He's a secular despot, which I'd take over any theocracy.

Putin is no angel, but under his watch Russia has been a far better world citizen than the USA, by any measure.

Had I mod points tonight, you'd have got an informative. Thank you.

Very true. Pebble looks the best solution for now but with the Apple watch and the equally interesting looking Microsoft Band thingy the market is hardly mature.

My reply appeared above your comment, for some reason... Bird strike inside of the FAA rules should be acceptable as an everyday occurence (laundry bills aside). 1549 was outside of these rules (many more birds hitting both engines) and it was a lucky escape; a very experienced pilot and a suitable place for a ditching (The first well-observed and survivable ditching in maybe 50 years? - it was by no means certain that ditching was a safe manoevre; all the substantiation was from scale model tests and simulation - no full-size tests).

To be quite blunt: if a bird of 8lb goes into your engine you're ok, if a bird of 9lb goes into your engine there's no guarantee. If the bird's bigger brother goes down the other engine then you're in the realms of statistical probabilities and prayer.

One of the institutions of which our colonial cousins should be very proud is the FAA, who make all the aerospace regulations freely available. These may seem like archaic and restrictive laws to prevent you from building your own aeroplane/rocket/drone but in fact they are extremely well researched and analysed specifications for anyone who wants to make a safe aeroplane/rocket/drone. They are also copied pretty much verbatim by everyone except the Russians (who have a similar system but with significantly worse weather!) and us Europeans, who go to great lengths to harmonise with the FAA so that the rules are more or less equivalent

So let's get to details and look at 33.76 regarding bird strike. The rules regarding what an aircraft engine should be able to ingest are enlightening: even the largest engines are only certified safe to fly after ingesting a bird of 8lb. This is a lot less than a person (that was a ridiculous example from the GP; ingesting a person would destroy an engine). Birds are obviously a lot more easily ingested than a carbon-fibre and steel drone.

Any reasonably large drone would have enough mass to endanger a civil airliner and you're just playing the numbers until one is brought down with three to four hundred deaths.

I think the problem is similar in both cases; the actual technical part, that people on /. are likely to enjoy, becomes a smaller part of the job the longer and/or more successful you are at it. If you work for a commercial enterprise then you are a businessman, and the people who enjoy that environment and get on are not generally the techies. If you want to stay in pure technical work then think about academia.

Very well put. I took an engineering degree at one of the World's best schools (Cambridge University) I ended up as an aerospace engineer and it has not been a bad life, all told; I could take you around most civil airliners and show you the parts that were 'mine' with some pride.

What I know now is that I would have been happier and/or richer being either:

(a) a banker, or

(b) a programmer.

Most of engineering is very, very dull indeed.

No they're not.

Uh, me, right now, and pretty much always...

Viewing the world through the letter slot of widescreen displays is simply horrid - HDTV set the computer graphics world back by well over a decade, and we're only just now beginning to release ourselves from its slimy clutches...

The inspector would write up faults, they would fix them, he would write up new faults...eventually he lost patience and let it be known that the real problem was that he hadn't yet found a blank envelope filled with cash.

This is Texas after all - a call to the Texas Rangers might well have ended that kind of corruption for good - most inspectors are state-licensed, and it's hard to make a living if you've lost your license. I'm not saying we're corruption-free here, but in my experience, the level of common ethical business standards is still much higher in Texas than in some other states I've done business in. (Cough, *California*, cough *Illinois*, cough, *New Jersey*...)

Really, if Tesla gets their way, then GM (or Toyota, VW, etc) can force you to get your GM car serviced only through "authorized" GM service centers, under pain of voiding your warranty. Especially in today's world of telematics, they will control your car more than you do. Is that what consumers want? I damn sure don't...

Tesla's model is hideously proprietary and abusive of its customers. The silly thing is that Tesla's customers are such fanboys that they cheer Tesla on in their subjugation of their rights as customers.

I'm no fan of dealers, but at least at a dealer there's a *chance* someone cares about me, if they're locally owned and not part of one of the increasing number of megachain dealerships. That chance is near-zero if my only choice is to deal directly with the manufacturer.

I said it before, Tesla is evil, and no amount of greenwashing can change that...

Remember that the dealership layer was inserted by the states to PROTECT consumers from the crushing power of the auto manufacturers, and add some local accountability through choice. (Choice that has vanished lately as we've allowed huge dealer networks to replace that local ownership, more or less defeating the original purpose.)

There are certainly significant problems with the current model, but remember that the current dealership model was created to address problems that resulted from exactly what Tesla is asking for - direct control of the customer relationship by the manufacturer, especially during the rapid consolidation of brands in the first three decades of the 20th century. That means we should at least THINK about what we're doing here before we make reactionary policy changes either for or against what Tesla's asking for. I'm no big fan of the dealership model, but I am skeptical that if Tesla gets what they want, that it won't be a huge win for the big manufacturers at the expense of local power and control, and ultimately, at the expense of buyers. (Dealers who regard customer service as a possibly necessary evil aren't exactly helping themselves here, of course...)

State government policy should first serve both the people and the corporations (which are just legally "embodied/corporeal" groups of people empowered to act as a single person) of the state. The best ironclad principle of true libertarian conservatism is that government power and control must be kept as local (at as low a level) as possible, as the higher it rises, the more corrupt and evil it will eventually become. Neither big government nor big business is a good thing, but the two of them "working together" is pretty much always a very bad thing...

This is just errant bigotry against Texas. If you actually knew anything about he state that's creating 75% of the new jobs in the entire US, you'd realize that there is a *very* competitive labor market here.

I definitely have to pay more for talented or skilled software people here (especially in Austin) than in other parts of the country. Hell, if you've got a CDL and can pass a drug test, you can make $100K+ driving an oilfield truck - all due to the economic miracle called fracking - no thanks to the US Government, which has tried its best to kill the strongest economic engine still running in the US... That said, there are a LOT of programmers who aren't worth what they're getting paid, and when the next bubble burst in the mobile/social software space, there are going to be many people out of work and with suddenly unmarketable skills.

BTW, it's not like the laws here are hurting Tesla any - Here in Austin, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of the things. I know one thing - I'd sure hate to own a Mercedes or BMW dealership, since that demographic has made the Tesla the currently trendy car for show-off poseurs.

Thank you. Homo Habilis was the point to which I was referring. When I was a kid my Dad had a book from Reader's Digest all about the development of homo sapiens. It was called The Last Two Million Years

Where did I say we need to do it now? I'm not an idiot, I'm an engineer. I just said we need to do it in the next billion years or so.