As someone who was there, I think they would rather just come home and get back to a normal life, or as much of one as is possible. This war has been going on for far too long, with far too much pointless killing on both sides. Over a million service members have served there. Many are wounded for life or made the ultimate sacrifice. The 30,000 or so still there do deserve a hand shake and a pat on the back, but that's about all. The real heroes didn't come home. Parades make me want to puke.
The prime contractor for Shuttle Orbiter was North American Rockwell. Rockwell was a pioneer in many areas from aerospace engineering to early semiconductors. I'm not sure how Lockheed Martin and Boeing entered the picture though.
The game plan I described would have been good about 15 years ago. I would probably need to rethink it with more modern weapons and cueing systems though. I flew Marine Hornets a while back and got to play with most of the other machines out there, mostly F-15s, but occasionally F-16s as well. I got out of the Marines, went to grad school and now I do other things. I would like to get back into flying sometime in the future, probably will get my sailplane license and maybe try to teach my kids how to fly when they're old enough.:-) The problem with the Marines is you get promoted and don't get to fly as much if at all.:-(
I haven't tried any of the modern simulator games. I remember playing Falcon 4.0 a while back, and the most realistic view would would track the other plane as it moved around your canopy. but I don't think you can simulate having to look over your shoulder to see someone with a flat desktop monitor.
If you're sitting straight up, you can crank around your shoulders and see directly behind you. If you're reclined at 35 degrees, this involves looking back and up at the same time. Try leaning back in a chair and looking directly at your level 6 o'clock position. You have to look back and up. I agree if you are in a level 2 circle, you can see the other person more easily because your head is more closely aligned with the lift vector. In a visual fight, where both pilots see each other, being reclined might be an advantage. It can be a disadvantage when the pilot doesn't know he's being attacked from the rear, because looking back takes more energy and the pilot needs to have a very good look out doctrine. I think the Air Force lost a couple of F-16s in Iraq due to unseen MANPADS this way, as recently as 2007.
I am a former military pilot, and I trained with F-16s a few times. F-16s are great for level 1- and 2- circle fights. The F-16 had a better thrust-to-weight ration than my machine and could sustain more g without bleeding his airspeed. My machine had better all-around visibility and better high Angle-of-Attack performance. F-16s usually avoided the vertical fight because they had a harder time seeing at the extreme corners of their view field. The best way to fight the F-16 in my opinion was to merge low to high and put your aircraft behind the pilots headbox at his dead 6. Then to go vertical high looking for the sun. The average F-16 pilot would do a 9 g level turn to try to regain his tally, you could pick him off from the high perch. A good F-16 pilot would recognize this and we would have a second merge high-to-low and the fight would go on through the next couple of iterations, before eventually transitioning to a descending 1-circle fight and trying to force the other guy out front.
The Swedes were the first to use a tilted seat in the Saab Viggen. I'm not sure if the 5th Gen fighters kept the reclined seat or not.
Between the Greek bailout fiasco, ethanol fuel fiasco, atomic energy extension then reversal, FDP falling on their swords, Stuttgart 21, etc., I don't think any of the mainstream political parties have any credibility with the German voters left. Maybe the Green party has some, but they'd blow it after a couple of years in power. I think Mrs. Merkel is looking for a new coalition partner, maybe she should advertise on one of those in search of web sites.
An acquaintance imports and sells garlic and other spices. He tried importing from China a couple of times, but always got burned. Shipments came late or not at all and what did come he was not able to sell. He gave up on China. China is probably ok if you have deep pockets or have family connections in the right place. Otherwise it's buyer beware.
...No-one has ever said "We must kill these people because they believe in a god". Religion is harmful because it can be used in this way.....
People in North Korea who believe in god may disagree with your statement...but I will agree with your comment that there are no selfless atheists who go around killing people merely because they believe in a god. When a dictator chants, "these people are against God and must die", most people nodding in agreement are thinking about how much they can steal and enrich themselves or how to show sufficient enthusiasm so as not to be targeted for murder themselves. Again, I stand by my original comment that Greed is at the root of all evil. Humans are greedy, and taking religion out of the equation won't change anything.
It's killed more than most illnesses I've heard of. And still does.
Mao, Hitler and Stalin were atheists. The 30 years war, the Crusades, the Spanish inquisition, Al Queda were religious. Your point is? Most mass murder is because of greed, not religion. Religion is used to justify the greed in some cases. In other cases, politics or biology are used as justification. But greed is at the heart of almost all killing and war. An atheistic world would be neither more peaceful nor less peaceful because even atheists are just as greedy as everyone else.
There's no reason Taiwan, South Korea, or China couldn't build good airplanes and undercut Boeing. All of these countries clearly have the engineering and industrial capacity to do so. The main reason they haven't done so, IMHO is due to the high startup costs associated with designing, manufacturing and certifying a passenger aircraft. It would be very difficult to bootstrap a new commercial aircraft business without some form of government support, or some very deep-pocketed investors who are willing to take on a lot of risk. Instead, these countries are gaining more and more work from EADS or Boeing, often as a pre-condition for sales to their national airlines. Through this work, they are developing engineering and production experience that will some day be used to compete directly against Boeing and EADS in the same way that ASUS took over most of Dell's business one bit at a time in TFA. Boeing has outsourced a significant amount of the development and production on the 787. Fortunately, or unfortunately for Boeing, designing and building aircraft components is very difficult and Boeing had to move a lot of the contracts back in house. It will probably take China another decade to build an indigenous commercial aviation industry, but I am confident that they will eventually do so.
From the ad it looks like they are looking at a very narrow definition of intelligence, that is the ability to perform on standardized exams or a PhD in Math, Physics, EE, or theoretical computer science from a "top" U.S. university. Not to be China bashing, but I think China is over emphasizing rote memorization or test taking ability to the exclusion of developing other, more creative forms of intelligence. I think China is in search of the SAT-taking gene, not the smart gene.
Most people just by a PC which comes pre-loaded with Windows. I think 99% of the problem is OEMs installing unlicensed copies of Windows, but charging their customers full retail. Maybe MS should go after the OEMs rather than the end users who probably are out the Windows tax and don't even have a valid license to show for it.
Boeing has many test pilots on staff, and I'm sure that they will be the ones making the first few flights. Normally a civilian company test pilot makes the first flights of any new aircraft design before it is handed over to government / military test pilots for the follow-on phases of flight test and development. NASA was more of an exception than the rule because they had their astronauts make the first flights of previous space capsules / shuttles. But if memory serves me correctly, the first flights of the X-15 were made by company test pilots before NASA pilots flew it.
Robert Goddard independently invented liquid-fueled rockets before Werner von Braun. The problem for Dr. Goddard was that the U.S. in the 1930s was in the middle of a great depression and wasn't ruled over by a maniacal dictator bent on ruling half the world. Dr. Goddard had to finance his research from private donations. Werner von Braun on the other hand, had the backing of the Nazi government and the German Army. It's no wonder that von Braun built bigger, better rockets than Dr. Goddard.
To say that the Americans were just a bunch of idiots who needed German help to get anything off the ground is just plain wrong. In 1945, the Germans were further along than the Americans. The German scientists who came over to America helped speed up the space program, but they weren't the only ones who made contributions. The same can be said about the Russian space program. The Russians had some German engineers and some V-2 rockets, but the R-7 rocket which launched Sputnik was developed by Russian engineers.
AC, I was basing my comment on this article Yes, it is smaller than Switzerland, it is 4300 square km. If it were a perfect circle, it would have a radius of 36 km. But it is not a perfect circle. It covers a much larger area, roughly the size of Switzerland much like an imperfect ink blob. It is twice the size of the Saarland, Germany's smallest province. Then you have the areas being monitored with elevated radiation which increases the area even further. Want to move there?
If any country has the engineering capacity to move off of Nuclear for base-load power, it is Germany. Blast Germany all you want to, but I hope they make it work. Maybe America could use a little more vision.
Unless you have lived in Germany, you probably aren't aware just how controversial nuclear power has been, especially since the 1970s. Germany was planning on quitting Nuclear power once the useful life span of their reactors expired, but Chancellor Merkel reversed this decision in what was derisively known as the "Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg" or in English, the "Exit from the Exit" from atomic energy. Then Fukushima happened on the eve of provincial elections in Baden-Wuertenberg. So she reversed course just in time, but her Christian Democratic Union still lost the election to the Green Party for the first time since the end of WW 2.
I don't agree on Merkels U-Turns every time public opinion shifts, but I am in favor of ending Nuclear energy. The contaminated (evacuated) zone around Chernobyl is the size of Switzerland. If something similar happened in Germany, they would loose a major chunk of their country. Just food for thought.
I'll probably go down in flames from the nuclear fanboys, this being/. and all. Sometimes, I think they are more afraid of someone finding an alternative than they are of an actual mishap. Maybe Nuclear power makes sense in a larger country such as the USA, or Russia in an isolated location. But in Germany, a mishap would be catastrophic and affect the livelihood of tens of millions of people. Yes, I do live in Germany.
I guess it's time to break out the overhead projector and photocopy our presentations onto transparent acetate. Or better yet, make photo-slides and be really old-school. Just hope none of them are in backwards or upside down. Really, this is pretty dumb. The problem is the people, not the tool.
This reminds me of the fake will awarding Melvin Dummar about half of the Howard Hughes estate for allegedly picking up a hitch hiking Mr. Hughes in the desert some time in the '60s. Like the Face Book email, this didn't go anywhere.
This is dangerous. The US isn't the only country with armed UAV technology. If the US is declaring that bombs dropped by UAVs are not acts of war, then the same would apply to other countries, especially China, Iran, Russia, and Israel. So what will the US say if Iran uses a UAV to take care of someone in Iraq they don't like, or of Israel uses UAVs in say Egypt or Syria? How about closer to home, what if Mexico got some UAVs and started bombing gun stores in Texas that were supplying the drug cartels in Mexico?
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As someone who was there, I think they would rather just come home and get back to a normal life, or as much of one as is possible. This war has been going on for far too long, with far too much pointless killing on both sides. Over a million service members have served there. Many are wounded for life or made the ultimate sacrifice. The 30,000 or so still there do deserve a hand shake and a pat on the back, but that's about all. The real heroes didn't come home. Parades make me want to puke.
The prime contractor for Shuttle Orbiter was North American Rockwell. Rockwell was a pioneer in many areas from aerospace engineering to early semiconductors. I'm not sure how Lockheed Martin and Boeing entered the picture though.
The game plan I described would have been good about 15 years ago. I would probably need to rethink it with more modern weapons and cueing systems though. I flew Marine Hornets a while back and got to play with most of the other machines out there, mostly F-15s, but occasionally F-16s as well. I got out of the Marines, went to grad school and now I do other things. I would like to get back into flying sometime in the future, probably will get my sailplane license and maybe try to teach my kids how to fly when they're old enough. :-) The problem with the Marines is you get promoted and don't get to fly as much if at all. :-(
I haven't tried any of the modern simulator games. I remember playing Falcon 4.0 a while back, and the most realistic view would would track the other plane as it moved around your canopy. but I don't think you can simulate having to look over your shoulder to see someone with a flat desktop monitor.
If you're sitting straight up, you can crank around your shoulders and see directly behind you. If you're reclined at 35 degrees, this involves looking back and up at the same time. Try leaning back in a chair and looking directly at your level 6 o'clock position. You have to look back and up. I agree if you are in a level 2 circle, you can see the other person more easily because your head is more closely aligned with the lift vector. In a visual fight, where both pilots see each other, being reclined might be an advantage. It can be a disadvantage when the pilot doesn't know he's being attacked from the rear, because looking back takes more energy and the pilot needs to have a very good look out doctrine. I think the Air Force lost a couple of F-16s in Iraq due to unseen MANPADS this way, as recently as 2007.
I am a former military pilot, and I trained with F-16s a few times. F-16s are great for level 1- and 2- circle fights. The F-16 had a better thrust-to-weight ration than my machine and could sustain more g without bleeding his airspeed. My machine had better all-around visibility and better high Angle-of-Attack performance. F-16s usually avoided the vertical fight because they had a harder time seeing at the extreme corners of their view field. The best way to fight the F-16 in my opinion was to merge low to high and put your aircraft behind the pilots headbox at his dead 6. Then to go vertical high looking for the sun. The average F-16 pilot would do a 9 g level turn to try to regain his tally, you could pick him off from the high perch. A good F-16 pilot would recognize this and we would have a second merge high-to-low and the fight would go on through the next couple of iterations, before eventually transitioning to a descending 1-circle fight and trying to force the other guy out front.
The Swedes were the first to use a tilted seat in the Saab Viggen. I'm not sure if the 5th Gen fighters kept the reclined seat or not.
But it's harder to see behind you if you're reclined at 35 degrees. Can be deadly in a visual fight.
Are there any plans to build a multi-stage version to reach even greater altitudes?
Between the Greek bailout fiasco, ethanol fuel fiasco, atomic energy extension then reversal, FDP falling on their swords, Stuttgart 21, etc., I don't think any of the mainstream political parties have any credibility with the German voters left. Maybe the Green party has some, but they'd blow it after a couple of years in power. I think Mrs. Merkel is looking for a new coalition partner, maybe she should advertise on one of those in search of web sites.
It is happy and sounds like a very nice new features. I will add it until I can not wait to faceboox account.
An acquaintance imports and sells garlic and other spices. He tried importing from China a couple of times, but always got burned. Shipments came late or not at all and what did come he was not able to sell. He gave up on China. China is probably ok if you have deep pockets or have family connections in the right place. Otherwise it's buyer beware.
...No-one has ever said "We must kill these people because they believe in a god". Religion is harmful because it can be used in this way. ....
People in North Korea who believe in god may disagree with your statement...but I will agree with your comment that there are no selfless atheists who go around killing people merely because they believe in a god. When a dictator chants, "these people are against God and must die", most people nodding in agreement are thinking about how much they can steal and enrich themselves or how to show sufficient enthusiasm so as not to be targeted for murder themselves. Again, I stand by my original comment that Greed is at the root of all evil. Humans are greedy, and taking religion out of the equation won't change anything.
It's killed more than most illnesses I've heard of. And still does.
Mao, Hitler and Stalin were atheists. The 30 years war, the Crusades, the Spanish inquisition, Al Queda were religious. Your point is? Most mass murder is because of greed, not religion. Religion is used to justify the greed in some cases. In other cases, politics or biology are used as justification. But greed is at the heart of almost all killing and war. An atheistic world would be neither more peaceful nor less peaceful because even atheists are just as greedy as everyone else.
There's no reason Taiwan, South Korea, or China couldn't build good airplanes and undercut Boeing. All of these countries clearly have the engineering and industrial capacity to do so. The main reason they haven't done so, IMHO is due to the high startup costs associated with designing, manufacturing and certifying a passenger aircraft. It would be very difficult to bootstrap a new commercial aircraft business without some form of government support, or some very deep-pocketed investors who are willing to take on a lot of risk. Instead, these countries are gaining more and more work from EADS or Boeing, often as a pre-condition for sales to their national airlines. Through this work, they are developing engineering and production experience that will some day be used to compete directly against Boeing and EADS in the same way that ASUS took over most of Dell's business one bit at a time in TFA. Boeing has outsourced a significant amount of the development and production on the 787. Fortunately, or unfortunately for Boeing, designing and building aircraft components is very difficult and Boeing had to move a lot of the contracts back in house. It will probably take China another decade to build an indigenous commercial aviation industry, but I am confident that they will eventually do so.
From the ad it looks like they are looking at a very narrow definition of intelligence, that is the ability to perform on standardized exams or a PhD in Math, Physics, EE, or theoretical computer science from a "top" U.S. university. Not to be China bashing, but I think China is over emphasizing rote memorization or test taking ability to the exclusion of developing other, more creative forms of intelligence. I think China is in search of the SAT-taking gene, not the smart gene.
Most people just by a PC which comes pre-loaded with Windows. I think 99% of the problem is OEMs installing unlicensed copies of Windows, but charging their customers full retail. Maybe MS should go after the OEMs rather than the end users who probably are out the Windows tax and don't even have a valid license to show for it.
...OS X pirates have already paid the Apple tax, they could care less.
Unless they're running on a Hackintosh.
Boeing has many test pilots on staff, and I'm sure that they will be the ones making the first few flights. Normally a civilian company test pilot makes the first flights of any new aircraft design before it is handed over to government / military test pilots for the follow-on phases of flight test and development. NASA was more of an exception than the rule because they had their astronauts make the first flights of previous space capsules / shuttles. But if memory serves me correctly, the first flights of the X-15 were made by company test pilots before NASA pilots flew it.
Robert Goddard independently invented liquid-fueled rockets before Werner von Braun. The problem for Dr. Goddard was that the U.S. in the 1930s was in the middle of a great depression and wasn't ruled over by a maniacal dictator bent on ruling half the world. Dr. Goddard had to finance his research from private donations. Werner von Braun on the other hand, had the backing of the Nazi government and the German Army. It's no wonder that von Braun built bigger, better rockets than Dr. Goddard.
To say that the Americans were just a bunch of idiots who needed German help to get anything off the ground is just plain wrong. In 1945, the Germans were further along than the Americans. The German scientists who came over to America helped speed up the space program, but they weren't the only ones who made contributions. The same can be said about the Russian space program. The Russians had some German engineers and some V-2 rockets, but the R-7 rocket which launched Sputnik was developed by Russian engineers.
This could be to escargot what Kopi Luwak is to coffee.
no, the food's better.
AC, I was basing my comment on this article Yes, it is smaller than Switzerland, it is 4300 square km. If it were a perfect circle, it would have a radius of 36 km. But it is not a perfect circle. It covers a much larger area, roughly the size of Switzerland much like an imperfect ink blob. It is twice the size of the Saarland, Germany's smallest province. Then you have the areas being monitored with elevated radiation which increases the area even further. Want to move there?
If any country has the engineering capacity to move off of Nuclear for base-load power, it is Germany. Blast Germany all you want to, but I hope they make it work. Maybe America could use a little more vision.
Unless you have lived in Germany, you probably aren't aware just how controversial nuclear power has been, especially since the 1970s. Germany was planning on quitting Nuclear power once the useful life span of their reactors expired, but Chancellor Merkel reversed this decision in what was derisively known as the "Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg" or in English, the "Exit from the Exit" from atomic energy. Then Fukushima happened on the eve of provincial elections in Baden-Wuertenberg. So she reversed course just in time, but her Christian Democratic Union still lost the election to the Green Party for the first time since the end of WW 2.
I don't agree on Merkels U-Turns every time public opinion shifts, but I am in favor of ending Nuclear energy. The contaminated (evacuated) zone around Chernobyl is the size of Switzerland. If something similar happened in Germany, they would loose a major chunk of their country. Just food for thought.
I'll probably go down in flames from the nuclear fanboys, this being /. and all. Sometimes, I think they are more afraid of someone finding an alternative than they are of an actual mishap. Maybe Nuclear power makes sense in a larger country such as the USA, or Russia in an isolated location. But in Germany, a mishap would be catastrophic and affect the livelihood of tens of millions of people. Yes, I do live in Germany.
I guess it's time to break out the overhead projector and photocopy our presentations onto transparent acetate. Or better yet, make photo-slides and be really old-school. Just hope none of them are in backwards or upside down. Really, this is pretty dumb. The problem is the people, not the tool.
This reminds me of the fake will awarding Melvin Dummar about half of the Howard Hughes estate for allegedly picking up a hitch hiking Mr. Hughes in the desert some time in the '60s. Like the Face Book email, this didn't go anywhere.
The underpants gnomes...that's the nuclear waste disposal plan.
This is dangerous. The US isn't the only country with armed UAV technology. If the US is declaring that bombs dropped by UAVs are not acts of war, then the same would apply to other countries, especially China, Iran, Russia, and Israel. So what will the US say if Iran uses a UAV to take care of someone in Iraq they don't like, or of Israel uses UAVs in say Egypt or Syria? How about closer to home, what if Mexico got some UAVs and started bombing gun stores in Texas that were supplying the drug cartels in Mexico?