For more on this, may I suggest any of Tom Brown Jr's books? He's written both manuals (which, as you'd expect are rather dry, but highly informative) and biographical story books, which are just as educational, but also very entertaining.
If you've never heard of him (and most people haven't) Tom Brown Jr, is one of the foremost experts on the lost art of tracking. He first started to learn the art as a young boy from his best friend's grandfather, who was a displaced Apache scout.
Today, he's a world renound naturalist and he also runs the finest tracking school in the world. People come from all over to study under him and his students. Other schools have even copied his techniques. You'd be shocked what you can learn from a track. Or even where you can find a track. Weight, sex, injuries (even old healed ones), mood, how full one's stomach or bladder are, weather one is carrying a load, even where someone is looking, can all be told from a track to a skilled tracker. Fascinating stuff.
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't. They save their criticism for activities that actually have their own intrinsic value.
Good point! Sorry if I took the wrong meaning form your first message. I do of course support SETI, but I guess the only point I disagreed with your post on was that I don't nessisarily see SETI as the *best* use of my space clock cycles, it just happens to be my *favorite* use.
But I see what you mean. It's tempting to say "let's not wast resources on x, when y is a big problem to life an limb" Keep doing this long enough (eliminate pro sports, record companies, video games, and anyother high dollar but unimportant-to-life-itself industry) and pretty soon you're living to be 280, but there's no books,or films, or video games, or art, or sports, or computers, or any of the things that make life so *enjoyable* today!
Sure I did. We can nitpick about the exact wording until the end of time, but he said that medical research is a waste of time compared to SETI. That's absurd. And he implied (whether intentionally or not) that such pursuits are futile. The inferance that "Our race somehow muddled through millions of years before we had cures for any diseases" implies that such cures for diseases aren't important. Again, I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know if that was the idea the post's author *intended* to convey. But never the less, that's what it looked like.
Also, if you had read my post, you'd see that I made (IMHO) a fairly good argument for why medical research is relativly more important than SETI. SETI is a feel good "because we can" type of project. Worthy in my mind, but not nessisarily best for humanity.
Not only that, but who said anything about healing *one* individual? These programs are about finding cures for diseases that strike millions, not just an individual.
Our race somehow muddled through millions of years without finding little green men.
That said, I run SETI@home myself. According to my SETI@home user profile, I've dedicated 1.788 years of CPU time so far and I've been a user for 3.694 years. So I'm certainly not against the program.
But to say that everybody's going to die anyway, so why bother is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. By that logic, we might as well shut down all the hospitals, and repeal all the laws on murder. After all, we're all going to go sometime.
It's kind of interesting. I've been using SETI@home for years now, and as far as I know, it was the only distributed computing application when I first started. For a long time, it certainly seemed the most worthy of my spare cycles. Now, however, there are apps for cancer research and other life and death ailments. It's got me thinking...
Which discovery would have the greatest impact on us? ET or a cure for cancer? Now, nobody supports space exploration, research, etc. more than I do. And I've put my money where my mouth is on this subject. But I've thought about this.
If today, while watching CNN, I saw breaking news, and it was a press conference where NASA or SETI or some other organization announced definitive proof of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, how would it change life here on earth?
Well, most likely, the news media would immediately wet their pants, ask all kinds of stupid questions "is it likely that they're hostile?" "Could they support the terrorists?!?" etc.
But that wouldn't last long, because eventually the scientific community would be able to explain to all but the thickest skulled journalist that that they're 500 light years away, and that the message we received left their planet while Christopher Columbus was still alive. They'd also have to explain to them that it would take just as long for us to *respond* to their message, and that with a 1000 year delay, the very civilization that sent the message might not even be there any more.
So to make a long story short, if SETI finds ET, all it will do is make us *know* that ET is out there. It won't make any difference in our day to day lives what so ever. Basically what we are undertaking is the most expensive quest to find an answer to a trivia question ever. Because that's all we can hope to get out of this: trivia. Knowing that there's ET intelligence is no more useful than knowing that in another million years there will be another Hawaiian Island.
Now what about cancer research (just to name one example). Let's say that distributed computation does lead somehow (I'm nowhere nearly as well versed on how this works as I am SETI@home) to a cure for cancer... Millions of lives will be saved. Millions of people will be spared suffering. Drugs or treatment programs will come to market. This will effect economies. Our understanding of our own biology will be expanded, and that could lead to even *more* quality of life improvements. I'm sure there will be other benefits that I can't even think of.
Being the space buff that I am, finding ET would move me more emotionally. Wow, what a discovery. But it wouldn't actually *do* all that much. I have no illusions that it would. On the other hand, medical research is perhaps one of the most noble things that we can lend our proc cycles to. And it's been tempting me for several months now. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone else.
While I don't think this is the the greatest thing since sliced bread or anything, I keep seeign people bringing this up in this story.
I eat at my desktop machine all the time. It's running without a case even (It's set up on a shelf one level under my keyboard, open-air). Oddly enough I never spill food or drink into my PC's delicate components.
I eat at fast food palces from time to time as well. Oddly enough, I've never had anyone eat over me either. Sure, kids may spill their drinks at other tables, but how exactly does that effect me if they're not getting it anywhere near me?
This is no better or worse than wifi in Starbucks or any other food service place.
I have a Firewire equiped PC and a DV Cam. Yeah, I can do this just as easily. I have the added step of having to launch my favorite capture program before I hit the capture button. Perhaps you can educate me, but I realy, realy don't see what makes a Mac better than a PC for graphics and dv editing. People always go on about how easy it is, but it's easy on the PC too.
But this is all besides the point. PC OR Mac, it's not easier than HTML, and, I'm sure the idiot BLOG programs that I see everywhere make it even simpler. It takes seconds to update with text. I don't have to render a video stream. I don't have to do any editing beyond proofreading, and spellchecking. Upload is near instant. Download is too. And people can read it at their liesure. What advantage does video bring to the table? A bit of cool factor and loss of the ability to search, browse, etc. It's still easier for me to look in the index of a book than it is to look for a specific point in a DVD, even if I've seen it before. Yeah, there's technology that can catalog speach, etc. It's quite imperfect, and again, we're missing the point, even if they were 100%, what do I get out of the massive drive space, processor power, DB space, and everything else involved that makes this superior to text?
Anyone else think that this article sounds like a Jon Katzarticle ? The way it tries to predict the future while sounding like it's got some great insight to the social signifigance of technology without actually understanding said technology? In my mind, he's a bit like the way some people describe Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. I can't stand him, I think he's an idiot, but I miss him! What ever happened to him?
Of course Video Blogs aren't the wave of the future. At least not the near future. It would be high bandwidth instead of low, it wouldn't be easily searchable or easy to catalog. It's an order of magnitude harder to do with no tangible benefits except for a little bit of "cool factor".
First off, I'm an American. And I'm rather proud to be fortunate enough to have been born in a nation with traditions of liberty and freedom. So I'm probably biased here.
Secondly, you're correct. The majority of foreign IRA money and logistical support comes from Americans. However, I live in New Jersey, and as I write this, I'm sitting in New York (home of the "New Yorkian shitbags"). I don't personally know anyone that supports the IRA. My mother's best friend is Irish. She's appalled by what goes on over there. Many Americans may feel one way or another in this conflict, but I don't know a single person who would condone the actions of the IRA. And that's pre-9/11. Now with this nations hypersensitivity to anything associated with the T-word, the IRA isn't likely to get any more sympathy than before. The USA doesn't cause Irish Terrorism. A very few people who happen to be largely American are sympathetic enough to donate money. Irish Terrorists cause Irish Terrorism.
Secondly, where do you get off saying the U.S. created Israel? You're a relatively smart guy. I know this because you seem to post to slashdot like 500 times a day. Most of what you say here is well thought out and even if I don't agree, I can see your point. But Israel was created by the UN in 1948 by Resolution 181. Of course, the U.S. has been a world leader and a leader within the UN, since it's creation, but we weren't there alone. We prop up Israel, and I don't agree with the actions of the current administration over there (I consider Sharon to be as bad for Israel as Arafat is for the Palestinians), but I am not against the state of Israel existing (though there needs to be a Palestinian state as well).
About Venezuela, I'm not as up to speed enough on the situation there to speak intelligently about it, but from what I do know, yes, we're guilty as charged. In this case, I say "we" because it wasn't just a few rouge Americans sending cash to outlaws or terrorists. It was a CIA backed operation. But you know what? There's an investigation under way in the State Department, and other areas of government, and the media is exposing it. I don't support this. It's one of many reasons I don't support the idiot we have in the White House.
Finally, the worst in your list is the Gulf War. This happens to be a subject I know a lot about. Something I spend a lot of time reading about and researching. Iraq attacked Kuwait, a sovereign nation. Not only did it attack and declare war with Kuwait, but it occupied it. Iraqi troops looted, raped, and pillaged. Then they started lining up forces on the Saudi Arabian border. The U.S. was pushing for the Liberation of Kuwait, yes. But once the Iraqi forces started amassing on the Saudi border, we didn't have to pressure or persuade anyone. They requested our support. The Gulf War started before the U.S. even joined it. It started when Iraq attacked a neighbor. We (the coalition, not just the U.S.) liberated Kuwait. War *is* hell. But the Gulf War was the single most justifiable war since World War II. In fact, the only thing I'd say was done wrong (on a large scale) was the lack of support for the Iraqi opposition forces in the aftermath of the War, and the fact that the Iraqis thought we were letting them off easy when they signed the armistice (they feared that our demands would be much, much stricter than they were, and were prepared to meet those demands. When we made our actual demands to end the war, they gladly signed).
Fuck the USA? No. I'm tempted to say "Fuck you", but I won't. It's not my intention to be offensive, but to retort your accusations where I feel they're unjustified. We Americans realize that we're not perfect. We screw up, but never in the history of civilization has a power so great wielded that power so sparingly and so justly. Not the Spanish, nor the Soviets, certainly not the French, nor even the British Empire.
I'll take your criticism where it's justified. In fact, this has urged me to learn more about the situation in Venezuela. But people like you make the U.S. sound like it's China, or Nazi Germany!
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but comments like this tend to make me mad.
Now, ancient peoples found that clothes got cleaner when they washed them at a certain point in the river. Do you know why?
No.
Because, human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. Bodies burnt. Water seeped into wood ashes to create lye. This is lye, The crucial ingredient. Once it mixed, with the melted fat of the bodies, a thick white soapy discharge crept into the river. Can I see your hand please.
What is this?
This is a chemical burn. It will hurt more than you have ever been burned, and you will have a scar.
What are you doing?
Stay with the pain, don't shut this out.
No, No. Oh, God!
Look at your hand. The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. Like the first monkeys shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
About your.sig, I didn't know that and it *is* interesting. I'm pretty sure you're trying to make a point by pointing that out, but I can't figure out what it is. Care to lay out your point explicitly for me? Sorry if I'm being dense, but I just don't get what (if anything) that's supposed to mean.
Okay, now I'll bite... What kind of SEAL was he then? I don't consider SEALs "spooks" either, nor am I paranoid that The Government is out to get us. But I'm curious, I checked Google, and apparently someone ran their mouth on Fox (*gasp* Fox, of all places!?!?) about how Ventura was just a UDT member. It turned up this link to this site dedicated to debunking SEAL imposters. Or were you refering to something else? Some people simply aren't aware that he was a SEAL, and think he's just an actor, and "wrestler" turned Statesman.
I count 902 Formula 1 drivers, according to this page. Contrast this with space flight. According to this site (Click on "Statistics". Sadly, I couldn't find information this current / complete on NASA's own site), only 434 humans have flown in space as of December 7, 2002.
Yes, I would call that a hand full. Especially as I'm not certain as to how complete that F-1 list is. Then again, I wouldn't balk at calling 902 people out of the history of the entire world a hand full either.
While I think the mythological tie in with the name Daedalus would be cool for a space vehicle, it doesn't fit in with the naming scheme NASA has used in the past. In the late 80s, NASA announced that it would be school children that would name the new orbiter to replace Challenger, at the time only called OV-105. My school participated. Though we weren't a "winning" school in the competition, we did submit the winning name, Endeavour. (As did many schools. I think that's why NASA chose it, it was the most popular choice.) This seemingly pointless trip down memory lane aside, when my class was doing research to come up with a good name, we looked at the origins of the names of the other orbiters.
They were all named after ships of research or exploration. All these ships pushed frontiers. The Columbia Rediviva searched for new trade routes. HMS Challenger was rigged for important oceanographic research. HMS Discovery was on a mission to find the Northwest Passage, on Captain James Cook's third voyage. Atlantis contributed "interdisciplinary research in marine biology, marine geology and physical oceanography" with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (the ships still serves today in Argentine naval research as the El Austral). And HMS Endeavour was on a really cool exploration / astronomy / botany / everything in one research trip under Captain James Cook into the Southern hemisphere.
One more thing all these ships had in common: None of them were war ships. Even HMS Challenger, which was technically a corvette had her guns removed for research gear and cabin space for researchers. This was the reason my school, at least didn't choose the name Phoenix, The name itself would have been appropriate in the wake of the Challenger disaster, but all we could find bearing that name in the history books were war ships. It didn't feel right submitting a name like that.
The only references to ships named Daedalus, that I could find are a U.S. Navy "Landing Craft Repair Ship" USS Daedalus (ARL-35), The first HMS Daedalus, which was involved in Captain George Vancouver's (who served under Captain Cook on his Austral voyage) search for a Northwest Passage (it resupplied him and was supposed to bring him more detailed orders, but it turned out not to carry the orders he was awaiting). The second, HMS Daedalus as part of a larger convoy touched bottom on a shoal and sank four days out from Madras. And the third HMS Daedalus' claim to fame was sighting a sea serpent off of the Cape of Good Hope.
Like I said, good name (I've always liked that legend), but I guess what the point I'm trying to make (at length) is that it just doesn't fit with how NASA has traditionally named it's shuttles.
No, but the parent was talking about retrofitting it so it would be a spacecraft. Most people don't realize this, but the Challenger was origionaly built as a test vehicle as well. Much like Enterprise. It was later retrofitted to become a full fledged orbiter. From the very site you cited:
"Rockwell's original $2.6 billion contract had authorized the building of a pair of static-test articles (MPTA-098 and STA-099 and two initial flight-test vehicles (OV-101 and OV-102. A decision in 1978 not to modify Enterprise from her Approach and Landing Test (ALT) configuration would have left Columbia as the only operational orbiter vehicle so on 1/29/79 NASA awarded Rockwell a supplemental contract to convert Challenger (STA-099) from a test vehicle into a space-rated Orbiter (OV-099)."
Also, although the Smithsonian now owns the Enterprise, it's not (yet) a museum piece. It's been sitting, in a hanger at Washington's Dulles International Airport, since... well, since the Smithsonian took delivery of the Enterprise in 1985.
There is good news though. The Smithsonian does have plans to display the Enterprise in it's new facility at the Dulles annex, when it opens (planned for December 2003).
So although converting the Enterprise probably won't happen, that doesn't mean it's technically impossible. It was done with Challenger.
Listen, Betamax was a better format than VHS, and I knew this. But did I ever go out and buy a Betamax player? No. Why not? Because Blockbuster doesn't carry Beta. Because my friends, my mom, and everyone I know don't have Beta.
Now, I use Linux for my webservers, and it works fine there. Just like I've (okay, my production people have, not me) used betamax for video production in the past. If you need professional grade, and you're not trying to acomodate the end user, these tools are great.
But I *like* being able to go to CompUSA and actually be able to buy a game. Not go to CompUSA, look at a huge shelf of software and hunt for the 5 titles that have a *nix version, out of the 150 titles they have in stock. Hell, the situation is better on the Mac, and it's still not to the point where I'd own a Mac, even though I know that OSX is supperior to windows in many ways.
I honestly think that trying to "win the hearts and minds of joe sixpack" over to *nix is a BAD thing. With windows, we have a standard. I could argue for how great the wierd little wall outlet plugs they have in Europe are, but I'd be a moron to install them in my home if I lived in the USA.
The Atari Jaguar was a much better game system than PS One, but it had crap for software, and not much of it at that. So it died. Should we have pushed for everyone to go buy a Jaguar instead of a Playstation because it was better? Never mind the fact that the games people wanted to play were on playstation. No, this is about good vs evil! We have to figure out a way to prop up Atari!
It's the same thing. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but once something achievs a certain critical mass of market penetration, it becomes a standard. And trying to change these standards to incompatible ones hurts.
Now, the audio market has made a shift several times. Records -> 8 Tracks -> Tapes -> CDs Video has done this once VHS -> DVD. But with each of these, there was compelling demand for bringing something new to the table. And in each instance, the old format was looking very long in the tooth.
But someone please explain to me why we need to topple windows (Which in my opinion is more mature for the end user than any OS except for OSX) rather than developing it further? Or in this case, being closed source, alowing (and encouraging) Microsoft to take it further? I won't let this become an open source vs closed sourse debate. It's irrelivant. I've never looked at the code of 99% of the open source software I run. And I know that the fact that I've looked at source code at all EVER puts me in a very small minoriity. MY MOM DOES NOT NEED THE SOURCE CODE TO HER SOUND CARD DRIVERS!!! If *you* like to tinker... if *you* like to hack the code, more power to you! But why does this mean that we need to overthrow Microsoft's monopoly, and install one that only a minority want?
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes. Are they abusing that? Yes. Should they be punished? Yes.
But itself Windows is not bad. It's a good OS. It is not evil. It is a product. I hate a lot of things Sony does, I hate their stupid useless standards that they try to impose, and I hate how they ran MiniDisc into the ground rather than letting it compete as an open standard against CDs. But I love Trinitrons. And I feel that Sony makes better TVs and Mointors than any others I can afford.
I make a distinction between companies and their products. I buy Sony TVs, Camcorders and DVD players, but I refrain on Playstations (I'm a Nintendo fanboy) and anything involving memory stick. And I write letters to Sony telling them why my money goes to Olympus, rather than getting a shiny new Sony Digital Camera with the Carl Zeiss lense, or why I decided not to opt for the Aiwa stereo and went Pioneer instead, or to Nintendo and Panasonic, urging them to bring the Gamecube/DVD player hybrid goodness that is the Q to the U.S., or to Microsoft urging them to bring features like the ability to keep one user's apps running in the background while another user is logged in and using the computer, which I'm told was just introduced in XP.
Companies listen to users, they want to please their customers, so that they can make more money off of them. I have a brand new copy of XP sitting on my desk waiting to be installed, because I'm hyped about some of the new features it brings to the table over Win2K. Microsoft is pleasing me on the OS front. But I don't use their browser. I use Mozilla. People have every right to freak out when something isn't the way they expect. These hybrid cars from Honda and Toyota are great because they work like cars, not golf carts. You don't have to plug them in. They fuel up at the same fuel station as everyone else. People are used to that. Just like they are used to MS word, and being able to port documents between home and work.
You can name thousand and one reasons why Windows sucks. But I don't see any advantage in throwing it out and improving on *nix to get it up to where Windows is now, rather than improving Windows to make it better.
Yes, stealth tech came from Skunkworks. Yes, Skunkworks and Skunkworks derived programs did lots of testing at "Area 51". No it's not all fiction. But it's not like aliens came down to Area 51 and gave us stealth. The truth is much more mundane. (But still an excelent read.) Basicly it came down to a little computer program called ECHO I (ECHO 1?).
The gyro story is interesting though. I do vaugley recall something along those lines. But I don't have enough info, to know what happened. Maybe something *is* up there.
As for the consparacy theorist site you linked to, so far all the claims I've seen for extrordinary aircraft later proove to be nothing more than new tech in prooving grounds. How many F-117 prototype flights do you think were mistaken for spaceships by nut-job conspiracy theorists in the 1980s?
"As for the "no fighter plane that *I* know if in the world could possibly turn like THAT!" people, I give you the Russian MiG 35. It doesn't look too radical, but the way it maneauvers is unreal. It uses vectored thrust like the U.S. F-22, but the russian designers have taken the vectored thrust a couple steps further than the F-22's. The diffrence is one of design theory. Western design emphesises standoff weponry and stealth. BVR kills (beyond visual range), where you shoot and kill the other guy before he even knows you're there. Russian designers are still designing for the dogfight. Close in furballs where speed is life. The guy with the most power and the tightest turning radius will usualy win (and in many cases, the guy with the most altitude has a tremendous advantage. Remember: You can always trade altitude for airspeed and vice versa). This kind of combat hasn't evolved a hell of a lot since the days of Baron von Richthofen. Anyway, I saw a demo of the MiG 35 on Discovery Wings. Amazing. The pilot was quite skilled, and a master of his aircraft. He could coax it to do things, that I would have told you were impossible to consistantly do on purpose and in control ina modern fighter aircraft. The man actually put the plane into reverse controled flight. He flew backwards for a short distance in controled flight. The Russian SU-37 also has thrust vectoring, but it's unclear to me which of the two represents a more advanced form of this tech. At any rate, an aircraft like these (or a more advanced generation of the same idea) could have moved like these "impossible patterns".
Couple of questions though, why use electrical as an interface for hydraulic control surfaces? This doesn't give you anything except computer aided stability. The F15 had this ( I believe ) , but it isn't considered a fbw.
There are several reasons for this. In no particular order: 1) You don't have to "fight" the airplane. Feedback is limited, if present at all. What you have in the cockpit fights you no more than the joystick on Pac-Man. This means that if you're in a spin, or another situation where the stick might be pegged in one direction in a conventional control plane, you don't have that problem in an "electric jet". 2) Simplicity. It's easier to have a small, closed hydraulic system to run an aleron, flap, or rudder with a couple wites running to and from it, than it is to run hydraulic lines to and from it. Wires are more flexable, can be more tempature tolerant, don't leak, don't explode, don't do a lot of things. 3) Weight. Wire is lighter than running full hydraulic lines all over the aircraft. 4) Power. While electric motors may be fine for small aircraft and model airplanes, they don't have the brute force of their hydrolic counterparts needed for moving large surface area control surfaces during supersonic flight. 5) You nailed it on the head when you added computer aided stability. I don't believe the F-15 has this, but I may be mistaken. I have read that planes like the F-117 are aerodynamicly due to the odd shape, and require many adjustments per second to maintain stable flight. 6) This sort of ties in with #5. In a "normal" plane, you move the stick left and a couple of things happen. The left aleron moves up and the right aleron moves down. This (assuming you're in normal flight, not on the ground, or in a spin) will make your aircraft roll to the left. Hit the Left rudder and the rudder turns left, yawing the aircraft to the left. Everything is mechanicly linked. An "electic jet" works slightly diffrently. You move the stick left, it sends a signal to the computer that says "I want to roll left" The computer will then figure out which control surfaces to move to roll the aircraft left based on your input. 99 times out of 100, this will move the alerons just like the conventional plane. But it has the added advantage of knowing if perhaps a little rudder might help, or if one aleron should move farther than the other, or if it shouldn't turn as fast as you'd like because that'll put you into a spin. Sorry if I was confusing before, I just now realized that in my last post, I neglected to mention the computer in the loop. A very important part that I left out.
Also, why would fbw require more maintenance then hydrolic?
It's not more maintenance than hydraulic. I think I was unclear in my previous post. The problem is that when hydraulic fails in a car, you still have mechanical. When "wire" fails in *this* car, you have nothing. The concequences of system failure are worse. As for in aircraft, they get away with it because they build in a lot of redundancy, on top of the fact, that every airplane in the sky is maintained better than 99.999% of the cars on the road. They have to be by the FAA's Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs). Nobody I know replaces their alternator every 40,000 miles weather it needs it or not. That's the kind of rules you often find in the aviation world. Engines have to be overhauled every so many hours, regardless of if they're running perfectly or not, structual components are inspected regularly, and if needed replaced, etc. You just don't find that kind of maintenance diligence in the automotive world.
I'm not saying that drive by wire is bad. In fact, my favorite car is already drive by wire. But there needs to be redundancy (preferably of a diffrent type from the primary system, which in this case is electrical) for things like steering and braking. It's not drive by wire that I have issues with it's just the lack of redundancies in the prototype. I'm sure a final version will have redundancies, but I just wanted to point out the diffrences between this and a final product should be.
It's true that the "A" and "B" planes are not fighters. But you said:
"Every US fighter jet has been all electronically controlled (aka, fly-by-wire) for 20+ years. No major problem, you just have to design with the problem in mind."
You didn't specify every US fighter deployed in the last 20 years. But if that's the way you want to go, the last new fighter in the US inventory was the F/A 18 Hornet. It was deployed in 1978. If you want to split hairs and consider each variant of each plane (F/A-18A F/A-18B, F/A-18C, etc), then I must point out that the F-15E Strike Eagle was deployed in 1988. It does not use fly by wire controls. The F-14 is still deployed in massive numbers. It's not being phased out yet, it's roll is actually expanding. The F-14 served admirably in Bosnia as a strike fighter. It doesn't use fly by wire either.
The A-10, while not a fighter, is a great example for the discussion of the merits of fly by wire vs. mechanical / hydraulic controls. It's one of the most recent additions to the US inventory, and yet, it's one of the most primitive! That's because it was designed to fly where it *would* take fire, not where it *might* take fire. Simply put, they decided to use the most simple, robust, and redundant systems on it that they could.
Now, I do think that fly by wire can be more robust in certain situations. But it is still susceptible to total electrical failure. Mechanical with hydraulic boost is inherently redundant, and quite fail safe. Electric can fail at multiple points (power source, or anywhere along the wire, then most fly by wire is just an interface for hydraulic control surfaces anyway, so you never eliminate the possibility of hydraulic failure).
So why isn't the F-16's fly by wire a problem? Why isn't it a problem in the upcoming F-22? Why does it work in the F-117? Because of maintenance. You sound like you're not around aviation very much. If you were, you'd probably be aware that most of the components on an aircraft *have to be* overhauled or replaced on a regular schedule (usually determined by engine hours). Most of these scheduled maintenance items aren't "if the part is bad", they're every 500 hours, or every 100 hours, weather it needs it or not. Military standards, are stricter than civil counterparts. Engines have to be overhauled after every x number of hours. Avionics get replaced periodically, hydraulic parts get replaced, even airframe components are replaced after a certain number of hours of service. Most people I know can't even remember to change their oil on a regular basis. They certainly don't do a "preflight" inspection of their car every time they drive and they're not strict on mechanical or electrical maintenance either. Inspections are limited to whatever is mandated by law in their state. Maintenance is limited to fixing something when it breaks, or once it starts to make a strange noise, or give other signs that it's death is imminent.
Yes, the odds are slim that the drive by wire system will fail, and yes, the mean time to failure will probably be very high. But, once a car like this goes into production, some of them *WILL* fail. Maybe none will fail in the first year, or 5 years, or 10 years. But some day, they will fail. And when it happens, what do you do when you are going 50 MPH and you don't have steering OR brakes? In a conventional design, you can still brake and steer manually, although not as well. There needs to be some serious redundancy, with something that screams "fix me NOW!" when one of the redundant systems goes.
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*ping*
Idea! We need a MULE based online auction site!
For more on this, may I suggest any of Tom Brown Jr's books? He's written both manuals (which, as you'd expect are rather dry, but highly informative) and biographical story books, which are just as educational, but also very entertaining.
If you've never heard of him (and most people haven't) Tom Brown Jr, is one of the foremost experts on the lost art of tracking. He first started to learn the art as a young boy from his best friend's grandfather, who was a displaced Apache scout.
Today, he's a world renound naturalist and he also runs the finest tracking school in the world. People come from all over to study under him and his students. Other schools have even copied his techniques. You'd be shocked what you can learn from a track. Or even where you can find a track. Weight, sex, injuries (even old healed ones), mood, how full one's stomach or bladder are, weather one is carrying a load, even where someone is looking, can all be told from a track to a skilled tracker. Fascinating stuff.
Can you hear me now?
Good!
Why don't people say: "Those guys on TV in that NASCAR race are just wasting resources we could be using in the war on cancer!" For some reason they don't. They save their criticism for activities that actually have their own intrinsic value.
,or films, or video games, or art, or sports, or computers, or any of the things that make life so *enjoyable* today!
Good point! Sorry if I took the wrong meaning form your first message. I do of course support SETI, but I guess the only point I disagreed with your post on was that I don't nessisarily see SETI as the *best* use of my space clock cycles, it just happens to be my *favorite* use.
But I see what you mean. It's tempting to say "let's not wast resources on x, when y is a big problem to life an limb" Keep doing this long enough (eliminate pro sports, record companies, video games, and anyother high dollar but unimportant-to-life-itself industry) and pretty soon you're living to be 280, but there's no books
Sure I did. We can nitpick about the exact wording until the end of time, but he said that medical research is a waste of time compared to SETI. That's absurd. And he implied (whether intentionally or not) that such pursuits are futile. The inferance that "Our race somehow muddled through millions of years before we had cures for any diseases" implies that such cures for diseases aren't important. Again, I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know if that was the idea the post's author *intended* to convey. But never the less, that's what it looked like.
Also, if you had read my post, you'd see that I made (IMHO) a fairly good argument for why medical research is relativly more important than SETI. SETI is a feel good "because we can" type of project. Worthy in my mind, but not nessisarily best for humanity.
Not only that, but who said anything about healing *one* individual? These programs are about finding cures for diseases that strike millions, not just an individual.
Using your logic:
Our race somehow muddled through millions of years without finding little green men.
That said, I run SETI@home myself. According to my SETI@home user profile, I've dedicated 1.788 years of CPU time so far and I've been a user for 3.694 years. So I'm certainly not against the program.
But to say that everybody's going to die anyway, so why bother is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. By that logic, we might as well shut down all the hospitals, and repeal all the laws on murder. After all, we're all going to go sometime.
It's kind of interesting. I've been using SETI@home for years now, and as far as I know, it was the only distributed computing application when I first started. For a long time, it certainly seemed the most worthy of my spare cycles. Now, however, there are apps for cancer research and other life and death ailments. It's got me thinking...
Which discovery would have the greatest impact on us? ET or a cure for cancer? Now, nobody supports space exploration, research, etc. more than I do. And I've put my money where my mouth is on this subject. But I've thought about this.
If today, while watching CNN, I saw breaking news, and it was a press conference where NASA or SETI or some other organization announced definitive proof of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, how would it change life here on earth?
Well, most likely, the news media would immediately wet their pants, ask all kinds of stupid questions "is it likely that they're hostile?" "Could they support the terrorists?!?" etc.
But that wouldn't last long, because eventually the scientific community would be able to explain to all but the thickest skulled journalist that that they're 500 light years away, and that the message we received left their planet while Christopher Columbus was still alive. They'd also have to explain to them that it would take just as long for us to *respond* to their message, and that with a 1000 year delay, the very civilization that sent the message might not even be there any more.
So to make a long story short, if SETI finds ET, all it will do is make us *know* that ET is out there. It won't make any difference in our day to day lives what so ever. Basically what we are undertaking is the most expensive quest to find an answer to a trivia question ever. Because that's all we can hope to get out of this: trivia. Knowing that there's ET intelligence is no more useful than knowing that in another million years there will be another Hawaiian Island.
Now what about cancer research (just to name one example). Let's say that distributed computation does lead somehow (I'm nowhere nearly as well versed on how this works as I am SETI@home) to a cure for cancer... Millions of lives will be saved. Millions of people will be spared suffering. Drugs or treatment programs will come to market. This will effect economies. Our understanding of our own biology will be expanded, and that could lead to even *more* quality of life improvements. I'm sure there will be other benefits that I can't even think of.
Being the space buff that I am, finding ET would move me more emotionally. Wow, what a discovery. But it wouldn't actually *do* all that much. I have no illusions that it would. On the other hand, medical research is perhaps one of the most noble things that we can lend our proc cycles to. And it's been tempting me for several months now. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone else.
While I don't think this is the the greatest thing since sliced bread or anything, I keep seeign people bringing this up in this story.
I eat at my desktop machine all the time. It's running without a case even (It's set up on a shelf one level under my keyboard, open-air). Oddly enough I never spill food or drink into my PC's delicate components.
I eat at fast food palces from time to time as well. Oddly enough, I've never had anyone eat over me either. Sure, kids may spill their drinks at other tables, but how exactly does that effect me if they're not getting it anywhere near me?
This is no better or worse than wifi in Starbucks or any other food service place.
Speaking of Hooters and aircraft...
Once again, people deciede to miss the point.
I have a Firewire equiped PC and a DV Cam. Yeah, I can do this just as easily. I have the added step of having to launch my favorite capture program before I hit the capture button. Perhaps you can educate me, but I realy, realy don't see what makes a Mac better than a PC for graphics and dv editing. People always go on about how easy it is, but it's easy on the PC too.
But this is all besides the point. PC OR Mac, it's not easier than HTML, and, I'm sure the idiot BLOG programs that I see everywhere make it even simpler. It takes seconds to update with text. I don't have to render a video stream. I don't have to do any editing beyond proofreading, and spellchecking. Upload is near instant. Download is too. And people can read it at their liesure. What advantage does video bring to the table? A bit of cool factor and loss of the ability to search, browse, etc. It's still easier for me to look in the index of a book than it is to look for a specific point in a DVD, even if I've seen it before. Yeah, there's technology that can catalog speach, etc. It's quite imperfect, and again, we're missing the point, even if they were 100%, what do I get out of the massive drive space, processor power, DB space, and everything else involved that makes this superior to text?
This is like an online Rube Goldberg Machine. I just don't get the point.
Anyone else think that this article sounds like a Jon Katz article ? The way it tries to predict the future while sounding like it's got some great insight to the social signifigance of technology without actually understanding said technology? In my mind, he's a bit like the way some people describe Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. I can't stand him, I think he's an idiot, but I miss him! What ever happened to him?
Of course Video Blogs aren't the wave of the future. At least not the near future. It would be high bandwidth instead of low, it wouldn't be easily searchable or easy to catalog. It's an order of magnitude harder to do with no tangible benefits except for a little bit of "cool factor".
First off, I'm an American. And I'm rather proud to be fortunate enough to have been born in a nation with traditions of liberty and freedom. So I'm probably biased here.
Secondly, you're correct. The majority of foreign IRA money and logistical support comes from Americans. However, I live in New Jersey, and as I write this, I'm sitting in New York (home of the "New Yorkian shitbags"). I don't personally know anyone that supports the IRA. My mother's best friend is Irish. She's appalled by what goes on over there. Many Americans may feel one way or another in this conflict, but I don't know a single person who would condone the actions of the IRA. And that's pre-9/11. Now with this nations hypersensitivity to anything associated with the T-word, the IRA isn't likely to get any more sympathy than before. The USA doesn't cause Irish Terrorism. A very few people who happen to be largely American are sympathetic enough to donate money. Irish Terrorists cause Irish Terrorism.
Secondly, where do you get off saying the U.S. created Israel? You're a relatively smart guy. I know this because you seem to post to slashdot like 500 times a day. Most of what you say here is well thought out and even if I don't agree, I can see your point. But Israel was created by the UN in 1948 by Resolution 181. Of course, the U.S. has been a world leader and a leader within the UN, since it's creation, but we weren't there alone. We prop up Israel, and I don't agree with the actions of the current administration over there (I consider Sharon to be as bad for Israel as Arafat is for the Palestinians), but I am not against the state of Israel existing (though there needs to be a Palestinian state as well).
About Venezuela, I'm not as up to speed enough on the situation there to speak intelligently about it, but from what I do know, yes, we're guilty as charged. In this case, I say "we" because it wasn't just a few rouge Americans sending cash to outlaws or terrorists. It was a CIA backed operation. But you know what? There's an investigation under way in the State Department, and other areas of government, and the media is exposing it. I don't support this. It's one of many reasons I don't support the idiot we have in the White House.
Finally, the worst in your list is the Gulf War. This happens to be a subject I know a lot about. Something I spend a lot of time reading about and researching. Iraq attacked Kuwait, a sovereign nation. Not only did it attack and declare war with Kuwait, but it occupied it. Iraqi troops looted, raped, and pillaged. Then they started lining up forces on the Saudi Arabian border. The U.S. was pushing for the Liberation of Kuwait, yes. But once the Iraqi forces started amassing on the Saudi border, we didn't have to pressure or persuade anyone. They requested our support. The Gulf War started before the U.S. even joined it. It started when Iraq attacked a neighbor. We (the coalition, not just the U.S.) liberated Kuwait. War *is* hell. But the Gulf War was the single most justifiable war since World War II. In fact, the only thing I'd say was done wrong (on a large scale) was the lack of support for the Iraqi opposition forces in the aftermath of the War, and the fact that the Iraqis thought we were letting them off easy when they signed the armistice (they feared that our demands would be much, much stricter than they were, and were prepared to meet those demands. When we made our actual demands to end the war, they gladly signed).
Fuck the USA? No. I'm tempted to say "Fuck you", but I won't. It's not my intention to be offensive, but to retort your accusations where I feel they're unjustified. We Americans realize that we're not perfect. We screw up, but never in the history of civilization has a power so great wielded that power so sparingly and so justly. Not the Spanish, nor the Soviets, certainly not the French, nor even the British Empire.
I'll take your criticism where it's justified. In fact, this has urged me to learn more about the situation in Venezuela. But people like you make the U.S. sound like it's China, or Nazi Germany!
Sorry for the off-topic rant, but comments like this tend to make me mad.
Now, ancient peoples found that clothes got cleaner when they washed them at a certain point in the river. Do you know why?
No.
Because, human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. Bodies burnt. Water seeped into wood ashes to create lye. This is lye, The crucial ingredient. Once it mixed, with the melted fat of the bodies, a thick white soapy discharge crept into the river. Can I see your hand please.
What is this?
This is a chemical burn. It will hurt more than you have ever been burned, and you will have a scar.
What are you doing?
Stay with the pain, don't shut this out.
No, No. Oh, God!
Look at your hand. The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. Like the first monkeys shot into space. Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
Off topic, I know, but I'm curious...
.sig, I didn't know that and it *is* interesting. I'm pretty sure you're trying to make a point by pointing that out, but I can't figure out what it is. Care to lay out your point explicitly for me? Sorry if I'm being dense, but I just don't get what (if anything) that's supposed to mean.
About your
Okay, now I'll bite... What kind of SEAL was he then? I don't consider SEALs "spooks" either, nor am I paranoid that The Government is out to get us. But I'm curious, I checked Google, and apparently someone ran their mouth on Fox (*gasp* Fox, of all places!?!?) about how Ventura was just a UDT member. It turned up this link to this site dedicated to debunking SEAL imposters. Or were you refering to something else? Some people simply aren't aware that he was a SEAL, and think he's just an actor, and "wrestler" turned Statesman.
I count 902 Formula 1 drivers, according to this page.
Contrast this with space flight. According to this site (Click on "Statistics". Sadly, I couldn't find information this current / complete on NASA's own site), only 434 humans have flown in space as of December 7, 2002.
Yes, I would call that a hand full. Especially as I'm not certain as to how complete that F-1 list is. Then again, I wouldn't balk at calling 902 people out of the history of the entire world a hand full either.
While I think the mythological tie in with the name Daedalus would be cool for a space vehicle, it doesn't fit in with the naming scheme NASA has used in the past. In the late 80s, NASA announced that it would be school children that would name the new orbiter to replace Challenger, at the time only called OV-105. My school participated. Though we weren't a "winning" school in the competition, we did submit the winning name, Endeavour. (As did many schools. I think that's why NASA chose it, it was the most popular choice.) This seemingly pointless trip down memory lane aside, when my class was doing research to come up with a good name, we looked at the origins of the names of the other orbiters.
They were all named after ships of research or exploration. All these ships pushed frontiers. The Columbia Rediviva searched for new trade routes. HMS Challenger was rigged for important oceanographic research. HMS Discovery was on a mission to find the Northwest Passage, on Captain James Cook's third voyage. Atlantis contributed "interdisciplinary research in marine biology, marine geology and physical oceanography" with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (the ships still serves today in Argentine naval research as the El Austral). And HMS Endeavour was on a really cool exploration / astronomy / botany / everything in one research trip under Captain James Cook into the Southern hemisphere.
One more thing all these ships had in common: None of them were war ships. Even HMS Challenger, which was technically a corvette had her guns removed for research gear and cabin space for researchers. This was the reason my school, at least didn't choose the name Phoenix, The name itself would have been appropriate in the wake of the Challenger disaster, but all we could find bearing that name in the history books were war ships. It didn't feel right submitting a name like that.
The only references to ships named Daedalus, that I could find are a U.S. Navy "Landing Craft Repair Ship" USS Daedalus (ARL-35), The first HMS Daedalus, which was involved in Captain George Vancouver's (who served under Captain Cook on his Austral voyage) search for a Northwest Passage (it resupplied him and was supposed to bring him more detailed orders, but it turned out not to carry the orders he was awaiting). The second, HMS Daedalus as part of a larger convoy touched bottom on a shoal and sank four days out from Madras. And the third HMS Daedalus' claim to fame was sighting a sea serpent off of the Cape of Good Hope.
Like I said, good name (I've always liked that legend), but I guess what the point I'm trying to make (at length) is that it just doesn't fit with how NASA has traditionally named it's shuttles.
This may be -1 Off Topic, but if it's not also +1 Interesting, I don't know what is!
Best. Post. Ever.
No, but the parent was talking about retrofitting it so it would be a spacecraft. Most people don't realize this, but the Challenger was origionaly built as a test vehicle as well. Much like Enterprise. It was later retrofitted to become a full fledged orbiter. From the very site you cited:
"Rockwell's original $2.6 billion contract had authorized the building of a pair of static-test articles (MPTA-098 and STA-099 and two initial flight-test vehicles (OV-101 and OV-102. A decision in 1978 not to modify Enterprise from her Approach and Landing Test (ALT) configuration would have left Columbia as the only operational orbiter vehicle so on 1/29/79 NASA awarded Rockwell a supplemental contract to convert Challenger (STA-099) from a test vehicle into a space-rated Orbiter (OV-099)."
Also, although the Smithsonian now owns the Enterprise, it's not (yet) a museum piece. It's been sitting, in a hanger at Washington's Dulles International Airport, since... well, since the Smithsonian took delivery of the Enterprise in 1985.
There is good news though. The Smithsonian does have plans to display the Enterprise in it's new facility at the Dulles annex, when it opens (planned for December 2003).
So although converting the Enterprise probably won't happen, that doesn't mean it's technically impossible. It was done with Challenger.
Listen, Betamax was a better format than VHS, and I knew this. But did I ever go out and buy a Betamax player? No. Why not? Because Blockbuster doesn't carry Beta. Because my friends, my mom, and everyone I know don't have Beta.
Now, I use Linux for my webservers, and it works fine there. Just like I've (okay, my production people have, not me) used betamax for video production in the past. If you need professional grade, and you're not trying to acomodate the end user, these tools are great.
But I *like* being able to go to CompUSA and actually be able to buy a game. Not go to CompUSA, look at a huge shelf of software and hunt for the 5 titles that have a *nix version, out of the 150 titles they have in stock. Hell, the situation is better on the Mac, and it's still not to the point where I'd own a Mac, even though I know that OSX is supperior to windows in many ways.
I honestly think that trying to "win the hearts and minds of joe sixpack" over to *nix is a BAD thing. With windows, we have a standard. I could argue for how great the wierd little wall outlet plugs they have in Europe are, but I'd be a moron to install them in my home if I lived in the USA.
The Atari Jaguar was a much better game system than PS One, but it had crap for software, and not much of it at that. So it died. Should we have pushed for everyone to go buy a Jaguar instead of a Playstation because it was better? Never mind the fact that the games people wanted to play were on playstation. No, this is about good vs evil! We have to figure out a way to prop up Atari!
It's the same thing. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but once something achievs a certain critical mass of market penetration, it becomes a standard. And trying to change these standards to incompatible ones hurts.
Now, the audio market has made a shift several times. Records -> 8 Tracks -> Tapes -> CDs
Video has done this once VHS -> DVD. But with each of these, there was compelling demand for bringing something new to the table. And in each instance, the old format was looking very long in the tooth.
But someone please explain to me why we need to topple windows (Which in my opinion is more mature for the end user than any OS except for OSX) rather than developing it further? Or in this case, being closed source, alowing (and encouraging) Microsoft to take it further? I won't let this become an open source vs closed sourse debate. It's irrelivant. I've never looked at the code of 99% of the open source software I run. And I know that the fact that I've looked at source code at all EVER puts me in a very small minoriity. MY MOM DOES NOT NEED THE SOURCE CODE TO HER SOUND CARD DRIVERS!!! If *you* like to tinker... if *you* like to hack the code, more power to you! But why does this mean that we need to overthrow Microsoft's monopoly, and install one that only a minority want?
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes. Are they abusing that? Yes. Should they be punished? Yes.
But itself Windows is not bad. It's a good OS. It is not evil. It is a product. I hate a lot of things Sony does, I hate their stupid useless standards that they try to impose, and I hate how they ran MiniDisc into the ground rather than letting it compete as an open standard against CDs. But I love Trinitrons. And I feel that Sony makes better TVs and Mointors than any others I can afford.
I make a distinction between companies and their products. I buy Sony TVs, Camcorders and DVD players, but I refrain on Playstations (I'm a Nintendo fanboy) and anything involving memory stick. And I write letters to Sony telling them why my money goes to Olympus, rather than getting a shiny new Sony Digital Camera with the Carl Zeiss lense, or why I decided not to opt for the Aiwa stereo and went Pioneer instead, or to Nintendo and Panasonic, urging them to bring the Gamecube/DVD player hybrid goodness that is the Q to the U.S., or to Microsoft urging them to bring features like the ability to keep one user's apps running in the background while another user is logged in and using the computer, which I'm told was just introduced in XP.
Companies listen to users, they want to please their customers, so that they can make more money off of them. I have a brand new copy of XP sitting on my desk waiting to be installed, because I'm hyped about some of the new features it brings to the table over Win2K. Microsoft is pleasing me on the OS front. But I don't use their browser. I use Mozilla. People have every right to freak out when something isn't the way they expect. These hybrid cars from Honda and Toyota are great because they work like cars, not golf carts. You don't have to plug them in. They fuel up at the same fuel station as everyone else. People are used to that. Just like they are used to MS word, and being able to port documents between home and work.
You can name thousand and one reasons why Windows sucks. But I don't see any advantage in throwing it out and improving on *nix to get it up to where Windows is now, rather than improving Windows to make it better.
Yes, stealth tech came from Skunkworks.
Yes, Skunkworks and Skunkworks derived programs did lots of testing at "Area 51".
No it's not all fiction.
But it's not like aliens came down to Area 51 and gave us stealth. The truth is much more mundane. (But still an excelent read.) Basicly it came down to a little computer program called ECHO I (ECHO 1?).
The gyro story is interesting though. I do vaugley recall something along those lines. But I don't have enough info, to know what happened. Maybe something *is* up there.
As for the consparacy theorist site you linked to, so far all the claims I've seen for extrordinary aircraft later proove to be nothing more than new tech in prooving grounds. How many F-117 prototype flights do you think were mistaken for spaceships by nut-job conspiracy theorists in the 1980s?
"As for the "no fighter plane that *I* know if in the world could possibly turn like THAT!" people, I give you the Russian MiG 35. It doesn't look too radical, but the way it maneauvers is unreal. It uses vectored thrust like the U.S. F-22, but the russian designers have taken the vectored thrust a couple steps further than the F-22's. The diffrence is one of design theory. Western design emphesises standoff weponry and stealth. BVR kills (beyond visual range), where you shoot and kill the other guy before he even knows you're there. Russian designers are still designing for the dogfight. Close in furballs where speed is life. The guy with the most power and the tightest turning radius will usualy win (and in many cases, the guy with the most altitude has a tremendous advantage. Remember: You can always trade altitude for airspeed and vice versa). This kind of combat hasn't evolved a hell of a lot since the days of Baron von Richthofen. Anyway, I saw a demo of the MiG 35 on Discovery Wings. Amazing. The pilot was quite skilled, and a master of his aircraft. He could coax it to do things, that I would have told you were impossible to consistantly do on purpose and in control ina modern fighter aircraft. The man actually put the plane into reverse controled flight. He flew backwards for a short distance in controled flight. The Russian SU-37 also has thrust vectoring, but it's unclear to me which of the two represents a more advanced form of this tech. At any rate, an aircraft like these (or a more advanced generation of the same idea) could have moved like these "impossible patterns".
By the way, if you'd like more info on the F-16's systems, here's a good source, that explains everything well.
Couple of questions though, why use electrical as an interface for hydraulic control surfaces? This doesn't give you anything except computer aided stability. The F15 had this ( I believe ) , but it isn't considered a fbw.
There are several reasons for this. In no particular order:
1) You don't have to "fight" the airplane. Feedback is limited, if present at all. What you have in the cockpit fights you no more than the joystick on Pac-Man. This means that if you're in a spin, or another situation where the stick might be pegged in one direction in a conventional control plane, you don't have that problem in an "electric jet".
2) Simplicity. It's easier to have a small, closed hydraulic system to run an aleron, flap, or rudder with a couple wites running to and from it, than it is to run hydraulic lines to and from it. Wires are more flexable, can be more tempature tolerant, don't leak, don't explode, don't do a lot of things.
3) Weight. Wire is lighter than running full hydraulic lines all over the aircraft.
4) Power. While electric motors may be fine for small aircraft and model airplanes, they don't have the brute force of their hydrolic counterparts needed for moving large surface area control surfaces during supersonic flight.
5) You nailed it on the head when you added computer aided stability. I don't believe the F-15 has this, but I may be mistaken. I have read that planes like the F-117 are aerodynamicly due to the odd shape, and require many adjustments per second to maintain stable flight.
6) This sort of ties in with #5. In a "normal" plane, you move the stick left and a couple of things happen. The left aleron moves up and the right aleron moves down. This (assuming you're in normal flight, not on the ground, or in a spin) will make your aircraft roll to the left. Hit the Left rudder and the rudder turns left, yawing the aircraft to the left. Everything is mechanicly linked. An "electic jet" works slightly diffrently. You move the stick left, it sends a signal to the computer that says "I want to roll left" The computer will then figure out which control surfaces to move to roll the aircraft left based on your input. 99 times out of 100, this will move the alerons just like the conventional plane. But it has the added advantage of knowing if perhaps a little rudder might help, or if one aleron should move farther than the other, or if it shouldn't turn as fast as you'd like because that'll put you into a spin. Sorry if I was confusing before, I just now realized that in my last post, I neglected to mention the computer in the loop. A very important part that I left out.
Also, why would fbw require more maintenance then hydrolic?
It's not more maintenance than hydraulic. I think I was unclear in my previous post. The problem is that when hydraulic fails in a car, you still have mechanical. When "wire" fails in *this* car, you have nothing. The concequences of system failure are worse. As for in aircraft, they get away with it because they build in a lot of redundancy, on top of the fact, that every airplane in the sky is maintained better than 99.999% of the cars on the road. They have to be by the FAA's Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs). Nobody I know replaces their alternator every 40,000 miles weather it needs it or not. That's the kind of rules you often find in the aviation world. Engines have to be overhauled every so many hours, regardless of if they're running perfectly or not, structual components are inspected regularly, and if needed replaced, etc. You just don't find that kind of maintenance diligence in the automotive world.
I'm not saying that drive by wire is bad. In fact, my favorite car is already drive by wire. But there needs to be redundancy (preferably of a diffrent type from the primary system, which in this case is electrical) for things like steering and braking. It's not drive by wire that I have issues with it's just the lack of redundancies in the prototype. I'm sure a final version will have redundancies, but I just wanted to point out the diffrences between this and a final product should be.
It's true that the "A" and "B" planes are not fighters. But you said:
"Every US fighter jet has been all electronically controlled (aka, fly-by-wire) for 20+ years. No major problem, you just have to design with the problem in mind."
You didn't specify every US fighter deployed in the last 20 years. But if that's the way you want to go, the last new fighter in the US inventory was the F/A 18 Hornet. It was deployed in 1978. If you want to split hairs and consider each variant of each plane (F/A-18A F/A-18B, F/A-18C, etc), then I must point out that the F-15E Strike Eagle was deployed in 1988. It does not use fly by wire controls. The F-14 is still deployed in massive numbers. It's not being phased out yet, it's roll is actually expanding. The F-14 served admirably in Bosnia as a strike fighter. It doesn't use fly by wire either.
The A-10, while not a fighter, is a great example for the discussion of the merits of fly by wire vs. mechanical / hydraulic controls. It's one of the most recent additions to the US inventory, and yet, it's one of the most primitive! That's because it was designed to fly where it *would* take fire, not where it *might* take fire. Simply put, they decided to use the most simple, robust, and redundant systems on it that they could.
Now, I do think that fly by wire can be more robust in certain situations. But it is still susceptible to total electrical failure. Mechanical with hydraulic boost is inherently redundant, and quite fail safe. Electric can fail at multiple points (power source, or anywhere along the wire, then most fly by wire is just an interface for hydraulic control surfaces anyway, so you never eliminate the possibility of hydraulic failure).
So why isn't the F-16's fly by wire a problem? Why isn't it a problem in the upcoming F-22? Why does it work in the F-117? Because of maintenance. You sound like you're not around aviation very much. If you were, you'd probably be aware that most of the components on an aircraft *have to be* overhauled or replaced on a regular schedule (usually determined by engine hours). Most of these scheduled maintenance items aren't "if the part is bad", they're every 500 hours, or every 100 hours, weather it needs it or not. Military standards, are stricter than civil counterparts. Engines have to be overhauled after every x number of hours. Avionics get replaced periodically, hydraulic parts get replaced, even airframe components are replaced after a certain number of hours of service. Most people I know can't even remember to change their oil on a regular basis. They certainly don't do a "preflight" inspection of their car every time they drive and they're not strict on mechanical or electrical maintenance either. Inspections are limited to whatever is mandated by law in their state. Maintenance is limited to fixing something when it breaks, or once it starts to make a strange noise, or give other signs that it's death is imminent.
Yes, the odds are slim that the drive by wire system will fail, and yes, the mean time to failure will probably be very high. But, once a car like this goes into production, some of them *WILL* fail. Maybe none will fail in the first year, or 5 years, or 10 years. But some day, they will fail. And when it happens, what do you do when you are going 50 MPH and you don't have steering OR brakes? In a conventional design, you can still brake and steer manually, although not as well. There needs to be some serious redundancy, with something that screams "fix me NOW!" when one of the redundant systems goes.
I wasn't aware of this, so thanks for the parent post for pointing it out, but here is the car I think the parent is refering to.