Actually, you have it backwards. The aviation industry has already done the research for fuel economy on it's jets, and it's ongoing every day to make it better in tiny incremental steps. One other thing the industry takes note of, an aircraft built to go 'all the way around' serves no purpose. The ideal long range airplane can go from anywhere, to anywhere, non stop. That means halfway around the world. If you take a close look, there's a bunch of companies that build aircraft that can do exactly that, Illushyin, Airbus and Boeing come to mind. Of course, when they have enough tanks on board for it go to halfway around, they stop putting in fuel tanks, and start putting in floor space that can accept either cargo pallettes, or passenger configuration interiors, stuff that makes the airplane actually useful in the real world.
This aircraft uses a very new (from 2004) commercially built turbofan, developed specifically to address the needs of the aviation industry in regards to fuel economy. Its mounted on an airframe built of composites that are also in very common use throughout the industry. it has a lot of similarity to it's older sister (voyageur), which already did this trip, but, with a crew of 2, and piston power. There's nothing new and bleeding edge about the aerodymaics involved.
This is a cool project, because it's done by a 'little guy'. OTOH, if Boeing took a brand new 747 with a pallette interior, strapped on some 'special' engines from pratt&witney that were specifically tuned for fuel economy on a single flight, then did a little paperwork to authorize that single airframe to do a single flight loaded to 125% of it's normal allowable takeoff weight, they would be in the game. Roll on a load of pallettes that are fuel tanks, add some pumps, put on a 1 man crew, and off they go, chasing a flight plan that keeps them at maximum fuel enconomy riding 100 knot tailwinds all the way.
All of the large airliner manufacturers are quite capable of accomplishing this task. The reason they dont, is very simple, they remember the lessons of the blue ribbon. In the early days of steamships, a lot of money/effort was spent procuring the blue ribbon for a given line, and many lives were lost in the process (can you say titanic). Eventually, the shipping companies made a truce on the subject, and stopped chasing the 'fastest atlantic crossing' because they finally realized, the good publicity of holding the ribbon was far outweighed by the bad publicity of the accidents happening trying to secure that ribbon. Chasing the blue ribbon decimated the steamship industry financially. In the airliner industry, records are not generally chased after, because the negative publicity from one bad incident can decimate the entire industry, whereas the good publicity from the achievement, are mostly ho-hum.
What these guys are doing, is incredibly cool, they are trying to break/make records. They are not doing any r&d, and nothing about this airplane is going to advance the aerospace industry in any way except 'the public eye'. What they have done, is build on all the advances by the engineers in the trenches, and produce a package that includes enough advancements, it is capable of doing the job. It gets a lot of 'cool factor' in the press, because its the little guys doing it, so it heads to the front page. If Boeing did this with a tricked out 747 purposely modified to do the job, it would be 'ho hum'. Illushyin is probably quite capable of doing a one off from an existing airframe, and get the same result, but that too would be just ho-hum, not headline material anywhere except industry journals.
It's interesting to note, this crossing is not without it's tribulations, now there is a question of fuel available. Since this is a one off from a 'nobody' in the airline industry (and yes, i do qualify virgin as a nobody in the industry), there wont be any real harm from a failure. If this were an attempt by Boeing, and it failed, that would swing airliner sales toward Airbus, simply due to public perception. The folks at scaled have everything to gain, and nothing to lose from this kind of publicity stunt. The folks at Boeing and Airbus, have everything to lose, nothing to gain, and that's why they dont do it.
Actually, the starship scared raytheon away because it started suffering from lamination issues, and they determined it was only a matter of time till there was an inflight breakup due to those issues. It was preferred to not continue to carry that product liability, especially in the USA. They felt it was far more cost effective to replace them all with a brand new KingAir, rather than keep the risk of facing a jury in a product liability suit, for a product that they knew was starting to show problems, even before it was actually into wide use.
Like it or not, the aviation industry in america is driven by the product liability lawyers. Until you guys learn to use the precious 'right to bear arms' and start shooting lawyers, it's gonna stay that way.
While they may be pretty good at designing / building one off special purpose aircraft, the track record in commercial aircraft is quite radically different. Starship was basically a Rutan design, done for beechcraft, and it even started into production. It was _such_ a good airplane, beech chose to buy them all back, and destroy them, rather than continue forward carrying the product liability risk of having that aircraft in commercial service. I wouldn't exactly call that a resounding vote of confidence from a former MAJOR customer.
This project is a great example. It's been waiting _how long_ for a weather window that will actually produce conditions where they expect the airplane to survive the trip ? It's a special purpose, one off, designed for one mission, flown in optimum conditions. After it's flown that mission, it's really no good for anything but wasting space in a hangar somewhere, because it's to flimsy to park outside exposed to the elements.
The formal definition of a 'round the world' is that it must pass over 2 points that are diametrically opposed on the globe, cross every line of longitude, with a landing location at or 'past' the point of departure, defined as either landing at or overflying the point of departure after completing the other requirements. That doesn't mean around the equator. Your 'run around the north pole' will qualify, if, it also includes a pass over the south pole, and returns you to the point of departure, landing there, or somewhere past it after passing over it.
I dont see why you folks are surprised, this is a very good fit. DOHS wants to gather up and categorize the data on every person in the USA. They have hired an expert in the field. It'll probably take a few months to get this new program rolling, but it's a pretty good bet, if you visit a.gov website in the near future, you are going to see the pop up asking you to accept installation of an activeX. That is, until they get microsoft to ship out the update telling all windows the world over that.gov websites are trusted, and dont bother pestering computer owners with warnings about such things on.gov sites.
Mr freeman probably thinks he's arrived in heaven. he gets to keep on doing what he's best at, the spyware business, but this time it's for the government, so no more hassles from all those pathetic anti-spyware whiners.
but I believe that washing machines do not qualify as COMMUNICATIONS equipment
A television is also not 'communications equipment'. The real issue most seem to miss here, FCC has jurasidiction over TRANSMISSIONS, not recievers. The last time I checked, a television is a passive reciever, and sends no signals out to the transmitters, therefore, it's not a device that falls under FCC jurasdiction.
Having an internet presence is critical to running a successful business venture.
This reminds me of all the drivel we heard in 99/2000 about how the internet was going to put all traditional businesses out of the game. Funny thing, it's only a few years later, and guess what, I still buy my groceries in a store, one that does not have a website. I still buy gasoline at a small station up the street, also, no website. And even more interesting, my business has survived fine, no website.
For most real viable businesses, an online presence is an afterthought, simply because it's trendy today. Maybe someday they'll fix it up so i can squeeze a tomatoe online before I buy it online, but, till then, gonna continue to buy them from the store. Can say the same for almost all of the necessities in life. The only time an online presence is important, if you are selling a discretionary product, and you need to reach a wider market than your phyical location has for a catchment area. Then again, i wouldn't call that a 'viable' business to begin with, but, good management and leveraging information systems, it can be made viable.
The FCC rules on transmitters are quite clear. Certifying in the unlicensed wifi area is also pretty clear, and the certification is for the combination of transmitter+antenna. The notebook vendor is doing the final integration, and is therefor bound by law, to follow the regulatory requirements.
It's easy to bypass this problem, dont buy a notebook with intergrated wireless. If you buy one with an integrated antenna, it's going to have these restrictions. If you dont like that, dont bitch at the vendor for following regulation in manufacturing/distributing the unit, go bitch to the FCC, it's thier ruleset.
The reality is, commercial quantities of H2 come from natural gas, so, it's still gonna be coming from a fossil fuel source. On the bright side, ng is very difficult to ship overseas in any kind of quantity, economically. It travels much better in pipelines. I think it'll be GREAT to see the us become dependant on ng instead of crude, they import most of that from the folks north of them, instead of the folks across the pond. And when you say something about useing electricity to create hydrogen, dont forget, that electrical plant will run on either coal, or ng.
Overall, this is exciting news though. the thought of the american economy being hostage to canadian natural gas instead of saudi oil, just makes my wallet go pitter patter.
The problem is, this is/. so they dont want to see photographic evidence. Besides, its pictures of gangs of kids running the streets, most of them have guns, some are getting shot. Sounds a lot like downtown LA doesn't it ?
I especially like the series of the american soldiers holding a gun to the head of what appears to be about a 6 year old. Lets put up a yellow ribbon for the 'hero'....
There's one thing about this event that has me wondering. Apparently it was of very short duration. did anybody know it was coming? How did they manage to have equipment pointed in just the right direction, at just the right time, to actually record the event? If it was an 'accidental' thing, ie they were pointed that way for other reasons, wouldn't that raise some questions about frequency of such events?
Just doing some straw hat quick numbers here, if we assume it requires modern equipment to monitor/record this event, and we define everything built in the last 50 years to be 'modern', then we further (overly conservative) assume all that equipment is always observing, then it's likely we can possibly be watching about 1% of the sky at any given time. If this event was an annual thing in the galaxy, it sounds 'about right' that after 50 years of observing a small portion of the sky, we actually got it 'on tape' now so to speak.
So I'm curious, just how common are such events, and, how did it happen that this one was directly observed? Was it accidental, or was there enough indication of something happening in advance, that astronomers did have radio telescopes pointed in the right direction on purpose, to observe this particular event ?
You know, that's interesting, I've been using YourOwn linux for a long time now. I tend to deploy mostly headless boxes, on non intel hardware, used as embedded process control systems, and network edge devices. With no monitors or keyboards, we do have 'special' requirements for our deployments, with a strong preference to do everything using web based configuration, and centralized distribution of stock configurations and updates. When I first started dabbling with linux, I did look all around for the 'perfect' distribution, and I was really surprised when I finally discovered and settled on this one. It's absolutely uncanny how the developers there seem to always anticipate my needs exactly. I've got a little over 300 boxes out there currently in 'edge device' roles. Just a few weeks ago we were having a round table discussion here, and comments came up about how nice it would be to have sip proxies on all the edge devices. It was amazing, only a couple days later, an asterisk package showed up on the packages list at YourOwnBox.org complete with really well planned out default configurations, and scripts to automatically deploy it onto all 300 edge devices overnite.
I'm really happy with YourOwn linux, it's served us well, and I cant imagine us moving to another distribution anytime soon. The reality is, it's served us so well, we've actually taken on the task of sponsoring the developers producing it, and have kept them on retainer ever since. This distribution has served us so well, I fully expect it'll be deployed on well over 1000 boxes by the end of the year.
This is/. , please dont ruin the fun of all the 'terrorist behind every shadow' reactionaries by polluting the discussion with actual facts, especially if they dont support the sensationalism of it all. They dont want to know that what is being reported is that they recovered 30kg less than expected, it's much more fun to rant about 30kg missing.
here we go again, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every shadow' reaction. I wonder how many years its going to take before this isn't trendy anymore....
It'll also be the first-ever space mission by a non-profit group (I think).
AMSAT has been putting up amateur radio satellites for a couple of decades now. Private, non profit. It's done 'because we can' and for the prestige of doing it. Up until now, the oscars normally hitch a ride on commercial launches, as ballast. There's going to be a plethora of wanna-be launch companies looking for guinea pig payloads in the near future, I do expect to see a few of them carry oscar payloads, simply because they have no other payload to carry on initial trial launches.
Nasa is a government organization, dependant on congressional allowances for funds. They compete for funds with organizations such as the Parks departments.
An announcement like this is absolutely perfect for the political game played in washington. Now Nasa can say 'we think there's life on mars, we need to design probes to prove it'. The bush administration can agree completely, knowing full well they will only have to provide financing for the early part of the program, studies etc to design the experiments / probes. Some future administration will be stuck with the bills to actually build and launch it. It's a win-win, the administration looks good (at little cost), and nasa secures future funding.
The only little catch to it all is, the interpretation of the 'evidence' is highly subjective, and anything but scientific. That's why the 'results' were leaked thru the popular press, and not thru normal scientific journal channels. To go the latter route, it would be exposed that this is a case of 'determine the conclusion we want, then hunt thru all evidence, and selectively cherry pick that which may support our desired conclusion'. And that sir, is the difference between science and politics. In science, you let evidence draw you to a conclusion. In politics, you selectively search for evidence to support the conclusions you desire to find.
These things are already being used by rogue states. The us military has a bunch of them dedicated to modelling nuclear events.
With regard to denial of service attacks, there's a cluebox over in the corner, you need to go grab a couple out of the box. DOS attacks dont require a big computer, they require massive bandwidth with massive routing diversity available. The actual computer power required borders on insignificant. A supercomputer like this is useless for that kind of thing, by necessity, it will have an internal networking and communications environment, and likely only a relatively low speed interconnect to external networks.
But look on the bright side, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every lamp post' reaction is just what the american government has been trying to instill in the population for the last few years. Your post here shows, it's been an effective campaign, money successfully spent, and the objective achieved. It's become the 'trendy' response to just about everything these days.
How soon folks forget. Nasa came damn close to LOSING a mars rover because of a problem with the underlying VxWorks. Doesn't anybody remember the day the rover went quiet, eventually determined to be a problem with the flash file system. Seems they overflowed a directory, and it didn't handle that cleanly...
Not everybody. Only those who were willing to give away the privacy of thier email accounts, in exchange for 50 cents worth of storage space. I still prefer to keep email servers in house, where strangers dont have access to the data stored there, and I dont have total strangers running programs that analyze the content. Currently they use it to target adds, but I wonder how long till they forward summaries to uncle sam. You know that's only just around the corner these days.
Physics, on the other hand, is still having its problems...
This is not for lack of trying tho. Most of them headed that way ended up taking jobs on the psychic hot line, but hey, it was only a minor spelling mistake...
The barnstorming analogy is a good one, but this is a more modern era. Note the whole point of this/. article. These guys aren't even at the point of having an airplane to fly yet, and they are already trying to set themselves up as the rulemakers.
I've been involved in aviation for almost 30 years, and I've seen a LOT of changes in that time, most of it in the areas of rules/regulations, as well as some pretty spectacular improvements in technology. Most rules changes I've seen, go back to some form of experience, many of them being the outcome of investigations into serious accidents. The point is, there is a deep well of experience driving the huge ruleset of today.
Within this group, I do not see the experience well required to provide regulation into a budding space industry. Like the barnstormers of old, one of them may have 3 flights under his belt, but, that's not a knowledge well deep enough from which to develop rulesets.
Aviation can be dangerous, and a lot of people have died over the years, accumulating our net knowledge depth in various subjects today. From that knowledge, we have developed guidelines, to try prevent further needless accidents/death. These guys dont have enough knowledge on the subject to be in a position to make definitive rulesets and guidelines, nobody does. If anybody thinks they can prevent a lot of accidents/deaths during the learning curve as space travel goes from infancy to a mature product, they are dreaming, it isn't going to happen.
Let them come back after they have 10 years of operations under thier belts, and then, based on experience, start developing rulesets. In the meantime, let common sense (is there such a thing left in this world), good judgement, and good engineering prevail. After a few years of operations, there will be lots of knowledge gained, and many 'obvious' things that need to go into a guiding ruleset, most of which they are ignorant of today. The WORST thing you can do to an industry in its infancy, is to straddle it with a huge set of rules based on pre-conceptions that are based on conjecture, with little/no firsthand experience to draw upon.
The real reason for the high oil price, is the drop in the us dollar over the last couple of years. Oil has retained it's value, the greenback has not. It's actually an artificial increase, that affects only the usa, and any country using a currency that's in some way tied to the greenback.
Contrary to what america wants you to believe, the greenback is NOT the defacto standard for world pricing anymore, the Euro is. Put a couple of charts side by side, one the price of oil (in us dollars), the other the exchange rate between the us dollar and the Euro. They will look surprisingly similar. Compare that to a chart of oil vs the Euro, and you'll see a relatively stable pricing environment, with some increases that basically are accounted for by the reduced world supply thanks to a war in iraq, and the uncertainty that brings to the market.
The greenback will not regain it's former strength till americans start running a balanced budet. For those that dont understand the concept, it means spending only what you take in, no charge cards allowed, and no negative balances carried forward. Since this is a concept that nobody in the usa even comes close to comprehending (how many of you have credit cards maxed out today?), it's never gonna happen. The american economy is imploding under an unmanageable debt load, and the only way to stop it, is for every american to actually pay off thier credit cards, and the government to run a balanced budget. Not gonna happen in our lifetime.
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This aircraft uses a very new (from 2004) commercially built turbofan, developed specifically to address the needs of the aviation industry in regards to fuel economy. Its mounted on an airframe built of composites that are also in very common use throughout the industry. it has a lot of similarity to it's older sister (voyageur), which already did this trip, but, with a crew of 2, and piston power. There's nothing new and bleeding edge about the aerodymaics involved.
This is a cool project, because it's done by a 'little guy'. OTOH, if Boeing took a brand new 747 with a pallette interior, strapped on some 'special' engines from pratt&witney that were specifically tuned for fuel economy on a single flight, then did a little paperwork to authorize that single airframe to do a single flight loaded to 125% of it's normal allowable takeoff weight, they would be in the game. Roll on a load of pallettes that are fuel tanks, add some pumps, put on a 1 man crew, and off they go, chasing a flight plan that keeps them at maximum fuel enconomy riding 100 knot tailwinds all the way.
All of the large airliner manufacturers are quite capable of accomplishing this task. The reason they dont, is very simple, they remember the lessons of the blue ribbon. In the early days of steamships, a lot of money/effort was spent procuring the blue ribbon for a given line, and many lives were lost in the process (can you say titanic). Eventually, the shipping companies made a truce on the subject, and stopped chasing the 'fastest atlantic crossing' because they finally realized, the good publicity of holding the ribbon was far outweighed by the bad publicity of the accidents happening trying to secure that ribbon. Chasing the blue ribbon decimated the steamship industry financially. In the airliner industry, records are not generally chased after, because the negative publicity from one bad incident can decimate the entire industry, whereas the good publicity from the achievement, are mostly ho-hum.
What these guys are doing, is incredibly cool, they are trying to break/make records. They are not doing any r&d, and nothing about this airplane is going to advance the aerospace industry in any way except 'the public eye'. What they have done, is build on all the advances by the engineers in the trenches, and produce a package that includes enough advancements, it is capable of doing the job. It gets a lot of 'cool factor' in the press, because its the little guys doing it, so it heads to the front page. If Boeing did this with a tricked out 747 purposely modified to do the job, it would be 'ho hum'. Illushyin is probably quite capable of doing a one off from an existing airframe, and get the same result, but that too would be just ho-hum, not headline material anywhere except industry journals.
It's interesting to note, this crossing is not without it's tribulations, now there is a question of fuel available. Since this is a one off from a 'nobody' in the airline industry (and yes, i do qualify virgin as a nobody in the industry), there wont be any real harm from a failure. If this were an attempt by Boeing, and it failed, that would swing airliner sales toward Airbus, simply due to public perception. The folks at scaled have everything to gain, and nothing to lose from this kind of publicity stunt. The folks at Boeing and Airbus, have everything to lose, nothing to gain, and that's why they dont do it.
Like it or not, the aviation industry in america is driven by the product liability lawyers. Until you guys learn to use the precious 'right to bear arms' and start shooting lawyers, it's gonna stay that way.
This project is a great example. It's been waiting _how long_ for a weather window that will actually produce conditions where they expect the airplane to survive the trip ? It's a special purpose, one off, designed for one mission, flown in optimum conditions. After it's flown that mission, it's really no good for anything but wasting space in a hangar somewhere, because it's to flimsy to park outside exposed to the elements.
Your definition is, well, lame.
This actually makes a lot of sense. DOHS is not about protecting your privacy, it's about invading it. They have hired the experts.
Mr freeman probably thinks he's arrived in heaven. he gets to keep on doing what he's best at, the spyware business, but this time it's for the government, so no more hassles from all those pathetic anti-spyware whiners.
A television is also not 'communications equipment'. The real issue most seem to miss here, FCC has jurasidiction over TRANSMISSIONS, not recievers. The last time I checked, a television is a passive reciever, and sends no signals out to the transmitters, therefore, it's not a device that falls under FCC jurasdiction.
This reminds me of all the drivel we heard in 99/2000 about how the internet was going to put all traditional businesses out of the game. Funny thing, it's only a few years later, and guess what, I still buy my groceries in a store, one that does not have a website. I still buy gasoline at a small station up the street, also, no website. And even more interesting, my business has survived fine, no website.
For most real viable businesses, an online presence is an afterthought, simply because it's trendy today. Maybe someday they'll fix it up so i can squeeze a tomatoe online before I buy it online, but, till then, gonna continue to buy them from the store. Can say the same for almost all of the necessities in life. The only time an online presence is important, if you are selling a discretionary product, and you need to reach a wider market than your phyical location has for a catchment area. Then again, i wouldn't call that a 'viable' business to begin with, but, good management and leveraging information systems, it can be made viable.
It's easy to bypass this problem, dont buy a notebook with intergrated wireless. If you buy one with an integrated antenna, it's going to have these restrictions. If you dont like that, dont bitch at the vendor for following regulation in manufacturing/distributing the unit, go bitch to the FCC, it's thier ruleset.
Overall, this is exciting news though. the thought of the american economy being hostage to canadian natural gas instead of saudi oil, just makes my wallet go pitter patter.
when did the brits start wearing stars and stripes on the shoulder patch ?
I especially like the series of the american soldiers holding a gun to the head of what appears to be about a 6 year old. Lets put up a yellow ribbon for the 'hero'....
Just doing some straw hat quick numbers here, if we assume it requires modern equipment to monitor/record this event, and we define everything built in the last 50 years to be 'modern', then we further (overly conservative) assume all that equipment is always observing, then it's likely we can possibly be watching about 1% of the sky at any given time. If this event was an annual thing in the galaxy, it sounds 'about right' that after 50 years of observing a small portion of the sky, we actually got it 'on tape' now so to speak.
So I'm curious, just how common are such events, and, how did it happen that this one was directly observed? Was it accidental, or was there enough indication of something happening in advance, that astronomers did have radio telescopes pointed in the right direction on purpose, to observe this particular event ?
I'm really happy with YourOwn linux, it's served us well, and I cant imagine us moving to another distribution anytime soon. The reality is, it's served us so well, we've actually taken on the task of sponsoring the developers producing it, and have kept them on retainer ever since. This distribution has served us so well, I fully expect it'll be deployed on well over 1000 boxes by the end of the year.
This is /. , please dont ruin the fun of all the 'terrorist behind every shadow' reactionaries by polluting the discussion with actual facts, especially if they dont support the sensationalism of it all. They dont want to know that what is being reported is that they recovered 30kg less than expected, it's much more fun to rant about 30kg missing.
here we go again, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every shadow' reaction. I wonder how many years its going to take before this isn't trendy anymore....
AMSAT has been putting up amateur radio satellites for a couple of decades now. Private, non profit. It's done 'because we can' and for the prestige of doing it. Up until now, the oscars normally hitch a ride on commercial launches, as ballast. There's going to be a plethora of wanna-be launch companies looking for guinea pig payloads in the near future, I do expect to see a few of them carry oscar payloads, simply because they have no other payload to carry on initial trial launches.
An announcement like this is absolutely perfect for the political game played in washington. Now Nasa can say 'we think there's life on mars, we need to design probes to prove it'. The bush administration can agree completely, knowing full well they will only have to provide financing for the early part of the program, studies etc to design the experiments / probes. Some future administration will be stuck with the bills to actually build and launch it. It's a win-win, the administration looks good (at little cost), and nasa secures future funding.
The only little catch to it all is, the interpretation of the 'evidence' is highly subjective, and anything but scientific. That's why the 'results' were leaked thru the popular press, and not thru normal scientific journal channels. To go the latter route, it would be exposed that this is a case of 'determine the conclusion we want, then hunt thru all evidence, and selectively cherry pick that which may support our desired conclusion'. And that sir, is the difference between science and politics. In science, you let evidence draw you to a conclusion. In politics, you selectively search for evidence to support the conclusions you desire to find.
With regard to denial of service attacks, there's a cluebox over in the corner, you need to go grab a couple out of the box. DOS attacks dont require a big computer, they require massive bandwidth with massive routing diversity available. The actual computer power required borders on insignificant. A supercomputer like this is useless for that kind of thing, by necessity, it will have an internal networking and communications environment, and likely only a relatively low speed interconnect to external networks.
But look on the bright side, the knee jerk 'terrorist behind every lamp post' reaction is just what the american government has been trying to instill in the population for the last few years. Your post here shows, it's been an effective campaign, money successfully spent, and the objective achieved. It's become the 'trendy' response to just about everything these days.
How soon folks forget. Nasa came damn close to LOSING a mars rover because of a problem with the underlying VxWorks. Doesn't anybody remember the day the rover went quiet, eventually determined to be a problem with the flash file system. Seems they overflowed a directory, and it didn't handle that cleanly...
Not everybody. Only those who were willing to give away the privacy of thier email accounts, in exchange for 50 cents worth of storage space. I still prefer to keep email servers in house, where strangers dont have access to the data stored there, and I dont have total strangers running programs that analyze the content. Currently they use it to target adds, but I wonder how long till they forward summaries to uncle sam. You know that's only just around the corner these days.
This is not for lack of trying tho. Most of them headed that way ended up taking jobs on the psychic hot line, but hey, it was only a minor spelling mistake...
I _think_ the ibm site can handle a /. swarm. No need to karma whore this one.
I've been involved in aviation for almost 30 years, and I've seen a LOT of changes in that time, most of it in the areas of rules/regulations, as well as some pretty spectacular improvements in technology. Most rules changes I've seen, go back to some form of experience, many of them being the outcome of investigations into serious accidents. The point is, there is a deep well of experience driving the huge ruleset of today.
Within this group, I do not see the experience well required to provide regulation into a budding space industry. Like the barnstormers of old, one of them may have 3 flights under his belt, but, that's not a knowledge well deep enough from which to develop rulesets.
Aviation can be dangerous, and a lot of people have died over the years, accumulating our net knowledge depth in various subjects today. From that knowledge, we have developed guidelines, to try prevent further needless accidents/death. These guys dont have enough knowledge on the subject to be in a position to make definitive rulesets and guidelines, nobody does. If anybody thinks they can prevent a lot of accidents/deaths during the learning curve as space travel goes from infancy to a mature product, they are dreaming, it isn't going to happen.
Let them come back after they have 10 years of operations under thier belts, and then, based on experience, start developing rulesets. In the meantime, let common sense (is there such a thing left in this world), good judgement, and good engineering prevail. After a few years of operations, there will be lots of knowledge gained, and many 'obvious' things that need to go into a guiding ruleset, most of which they are ignorant of today. The WORST thing you can do to an industry in its infancy, is to straddle it with a huge set of rules based on pre-conceptions that are based on conjecture, with little/no firsthand experience to draw upon.
Contrary to what america wants you to believe, the greenback is NOT the defacto standard for world pricing anymore, the Euro is. Put a couple of charts side by side, one the price of oil (in us dollars), the other the exchange rate between the us dollar and the Euro. They will look surprisingly similar. Compare that to a chart of oil vs the Euro, and you'll see a relatively stable pricing environment, with some increases that basically are accounted for by the reduced world supply thanks to a war in iraq, and the uncertainty that brings to the market.
The greenback will not regain it's former strength till americans start running a balanced budet. For those that dont understand the concept, it means spending only what you take in, no charge cards allowed, and no negative balances carried forward. Since this is a concept that nobody in the usa even comes close to comprehending (how many of you have credit cards maxed out today?), it's never gonna happen. The american economy is imploding under an unmanageable debt load, and the only way to stop it, is for every american to actually pay off thier credit cards, and the government to run a balanced budget. Not gonna happen in our lifetime.