I would point out the irony in everything you've just said but I'm afraid that distance it would go over your head would just add to the crowding in LEO.
Millions of people also think the Bach Brandenburg concertos, Firefly, Aliens, Terminator2, the Curiosity rover, seasons 3-10 of the Simpsons and Raiders of the lost Ark were pretty awesome. Your point?
You're missing the point, though. A John Deere tractor is much better than what they're making and I'm sure they would agree with that assessment. Their machines are cheaper and more importantly much simpler so that they can be built or have major repairs done on site with very simple metalworking tools.
That's not much of a selling point in the US but in a developing nation, it's a game changer. We could give a bunch of poor farmers John Deer tractors and when they break down, those farmers can't afford replacement parts and can't make parts. This has been the bane of most of the humanitarian efforts of the past. We airdrop in and give the locals a bunch of tech that makes sense for the US, pat them on the back and jet back out. Then we get all surprised when all that shit stops working 2 years later. OTOH, if those farmers have built up the metalworking infrastructure that's part of the package, they can keep these machines running for much longer.
Of course there's certain parts like the ICE and hydraulic pumps that won't be buildable for the foreseeable future this way but they're fairly inexpensive and widely available.
In the US, we benefit from a gigantic industrial infrastructure full of institutional knowledge. That's why a John Deere makes sense here. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that knowledge is proprietary and locked up if you don't have enough money. The group's aim is to try and at least come up with a skeleton of open source infrastructure/institutional knowledge that anyone can access, regardless of wealth.
Obviously they've got a tremendous way to go before they can even say they're scratching the bottom of that goal but it's a laudable one.
The whole antibiotics thing that's post-industrial revolution was pretty nifty, IMO.
I'll agree that they're a bit scattered in scope but they are doing interesting things. I've been following the group fora few years now and it seems that the overall aim is moving away from a 'rebuild civilization' kit towards open source, low-cost farm equipment for smaller farms and developing nations. There's a strong emphasis on low cost, modular design where the metalworking is all very simple. That alone is definitely worth the cost of admission.
There's no shortage of very technically savvy people in the military and other branches of the federal government as well as academia. All of those pay well below the industry average. Not everyone is solely motivated by money.
You seem to think that the military is solely composed of 18-year old recruits from the ghetto. I seem to recall that digital computers, the internet and even the space race all have their roots in military R&D. One might make an argument about the relative creativity/research productivity per $ of private industry vs academia vs the military but it's a silly argument to think that the military is incapable of this sort of work or that people wouldn't accept lower pay to do something they believe in.
Ummmmmmm... Have you just not been reading anything at all about the pervasive SCADA security holes that keep popping up everywhere? Hooking industrial control hardware to the internet to centralize monitoring, control and update has been a huge industry movement. Combine that with a mindset in the SCADA industry and end users that is much more focused on reliability than security and you get the equivalent of thousands of pieces of hardware on the internet with the security equivalent of a wireless router with the default admin account and password.
The SCADA security holes have only recently come to the attention of the industry. I can assure you that there's a giant collective brick being shat over it but fixing this stuff takes time.
And foaming at the mouth about honest mistakes isn't going to solve anything.
Fair 'nuff, you hadn't mentioned the personal nostalgia angle and that's worth something. However drawing form my experience at another Paul Allen museum (the EMP/Sci-Fi museum), the average Slashdotter is probably going to have a far better and more interesting time at the MoC.
Their hours are really weird but it's the best museum (and one of the best kept secrets) in Seattle. They've got a gigantic collection of old (early 20th century) telephone switching gear that is operational and available for viewing. The oldest is a nearly completely mechanical computer that Babbage would have probably been at home working on.
The best part of the MoC, though is the docents. It's staffed by a bunch of *old* school engineers in their 70-90s that were all Ma Bell lifers. I've had one of them walk me through the use and repair of an old crossbar switching system and the sheer volume of knowledge that those engineers had to have is mind-blowing. The docents are more than happy to spend a few hours one-one one with you and I guarantee you'll get far more out of your time at this place than Paul Allen's museum.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt since you seem to mean well but that post was seriously fucked up on many levels. I kind of want to tear you a new one but I'm going to try and refrain since you seem to at least have your heart in sort of the right place.
First, social engineering skills != social skills. Not even close. Actual social skills that actual healthy adults have are a combination of understanding the motivations of others and having respect for them as individuals. People are not a set of walking stimulus/response sets for someone to manipulate. A failure to distinguish between the two is very common amongst intelligent, socially awkward types. Hacker types *are* socially awkward on average. The thing is that most people in hacker circles manage to learn actual social skills at some point. Sadly a portion of them never grow out of the mindset that crude, non-consensual manipulation of others for entertainment or gain is somehow indicative that they have learned to interact with other people on a meaningful level. Also, the ability to trick an over-trusting secretary out of a password on the phone hardly makes one the next Machiavelli, just FYI.
Second, yes poor social skills *are* the heart of the matter. I've been around plenty of social settings (including many hacker/geek social settings) where there were drugs, alcohol, hot women (sometimes hot men and women in states of undress and sometimes having sex) where people managed to not be immature douchebags and treated each other with respect. This is a cultural problem and needs to be treated as such. Yes, it's sometimes kind of annoying when a girl acts all slutty and shows off her body because she wants attention but that in no way entitles everyone in eyesight to groping her uninvited any more than a guy wearing an expensive watch or driving an ostentatious car deserves to be mugged/carjacked for doing so. And it *DEFINITELY* does not excuse other people from degrading and intimidating women as a group because a few of them chose to act a certain way any more than I should feel entitled to walk down the street, punching random guys in the face for the actions of a few sexist idiots.
Third, I definitely agree that everyone at such an event should feel safe and it's heartening that you bring this up. However you kind of fall flat on your face in the next sentence. You think people should feel safe so that the 'most attractive females' will keep showing up? Excuse me? I thought Defcon was about hacking and computer skills, not so that you can eye hot girls. There is a whole internet full of naked, hot girls you can ogle to your heart's content and plenty of hot girls in Vegas you can go out and hit on and lots of hot prostitutes in the greater state of Nevada you can pay to sleep with if that's what you are interested in. Also note how your rationale is conspicuously missing any reference to making female computer hackers feel welcome or any indication that women can be something other than 'attractive young fangirl/cheerleaders'.
Lastly, the community definitely needs to shoulder some of the blame. Yes, Defcon should implement some sort of comprehensive policy towards harassment that is clear and well enforced. But that is only half the solution. Human culture is *not* a clean set of equations that a few rule changes can reform like tweaking the code for The Sims. Rule changes are pretty useless - ultimately, they have to find an impossible sweet spot between being toothless and draconian and rules by themselves will never change the minds of people any more than all those DARE ads convinced us all that drugs are bad. That you seem to think so is not surprising given your attitude towards social engineering.
However, you need to get through your head that the larger Defcon community is partially at fault for tolerating a hostile environment and that a broader, self-initiated social shift is required if any meaningful change is going to happen. When a woman h
Yes, genetic drift can remove previous beneficial mutations but not always.
Some resistance mechanisms carry little to no negative effect. Take, for example chloramphenicol resistance in E. coli. One of the common resistance mechanisms is a mutation in one of the ribosome subunits. (I forget which one and am too lazy to look it up right now) It has a small deleterious effect but prevents chloramphenicol from covalently attaching to and inactivating the ribosome. It has been observed that many bacteria under selection them develop mutations in other areas of the ribosome that help to offset the deleterious effects of the resistance mutation.
Once that happens, the resistance mutation is not only neutral outside of selection but are often locked in as well. The compensatory mutations that helped the ribosome relieve the distortion from the resistance mutation now prevent it from being lost. A single mutation that eliminates the resistance mutation now reintroduces distortion in the ribosome and is negatively selected.
So it's a bit of a stretch to say that beneficial mutations are exclusionary to each other. That is often the case but you should always be careful about making generalizations in biology. Often, you can get beneficial mutations that are locked in that don't revert when the selective pressure is off. This especially applies to mutations that have had significant amounts of time to be refined by subsequent evolution.
The concept of licensing goes back much further than that. Early wax cylinder recordings from 100 years ago came with the equivalent of EULAs that stated you were merely buying the rights to play the music contained thereon. While I haven't read up on it myself, a friend of mine once told me that this can be traced another hundred years to the sheet music industry.
Basically, any medium where the final product is easily copied or mass disseminated has tended towards EULA style business models for a while. It's just recently that we've seen a greater move towards physical gadgets being EULA'd up.
Eh, the truth is somewhere in middle as usual. The high bypass turbofans made the 747 possible from an engineering standpoint but it was Trippe's initial commitment that made the 747 development financially tenable.
If you haven't already, you should read Joe Sutter's book about the design of the 747.
Beat me to it. According to Sutter, the 747 was a clean sheet design. I'm sure some of the military plane engineering was incorporated but the 747 was very much its own beast.
Actually, in terms of fuel used per passenger mile, modern aircraft have nearly reached parity with trains. It's just that plane flights tend to cover such long hauls that they are associated with large amounts of fuel consumption.
The airline industry has been gradually moving to twin engine jets because of the better economics and the increased reliability of modern engines. This has been a trend for a long time. It's not helped by the fact that airlines tend to keep the existing 747 fleet flying rather than buying new ones.
Boeing did multiple detailed studies into larger 747 models of a similar size to the A380 and concluded that they would never make their R&D investment back. Heck, the new 747-8 isn't exactly selling like hotcakes right now either. The 747 is slowly being relegated to a cargo transporter - a role it excels at. However, even that might be in question as the new 777 freighter can carry almost as much weight in a smaller footprint.
The A380 is by all means a fantastic airplane. I say that as someone who has a lot of reason to be a Boeing booster. However, the economic model just doesn't make sense. They needed to sell hundreds of the things to break even. With all of the wiring snafus, the development costs ballooned to the point where it is unlikely that Airbus will ever even break even on the project.
Sadly, I suspect that the major motivation for the A380 was bragging rights. Airbus wanted a plane that could unseat Boeing's role as the sole jumbo jet producer. That blinded them to the marginal economic model. There are persistent rumors that Boeing did their part to egg Airbus on as well to distract them while they worked on the 787.
The end result is a great plane that will end up losing billions for its manufacturer. Also, it allowed Boeing to gain a several year head start on Airbus in terms of composite fuselage manufacturing technology. When Boeing announced the 787, it sent Airbus into a panic - all estimates had Boeing being at least 5 years away from being able to do that.
There is a ridiculous amount of maneuvering and strategy in the airplane manufacturing world. Expect things to get even more interesting as Japan and China start moving into the passenger jet market. Even small plane manufacturers like Embraer and Bombardier are rumored to be trying to size up to try and get a bite of the 737/A320 market.
There are persistent rumors that pilots have done 1 G barrel rolls in nighttime transoceanic flights when they're outside the range of ground control radars. As a passenger, unless you were watching the stars, all you'd notice was a bit of rocking in the plane.
I'm a bit dubious of the story since the in flight data recorder would capture that maneuver and it strikes me as fantastic way to lose your flight license. However, since I've heard it a couple times at my workplace - a large aerospace company who's name starts with B and rhymes with "going", I can't entirely dismiss it either.
Yep, airframes have a guaranteed service life measured in number of flight cycles/years of service they operate. There is a large market for operating planes outside that service life to wring some more passenger dollars out of them. Not surprisingly, the 747 is one of the ones that tends to get run the longest, given the huge initial cost of each plane.
There's a huge infrastructure in place that constantly revises operating manuals, inspection schedules and repair guides to handle those aging aircraft. You can fly a 747 pretty much forever but as it ages, the required crack inspections become more and more frequent. These inspections are not simple matter either, many of them basically require stripping the plane down to bare metal, taking it out of service for weeks. Eventually, the downtime costs are greater than the amount of money the plane can generate and it makes a trip out to the boneyard.
I personally put web-based services like Expedia partly to blame here. While things may have changed in the last couple years since I haven't flown recently, my experience with such websites has always been that they fixate on the total cost of the flight. When you search, what flight will most people pick? The cheapest one. Veteran fliers may know which airlines and which flights have better amenities and legroom but the average traveler that flies once or twice a year is relatively clueless and therefore uses price as the sole decision mechanism for choosing a flight.
This has helped to encourage cattle class flights where the ticket price is lowered as much as possible at the expense of service, safety and having to recoup costs through baggage surcharges, etc. Once there is a better mechanism for showing a prospective buyer the legroom and other non-ticket price amenities a given seat has, we'll probably see a reversal in this trend. (note, this may already be happening, I haven't flown in a couple years)
I remember a similar trend happened with PriceWatch for PC components. When it first started, the list price was the only criteria and various companies gouged on S&H, customer service, bait and switch tactics and outright fraud to get the lowest price listing. (Oh, you thought you were looking at a hard drive for that price? Oh no, that's just the IDE cable, sorry that was poorly labeled....not) Eventually, PriceWatch started factoring in S&H in the listings and word of mouth started rewarding sites like Newegg that gave decent customer service at a low but not rock-bottom price.
Eventually, I imagine something similar will happen with air travel.
I'm too lazy to look up references but I know the orbital gun idea has been touched at least twice since Bull. There was a small private firm named Columbiad, IIRC, that was trying to do suborbital launches a few years back, not sure if they're still around.
The US gov't also had a big program using giant rams to push hydrogen gas behind a launch payload. The capital cost was around one $ billion or so because of the sheer scale of the thing. It would have been single-shot orbital insertion, though. Never got past a scale demonstrator.
Basically, the gun concept has a number of weaknesses. One of the primary ones is that it's hard to have any sort of booster that can survive the G forces inherent in a gun launch that gives you any meaningful fraction of orbital delta V.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit, you win the biggest moron I've seen on the internet all month award.
I would point out the irony in everything you've just said but I'm afraid that distance it would go over your head would just add to the crowding in LEO.
I know, right? It's such a shame that MS won the browser wars and killed off the competition.
Millions of people also think the Bach Brandenburg concertos, Firefly, Aliens, Terminator2, the Curiosity rover, seasons 3-10 of the Simpsons and Raiders of the lost Ark were pretty awesome. Your point?
You're missing the point, though. A John Deere tractor is much better than what they're making and I'm sure they would agree with that assessment. Their machines are cheaper and more importantly much simpler so that they can be built or have major repairs done on site with very simple metalworking tools.
That's not much of a selling point in the US but in a developing nation, it's a game changer. We could give a bunch of poor farmers John Deer tractors and when they break down, those farmers can't afford replacement parts and can't make parts. This has been the bane of most of the humanitarian efforts of the past. We airdrop in and give the locals a bunch of tech that makes sense for the US, pat them on the back and jet back out. Then we get all surprised when all that shit stops working 2 years later. OTOH, if those farmers have built up the metalworking infrastructure that's part of the package, they can keep these machines running for much longer.
Of course there's certain parts like the ICE and hydraulic pumps that won't be buildable for the foreseeable future this way but they're fairly inexpensive and widely available.
In the US, we benefit from a gigantic industrial infrastructure full of institutional knowledge. That's why a John Deere makes sense here. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that knowledge is proprietary and locked up if you don't have enough money. The group's aim is to try and at least come up with a skeleton of open source infrastructure/institutional knowledge that anyone can access, regardless of wealth.
Obviously they've got a tremendous way to go before they can even say they're scratching the bottom of that goal but it's a laudable one.
The whole antibiotics thing that's post-industrial revolution was pretty nifty, IMO.
I'll agree that they're a bit scattered in scope but they are doing interesting things. I've been following the group fora few years now and it seems that the overall aim is moving away from a 'rebuild civilization' kit towards open source, low-cost farm equipment for smaller farms and developing nations. There's a strong emphasis on low cost, modular design where the metalworking is all very simple. That alone is definitely worth the cost of admission.
There's no shortage of very technically savvy people in the military and other branches of the federal government as well as academia. All of those pay well below the industry average. Not everyone is solely motivated by money.
You seem to think that the military is solely composed of 18-year old recruits from the ghetto. I seem to recall that digital computers, the internet and even the space race all have their roots in military R&D. One might make an argument about the relative creativity/research productivity per $ of private industry vs academia vs the military but it's a silly argument to think that the military is incapable of this sort of work or that people wouldn't accept lower pay to do something they believe in.
Ummmmmmm...
Have you just not been reading anything at all about the pervasive SCADA security holes that keep popping up everywhere? Hooking industrial control hardware to the internet to centralize monitoring, control and update has been a huge industry movement. Combine that with a mindset in the SCADA industry and end users that is much more focused on reliability than security and you get the equivalent of thousands of pieces of hardware on the internet with the security equivalent of a wireless router with the default admin account and password.
The SCADA security holes have only recently come to the attention of the industry. I can assure you that there's a giant collective brick being shat over it but fixing this stuff takes time.
And foaming at the mouth about honest mistakes isn't going to solve anything.
Fair 'nuff, you hadn't mentioned the personal nostalgia angle and that's worth something. However drawing form my experience at another Paul Allen museum (the EMP/Sci-Fi museum), the average Slashdotter is probably going to have a far better and more interesting time at the MoC.
If you're looking for a place to visit in Seattle, I think your time would be better spent here:
http://museumofcommunications.org/
Their hours are really weird but it's the best museum (and one of the best kept secrets) in Seattle. They've got a gigantic collection of old (early 20th century) telephone switching gear that is operational and available for viewing. The oldest is a nearly completely mechanical computer that Babbage would have probably been at home working on.
The best part of the MoC, though is the docents. It's staffed by a bunch of *old* school engineers in their 70-90s that were all Ma Bell lifers. I've had one of them walk me through the use and repair of an old crossbar switching system and the sheer volume of knowledge that those engineers had to have is mind-blowing. The docents are more than happy to spend a few hours one-one one with you and I guarantee you'll get far more out of your time at this place than Paul Allen's museum.
Dude, I think you forgot your tinfoil hat this morning.
Would it make you feel better to know that Sojourner from the Pathfinder mission tried to return to it's base station after we lost contact with it?
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20070111_prt.htm
Wait, no? Why are you sobbing?
OK, so wow. Just wow.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt since you seem to mean well but that post was seriously fucked up on many levels. I kind of want to tear you a new one but I'm going to try and refrain since you seem to at least have your heart in sort of the right place.
First, social engineering skills != social skills. Not even close. Actual social skills that actual healthy adults have are a combination of understanding the motivations of others and having respect for them as individuals. People are not a set of walking stimulus/response sets for someone to manipulate. A failure to distinguish between the two is very common amongst intelligent, socially awkward types. Hacker types *are* socially awkward on average. The thing is that most people in hacker circles manage to learn actual social skills at some point. Sadly a portion of them never grow out of the mindset that crude, non-consensual manipulation of others for entertainment or gain is somehow indicative that they have learned to interact with other people on a meaningful level. Also, the ability to trick an over-trusting secretary out of a password on the phone hardly makes one the next Machiavelli, just FYI.
Second, yes poor social skills *are* the heart of the matter. I've been around plenty of social settings (including many hacker/geek social settings) where there were drugs, alcohol, hot women (sometimes hot men and women in states of undress and sometimes having sex) where people managed to not be immature douchebags and treated each other with respect. This is a cultural problem and needs to be treated as such. Yes, it's sometimes kind of annoying when a girl acts all slutty and shows off her body because she wants attention but that in no way entitles everyone in eyesight to groping her uninvited any more than a guy wearing an expensive watch or driving an ostentatious car deserves to be mugged/carjacked for doing so. And it *DEFINITELY* does not excuse other people from degrading and intimidating women as a group because a few of them chose to act a certain way any more than I should feel entitled to walk down the street, punching random guys in the face for the actions of a few sexist idiots.
Third, I definitely agree that everyone at such an event should feel safe and it's heartening that you bring this up. However you kind of fall flat on your face in the next sentence. You think people should feel safe so that the 'most attractive females' will keep showing up? Excuse me? I thought Defcon was about hacking and computer skills, not so that you can eye hot girls. There is a whole internet full of naked, hot girls you can ogle to your heart's content and plenty of hot girls in Vegas you can go out and hit on and lots of hot prostitutes in the greater state of Nevada you can pay to sleep with if that's what you are interested in. Also note how your rationale is conspicuously missing any reference to making female computer hackers feel welcome or any indication that women can be something other than 'attractive young fangirl/cheerleaders'.
Lastly, the community definitely needs to shoulder some of the blame. Yes, Defcon should implement some sort of comprehensive policy towards harassment that is clear and well enforced. But that is only half the solution. Human culture is *not* a clean set of equations that a few rule changes can reform like tweaking the code for The Sims. Rule changes are pretty useless - ultimately, they have to find an impossible sweet spot between being toothless and draconian and rules by themselves will never change the minds of people any more than all those DARE ads convinced us all that drugs are bad. That you seem to think so is not surprising given your attitude towards social engineering.
However, you need to get through your head that the larger Defcon community is partially at fault for tolerating a hostile environment and that a broader, self-initiated social shift is required if any meaningful change is going to happen. When a woman h
Yes, genetic drift can remove previous beneficial mutations but not always.
Some resistance mechanisms carry little to no negative effect. Take, for example chloramphenicol resistance in E. coli. One of the common resistance mechanisms is a mutation in one of the ribosome subunits. (I forget which one and am too lazy to look it up right now) It has a small deleterious effect but prevents chloramphenicol from covalently attaching to and inactivating the ribosome. It has been observed that many bacteria under selection them develop mutations in other areas of the ribosome that help to offset the deleterious effects of the resistance mutation.
Once that happens, the resistance mutation is not only neutral outside of selection but are often locked in as well. The compensatory mutations that helped the ribosome relieve the distortion from the resistance mutation now prevent it from being lost. A single mutation that eliminates the resistance mutation now reintroduces distortion in the ribosome and is negatively selected.
So it's a bit of a stretch to say that beneficial mutations are exclusionary to each other. That is often the case but you should always be careful about making generalizations in biology. Often, you can get beneficial mutations that are locked in that don't revert when the selective pressure is off. This especially applies to mutations that have had significant amounts of time to be refined by subsequent evolution.
Bunnie's go a fairly good blog that has a number of entries on the Chumby manufacturing process that goes into a lot more detail than the interview.
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=7
The concept of licensing goes back much further than that. Early wax cylinder recordings from 100 years ago came with the equivalent of EULAs that stated you were merely buying the rights to play the music contained thereon. While I haven't read up on it myself, a friend of mine once told me that this can be traced another hundred years to the sheet music industry.
Basically, any medium where the final product is easily copied or mass disseminated has tended towards EULA style business models for a while. It's just recently that we've seen a greater move towards physical gadgets being EULA'd up.
Eh, the truth is somewhere in middle as usual. The high bypass turbofans made the 747 possible from an engineering standpoint but it was Trippe's initial commitment that made the 747 development financially tenable.
If you haven't already, you should read Joe Sutter's book about the design of the 747.
Beat me to it. According to Sutter, the 747 was a clean sheet design. I'm sure some of the military plane engineering was incorporated but the 747 was very much its own beast.
Actually, the 787 represents a similar leap of faith. Boeing has basically bet the farm on its success.
Actually, in terms of fuel used per passenger mile, modern aircraft have nearly reached parity with trains. It's just that plane flights tend to cover such long hauls that they are associated with large amounts of fuel consumption.
The airline industry has been gradually moving to twin engine jets because of the better economics and the increased reliability of modern engines. This has been a trend for a long time. It's not helped by the fact that airlines tend to keep the existing 747 fleet flying rather than buying new ones.
Boeing did multiple detailed studies into larger 747 models of a similar size to the A380 and concluded that they would never make their R&D investment back. Heck, the new 747-8 isn't exactly selling like hotcakes right now either. The 747 is slowly being relegated to a cargo transporter - a role it excels at. However, even that might be in question as the new 777 freighter can carry almost as much weight in a smaller footprint.
The A380 is by all means a fantastic airplane. I say that as someone who has a lot of reason to be a Boeing booster. However, the economic model just doesn't make sense. They needed to sell hundreds of the things to break even. With all of the wiring snafus, the development costs ballooned to the point where it is unlikely that Airbus will ever even break even on the project.
Sadly, I suspect that the major motivation for the A380 was bragging rights. Airbus wanted a plane that could unseat Boeing's role as the sole jumbo jet producer. That blinded them to the marginal economic model. There are persistent rumors that Boeing did their part to egg Airbus on as well to distract them while they worked on the 787.
The end result is a great plane that will end up losing billions for its manufacturer. Also, it allowed Boeing to gain a several year head start on Airbus in terms of composite fuselage manufacturing technology. When Boeing announced the 787, it sent Airbus into a panic - all estimates had Boeing being at least 5 years away from being able to do that.
There is a ridiculous amount of maneuvering and strategy in the airplane manufacturing world. Expect things to get even more interesting as Japan and China start moving into the passenger jet market. Even small plane manufacturers like Embraer and Bombardier are rumored to be trying to size up to try and get a bite of the 737/A320 market.
There are persistent rumors that pilots have done 1 G barrel rolls in nighttime transoceanic flights when they're outside the range of ground control radars. As a passenger, unless you were watching the stars, all you'd notice was a bit of rocking in the plane.
I'm a bit dubious of the story since the in flight data recorder would capture that maneuver and it strikes me as fantastic way to lose your flight license. However, since I've heard it a couple times at my workplace - a large aerospace company who's name starts with B and rhymes with "going", I can't entirely dismiss it either.
Yep, airframes have a guaranteed service life measured in number of flight cycles/years of service they operate. There is a large market for operating planes outside that service life to wring some more passenger dollars out of them. Not surprisingly, the 747 is one of the ones that tends to get run the longest, given the huge initial cost of each plane.
There's a huge infrastructure in place that constantly revises operating manuals, inspection schedules and repair guides to handle those aging aircraft. You can fly a 747 pretty much forever but as it ages, the required crack inspections become more and more frequent. These inspections are not simple matter either, many of them basically require stripping the plane down to bare metal, taking it out of service for weeks. Eventually, the downtime costs are greater than the amount of money the plane can generate and it makes a trip out to the boneyard.
I personally put web-based services like Expedia partly to blame here. While things may have changed in the last couple years since I haven't flown recently, my experience with such websites has always been that they fixate on the total cost of the flight. When you search, what flight will most people pick? The cheapest one. Veteran fliers may know which airlines and which flights have better amenities and legroom but the average traveler that flies once or twice a year is relatively clueless and therefore uses price as the sole decision mechanism for choosing a flight.
This has helped to encourage cattle class flights where the ticket price is lowered as much as possible at the expense of service, safety and having to recoup costs through baggage surcharges, etc. Once there is a better mechanism for showing a prospective buyer the legroom and other non-ticket price amenities a given seat has, we'll probably see a reversal in this trend. (note, this may already be happening, I haven't flown in a couple years)
I remember a similar trend happened with PriceWatch for PC components. When it first started, the list price was the only criteria and various companies gouged on S&H, customer service, bait and switch tactics and outright fraud to get the lowest price listing. (Oh, you thought you were looking at a hard drive for that price? Oh no, that's just the IDE cable, sorry that was poorly labeled....not) Eventually, PriceWatch started factoring in S&H in the listings and word of mouth started rewarding sites like Newegg that gave decent customer service at a low but not rock-bottom price.
Eventually, I imagine something similar will happen with air travel.
I'm too lazy to look up references but I know the orbital gun idea has been touched at least twice since Bull. There was a small private firm named Columbiad, IIRC, that was trying to do suborbital launches a few years back, not sure if they're still around.
The US gov't also had a big program using giant rams to push hydrogen gas behind a launch payload. The capital cost was around one $ billion or so because of the sheer scale of the thing. It would have been single-shot orbital insertion, though. Never got past a scale demonstrator.
Basically, the gun concept has a number of weaknesses. One of the primary ones is that it's hard to have any sort of booster that can survive the G forces inherent in a gun launch that gives you any meaningful fraction of orbital delta V.