You are wrong.

White Knight Two was designed to be a fully acrobatic aircraft. Burt said what he said. Only a handful of Scaled test pilots has flown this aircraft, and Dick is neither a Scaled test pilot, nor one of those few men.

To everyone else who cares, this particular plane is a proof of concept vehicle, a proto-type. It will be the first of many, and it will be the vehicle that launches the industry. The decals for windows on the left fuselage are to indicate where the design is intended to go. As of right now, there is no reason to waste resources on installing windows, seats, and other things into the left fuselage. The crew flies from the right side.

Disclaimer -- I work for Scaled Composites. I am only clarifying public knowledge that has been given by the customer (Virgin Galactic) or people much higher on the totem pole than myself (Burt Rutan). I cannot provide any further insight.

-- Len

I looked at a handful of his mapped locations, and seriously worry about where he is steering people. Sure, the Joseph Priestly House would be a good place to visit for the budding chemistry geek, but some of the others are seriously misguided.

Take for example the Nikolai Tesla museum in Belgrade, Serbia. A budding mad scientist should know that Tesla, although Serbian, never set foot in Belgrade. His contributions to science started in Graz, Austria, and then really took off in the US. There is no placemarks for Tesla in Pittsburgh, Colorado Springs, nor New York City, where he had his various laboratories, producing things like fluorescent lights and tesla coils.

Or the abundance of atomic bomb test sites, but the absence of places like Edwards Air Force Base, where the speed of sound was first broken. The Glenn-Curtiss museum is included, but not one for the Wright brothers in Dayton, OH.

Other underwhelming things like the Carl Sagan Planet Walk (in Ithaca, NY), should have been dropped all together. I think it went in after he died, and I'm not sure if his widow's pot-smoking paraphernalia shop still exists near the center of the model, anymore.

-- Len

My anecdotal data set indicates that with a modern engine (turbo-charged and non-turbo, tuned port or direct-injection gasoline) with a modern ECU, you will most certainly get better fuel economy with higher octane fuel. My data comes from my personal studies on four different engines from VW, Audi, and Mercedes Benz. The Turbo-charged direct injection I4 benefited the most, followed by the twin-turbo V6, then the normally aspirated V8, then the normally aspirated I4. I have seen between 2-5 mpg increases (before the ethanol mandate). E10 just sucks all around.

Why is this? Well, as you stated, higher octane fuels are more resistant to pre-detonation than lower octane fuels. This is what gives better efficiency. Most modern engines are equipped with knock sensors, which the ECU's use to advance or retard the spark as required. This is what clues in the ECU to what kind of octane rating the fuel has. If you are running a higher-octane fuel, the ECU will lean out the mixture and adjust the spark timing to maximize the power for the amount of fuel used. Lower octane fuels burn hotter, and must be kept at a richer mixture (lowering mpg).

In the case of the turbo-charged engines, pre-detonation is a much bigger issue, as the turbo makes sure that there will be an abundance of oxygen to combust with the fuel. Because of this, most turbo-charged engines require a high-octane fuel to start with. Running a lower-octane fuel on a modern engine (turbo or not) causes the ECU to advance the spark to avoid knocking and pre-detonation, which wastes some of the combustion energy on the compression stroke.

-- Len

I have a 2006 VW GLI. It has a 2.0L turbo-charged, direct injected engine in it. While driving across the country a few years ago (before the federal mandate hit), I averaged 34 mpg while driving in non-ethanol states. Once I hit states that had already started adding ethanol to the gasoline, my fuel economy dropped to 27 mpg.

I was shocked! Changing the fuel to 10% ethanol resulted in a drop in fuel economy by 21%. I couldn't reconcile the drop, as it didn't make sense that ethanol would drive my economy worse by an amount greater than the percentage of ethanol added.

I don't drive like a maniac, and discovering this caused me to reform my driving habits to get better fuel economy. The best I have been able to manage since the mandate is 29 mpg. Again, I was getting 34 mpg on straight non-ethanol gasoline, while driving more aggressively.

I did some further research, and found that Volkswagen's stance on ethanol is to absolutely not use it, ever. My engine uses a new technology (gasoline direct injection) that is emerging in just about every high-efficiency gasoline engine that is on the current or near horizon. All of them will have the same detrimental performance with ethanol blend fuels.

This will set up a situation where the non-government controlled auto industry, attempting to meet the new aggressive CAFE standards will be fighting against the government castrated companies and the ethanol lobby. I hate to admit that we will all be losers in the end, as the former winning will increase fuel economy, but probably cause fuel taxes to rise to make up for lost revenue from increased mileage. The latter's win will also increase the cost of fuel, while further decreasing mileage on new direct-injection engines.

-- Len

No, the homophobic or heterophobic bigot stories don't do anything for me.

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "exact same thing" because I was taking the connotation of frivolous, useless, or pedantic, for the word that got your panties all bunched up.

I'll keep in mind that I should politically cleanse my quoted material, least I transgress a member of our community who is easily offended or aroused by words that may call into question the asexuality of the Lego Soup Spoon builders. I wouldn't want to imply that they may have found sexual partners of either same or opposite sex.

-- Len

Absolutely! I was thinking the exact same thing, but your hypothetical article title was better.

-- Len

You are referring to the YF-12A, which did fly and successfully launch an air-to-air guided missle, while flying at mach 3.2 at 74,000 feet, hitting a target drone flying at 500 feet altitude. Amazing, given the state of electronics and guidance technology at the time. Hell, all of the technology for the A-12 / YF-12 / SR-71 is still amazing today.

Anyway, the YF-12 was acknowledged and publicized so it could be used as a cover for the similar A-12 and follow-on RS-71 planes. It wasn't much of a stretch to think that we had ever-faster interceptors, but a stratospheric, Mach 3+ spy plane? That was science fiction. The RS-71 was re-named the SR-71 after Lyndon Johnson flubbed the name on live television. They changed all drawings and documents for the program, an amazingly expensive waste of tax-payers dollars, just so that no one would have to correct the Commander in Chief.

-- Len

I don't know if it was a compliment or an insult. Not that I or anyone else with basic video editing skills couldn't insert the audio of someone yelling "Kill Him!" after the fact.

I prefer to look at facts like what the Secret Service investigation found, rather than a questionably sourced video. I guess that makes me a troll to those that find the truth inconvenient.

-- Len

Yeah, I remember that, because it supposedly happened in my home state. Unfortunately, it was a complete fabrication by the reporter who ascribed the comment to the anonymous crowd. This defaming lie was discovered a few days later and then not discussed again, because it had done its damage and was only useful as a dodge or diversion from serious questions about Obama's past affiliations and his suitability to lead the country.

I don't have any familiarity with "Mudflats" but I suspect her actions were in the same vein as the reporter who fabricated the "kill him!" story. Politics is ugly, and use of anonymity to defame should have no place.

And it is a good thing that they didn't exist, except in the minds of the paranoid and bigoted who just know what kind of people republicans or conservatives are.

I'm sure that's how Joe the Plumber feels. Wait a second, he was real, and people did abuse their power to go after him for publicly daring to ask Obama a serious and real question, using his own name! If I remember correctly, people were accusing him of using a pseudonym, because his middle name, not his first name, is Joe, and that he didn't have a plumber's license, so how could he be a plumber. Nevermind that he asked the first pertinent question that our current President had faced for at least the two weeks prior to that event. Destroy him!

Nothing to see here, move along...

-- Len

You're way off base with regards to Apple and 64-bit. OS X (generic including iPhone, AppleTV and Mac OS X), has a really elegant mechanism for having multiple architecture binaries included for each program, without triggering .DLL hell. In this way, Apple, as well as developers, can target multiple architectures during the build, and deliver for multiple architectures. I think it is as easy or easier for them to support multiple architectures as it is for Microsoft and the NT derivatives. For God's sake, NeXT Step/OpenStep, the core of what became Cocoa was ported to PA-Risc, SPARC, x86, i960, 680x0, and PowerPC, as well as to run as a system atop the NT kernel, Solaris, and HP-UX; all before Apple bought NeXT. This code has been portable from day one.

Snow Leopard at this point, may or may not be Intel only, but it will be built and delivered for both 64-bit and legacy x86 in the same packages, just as contemporary Leopard ships with PowerPC 32, PowerPC 64, intel x86 and intel x86-64 binaries in one package. Subsets of the same Snow Leopard codebase will be delivered in a stripped down version for ARM9 for the iPhone. The decision to make Snow Leopard Intel-only, will likely be a pure marketing decision, just as how I cannot buy a version of Vista, XP, or Server 2008 for any chips other than Intel 32 or 64.

On to the issue of running sub-systems for compatibility, it sounds like you are describing the NT kernel as a version of the Mach kernel, and then denying that any other OS other than NT has the ability to do this. News flash, OS X, AIX, and OSF/1, MkLinux, and the GNU/Hurd are all Mach-based to some degree or other, and all have this capability for the last twenty years.

I do agree with your statements on developer tools. Microsoft has done the right thing by facilitating development with good tools, but I think Apple has got a good start at tackling that problem. Their choice of using GCC was a pragmatic decision, and now they are filling their portfolio of tools with much better options, as well as contributing back to OpenSource. Integrating dTrace, LLVM, and a few other tools that escape my mind, show the direction that they are going. XCode has had steady improvements and is a pretty good IDE. Also, Apple does not charge for tools, and are likely not going to do that in the near future. How much does a seat of VS cost now?

-- Len

The default behavior for Windows has a 2GB limit because Windows gives a 4GB VM space to 32-bit programs, but it partitions it into 2GB for the program and 2GB for the kernel. This behavior does not change with 64-bit windows

As per your link, you can set program specific parameters to enlarge the program window to 3GB on 32-bit systems or the full 4GB on 64-bit systems, but this is not the default case. Since both of these rely on PAE being present, only newer programs, where the developer made the proper provisions, will work well. You have to have a system that uses PAE, and most 32-bit systems doe not have this support. Every program that I have used that had support for large images, were shipped with this parameter un-set, and cautionary notes were attached about enabling this capability.

-- Len

Actually, it will be a full 64-bit OS from kernel to user with legacy support for 32-bit carbon and cocoa. By your reasoning, XP 64 and Vista 64-bit aren't 100% either as both use the less-elegant WoW for 32-bit stuff and System32 for the 64-bit bits. This, in addition to the fact that Microsoft requires separate versions, rather than just shipping a product that covers both architectures. There's also that pesky problem that most programs for Windows are 32-bit apps, and many are very fragile on the 64-bit Windows platform. I'll stop now.

As it also happens with Snow Leopard, as the kernel goes full 64-bit (on Core 2 and newer machines). Current Leopard already gives the 64-bit benefits of increased registers and larger VM space to 64-bit programs, so there isn't a lot more to gain. These capabilities are not magically transferred to 32-bit apps under any OS, as the architecture is different, so there is no way that Vista-64 or Win7-64 will gift 32-bit apps with more than the 2GB of address space that they are currently allowed (vs. the full 4GB that OS X gives to 32-bit apps). Any speed increase comes from taking less time for register shuffles on 64-bit programs, giving more time to all processes.

Oh ho! What a canard. A simple re-compile was what has been hamstringing 64-bit graphics drivers and codecs for the last three years or so on XP-64 and Vista-64? Apple doesn't sell it's API's, it just publishes them. Adobe had 8 years of warning and opportunity to move it's cruft from Carbon to a cleaner, more modern API, and they decided to play chicken because Apple started eating their lunch with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. Being Carbon developers, they knew that it would not be an easy to clean up all of the legacy crap in the API without breaking backwards compatibility. Developing the iPhone was the final nail in Carbon's coffin.

Yes, this is why Microsoft came up with thunking and the 16-bit \System folder and the 32-bit \System32 folder for Win32, which became the 32-bit \WoW and 64-bit \System32 folder. Brilliant. It isn't quite fair to drag System 9 applications into this mess. Do old Borland TurboPascal programs magically compile to 64-bit? Most System 9 programs were done as projects in Metrowerks Code Warrior with the PowerPlant framework, a system that was bought and buried by Motorola. Mac OS 9 was a cooperatively multi-tasked mix of PowerPC and 680x0 code, which used legacy system calls that needed Paschal syntax. OS X is basically a BSD Unix with no 680x0 code that uses GCC for compilation. Different architectures, compilers, system calls, hell the only things that are the same are the word "Mac" and "Apple". Up until the the Intel switch, you could run Mac OS 9 code, similar to WoW, without a re-compile. In most cases, the question is why would you want to.

Yes, I remember those extremely expensive DEC Alpha NT PC's. They had what, about three programs available for them? They were great at running bench marks, but didn't even have all of the normal included programs that you got when you bought NT for the PC. I don't remember ever seeing an Alpha running anything other than VMS in the real world. At that time, NT wasn't really good at doing much of anything other than letting you still click things while the hour glass was being displayed. Oh, and what use was one of those Alpha PC's for their 64-bitness if you couldn't install more than 4 GB of RAM or actually run any programs?

At that time, the big push from Microsoft was to entice CAD companies to port their UNIX packages to NT, where the POSIX and OpenGL support was a joke, but still garnered bullet point status on sales literature. I had a newly minted Pentium Pro NT box on my desk with the just-ported Pro/Engineer installed. It was still very-much faster to use the then 8-year old HP/UX box that was also on my desk, to do the work, because it wasn't hanging on network transfers or crashing all the time. NT 4 wasn't really useful until after SP5 was released, and by that time, the non x86 platforms had basically died off. I don't even recall if SP6 was made available for the Alpha.

Apple should have qualified their add to specify that they had the first truly useful 64-bit PC. That would have put them in the clear.

-- Len

I met a few students from Iran at a robotics competition when I was in my graduate studies. They were remarkably resourceful, mostly because they couldn't get many components that we take for granted.

While most robots in the contest had modern solid-state motor controls, the Iranians were attempting to do PWM with electromechanical relays. We had slick SMT chips, they had discrete wire-leaded components. They did very well, in spite of their extremely limited electronic part availability and most of their components came from cannibalizing something else.

I remember not too long ago people talking about making small clusters of PS3's to crunch heavy calcs. I'm sure that if the Iranian government could get a hold of enough of them, they would probably build the largest cluster of PS3's in the world. The same could be done by resourceful people with a bunch of printer RISC processors. I mean, doesn't Linux run on just about anything now?

Just because it doesn't seem like a good or efficient idea to you because you can get a farm of dual-quad-core boxes with multi-TB storage and Many-gig RAM, doesn't mean that it isn't a great idea for people who could only dream of getting something as powerful as a 486DX with 20 Meg of RAM.

-- Len

My conscience is clear and I no longer work for that firm.

I had to deal with months of sleepless nights, wrestling with that information. The anthrax scare in the immediate period after the 9/11 attacks brought fears of culpability through inaction. Those letters ended up being sent by one of our own deranged scientists.

Likewise, having friends and children of friends being sent to Iraq, clearly focused for me the tangled web we weave. Has anything you designed, built or coded been used to hurt other people? How about indirectly? What about actions taken for profit motives? Our equipment was designed for beneficial biological research. The actions of our CEO were arguably for the benefit of the shareholders and employees who depended on that order to stay in business. When the actual end use context is applied, the situation looks much uglier and quite scandalous.

The shocking thing for me about this episode is the amount of stuff that happened "above board". Sure, this company had a back-up plan of using foreign intermediaries. Instead, they went to the Commerce Department. The donation from our CEO showed up on public transparency websites dealing with campaign finance. The extremely close timing between the donation and the commerce department approval is not obviously linked, unless you know to look.

Transparency did not prevent this transaction, because there aren't enough watch dogs. Who is to say that every export license granted is for exactly what it says it is for? Sure we were sending equipment related to medical research, but there was a known absence of medical research and a known massive biological weapons program in existence at the time in Iraq. The dual-use nature of the equipment should have stopped the order in Commerce, but the right lubrication ($$) and the application of selective omission got the whole deal through.

We got Dr. Germ and her friend Dr. Anthrax. My gut feeling is that most of the equipment in this transaction was destroyed in the initial invasion, or looted in the aftermath. Either way, the equipment is no longer traceable and the biological weapons program no longer viable.

-- Len