Diesels haven't been loud, smelly, polluting (at least more than petrol cars) nor hard to start in cold weather here since the 1980s. Modern diesel cars here are barely distinguishable from petrol ones, except in that they use a lot less fuel.
An electric car isn't your solution, a bicycle (probably) is. 1.5 miles is an easy ride at a slow pace. If you're worried about getting sweaty, then you can get an electrically assisted bike, not hugely expensive (especially compared to an electric car). You save a huge amount of wear and tear on your car, driving that short of a distance is hard on your vehicle. But you still have the car for when the weather is bad or when you want to see your sister.
The problem with IE9 and IE10 - well, IE10 is not even released yet, and it's far far behind Firefox or Chrome in HTML5 support - which is becoming more important as time goes on.
You don't have to imagine: when a soon-to-be-fired employee of FedEx tried to take over a FedEx DC-10 by attacking the crew (his plan was to crash the aircraft), the seriously injured flight crew flew semi-aerobatic manuevers to prevent the hijacker from taking over the aircraft. Although all three crewmembers were very seriously injured in the attack, they managed to subdue the would-be hijacker.
Large companies usually suffer from the sydrome of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Corporate schizophrenia is the norm, not the exception.
As a general aviation pilot, who has had occasion to do mountain flying, please for the love of dog don't do it unless it has "sense and avoid" mechanisms you're positive work well. You can't rely on GA aircraft having transponders, either, in remote areas often they don't. It's all about see-and-avoid. So your drone needs to see-and-avoid too.
I've almost had a mid-air collision with an RC aircraft flying where it shouldn't have been. Small RC size aircraft are hard to see from a full size aircraft, even a slow one like mine (115 mph on a good day). In the case of the RC aircraft, I think the aircraft was deliberately flown at us (we were a formation of 2 aircraft, so perfectly visible - it actually flew between us going the opposite direction).
If you want to check out stuff from the air, then learn to fly and do it as pilot in command of an actual aircraft. Yes, it's expensive, but a PPL will probably cost the same to do as building a drone with the capabilities you need, and it opens up a whole lot of other fun, too.
I also fly RC helicopters and fixed wing, so it's not like I'm some grumpy GA pilot who hates RC.
I had to chortle at the "easiest and safest way" too. But gyroplanes aren't *that* bad, certainly no worse than a helicopter with a semi-rigid 2 blade design (think the Bell 206 Jetranger, or the Bell Huey, or the Bell 222 (aka Airwolf) or the Robinson R22/R44) and lack some failure modes that helicopters have. But ignorance can easily kill you in a gyroplane, too. Just like teetering head design helicopters, low-G manuevers can result in a very bad day. I'd say a typical 3 axis microlight is easier to fly and more foolproof than a gyroplane.
The advantage with the gyroplane for this trike is that the rotors are a lot easier to stow than the much larger wings of a fixed wing aircraft.
Motorcycles don't have bumpers. Given that the ground form is a trike, it likely qualifies at least in Europe not as a car, and therefore doesn't need to comply with car regulations.
This is probably because there's no such thing as "high British", unless by that you mean the neutral BBC accent. But no one in the street speaks like that.
I'm not a US citizen, never been a US permanent resident, and don't even live in the US, but I have an SSN. I worked on an L-1 visa for a while, and I had to get an SSN to be able to report taxes. All you need for an SSN is some valid form of ID like a passport, IIRC. (It might have changed now, but at the time that's all I needed).
When we consider German GDP per capita versus US GDP per capita, we must remember that the average German works a 35 hour week and has 6 weeks paid vacation, vs the average American who works a 40 hour week and has only 2 weeks paid vacation. Germans nominally have a 1610 hour work year, vs a 2000 hour work year for the aveage American. 37935/1610 = avg. $23.56 per hour, while the US is only slightly higher per hour, $24.07. I suspect the Germans have a far higher quality of life for their money.
However, in the UK, eyes are no longer tested after you do your driving test. So in reality there are many drivers on the roads with substandard vision who have not been tested in decades (I got rear-ended on my bike by one on a straight road, in good visibility, while wearing bright clothing. It was an elderly gentleman who had no corrective lenses - he just ploughed into the back of me). At least when I was in Texas you got an eye test for driving every 4 years, not a "squint at this numberplate" eye test, but one using an optician's machine.
I've never heard of anyone being denied a promotion - or anyone even having a medical exam as a consequence of promotion - before. Where did you hear that one?
Rotax 2 strokes (used in some ultralights) are liable to quit because of their 2 stroke nature. 2 strokes generally are a bit more tempremental and in need of much more maintenance and care than 4 strokes (even though the nature of that maintenance is generally simple).
Rotax 4 strokes though perform well and are very robust. I've quite happily flown over the north Irish Sea, well out of gliding distance of land, in a 4 stroke (turbocharged Rotax 914) Rotax engine. Performance and economy of this aircraft (tri-gear Europa) was excellent. Many hundreds of thousands of incident free hours have been logged behind Rotax 4 stroke engines.
I used a very similar design for paper planes myself, except at least on the A4 sheet of paper type, I always folded the pointy tip of the nose back about a centimeter. It improved the balance of the aircraft, made it much more stable, and it would fly much further (and it also made the nose more resilient on landing). This design has a bit of an aft centre-of-gravity if you don't fold the nose back a bit.
The other thing I used to do is to make a little vertical tail in the middle. I don't think that made any actual difference though.
Certainly at the A4 sheet scale you can make a paper plane like this that from a hand launch goes a long way and wins contests:-)
Well aside from the strategic petroleum reserve, US (or even the entirety of north American) cannot physically, with the best will in the world, produce oil at the rate that the US consumes oil - by a factor of five or so. You'd still be stuck with a horrific shortage if the entire rest of the world embargoed the US (fortunately, very unlikely)
Strowger (step by step electromechanical) telephone exchanges were still in use in Britain right into the early 1990s. Our local exchange was one right up to about 1990, and it always seemed to like adding line noise to any call you made using a modem.
A now retired work colleague used to be a telecom engineer, and he worked on these machines when they were still in large exchanges (right into the late 1980s!). There is nothing electronic about these telephone switches, they are literally physical switches. The machine that makes the tones (dialing tone, busy tone, number unobtainable, exchange busy, ringing tone) is not an electronic oscillator, it is a huge machine driven by a DC motor with a bunch of switches to make the cadence of the various tones (I guess the actual tone is made by a contact disc and wipers) - it's called a Ringer 2A.
The stuff that connects calls is an intricate network of physical switches. When you lift the handset, a stepper motor driven uniselector finds you a free first selector. This too is an electromechanical machine, with a bunch of relays and a bidirectional switch which can make one of 100 contacts. When you dial, the wiper steps up to the level you dial (so dial a 3, and it steps up to level 3), and then it steps horizontally to find the next free stage in the exchange, and so on, until you dial the last number. The last selector steps up to the number you dial, then steps horizontally to the last digit of the number you dial, and tries to connect you to the other end.
As you can imagine, a large telephone exchange is an incredibly noisy place because there are switches and relays constantly in motion. My colleague described working late one night in one of these exchanges. It was quiet, with just the odd call progressing (he said you could hear a single call stepping through the exchange - you could physically hear how far the dialing had progressed by where the sound of switch and relay motion was coming from). Then all of a sudden, the noise started to build up as more and more people were making calls, until the place was a deafening racket. Wondering what the hell was going on, he phoned headquarters and found out the reason - a soap opera had ended in some sort of controversy and everyone was gossiping about it.
These electromechanical machines seemed *alive*. If you look on youtube, there's quite a few videos of them in action (various designs from various countries). There used to be a working rack of Strowger gear at the London Science Museum, probably for lack of someone to maintain it it's unfortunately now just a static exhibit (or at least was, a couple of years ago). But when it was working it was fun to get all 8 phones connected to each other, then replace the handsets simulataneously. The sound of all the selectors returning home at once was sweet enough to make a brave man cry.
Also it's quite easy to see why the phone used to be so hideously expensive. It wasn't just because of the then GPO monopoly, but because it took 30 engineers to keep a busy 10,000 line Strowger exchange working. Today, it takes 1 engineer to keep six 10,000 line digital exchanges working.
You have to remember that Nokia is now a run-of-the-mill Windows Phone manufacturer (don't forget HTC et al. make them too). Except a quick google search revealed from October 2011 to Jan 2012, Windows Phone market share fell 1% in that quarter alone, while iOS and Android gained 1.4 and 2.3 respectively...
La Niña (and El Niño) affect us all the way across in Europe. It'll sure as hell affect you in the Great Lakes region. It causes the jetstream's path to change, and this affects the track of low pressure systems over most of the northern hemisphere.
Funny you should talk about HP9000s - we've got a bunch of them here and have for several years, and they are trouble-free (and we use them a lot). I was going to cite them as something really good quality from HP.
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Diesels haven't been loud, smelly, polluting (at least more than petrol cars) nor hard to start in cold weather here since the 1980s. Modern diesel cars here are barely distinguishable from petrol ones, except in that they use a lot less fuel.
An electric car isn't your solution, a bicycle (probably) is. 1.5 miles is an easy ride at a slow pace. If you're worried about getting sweaty, then you can get an electrically assisted bike, not hugely expensive (especially compared to an electric car). You save a huge amount of wear and tear on your car, driving that short of a distance is hard on your vehicle. But you still have the car for when the weather is bad or when you want to see your sister.
The problem with IE9 and IE10 - well, IE10 is not even released yet, and it's far far behind Firefox or Chrome in HTML5 support - which is becoming more important as time goes on.
It has happened, at least with a missile:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Baghdad_DHL_attempted_shootdown_incident
Flying a small plane into an airliner would be difficult, ATC would see it on RADAR and vector the airliners away.
You don't have to imagine: when a soon-to-be-fired employee of FedEx tried to take over a FedEx DC-10 by attacking the crew (his plan was to crash the aircraft), the seriously injured flight crew flew semi-aerobatic manuevers to prevent the hijacker from taking over the aircraft. Although all three crewmembers were very seriously injured in the attack, they managed to subdue the would-be hijacker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Express_Flight_705
Large companies usually suffer from the sydrome of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Corporate schizophrenia is the norm, not the exception.
NetBEUI (NetBIOS) isn't even a Microsoft protocol, it was developed in 1983 by Sytek. So they didn't even innovate there.
As a general aviation pilot, who has had occasion to do mountain flying, please for the love of dog don't do it unless it has "sense and avoid" mechanisms you're positive work well. You can't rely on GA aircraft having transponders, either, in remote areas often they don't. It's all about see-and-avoid. So your drone needs to see-and-avoid too.
I've almost had a mid-air collision with an RC aircraft flying where it shouldn't have been. Small RC size aircraft are hard to see from a full size aircraft, even a slow one like mine (115 mph on a good day). In the case of the RC aircraft, I think the aircraft was deliberately flown at us (we were a formation of 2 aircraft, so perfectly visible - it actually flew between us going the opposite direction).
If you want to check out stuff from the air, then learn to fly and do it as pilot in command of an actual aircraft. Yes, it's expensive, but a PPL will probably cost the same to do as building a drone with the capabilities you need, and it opens up a whole lot of other fun, too.
I also fly RC helicopters and fixed wing, so it's not like I'm some grumpy GA pilot who hates RC.
I had to chortle at the "easiest and safest way" too. But gyroplanes aren't *that* bad, certainly no worse than a helicopter with a semi-rigid 2 blade design (think the Bell 206 Jetranger, or the Bell Huey, or the Bell 222 (aka Airwolf) or the Robinson R22/R44) and lack some failure modes that helicopters have. But ignorance can easily kill you in a gyroplane, too. Just like teetering head design helicopters, low-G manuevers can result in a very bad day. I'd say a typical 3 axis microlight is easier to fly and more foolproof than a gyroplane.
The advantage with the gyroplane for this trike is that the rotors are a lot easier to stow than the much larger wings of a fixed wing aircraft.
Motorcycles don't have bumpers. Given that the ground form is a trike, it likely qualifies at least in Europe not as a car, and therefore doesn't need to comply with car regulations.
I thought David Cutler left DEC to join MS, I didn't think he was fired... where did you find this information?
This is probably because there's no such thing as "high British", unless by that you mean the neutral BBC accent. But no one in the street speaks like that.
You don't need citizenship to have an SSN.
I'm not a US citizen, never been a US permanent resident, and don't even live in the US, but I have an SSN. I worked on an L-1 visa for a while, and I had to get an SSN to be able to report taxes. All you need for an SSN is some valid form of ID like a passport, IIRC. (It might have changed now, but at the time that's all I needed).
When we consider German GDP per capita versus US GDP per capita, we must remember that the average German works a 35 hour week and has 6 weeks paid vacation, vs the average American who works a 40 hour week and has only 2 weeks paid vacation. Germans nominally have a 1610 hour work year, vs a 2000 hour work year for the aveage American. 37935/1610 = avg. $23.56 per hour, while the US is only slightly higher per hour, $24.07. I suspect the Germans have a far higher quality of life for their money.
However, in the UK, eyes are no longer tested after you do your driving test. So in reality there are many drivers on the roads with substandard vision who have not been tested in decades (I got rear-ended on my bike by one on a straight road, in good visibility, while wearing bright clothing. It was an elderly gentleman who had no corrective lenses - he just ploughed into the back of me). At least when I was in Texas you got an eye test for driving every 4 years, not a "squint at this numberplate" eye test, but one using an optician's machine.
I've never heard of anyone being denied a promotion - or anyone even having a medical exam as a consequence of promotion - before. Where did you hear that one?
Roughly similar to Chapter 11 in the US, which even if you're not from the US is fairly widely know.
Rotax 2 strokes (used in some ultralights) are liable to quit because of their 2 stroke nature. 2 strokes generally are a bit more tempremental and in need of much more maintenance and care than 4 strokes (even though the nature of that maintenance is generally simple).
Rotax 4 strokes though perform well and are very robust. I've quite happily flown over the north Irish Sea, well out of gliding distance of land, in a 4 stroke (turbocharged Rotax 914) Rotax engine. Performance and economy of this aircraft (tri-gear Europa) was excellent. Many hundreds of thousands of incident free hours have been logged behind Rotax 4 stroke engines.
I used a very similar design for paper planes myself, except at least on the A4 sheet of paper type, I always folded the pointy tip of the nose back about a centimeter. It improved the balance of the aircraft, made it much more stable, and it would fly much further (and it also made the nose more resilient on landing). This design has a bit of an aft centre-of-gravity if you don't fold the nose back a bit.
The other thing I used to do is to make a little vertical tail in the middle. I don't think that made any actual difference though.
Certainly at the A4 sheet scale you can make a paper plane like this that from a hand launch goes a long way and wins contests :-)
Prices didn't fall because demand was ALSO at an all-time high - it's called supply *and* demand. When demand collapsed, so did the price.
Well aside from the strategic petroleum reserve, US (or even the entirety of north American) cannot physically, with the best will in the world, produce oil at the rate that the US consumes oil - by a factor of five or so. You'd still be stuck with a horrific shortage if the entire rest of the world embargoed the US (fortunately, very unlikely)
Strowger (step by step electromechanical) telephone exchanges were still in use in Britain right into the early 1990s. Our local exchange was one right up to about 1990, and it always seemed to like adding line noise to any call you made using a modem.
A now retired work colleague used to be a telecom engineer, and he worked on these machines when they were still in large exchanges (right into the late 1980s!). There is nothing electronic about these telephone switches, they are literally physical switches. The machine that makes the tones (dialing tone, busy tone, number unobtainable, exchange busy, ringing tone) is not an electronic oscillator, it is a huge machine driven by a DC motor with a bunch of switches to make the cadence of the various tones (I guess the actual tone is made by a contact disc and wipers) - it's called a Ringer 2A.
The stuff that connects calls is an intricate network of physical switches. When you lift the handset, a stepper motor driven uniselector finds you a free first selector. This too is an electromechanical machine, with a bunch of relays and a bidirectional switch which can make one of 100 contacts. When you dial, the wiper steps up to the level you dial (so dial a 3, and it steps up to level 3), and then it steps horizontally to find the next free stage in the exchange, and so on, until you dial the last number. The last selector steps up to the number you dial, then steps horizontally to the last digit of the number you dial, and tries to connect you to the other end.
As you can imagine, a large telephone exchange is an incredibly noisy place because there are switches and relays constantly in motion. My colleague described working late one night in one of these exchanges. It was quiet, with just the odd call progressing (he said you could hear a single call stepping through the exchange - you could physically hear how far the dialing had progressed by where the sound of switch and relay motion was coming from). Then all of a sudden, the noise started to build up as more and more people were making calls, until the place was a deafening racket. Wondering what the hell was going on, he phoned headquarters and found out the reason - a soap opera had ended in some sort of controversy and everyone was gossiping about it.
These electromechanical machines seemed *alive*. If you look on youtube, there's quite a few videos of them in action (various designs from various countries). There used to be a working rack of Strowger gear at the London Science Museum, probably for lack of someone to maintain it it's unfortunately now just a static exhibit (or at least was, a couple of years ago). But when it was working it was fun to get all 8 phones connected to each other, then replace the handsets simulataneously. The sound of all the selectors returning home at once was sweet enough to make a brave man cry.
Also it's quite easy to see why the phone used to be so hideously expensive. It wasn't just because of the then GPO monopoly, but because it took 30 engineers to keep a busy 10,000 line Strowger exchange working. Today, it takes 1 engineer to keep six 10,000 line digital exchanges working.
You have to remember that Nokia is now a run-of-the-mill Windows Phone manufacturer (don't forget HTC et al. make them too). Except a quick google search revealed from October 2011 to Jan 2012, Windows Phone market share fell 1% in that quarter alone, while iOS and Android gained 1.4 and 2.3 respectively...
La Niña (and El Niño) affect us all the way across in Europe. It'll sure as hell affect you in the Great Lakes region. It causes the jetstream's path to change, and this affects the track of low pressure systems over most of the northern hemisphere.
Funny you should talk about HP9000s - we've got a bunch of them here and have for several years, and they are trouble-free (and we use them a lot). I was going to cite them as something really good quality from HP.