule due to a sick family member. No problem, the new installation date was verbally confirmed with me by the CSR on the phone. On the day of the install, I waited and waited. 30 minutes after the close of the 2 hour installation window, I called and was informed that I was scheduled for installation the NEXT day. The next day the install tech comes out and asks to look in my back yard. No problem. I've got both the cable and phone boxes in my yard for about 6 houses in my neighborhood. While the tech is standing there looking somewhat confused, I say, "If your looking for the network interface, there insn't one. We've never had a landline at this address." The tech then tells me that a different tech has to install the network interface and run the drop to it and asks if they could reschedule the install for Monday. I say that's fine, but Monday is a holiday, and asked if they really did installations on holidays. The tech said yes and told me that someone would be by after 19:00 that day to install the network interface and run the drop.
No tech shows up that day to install the network interface and run the drop, so the first thing Monday morning, I call AT&T and tell them that it wasn't installed and asked if it would be installed prior to the tech arriving to do the install. I was informed that they didn't do installs on holidays and they rescheduled my install for the next day and assured me that both the install tech would be there and the person to do the network interface installation and run the drop.
The next day, the install tech showed up and I asked him where the other tech was who was going to do the network interface installation and run the drop. He got a funny look on his face and went outside to make a phone call. He returned and said that the other tech was on the way. While we waited for the other tech, I showed im the 2 TVs that needed set top boxes and where I wanted their router installed to connect into my network wiring. The other tech arrived and they started working. About 15 minutes later, they had the network interface installed and the drop run and then things got REAL quiet for about 15 minutes and suddenly a third AT&T person showed up. It turns out that Uverse has a max length of 3,000 feet from their box in the subdivision to the house and we were 3,400 feet away.
Our subdivision is less than 5 years old, so I asked who decided to lay out their cable in such a manner that almost everyone on my street would be unable to have Uverse service and they admitted it was one of their engineers.
So, the end result is that most of the people on my street in the subdivision can't have Uverse service and AT&T spent who knows how much money figuring it out. Oh, and I'm still getting solicitations for Uverse. Maybe I should order it again. Maybe I should order it every time I get a solicitation until they stop sending me solicitations.
If they were smart, they would have filled that empty space with supplies and plumbing parts! Ah yes, that's where the toilet parts are being stored:-)
There is also the love bug issue in FL... It's been a while since I lived there, but rather than being a year-round issue, aren't there two love bug seasons; June and September? If this was a big issue it would seem that one would simply avoid love bug sensitive pours during the two seasons.
STS-124 is carrying Kibo, making it a rather heavy liftoff. It would have taken Discovery a little longer than usual to get away from the pad, subjecting it to a longer duration acoustic/vibration environment. We know this is the largest payload by volume, given that they had to remove the Shuttle's onboard robot arm and leave at the ISS on its last trip, but was it the heaviest payload? Perhaps the payload was simply a mostly empty large cylinder? I honestly don't know the answer to the question and am just asking.
People just never seem to learn that prices can't go up forever. Actually, with small exceptions, they do. In the U.S., these exceptions include the Great Depression and various recessions.
The banks also shot themselves in the foot by getting the bankruptcy laws changed. One of the bedrock assumptions made when assessing risk was, "People will pay their mortgage before their other debts." Historically, this was true. When the fit hits the shan, people would pay their debts in the following order:
The banks didn't like the fact that people would stop paying their credit card debt, with its associated 10%+ return, when they had financial trouble. So they pressured Congress to make it almost impossible for people to get out of paying credit card debt. When this happened, did the banks lower the interest rate on the credit card debt that was still unsecured, but effectively guaranteed by the federal government to reflect the reduced risk of that debt? Nope. Of course not. They still wanted their 10%+ return.
This effectively reordered the debt payment order into:
1) Credit card. 2) House 3) Car. 4) Other secured debt.
So, when someone's ARM adjusts and their house payment goes from $500/month to $900/month and they don't have enough income to make the payment, they look to see what they can stop paying or pay late. Now they have to make the credit card payment, and they realize that even if they stop paying all their other debt, they can't make the house payment, they decide to sell the house. Oops. They owe more on the house than it's worth. The end result is that they let the bank foreclose on the house, move into an apartment, and pay their other bills.
Now the banks find themselves owning a whole lot of real estate that is worth less than the mortgage. Since banks don't want to own the real estate, especially in a declining real estate market, they dump it as quickly as they can, taking a loss on the mortgage loan, and further depressing housing prices.
It may be, but here in the US there aren't sidewalks everywhere to ride your bike and to actually ride your bike you have to take tons of side streets unless you want to risk being run over on the interstate which takes you quite long and if you have to be at your job by say 8 you had better wake up at 6. Don't forget that in some states such as Texas, it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk, but I doubt any peace officer would cite a child in such a situation. In other states, the sidewalks are in such poor shape that you wouldn't want to ride on them, even on a mountain bike.
Also, in many states, it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the Interstate. You don't see the signs much anymore, but I remember seeing signs at Interstate on-ramps that said things like, "Pedestrians, bicycles, farm animals, and motorized vehicles with less than ? bhp are prohibited."
There is no such thing as a cheap production aircraft. There are three main reasons for this:
1) The cost of certification. Lots and lots of documentation and testing are required. 2) Reliability. If your car engine dies, you can simply pull off to the side of the road. Obviously, you can't do this in an aircraft. This reliability is often achieved by redundancy. A simple example if this is spark plugs. Aircraft engines have two spark plugs per cylinder. If one dies, you will get reduced power, but it will be sufficient power to keep the aircraft in the air long enough to land safely. Now add the cost of duplicating major important aircraft components. 3) Liability. This is probably the biggest reason there are no cheap aircraft. If something goes wrong and there is a crash, just about any company that built a part that is on that aircraft will be sued. Combine that with many juries anti-corporation mindset and you've got a huge problem.
Here's an example of #3. Let's say you want to take video of what it's like to drive your prized 1960 Ford Fairlane, so you rig up this huge video camera mount on the steering wheel of your car. Next, you are feuding with you neighbor and as he sees you pulling out of your garage with the video camera on the steering wheel, he parks his F-550 pickup truck across the end of your driveway to prevent you from leaving. Your car is rather old, so it's not required to have seatbelts and doesn't. You speed out of your garage, down the driveway, and hit your neighbor's F-550 with your car. This causes you to fly forward and hit your head on the video camera and mount you have attached to the steering wheel, causing serious injuries. Your wife decides to sue. Who does she sue? 1) You for being so stupid to mount a video camera to the steering wheel of your car and not stopping when you see your neighbor's F-550 parked across the driveway. 2) Your neighbor for parking his F-550 across your driveway in an attempt to keep you from leaving. 3) Ford for making an unsafe automobile.
If your wife chooses #3, what do you think are the chances of her being successful in suing Ford?
Change the 1960 Ford Fairlane to a 1940's Piper Cub, the F-550 to a fuel truck, and the driveway to a runway and you have exactly what happened. To make things even more bizarre, the jury found the aircraft maker, Piper, liable for millions of dollars of damages for producing an unsafe aircraft design.
In general you are correct. One of the reasons that Mooneys are the sports cars of the pre-composite aircraft era is that they aren't very wide. However, remember it's the frontal area, or flat-plate area as you mentioned, rather than just width that matters.
Also, the typical 152/172 has these huge struts with steps on them that really add to the drag. That's one of the reasons the Cessna 200 series of aircraft got rid of the struts.
You can make up for some of that increase in frontal area by having a lower aircraft weight. Just look at the speeds the newer composite aircraft are getting while carrying 4 passengers.
Without engine specifics, it's hard to predict whether their fuel consumption figures are reasonable, but their numbers seem a bit optimistic.
Congrats on the aircraft purchase. It reminds me of my ultralight flying days, except you've got a canopy.
Might want to check in with Compaq and DEC about that. I don't think anyone at DEC had any illusions about what was going to happen. A lot of AMD's hardware engineers came from DEC after Compaq bought DEC.
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You can't because none of the above exist. The employee is no more responsible for ensuring that the security software and associated updating software is functioning properly than he is responsible for ensuring that all required maintenance, preventative and otherwise, is performed on his employer supplied vehicle.
Neither of the above are the employee's job. There are other people whose job it is to perform those functions. In this case, someone in the IT department didn't do their job properly with life-altering consequences for the falsely accused employee.
There are a lot of things we don't know about this project, which forces us to make assumptions that may or may not be correct.
For example, there is mention that somewhere along the way they were attempting to implement the Rational/IBM RUP. As someone else mentioned, this would appear to be an insane thing to do during the project. We don't know who initiated this. Was it the client? The consultants? Which consultants? The current ones or one of the many previous ones? Was <obscure language> not supported by the RUP tools being used? If so, that may have driven the decision to do a rewrite in Java. Was <obscure language> so obscure that it's almost impossible to find people with that skillset? Is <obscure language> dying? If so, implementing the new system in <obscure language> could very well have resulted in a system that had to be rewritten in a few years.
My point is that there are simply too many things we don't know about this project to discuss many of the specifics in an intelligent manner.
You saying we are "supposed" to is about the same as the judges interpreting something. No. The Founding Fathers knew that they couldn't cover every possible situation and made provisions for amending the Constitution. "Supposed to" has nothing to do with it. Legalities never work for constitutions. You can't make a fusion bomb really illegal because then they find something 99% a fusion bomb that isn't one. Laws can keep up but constitutions become very ugly very fast if they try that approach. Apples and oranges. Legality refers to laws. Constitutional refers to the Constitution. The Constitution wasn't supposed to be tinkered with and this is why changing it is so difficult. If you don't like this, there is a process for changing that too.
Now if one or more of the former states had later decided they wanted back in, Congress could have said no, and it would have all been constitutional.
1) Fixed phones are tied to a place, not a person. If someone is home (anyone), then they can pick up the phone. This is great for deliveries, guests, etc. They often also have cheaper long distance plans than cell phones (especially if you buy calling cards, where some cell phone companies charge you a surcharge to call an 800 number). We dropped our landline when the cost of the landline without any long distance was almost as much as our cell bill, 2 phone family plan, with unlimited nights and weekends with nights starting at 19:00, and rollover minutes. Now, this probably wouldn't work if we had teenagers
Different providers the ability to work around "damage/outages" if you need to. That's the only advantage a POTS has over our cell phone plan.
Ah yes, AT&T. I'll keep this short :-)
I've been waiting for AT&T Uverse to become available in my neighborhood to provide some competition to Time/Warner. I got a flyer in the mail saying that Uverse was was now available to me. I logged onto the web site and tried to order it. It took me several tries to actually place an order because I followed the instructions that said that my driver's license expiration date had to be entered in mmyyyy format. The day before the install date, I had to reschedule due to a sick family member. No problem, the new installation date was verbally confirmed with me by the CSR on the phone. On the day of the install, I waited and waited. 30 minutes after the close of the 2 hour installation window, I called and was informed that I was scheduled for installation the NEXT day. The next day the install tech comes out and asks to look in my back yard. No problem. I've got both the cable and phone boxes in my yard for about 6 houses in my neighborhood. While the tech is standing there looking somewhat confused, I say, "If your looking for the network interface, there insn't one. We've never had a landline at this address." The tech then tells me that a different tech has to install the network interface and run the drop to it and asks if they could reschedule the install for Monday. I say that's fine, but Monday is a holiday, and asked if they really did installations on holidays. The tech said yes and told me that someone would be by after 19:00 that day to install the network interface and run the drop.
No tech shows up that day to install the network interface and run the drop, so the first thing Monday morning, I call AT&T and tell them that it wasn't installed and asked if it would be installed prior to the tech arriving to do the install. I was informed that they didn't do installs on holidays and they rescheduled my install for the next day and assured me that both the install tech would be there and the person to do the network interface installation and run the drop.
The next day, the install tech showed up and I asked him where the other tech was who was going to do the network interface installation and run the drop. He got a funny look on his face and went outside to make a phone call. He returned and said that the other tech was on the way. While we waited for the other tech, I showed im the 2 TVs that needed set top boxes and where I wanted their router installed to connect into my network wiring. The other tech arrived and they started working. About 15 minutes later, they had the network interface installed and the drop run and then things got REAL quiet for about 15 minutes and suddenly a third AT&T person showed up. It turns out that Uverse has a max length of 3,000 feet from their box in the subdivision to the house and we were 3,400 feet away.
Our subdivision is less than 5 years old, so I asked who decided to lay out their cable in such a manner that almost everyone on my street would be unable to have Uverse service and they admitted it was one of their engineers.
So, the end result is that most of the people on my street in the subdivision can't have Uverse service and AT&T spent who knows how much money figuring it out. Oh, and I'm still getting solicitations for Uverse. Maybe I should order it again. Maybe I should order it every time I get a solicitation until they stop sending me solicitations.
My point was that inflation causes the price of everything to go up, the exceptions being the Great Depression and other recessions.
The banks also shot themselves in the foot by getting the bankruptcy laws changed. One of the bedrock assumptions made when assessing risk was, "People will pay their mortgage before their other debts." Historically, this was true. When the fit hits the shan, people would pay their debts in the following order:
1) House.
2) Car.
3) Other secured debt.
4) Credit card.
The banks didn't like the fact that people would stop paying their credit card debt, with its associated 10%+ return, when they had financial trouble. So they pressured Congress to make it almost impossible for people to get out of paying credit card debt. When this happened, did the banks lower the interest rate on the credit card debt that was still unsecured, but effectively guaranteed by the federal government to reflect the reduced risk of that debt? Nope. Of course not. They still wanted their 10%+ return.
This effectively reordered the debt payment order into:
1) Credit card.
2) House
3) Car.
4) Other secured debt.
So, when someone's ARM adjusts and their house payment goes from $500/month to $900/month and they don't have enough income to make the payment, they look to see what they can stop paying or pay late. Now they have to make the credit card payment, and they realize that even if they stop paying all their other debt, they can't make the house payment, they decide to sell the house. Oops. They owe more on the house than it's worth. The end result is that they let the bank foreclose on the house, move into an apartment, and pay their other bills.
Now the banks find themselves owning a whole lot of real estate that is worth less than the mortgage. Since banks don't want to own the real estate, especially in a declining real estate market, they dump it as quickly as they can, taking a loss on the mortgage loan, and further depressing housing prices.
Also, in many states, it's illegal to ride a bicycle on the Interstate. You don't see the signs much anymore, but I remember seeing signs at Interstate on-ramps that said things like, "Pedestrians, bicycles, farm animals, and motorized vehicles with less than ? bhp are prohibited."
There is no such thing as a cheap production aircraft. There are three main reasons for this:
1) The cost of certification. Lots and lots of documentation and testing are required.
2) Reliability. If your car engine dies, you can simply pull off to the side of the road. Obviously, you can't do this in an aircraft. This reliability is often achieved by redundancy. A simple example if this is spark plugs. Aircraft engines have two spark plugs per cylinder. If one dies, you will get reduced power, but it will be sufficient power to keep the aircraft in the air long enough to land safely. Now add the cost of duplicating major important aircraft components.
3) Liability. This is probably the biggest reason there are no cheap aircraft. If something goes wrong and there is a crash, just about any company that built a part that is on that aircraft will be sued. Combine that with many juries anti-corporation mindset and you've got a huge problem.
Here's an example of #3. Let's say you want to take video of what it's like to drive your prized 1960 Ford Fairlane, so you rig up this huge video camera mount on the steering wheel of your car. Next, you are feuding with you neighbor and as he sees you pulling out of your garage with the video camera on the steering wheel, he parks his F-550 pickup truck across the end of your driveway to prevent you from leaving. Your car is rather old, so it's not required to have seatbelts and doesn't. You speed out of your garage, down the driveway, and hit your neighbor's F-550 with your car. This causes you to fly forward and hit your head on the video camera and mount you have attached to the steering wheel, causing serious injuries.
Your wife decides to sue. Who does she sue?
1) You for being so stupid to mount a video camera to the steering wheel of your car and not stopping when you see your neighbor's F-550 parked across the driveway.
2) Your neighbor for parking his F-550 across your driveway in an attempt to keep you from leaving.
3) Ford for making an unsafe automobile.
If your wife chooses #3, what do you think are the chances of her being successful in suing Ford?
Change the 1960 Ford Fairlane to a 1940's Piper Cub, the F-550 to a fuel truck, and the driveway to a runway and you have exactly what happened. To make things even more bizarre, the jury found the aircraft maker, Piper, liable for millions of dollars of damages for producing an unsafe aircraft design.
In general you are correct. One of the reasons that Mooneys are the sports cars of the pre-composite aircraft era is that they aren't very wide. However, remember it's the frontal area, or flat-plate area as you mentioned, rather than just width that matters.
Also, the typical 152/172 has these huge struts with steps on them that really add to the drag. That's one of the reasons the Cessna 200 series of aircraft got rid of the struts.
You can make up for some of that increase in frontal area by having a lower aircraft weight. Just look at the speeds the newer composite aircraft are getting while carrying 4 passengers.
Without engine specifics, it's hard to predict whether their fuel consumption figures are reasonable, but their numbers seem a bit optimistic.
Congrats on the aircraft purchase. It reminds me of my ultralight flying days, except you've got a canopy.
A lot of AMD's hardware engineers came from DEC after Compaq bought DEC.