Think of them as more efficient higher capacity longer range helicopters.

Prop plane max ceiling is due to losing lift for the wings and oxygen for the engines at high altitudes, same as jet planes. Jets being faster, and lift being proportional to the square of the speed, jets can go higher, but it's got nothing to do with resistance of props.

Prop planes have a lot more trouble breaking the sound barrier. I know sometimes prop tips go supersonic, but they lose efficiency, and I don't think any prop plane has ever gone supersonic, even in a dive out of control.

Karma from their patent wars. Their resources switching from innovation to legal wrangling, especially their management shifting focus from future products to past competitive products which they can sue over, that's got to be a big drain, and especially damaging to their entire mindset. Could even be a bit of inheritance problem -- Steve Jobs left them a legacy of patent wars and a unique style, and it's much harder to reproduce his style and taste than merely hiring lots of lawyers, so they focus on what they know they can do instead of what they should be doing. Thus it always is with inherited kingdoms. The first generation was successful because of themselves, hard work, and the luck of having the right ideas at the right times. The second generation has no gut memory of the hard work, slacks off, focuses on the easy to understand, and the ephemeral luck and instincts which built the empire vanish.

Of course, Wall Street would never say such a thing in public. I wonder if they even say it to each other in private.

Cars have been a significant factor for less than a hundred years, considering early cars were a lot slower and not that common. Evolution takes a lot longer to effect changes.

It was too far to go around.

Try a mirror or two.

Too late -- several, scratch that, a gazillion people already have the patent on internet patents. Now if they all get busy and start suing each other, they won't have time to sue anybody doing real work.

Bear with me here ...

Japanese syllables generally start with a consonant and end with a vowel, or are a vowel alone. Thus "McDonalds" is something like "ma ku do na ru do" and a Big Mac is a biggu makku.

For some reason, they used the American pronunciation of "Mexico" (meks sih ko) as the basis for their word, which comes out as "may kee shi ko". But the Spanish pronunciation "may hee ko" copies over almost perfectly into Japanese. It's a shame they copied the wrong pronunciation.

I suppose the proper pronunciation could be coming into vogue. It ought to be.

But there's your Japanese Mexico USA connection.

The linked story is about the plea by the jetskier. The actual incident was back in August.

I am not exactly sure what you mean by "data transmission". But might running SMTP by hand using telnet be on the right path for beginners?

I have astonished a few friends who think computers are complicated just by "telnet domain.com 25" and running through a simple SMTP session to send a simple email. It's suddenly not quite so mysterious as before.

You can also do HTTP, but usually the returned data is too complex for a tty window. On the other hand, if you run your own webserver and "telnet localhost 80", you can set up simple pages to return.

It will be interesting to see who he thinks his employer is ... the people or the government?

I get the impression that NASA is so hung up on finding life on Mars that instead of letting the data speak for itself, all they investigate is organics or things that look like they could have been microbes a billion years ago.

I note it's not governments doing the harassing and shaming, which is what the First Amendment protects against. It's individuals exercising the same free speech she exercised.

Just as I would defend her right to be an ass, I would defend others rights to tell her, and the world, that she was an ass. And if she discovers that being an ass and making provocative statements has a price, well, stand up for your right to be provocative, don't cower and whine and say you weren't trying to be provocative. Wear your problems like a hero's badge. What? You say you didn't want to be a hero? Well, maybe next time you need to think a little.

It's one thing to smoke a ciggie in front of a sign forbidding smoking, or standing behind a No Trespassing sign. Did she really think no one would be upset at pretending to insult dead soldiers? I notice she wasn't daring enough to actually smoke in front of people, only a sign. Maybe next time she should try something really daring, like toking up in a police station.

Sometimes dumb is just dumb, and is its own reward, and dumb people need to wise up.

If you want to look for a result, you already have one: descendant lives, potential competitor doesn't. It's nothing new under the sun. Put it down to genetic reflex if you want, but only someone willfully blind won't see it as having solved the problem. Just because it's abhorrent to most everybody else doesn't make it irrational to his thinking.

Refusing to understand delusions does nothing to help prevent the results of those delusions. How can you fix problems you don't understand? I consider that irrational too. If you like living in a world governed by irrational fiat rather than understanding, you're on the right track.