So THAT's what happened. Your minions hijacked the plane and flew it to your secret submarine airbase, which rises to the surface when needed!

A British airliner that disappeared a few miles from the airport back in 1951 was recently discovered. Its next-to-last messages (via Morse Code) were that it was close to landing. Its fate was unknown until 1998. And that was on land. The area to be searched, given the best possible scenario with present data, is IIRC 22,000 square miles, about the size of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire combined - about 1/3 of New England or about the same as Latvia or Lithuania, or 2/3 of Scotland. This is a much harder problem than the Air France jet of a few years ago, where they knew within a small range where the plane was likely to be.

I don't think it's possible for the pilot to shut off the flight recorders, at least without climbing all over the airplane. They are independently powered and situated at the back of the plane. They may only be accessible from outside the plane - I don't know this for sure.

To add to that, that area of ocean has about the worst conditions for ships, planes or helos. The "Roaring Forties" is not named that for nothing. A typical 'nice' day there will have 30 to 60 knot winds and 20 foot seas, plus a lot of fog, clouds and rain, air temps in the 0C to 10C range, and sea temps of 0C. Of course, if that's too balmy, there's always the Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties. The Indian Ocean gradually becomes the Southern Ocean, which is the only ocean that has no barriers to its west-to-east current to slow it down, and the air above it is the same. The speeds are also multiplied because this is the air current that is balancing the east-to-west flow at the Equator, and also the rising air over the Equator sinks back down around the 30th parallel. But the circumeferential of the Earth at that latitude is about 1/2 that at the Equator, so the air travels twice as fast.

Think of Jupiter, and the tremendous winds generated there and the different bands going different ways - if there were no land masses the winds on Earth would look similar.

Then there's the depth and underwater terrain - the depth ranges from 3000 to 23000 feet (Mt. Everest is 29000) and is reportedly very rugged with canyons etc. It's one of the least explored parts of the global ocean, because of the conditions.

Most of the electronics in the cockpit - radios especially - are decades-old technology. This is in part because of the overlapping and 'rigorous' FAA and FCC standards. If a single component - a resistor, whatever - is changed, the entire unit has to go through certification all over again, by both agencies. This costs perhaps $10 million, and the total sales of that model radio may be 10,000 units, which means the amortized cost of certification is on the order of $1000 per radio. That is direct cost in advance of manufacturing. Back when I was flying, CB radios that cost under $100 had better reception and better voice quality than $3000 aircraft radios.

You're such a sentimentalist. :)

I haven't kept up, but it sez here::

WRT to OSX, there is history. Back in the days of NeXT, Jobs & co. decided to use Display Postscript for a variety of reasons. A few of the reasons: X back then was huge, ungainly and a total beast to work with using the limited memory and cycles available (The NeXTstation used a 25MHz 68000); their team were not ever going to be able to morph X into an object-oriented platform, which NeXT definitely was; Display Postscript was Adobe's new Hotness; the NeXT folks could write drivers for DP that worked with the Texas Instruments signal processor (TM-9900? I forget), which was truly amazingly fast at screen manipulation; and the X architecture didn't fit well with either Display Postscript or the TM-9900.

In 2001 I had a NeXTstation that I added some memory and a bigger disk to. The machine was by then more than 10 years old. For normal workstation duties, it was faster than my brand new desktop machine due entirely to the display architecture. But compiling almost anything on that 25MHz CPU was an overnight task - I had one compile that ran three days.

... has been going on for almost as long as coinage itself. One of the advantages of paper money (in addition to weight, lower manufacturing cost, etc.) is that it can be harder to forge. Any shmuck with a press can create coins that are hard to distinguish from the real thing. On a larger scale, one of the big problems today with gold is people hollowing out gold bars and filling them with tungsten, or starting with tungsten and wrapping a small amount of gold. These are indistinguishable from the real thing, for the non-expert and even for experts without the necessary equipment (and suspicion).

IANA bitcoin holder, but having looked into the original Nakamoto paper (which is short and much better than any of the derivatives), and discussed this with people who know, the bitcoin methodology or protocol or whatever is with us to stay, and will be used for a lot of things beyond just digital money. The same methodology will be essential for things like secure confirmed transactions between entities far distant from each other (like space stations, moon colonies, etc. - this happens to be one of my interests); it will be used for 'digital contracts' with its internal scripting system, and perhaps even for guaranteed unique digital identity; and it has the powerful feature that it doesn't depend on any external agency - governments or whatever. So bitcoin itself is having growing pains, and it may or may not survive and grow, but don't believe that the methodology won't be an essential part of many future activities.

Amusing - according to Wikipedia, egg albumin is used as a binder. Oops, not so vegan after all!

Hence butts.

Yes, metals are bad. Water (source of hydrogen = protons) is the best shield, or so say Those Who Know Such Things.

That doesn't work. You don't have orbital velocity at that elevation. You essentially have 0 velocity relative to the Earth, until gravity starts to pull you down. So you'd still have to have some large amount of thrust to get you moving at 7-9km/s horizontally. Now you _could_ go to say, 2x LEO and start falling while you accelerate. But that's still a lot of fuel etc.

I'll just note that the X-window system was designed and built for systems much more powerful than the ones it was built on. The designers knew the capabilities would be available 'soon'. That's not a great example but indicative. Doing thought experiments of this kind is not stupid, just hopeful. Leonardo Da Vinci designed a simple airplane that was proved to be workable in the last decade or two. Da Vinci couldn't have built it because there were no motors to drive it at that time.

This provides a perfect excuse for an experiment / prank I've always wanted to do - hang a roll of toilet paper out of a plane and let it spin out and fall. Today's version would be to take a balloon to the top of the atmosphere and drop a ribbon to the ground, then let the top go. Make it out of something fish can eat, and do it over the ocean, so it doesn't pollute too much and you don't have to worry overmuch about wrapping it around someone's house 50 miles away.

I like coilguns. I especially like the idea of a coilgun in Ecuador, running up the Andes. It's not an ideal 45 degrees, but it'll do. 100 km coilgun with 3G acceleration, gets you to around 2500m/s (5600 mph) IIRC, which is about 1/3 orbital velocity and essentially replaces the entire first stage of a rocket stack. Exit altitude is a bit low for that speed though.