When? The U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson, a man who enforced simplicity wherever possible and valued the lives of everyone around his planes. Having anyone run up to it or chase it in a truck to install pogos while it was moving would risk a collision or injury, or both. Besides, the entire aircraft is only 16 feet tall, and the wings are maybe a third of that off the ground.
As far as I know, the plane has always landed like that, and Kelly Johnson knew it would. That kind of practice doesn't start showing up decades or even years later.
No one does that. When it comes to a stop, it tips gently over to rest on the wingtip, which has a reinforced titanium strip on the bottom. Because of the wingspan, the tip is only a few degrees. Ground crews then go to the stationary aircraft to reinstall the pogos so it can taxi back.
It wasn't in LAX airspace (that caps out at 10,000 feet), but in LA Center's coverage area, which oversees airspace in Southern and Central California and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona that isn't controlled by airports or by approach/departure controllers. The entire system is tied together to handle transitions from one controlling agency (or controller within an agency) to another.
As an aside, LAX's airspace extends various distances from the airport with the most distant point about 25 miles to the east, depending on the altitude. At any given time, there may be dozens of aircraft within its airspace on approach or departure, or transitioning through to other destinations.
I just went and checked on a number of search engines to see who does this. I used the Top 15 engines (the site draws from Alexa's rankings, which I know are borderline useless but they seem to suffice for this). In each case, I searched for "slashdot" and checked the results by right-clicking on the appropriate link, copying, and pasting into the URL bar to inspect the results. (I substituted Baidu for Contenko since the latter didn't return any results and Baidu is pretty popular, and added Yandex and IxQuick for popularity reasons as well.)
Search engines that use hidden redirects: -- Alhea (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace) -- Baidu -- Dogpile -- Google -- Info.com (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace) -- InfoSpace (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page) -- MyWebSearch (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page) -- Webcrawler -- Yahoo -- Yandex
Search engines that do not use hidden redirects and link directly to result: -- AOL (has JavaScript onclick action) -- Ask (has JavaScript onmousedown action) -- Bing (sends information on link click to www.bing.com/fd/ls/GLinkPing.aspx) -- Blekko -- DuckDuckGo (sends information on link click to r.duckduckgo.com/l/) -- IxQuick (has JavaScript onClick action) -- Wow (has JavaScript onclick action)
Blekko appears to be the only one that doesn't send anything in any fashion back to the server. That doesn't mean they don't log your IP address or your search terms, of course. And their display method leaves much to be desired.
So which is worse? Using a hidden redirect that can be detected if you right-click on the link and paste it somewhere? Or sending back where you go by JavaScript that is sometimes visible to someone with a modicum of code knowledge and sometimes requires either much deeper analysis or watching the URLs that are called?
As ultranova said, you're getting upset over something that search engines have very solid reasons to do so they can rate the pages and return better results for the searcher.
This...makes a lot of sense. I was iffy on the proposal, but the way you've explained it means that, while I may not choose to use it myself, it could be very valuable for the less literate.
It's worth a thought experiment. A submarine fuel facility has the advantage of not being affected much by the surface seas. Perhaps it wouldn't go deep, but instead remain about 60 feet or so underwater. A float mechanism could be used to hoist the hoses to the surface, and then the hoses could be connected for fueling. This would keep the fueling platform itself stable and reduce the risks involved in a collision. It would probably require a significant re-engineering of the coupling mechanism, and I'm not sure how refueling underway would be accomplished, but maybe someone else has an idea.
Wreckage of AF447 (including bodies) was found within the first couple of days, so they knew for certain there was a water impact and approximately where. It took time to find the main wreckage, but it was located, and in fact new analysis of sonar data collected by a French sub within the first week after the crash was critical in finding it. The sonar had heard the FDR pings, but it was below the equipment's identification threshold at the time.
Here, a water impact is presumed but not certain. Aside from the engine pings, there's very little to go on, and even the satellite images and the civilian sighting of a pallet and belts the other day may be nothing more than shipping equipment that fell overboard.
China and India may become friendlier and work together on more issues, but will probably not become allies in the short term. Their interests do not intersect well enough, the Himalayas prevent significant cross-training or war games to allow their militaries to interoperate, and both are interested in expanding their influence over fellow Asian states. China's belligerence over claimed oceanic territory and their growing navy threatens Indian trade. India's growing population seeks food supplies that China may need for its own population.
They're unlikely to become very close. Fortunately, the same Himalayas that help prevent them from becoming close also make a war between them unlikely because neither side could actually hold territory. There is a risk of nuclear exchange, but the rest of the world has strong reason to keep that from becoming likely.
Calling the Warsaw Pact "allies" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. Even within the governments that nominally looked to Moscow for guidance and direction, there was often a great deal of quiet grumbling. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet troops, many of the Eastern European countries protested privately to Moscow but were either ignored or threatened into submission. They did so, knowing that the West wasn't about to get involved in their affairs because the risk of war was too high.
The same thing is happening now. As much as the West would like to see Ukraine become closer, it's not about to risk outright war with Russia over it. This is going to be played out over years or decades.
It's "mostly populated by Russians" because the Soviets forcefully exiled much of the native Tatar, Greek, and other non-Russian ethnic populations in the 1930s and 1940s and replaced them with ethnic Russians. There was a Russian population before then, but it was a minority population.
That's an artifact of how movie accounting is done. The studios tack on so many fees and have access to so much of the gross that the subsidiary companies (almost always used when filming movies, with one created per movie) almost never show a net profit. The studios show a profit, of course, due to the "fees" they charge. So a movie production may rarely make a profit, but an individual movie, when factored through the entire revenue stream, often does (though many are spectacular failures and the studio loses money on them, too).
A stall is not "plummet to the ground." Any pilot competent with his plane should in most cases be able to recover from a stall with minimal loss of altitude. This varies by the aircraft, but it's not an automatic lethal event. The primary risk that a U-2 carries in stalling while at maximum altitude is dipping down into radar or SAM range and/or losing what little maneuverability the plane does have, plus possibly additional airframe wear.
Actually I've heard the PTSD can be even worse - the human brain is apparently not that well suited to killing people 8-to-5 and then going home to the wife and kids who can't relate at all.
The wife and kids probably couldn't even try to relate if they wanted to. In general, the spouse doesn't hold the same security clearance, and the kids definitely don't get clearance. That means a lot of details get left out beyond just having a bad day at work.
That site appears to have it backwards. Davy settled on "aluminum" by the time he published Elements of Chemical Philosophy in 1812 (the year your link claims was when he settled on an ending of -ium. Wikipedia includes a quote from the book.
"This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."
The quote is visible from a scanned copy at this link
muggers can be anywhere, especially with the economy still in such a bad state.
They can be anywhere when the economy is not in such a bad state. But the funny thing is that violent crime has generally been down almost every year since peaking in 1992. There were little bumps up in 2001 (about 1%, not including 9/11), 2005 (about 2%), 2006 (about 3%), and 2012 (less than 1%); you might remember the middle two as times when the economy was considered to be in a pretty good state. The final numbers for 2013 won't be available until much later in the year, but there seems to have been a relatively sharp drop in crime for at least the first half.
There's a lot of debate about why. Improved education, more resources available for the downtrodden, more career criminals in prison, the removal of lead from gasoline showing unanticipated effects... Pick your favorite. Whatever it is, we have 37% fewer overall crimes being committed despite 23% more population. That's basically half the crime rate we had in 1992.
If you're going to try to get someone not to use Glass, scaring them with warnings of random crime isn't really that effective.
There are lots of applications for Google Glass technology that have nothing to do with voyeurism.
And yet you fail to even list a single one.
--GPS without having to take your eyes off the road. (Or GPS while you're walking in a crowded area where using a phone means you bump into people, like much of NYC.) --Finding out when the buses run by looking at a bus stop sign and having Glass cross-reference the appropriate schedules. --Referencing a manual when you're in a position that makes it difficult to read printed material (like under a car, or even just twisted under a dashboard to pull a component) --Taking notes when you're in that awkward position --Pilots pulling up a checklist without having to fish around for the actual checklist (especially useful in emergency situations) --Conferring with colleagues on the best course of action during the job without having to bring them on-site (already happening during surgeries) --Walking people through first-aid procedures while help is still on the way --Emergency alert notifications such as for tornadoes, floods, or evacuation that might only trip a notification on your phone.
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty of others that would never occur to me if someone else didn't come up with them first.
A lot of us think that, at least in it's current iteration, Glass is pointless, creepy, distracting, and unacceptably invasive to both the surrounding populace and the user themself.
The same thing was said when smartphones (especially those with cameras) started showing up on the market. People could suddenly take pictures and sometimes video of anyone, anywhere, and it would be hard to know. They could even surreptitiously take downshirt and upskirt photos without holding something that looked like a camera and then post them online. And they could look up people they had just met, maybe even during the conversation. And they were always paying attention to the phone, and not looking around at the world.
Roughly the same complaints come up about Glass, although I would argue it has the potential to be less distracting as the world is still there for you to see even while you're using it. It's still in very early stages, and competition seems to be coming around, so the uses for it will increase. I've had at least one opportunity to order, but I'm waiting for a hardware iteration. The current CPU is a TI OMAP 4430, which is no longer in production or really supported by TI as TI dropped out of the mobile processor market in 2012. Once they replace it with something that has a better chance of future Android support, I'll probably dive in. I will, however, keep an extra set of plain glasses with me most of the time (in the car or in a bag) in case I run into a situation where I can't wear Glass.
In the US, a finding of not guilty almost always immediately ends the trial process due to the prohibition of double jeopardy (trying someone for the same crime more than once). A person who is convicted can appeal to higher courts[1] who generally rule only on the law and not on the facts. Should the appeals court find in favor of the defendant, the case will be handed back down for either retrial (if going to the trial court) or rehearing (if going to an appellate court). If in the latter case, it can be appealed up again or sent back down to the trial court. Retrial can be for either determination of guilt or for sentencing, depending on what is being appealed.
Getting a not-guilty verdict set aside is almost impossible and hinges on the prosecutor proving malfeasance on the part of the judge or jury, a rare event. Even then, reinstatement of charges is not guaranteed.
In certain cases, a not-guilty verdict under state charges has resulted in federal charges being brought, perhaps most famously in the Rodney King case. There has long been a great deal of controversy over this. Some claim that it falls under double jeopardy because the defendant is facing trial twice for the same act, but others (including the Supreme Court) believe that it's not as the federal charges are generally of violating civil rights and not for the action itself (i.e., murder or assault).
Anyway, based on this, I would expect the US to oppose an extradition request based on US law. While Knox might have been extradited had she made her way to the US before the trial began in Italy, since she was found not guilty once, she would be considered untriable in the US and therefore extradition could be blocked.
[1] This sequence is generally to an appeals court of three judges, occasionally an en banc appeal to a hearing of as many as 11 judges, and then the Supreme Court. The process is effectively the same with both state and federal trials, except that those appealing a state conviction may also try to appeal through federal appeals courts. This rarely works, though.
He's in the UK, in the Ecuadoran embassy. Embassies are not extraterritorial soil, but are protected under the Vienna Convention. Under the Convention, the UK can't enter without approval from Ecuador, which makes it similar in practical effect, but it's not the same as being on Ecuadorian soil.
What part of "trends that some say have been accelerated by increasingly strict federal regulations" don't you understand? Big government strikes again . ..
Actually, there's work underway in the form of the rewrite of FAR Part 23 (Airworthiness Standards: Normal, Utility, Acrobatic and Commuter Airplanes). Passed with strong bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, it directs the FAA to accept the findings of the Part 23 Reorganization Aviation Rulemaking Committee by the end of 2015. These are intended to reduce the certification cost by half while doubling safety by reducing the amount of prescriptive regulation and not requiring that small airplanes and add-ons be tested to extremes so unlikely to occur in general aviation flight that by the time they do occur, something much worse probably will have failed, or the pilot's judgment to begin with will have gotten everyone aboard killed. Standards would probably be developed by industry consensus (subject to FAA approval), which could cut the cost of small airplanes dramatically while allowing more rapid improvements.
There's also a move to allow private pilots to self-certify their health, though the FAA seems to be resisting that with significantly more force. Basically, if pilots can get a driver's license, they would be able to self-certify their medical state for a Class III certificate with some restrictions. I'm not entirely comfortable with this, but I can understand the drive for it. Some medical examiners mark up the most minor things, and getting the FAA to write up an exception can be such a costly and lengthy endeavor that many simply give up flying. But I've also seen a number of pilots who, at least outside of the cockpit, don't follow anything remotely like suggested healthy living, and I wonder how many of them are heart attacks waiting to happen. Maybe an age limit on self-certification would be appropriate as a middle ground.
I participated in Technocrat, and it had a number of problems including editors who were accused of deleting or editing posts that disagreed with them. It started a hard downhill slide when Bruce made a post about the 2006 election that essentially said that if you didn't vote Democrat, you were stupid, evil, or both. This resulted in some very strong words from Libertarians, whom he suggested were just wasting their votes. Most of us had no problem with him supporting his chosen candidates. It was when his tone turned abusive toward those of us who didn't support them that things went south. He folded it in January 2009 when it didn't turn into what he wanted it to be, which seemed to be largely a group that agreed with him. Slashdot has many faults, but editing and deleting posts that don't agree with the editors doesn't seem to be one of them.
That said, if you pop over to technocrat.net, he's posted both his e-mail address and a phone number. You're welcome to contact him either way to see if he'll bring it back.
Slashdot Mirror
When? The U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson, a man who enforced simplicity wherever possible and valued the lives of everyone around his planes. Having anyone run up to it or chase it in a truck to install pogos while it was moving would risk a collision or injury, or both. Besides, the entire aircraft is only 16 feet tall, and the wings are maybe a third of that off the ground.
As far as I know, the plane has always landed like that, and Kelly Johnson knew it would. That kind of practice doesn't start showing up decades or even years later.
No one does that. When it comes to a stop, it tips gently over to rest on the wingtip, which has a reinforced titanium strip on the bottom. Because of the wingspan, the tip is only a few degrees. Ground crews then go to the stationary aircraft to reinstall the pogos so it can taxi back.
It wasn't in LAX airspace (that caps out at 10,000 feet), but in LA Center's coverage area, which oversees airspace in Southern and Central California and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona that isn't controlled by airports or by approach/departure controllers. The entire system is tied together to handle transitions from one controlling agency (or controller within an agency) to another.
As an aside, LAX's airspace extends various distances from the airport with the most distant point about 25 miles to the east, depending on the altitude. At any given time, there may be dozens of aircraft within its airspace on approach or departure, or transitioning through to other destinations.
I just went and checked on a number of search engines to see who does this. I used the Top 15 engines (the site draws from Alexa's rankings, which I know are borderline useless but they seem to suffice for this). In each case, I searched for "slashdot" and checked the results by right-clicking on the appropriate link, copying, and pasting into the URL bar to inspect the results. (I substituted Baidu for Contenko since the latter didn't return any results and Baidu is pretty popular, and added Yandex and IxQuick for popularity reasons as well.)
Search engines that use hidden redirects:
-- Alhea (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace)
-- Baidu
-- Dogpile
-- Google
-- Info.com (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace)
-- InfoSpace (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page)
-- MyWebSearch (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page)
-- Webcrawler
-- Yahoo
-- Yandex
Search engines that do not use hidden redirects and link directly to result:
-- AOL (has JavaScript onclick action)
-- Ask (has JavaScript onmousedown action)
-- Bing (sends information on link click to www.bing.com/fd/ls/GLinkPing.aspx)
-- Blekko
-- DuckDuckGo (sends information on link click to r.duckduckgo.com/l/)
-- IxQuick (has JavaScript onClick action)
-- Wow (has JavaScript onclick action)
Blekko appears to be the only one that doesn't send anything in any fashion back to the server. That doesn't mean they don't log your IP address or your search terms, of course. And their display method leaves much to be desired.
So which is worse? Using a hidden redirect that can be detected if you right-click on the link and paste it somewhere? Or sending back where you go by JavaScript that is sometimes visible to someone with a modicum of code knowledge and sometimes requires either much deeper analysis or watching the URLs that are called?
As ultranova said, you're getting upset over something that search engines have very solid reasons to do so they can rate the pages and return better results for the searcher.
This...makes a lot of sense. I was iffy on the proposal, but the way you've explained it means that, while I may not choose to use it myself, it could be very valuable for the less literate.
It's worth a thought experiment. A submarine fuel facility has the advantage of not being affected much by the surface seas. Perhaps it wouldn't go deep, but instead remain about 60 feet or so underwater. A float mechanism could be used to hoist the hoses to the surface, and then the hoses could be connected for fueling. This would keep the fueling platform itself stable and reduce the risks involved in a collision. It would probably require a significant re-engineering of the coupling mechanism, and I'm not sure how refueling underway would be accomplished, but maybe someone else has an idea.
Wreckage of AF447 (including bodies) was found within the first couple of days, so they knew for certain there was a water impact and approximately where. It took time to find the main wreckage, but it was located, and in fact new analysis of sonar data collected by a French sub within the first week after the crash was critical in finding it. The sonar had heard the FDR pings, but it was below the equipment's identification threshold at the time.
Here, a water impact is presumed but not certain. Aside from the engine pings, there's very little to go on, and even the satellite images and the civilian sighting of a pallet and belts the other day may be nothing more than shipping equipment that fell overboard.
China and India may become friendlier and work together on more issues, but will probably not become allies in the short term. Their interests do not intersect well enough, the Himalayas prevent significant cross-training or war games to allow their militaries to interoperate, and both are interested in expanding their influence over fellow Asian states. China's belligerence over claimed oceanic territory and their growing navy threatens Indian trade. India's growing population seeks food supplies that China may need for its own population.
They're unlikely to become very close. Fortunately, the same Himalayas that help prevent them from becoming close also make a war between them unlikely because neither side could actually hold territory. There is a risk of nuclear exchange, but the rest of the world has strong reason to keep that from becoming likely.
Calling the Warsaw Pact "allies" is perhaps a bit of a misnomer. Even within the governments that nominally looked to Moscow for guidance and direction, there was often a great deal of quiet grumbling. When Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet troops, many of the Eastern European countries protested privately to Moscow but were either ignored or threatened into submission. They did so, knowing that the West wasn't about to get involved in their affairs because the risk of war was too high.
The same thing is happening now. As much as the West would like to see Ukraine become closer, it's not about to risk outright war with Russia over it. This is going to be played out over years or decades.
It's "mostly populated by Russians" because the Soviets forcefully exiled much of the native Tatar, Greek, and other non-Russian ethnic populations in the 1930s and 1940s and replaced them with ethnic Russians. There was a Russian population before then, but it was a minority population.
For the US to enter a treaty, Senate concurrence is required. This was never run past the Senate, nor was it ever intended to be.
That's an artifact of how movie accounting is done. The studios tack on so many fees and have access to so much of the gross that the subsidiary companies (almost always used when filming movies, with one created per movie) almost never show a net profit. The studios show a profit, of course, due to the "fees" they charge. So a movie production may rarely make a profit, but an individual movie, when factored through the entire revenue stream, often does (though many are spectacular failures and the studio loses money on them, too).
A stall is not "plummet to the ground." Any pilot competent with his plane should in most cases be able to recover from a stall with minimal loss of altitude. This varies by the aircraft, but it's not an automatic lethal event. The primary risk that a U-2 carries in stalling while at maximum altitude is dipping down into radar or SAM range and/or losing what little maneuverability the plane does have, plus possibly additional airframe wear.
Actually I've heard the PTSD can be even worse - the human brain is apparently not that well suited to killing people 8-to-5 and then going home to the wife and kids who can't relate at all.
The wife and kids probably couldn't even try to relate if they wanted to. In general, the spouse doesn't hold the same security clearance, and the kids definitely don't get clearance. That means a lot of details get left out beyond just having a bad day at work.
That site appears to have it backwards. Davy settled on "aluminum" by the time he published Elements of Chemical Philosophy in 1812 (the year your link claims was when he settled on an ending of -ium. Wikipedia includes a quote from the book.
"This substance appears to contain a peculiar metal, but as yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state, though alloys of it with other metalline substances have been procured sufficiently distinct to indicate the probable nature of alumina."
The quote is visible from a scanned copy at this link
Roddy Piper found a pair of glasses that took all the ads away. It got him into all kinds of trouble.
Define "a long time." Because the phone I carry is powerful enough to do it, or will be very soon, and Glass is currently using a CPU from 2011.
muggers can be anywhere, especially with the economy still in such a bad state.
They can be anywhere when the economy is not in such a bad state. But the funny thing is that violent crime has generally been down almost every year since peaking in 1992. There were little bumps up in 2001 (about 1%, not including 9/11), 2005 (about 2%), 2006 (about 3%), and 2012 (less than 1%); you might remember the middle two as times when the economy was considered to be in a pretty good state. The final numbers for 2013 won't be available until much later in the year, but there seems to have been a relatively sharp drop in crime for at least the first half.
There's a lot of debate about why. Improved education, more resources available for the downtrodden, more career criminals in prison, the removal of lead from gasoline showing unanticipated effects... Pick your favorite. Whatever it is, we have 37% fewer overall crimes being committed despite 23% more population. That's basically half the crime rate we had in 1992.
If you're going to try to get someone not to use Glass, scaring them with warnings of random crime isn't really that effective.
--GPS without having to take your eyes off the road. (Or GPS while you're walking in a crowded area where using a phone means you bump into people, like much of NYC.)
--Finding out when the buses run by looking at a bus stop sign and having Glass cross-reference the appropriate schedules.
--Referencing a manual when you're in a position that makes it difficult to read printed material (like under a car, or even just twisted under a dashboard to pull a component)
--Taking notes when you're in that awkward position
--Pilots pulling up a checklist without having to fish around for the actual checklist (especially useful in emergency situations)
--Conferring with colleagues on the best course of action during the job without having to bring them on-site (already happening during surgeries)
--Walking people through first-aid procedures while help is still on the way
--Emergency alert notifications such as for tornadoes, floods, or evacuation that might only trip a notification on your phone.
Those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty of others that would never occur to me if someone else didn't come up with them first.
The same thing was said when smartphones (especially those with cameras) started showing up on the market. People could suddenly take pictures and sometimes video of anyone, anywhere, and it would be hard to know. They could even surreptitiously take downshirt and upskirt photos without holding something that looked like a camera and then post them online. And they could look up people they had just met, maybe even during the conversation. And they were always paying attention to the phone, and not looking around at the world.
Roughly the same complaints come up about Glass, although I would argue it has the potential to be less distracting as the world is still there for you to see even while you're using it. It's still in very early stages, and competition seems to be coming around, so the uses for it will increase. I've had at least one opportunity to order, but I'm waiting for a hardware iteration. The current CPU is a TI OMAP 4430, which is no longer in production or really supported by TI as TI dropped out of the mobile processor market in 2012. Once they replace it with something that has a better chance of future Android support, I'll probably dive in. I will, however, keep an extra set of plain glasses with me most of the time (in the car or in a bag) in case I run into a situation where I can't wear Glass.
Firmware updates can also be installed via USB.
In the US, a finding of not guilty almost always immediately ends the trial process due to the prohibition of double jeopardy (trying someone for the same crime more than once). A person who is convicted can appeal to higher courts[1] who generally rule only on the law and not on the facts. Should the appeals court find in favor of the defendant, the case will be handed back down for either retrial (if going to the trial court) or rehearing (if going to an appellate court). If in the latter case, it can be appealed up again or sent back down to the trial court. Retrial can be for either determination of guilt or for sentencing, depending on what is being appealed.
Getting a not-guilty verdict set aside is almost impossible and hinges on the prosecutor proving malfeasance on the part of the judge or jury, a rare event. Even then, reinstatement of charges is not guaranteed.
In certain cases, a not-guilty verdict under state charges has resulted in federal charges being brought, perhaps most famously in the Rodney King case. There has long been a great deal of controversy over this. Some claim that it falls under double jeopardy because the defendant is facing trial twice for the same act, but others (including the Supreme Court) believe that it's not as the federal charges are generally of violating civil rights and not for the action itself (i.e., murder or assault).
Anyway, based on this, I would expect the US to oppose an extradition request based on US law. While Knox might have been extradited had she made her way to the US before the trial began in Italy, since she was found not guilty once, she would be considered untriable in the US and therefore extradition could be blocked.
[1] This sequence is generally to an appeals court of three judges, occasionally an en banc appeal to a hearing of as many as 11 judges, and then the Supreme Court. The process is effectively the same with both state and federal trials, except that those appealing a state conviction may also try to appeal through federal appeals courts. This rarely works, though.
He's in the UK, in the Ecuadoran embassy. Embassies are not extraterritorial soil, but are protected under the Vienna Convention. Under the Convention, the UK can't enter without approval from Ecuador, which makes it similar in practical effect, but it's not the same as being on Ecuadorian soil.
Actually, there's work underway in the form of the rewrite of FAR Part 23 (Airworthiness Standards: Normal, Utility, Acrobatic and Commuter Airplanes). Passed with strong bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, it directs the FAA to accept the findings of the Part 23 Reorganization Aviation Rulemaking Committee by the end of 2015. These are intended to reduce the certification cost by half while doubling safety by reducing the amount of prescriptive regulation and not requiring that small airplanes and add-ons be tested to extremes so unlikely to occur in general aviation flight that by the time they do occur, something much worse probably will have failed, or the pilot's judgment to begin with will have gotten everyone aboard killed. Standards would probably be developed by industry consensus (subject to FAA approval), which could cut the cost of small airplanes dramatically while allowing more rapid improvements.
There's also a move to allow private pilots to self-certify their health, though the FAA seems to be resisting that with significantly more force. Basically, if pilots can get a driver's license, they would be able to self-certify their medical state for a Class III certificate with some restrictions. I'm not entirely comfortable with this, but I can understand the drive for it. Some medical examiners mark up the most minor things, and getting the FAA to write up an exception can be such a costly and lengthy endeavor that many simply give up flying. But I've also seen a number of pilots who, at least outside of the cockpit, don't follow anything remotely like suggested healthy living, and I wonder how many of them are heart attacks waiting to happen. Maybe an age limit on self-certification would be appropriate as a middle ground.
I participated in Technocrat, and it had a number of problems including editors who were accused of deleting or editing posts that disagreed with them. It started a hard downhill slide when Bruce made a post about the 2006 election that essentially said that if you didn't vote Democrat, you were stupid, evil, or both. This resulted in some very strong words from Libertarians, whom he suggested were just wasting their votes. Most of us had no problem with him supporting his chosen candidates. It was when his tone turned abusive toward those of us who didn't support them that things went south. He folded it in January 2009 when it didn't turn into what he wanted it to be, which seemed to be largely a group that agreed with him. Slashdot has many faults, but editing and deleting posts that don't agree with the editors doesn't seem to be one of them.
That said, if you pop over to technocrat.net, he's posted both his e-mail address and a phone number. You're welcome to contact him either way to see if he'll bring it back.