So you're saying that the Apple... errr... "Watch" is not a timepiece and therefore no confusion is possible?

Or it could just be a story from April 1 2012. This is Slashdot after all.

What about all the cash they get from civil forfeitures? Oh, I forgot, that just pays for vacations, margarita machines, tanning beds, gold plated whistles and things like that. Not for solving crimes.

That's exacty the reason I gave in my explanation, if you read it again. (Just after your cut)

Minimum fuel consumption per mile (ergo total fuel consumption for a trip from A to B) is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and a lower speed in a tailwind.

If an airship can fly at 80 kts (which is very fast indeed for an airship), it will *not* require 100% more power to increase its speed by 5 kts. That's just preposterous. Drag probably increases with the square of the speed just like (roughly) for airplanes. Obviosuly an airship will have more drag at any speed because of its huge frontal area, but the shape of the drag curve will not be drastically different. Certainly not to the point of requiring twice as much power for 5% more speed.

So the comparison with a small plane that has a cruising speed of 80 kts is in fact perfectly valid.

The GGP was talking about making headway against a strong headwind. In a steady headwind, any airplane with an 80 kt cruising speed will see the same effect from that headwind. The fact that the airship happens to be really big does not change the fact that it simply gets the same wind speed vector added to its airspeed.

Gusts would just make the flight more turbulent, but would not change the average speed much.

It was filled with hydrogen, and an exploding shell did not make it explode?

There are legal reasons requiring companies to react to violations of their copyright and trademarks, since they may otherwise legally lose them. However, they could have just reacted with "place a notice on your website that we own all the trademarks and copyrights but gave you explicit permission to keep this excellent remake on your website as long as it's limited to part of the first level."

It's more publicity for their game and may actually lead to more sales from people trying out the web version and then buying the real thing. But alas, lawyers don't think that way.

I wonder how it would survive a missile strike. OK, the helium is not going to explode, but if it leaks out through a big hole in the hull, you're going to go down anyway. You'll need lots of compartments to limit that, and those compartments would add quite a lot of weight.

Just to clarify a common misconception about wind and "windage": many people seem to think that wind affects airplanes the same way as cars, needing more power to keep moving in a headwind. That is not the case. Airplanes fly in the air, they don't care about the ground. If that air happens to be moving, they move along with it. It's an extra speed vector to be added to airspeed, nothing more. Like walking on a conveyor belt, you don't get more or less tired (per minute) when walking at the same pace, but you do move more quickly or slowly depending on the direction of the belt. Airplanes don't "feel" crosswinds either, they just fly straight through the air, but end up moving sideways relative to the ground because of the addition of the two speed vectors.

The only reason why airplanes often use more power in a headwind, is because the pilot may elect to fly faster to (partially) compensate for the wind. An 80 kt airship in a 40 kt headwind will only have a ground speed of 40 kt, so the pilots may well choose to increase power to get a higher ground speed. The economic optimum speed for total fuel consumption over a given distance is at a higher airspeed in a headwind, and at a lower airspeed in a tailwind, simply because the math works out that way: the airship in a 40 kt headwind will get a 10% boost in ground speed (44 i.o. 40) for only a 5% boost in airspeed (84 i.o. 80), which shifts the economic optimum speed upward. But fuel consumption per minute at the same airspeed is the same no matter what the wind is.

So headwinds don't affect the airship any more than it affects a small plane with a cruising speed of 80 kts.

Changing gusts of wind are a different matter, of course. The plane or airship definitely does "feel" those.

I think that's just a small part of it, I know plenty of rich people who give their children junk food, and poor people who make a big effort to only buy healthy stuff.

I think the researchers simply got cause and effect mixed up.

People with smaller brains tend to end up with a lower income and get less education. And their kids end up inheriting the smaller brain from their parents.

Obviously that doesn't mean than all poor people are stupid, just that statistically, people with larger brains tend to do better in life, and this results in a correlation when you look at a sufficiently large number of people.

Makes a lot more sense to me.

Yeah, they'll take it down. They wouldn't want people who have never played the game before to get a taste of the first level and then go and buy the real game, would they? Best to leave them in the dark.

The real reason for the secrecy of confessions is much cleverer.

If you tell people they should confess their sins, and their secrets are safe with the priest, the end result is that the priest knows all the secrets of the village. Need I say more? The local priest used to be the most powerful person in the village, subtly using his knowledge to play the people and instill fear in them. Brilliant idea.

And it's obviously completely impossible to give false answers to those questions. No, never seen a doctor. No depression, nothing, perfectly fine.

That's not true. I, for example, am way above that kind of thinking.