And the BBC's web player doesn't work for US viewers. Doesn't Britain know that it's part of a larger world that might be interested in such a service?

Or maybe it's foolish to harangue slashdot users over the policies of a company they have no control over.

I'm not saying that normal houses don't have their share of waste or that the finished airplane house was leaking hydraulic fluid. I'm saying that it's stupid to call either of them green or sustainable.

I could build a house out of vcr's because of some fetish with magnetic tape but it wouldn't be green or sustainable just because it saved some vcr's from the dump. It would just be a self-indulgent, if whimsical, drain on my extravagant wealth.
(the $50,000 quoted in tfa is a minuscule portion of the house's actual cost)

Sorry to respond to myself but I just had to add some things.

-no, they sure as hell did not disassemble all 4,500,000 pieces. Most of that number is fasteners (rivets) which are destroyed by being removed (and need to be replaced).

-here are a few things that aren't part of a "sustainable" house: many pounds of lead, cadmium all over the place, hydraulic fluid, fuel cells with fuel residue, halon fire suppression system, primer loaded with chromates, toxic insulation, plastic and fabric treated with flame retardants, etc.

-trucked cross-country

What this amounts to is a pile of used scrap aluminum generously sprinkled with hazardous waste. 8 years in aviation maintenance has been enough for me to lose any childhood fantasies about living in airplanes.

It just bugs me that they're using words like green and sustainable around an airplane. Might as well build a house out of pre-RoHS electronics.

-b

Have any of you ever seen a 747?

-b

This article is much more illuminating:
http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=41255&t=Vatican%3A+++Pope+urges+Catholic+press+to+help+discover+truth+in+an+increasingly+virtual+world

I'm not even going to waste my time ridiculing slashdot's editorial decisions...

-b

What?

MBP here with two browsers open 24x7 plus whatever other stuff I have open (avg 4-5 open windows).

Here's the output of my 'uptime' command:
14:59 up 6 days, 14:14, 2 users, load averages: 0.22 0.34 0.54

Here's the top of my 'top' output:
Processes: 60 total, 3 running, 57 sleeping, 319 threads 15:01:50
Load Avg: 0.35, 0.35, 0.51 CPU usage: 4.5% user, 5.1% sys, 90.93% idle
SharedLibs: 8988K resident, 1988K data, 0B linkedit.
MemRegions: 26148 total, 927M resident, 22M private, 454M shared.
PhysMem: 854M wired, 2181M active, 525M inactive, 3560M used, 408M free.
VM: 134G vsize, 1036M framework vsize, 928794(0) pageins, 150(0) pageouts.
Networks: packets: 11435804/7468M in, 10101665/1550M out.
Disks: 1329934/17G read, 604685/24G written.

Seems pretty healthy to me. If you want to point fingers, try firefox (currently using 723 MB real) or itunes (currently using 275 MB real). That just blows my mind. Two of the (ostensibly) most basic programs using more RAM than would fit into my first hard drive.

-b

Bad news: the scotus has already ruled that police can, in fact, legally stand by as you are raped. Even if they know about it. Even if you call for help.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

Also:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html

I have some experience with these barriers- Every American base in Iraq uses thousands of them for building fortification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

You'd usually find a ring of them around a building, two deep, with an additional course laid on top of that. They are, as the wiki article mentions, "one of the less heralded life- and labor-saving devices of war" (among other uses).

I felt pretty safe having them around.

-b

You're kidding, right? You can't turn on the tv without seeing stories and ads about investing in gold. Even glen beck is hawking gold and you cam hardly call him obscure.

This aircraft will not be man-rated. That shaves off years. Then consider that Boeing has decades of cutting-edge research already done and ready to apply.

I work in aerospace. Give me four years and I'll build you an airplane myself. Give me four years and a team of some of the finest engineers on the planet and I'll give you an aircraft that can stay aloft for five years.

This thing will not be another f-22. Even if it was, those problems are solved now anyways. This project is simply a matter of optimizing certain parameters well beyond what is considered typical. Just like the sr71, the a380, or the f-22.

-b

You're not the first person to equate 'permit' with 'bribe'.

I'm not a big fan of paying for permits, but I understand why they exist.

You're a poacher unless you buy a hunting/fishing/trapping license.
You're in violation of most city ordinances unless you purchase a building permit to work on your house.
Where I live you need to purchase a license to buy handguns and 'assault rifles'.
Want to camp in a state/national park? Need to buy a permit.

Those are just a few examples I can think of where you need to pay officials for the privilege of doing something. Are you seriously saying that you consider a camping permit a bribe?

The logic behind this guy's proposal seems shaky, but the issuance of permits for privileges is not a new thing.

-b

I have had to go through that process as well, and it was incredibly frustrating. People get tagged in photos they aren't actually in all the time. So I had to pass the test by guessing which friend was tagged in a picture of a snowmobile or an infant.

I don't know if it's just my friends or if it's commonplace- either way, the system is broken.

-b

This whole story reminds me of a dirty campaign trick from a few years back- I'm not going to figure out which campaign or which election, since that's not important to this example.

Basically what happened was that someone went around stapling up fliers all over poor/wrong color/undesirable neighborhoods exhorting them to vote- but the date on the flier was the day after the real election. When I read about this, the events in question were recent enough to make me pretty angry, and I brought it up at the break table one day. Someone said, "If a person can't figure out what day the election is on, do you really want them voting?"

Someone had the humorous idea of redirecting visitors to a violent DC neighborhood. Probably thinking, "If someone can't figure out the difference between a violent neighborhood and the lincoln memorial, do you want them rallying?" I think in Beck's case the answer would be YES, YES that is exactly who we want, so I can see this being turned into a HUGE national news story as FOX uses this for free advertising and for the sympathy angle. The other networks will pick it up as 'Beck accuses liberals of trying to trick his fans' and that the pure-as-the-driven-snow liberals are shocked- SHOCKED- that anyone would accuse them of underhanded tactics (at least tactics that aren't embarrassingly obvious and transparent from the beginning).

This situation is breaking right as I plan a vacation to europe, and that process is beginning to take on a somewhat frantic flavor...

-b

I have found the ideal way to learn geography (besides going to war*):

At work we have a sealant mixing table where you'll have a captive set of eyes for at least five minutes while the machine does its thing. Someone decided to put up a 3x4 world map directly in front of the worker's station.

So now, for five minutes, 3 or 4 times a day, I get to stare at the world. You start kind of centered in front of Cape Goodenough, from which point you can sort of wander north and east looking for interesting names. At some point we'll have to shift the map to the right a bit, since the neck can get sore from staring towards the americas.

*Oh and I feel I should point out, despite chagrin, that a few of my brothers-in-arms couldn't find themselves on a map when they're deployed. I work with one guy who- in the same breath- talked about deploying to Curaçao where he drank, yes, Curaçao (but pronounced curakow). He couldn't make the connection that the country he was in was spelled the same way as the drink he was ordering. And no one had corrected him in ~10 years.

-b

For the record, the game- and it is a standalone game, not an expansion- is called Fallout: New Vegas.

And if Bethesda was behind it, the radio signal would be Chinese, not Russian.

I'll go away now.

-b