I was hoping it was the Cybernaughts, but nooooo... Slashdot went the cheap and easy route.

Indeed. It would have been funny if the answer was "There is now". But as is, it's just lame.

*sigh* Do pay the fuck attention.

The statement wasn't about efficiency, it was about the ability to maintain speed over ground. Aircraft (and airships) do need more power to maintain a given speed over ground in the face of a headwind, period. All this bull about efficiency and relative airspeed is just pedantic nitpicking that fails to make you look intelligent.

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

True, but misleading - while they don't need more power to maintain speed relative to the airflow, they do need more power to maintain speed over ground. (To "make headway" as the sentence you quoted states.) Airships (and the occasional small HTA craft) have been observed making negative speed over ground while maintaining a positive speed relative to the local airflow.*
 

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

All your irrelevant handwaving bullshit aside, you've left one absolutely vital factor out of your idealized calculation - an airship isn't a small plane. It had a sail area orders of magnitude (or more) higher, which means the effects of a given wind (head, tail, or cross) are much higher than they are for a small plane. While a heavier than air craft might have to increase power 5% to overcome a given headwind and maintain speed over ground, the larger sail area of a lighter than aircraft means it may have to increase power by 100% or more (and it goes without saying that they rarely have that much reserve power).
 
Or to put it another way, you're wrong. Wind (head, tail, or cross) do affect airships more than they do small planes. Airships can be, and have been, blown all over creation by rather modest winds which a heavier than air craft simply plows right through. The concerns over their ability to make speed over ground (headway) and maintain course are based on observation and engineering reality, not "misconceptions".

*This difference between speed over ground and speed versus local airflow is why aircraft carriers turn into the wind for launch and recovery operations.

However, when reading articles about the Airliner, it is always about the technical gobbledegook that engineers and airship geeks get off on... never does it cover the things that matter to the potential investor

If the potential investor isn't interested in the technical gobbledegook, he probably shouldn't be investing. Or at least he shouldn't be at this point, when the technology is still unproven and the hardware still in the prototype stage.

On top of the irony that on a site for "news for nerds" a comment is highly rated which complains the article is "too technical" rather than sounding like a marketing pitch designed to "fire the imagination of twelve year olds".

It is a complicated technology

Seriously, there's nothing there anyone who knows even the basics of accounting wouldn't recognize. It's just wrapped in a high-tech packaging.

Exactly this. Accountants have been dealing with multiple currencies, currency exchange, etc... for centuries. Bitcoin is nothing new, nor particularly complicated from an accounting point of view.

The grandparent just sounds like a variant of the typical Bitcoin fan's anti-goverment rhetoric. He doesn't even grasp that the Chinese goverment didn't try and regulate Bitcoin - it just made it illegal for banks to trade in Bitcoin. (Sensible, given it's inherent volatility.)

Whereas satellites generally have a pre defined orbit.

Um.... the X-37B is a satellite.
 

I imagine the X37B can change orbit on cue and monitor hot spots around the world.

Too lazy to go look up the exact numbers, but conventional recce birds have been doing that on a regular basis since the 1970's.

Yeah, we're up to 2 busted nuclear plants in the whole world.

Chernobyl, Fukishima, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Fermi... that's 5sites just off the top of my head. We've only had two major accidents - but enough serious incidents and close misses that only a fool would talk about how having only two "busted"plants is proof of anything.

So, when the Wright Brothers were building their plane you were standing their telling them it couldn't be done eh?

Nope. Unpowered flight already existed by the time the Wright brothers headed to Kitty Hawk, and powered flight was right on the edge of possibility. The drives you propose, aren't. The problem is, you don't grasp that fundamental difference and thus assume that people who aren't as egregiously ignorant as you are the ones in the wrong.
 

Just because there isn't off the shelf technology at the moment doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for longer term solutions to interplanetary travel.

True. But those solutions must fall within the bounds of physics and chemistry - and nuclear reactors and ion engines, for the reasons I outlined, don't. Absent new physics, they never will.
 

Regardless of the propulsion system, having electrical power, lots of it, is the difference between coasting from A to B in a tin can vs something that could actually be called a Ship.

Only to someone who doesn't grasp physics in general as well as the mathematics behind orbital mechanics. Absent new physics, all vehicles in space are going to spend far more time coasting than under power.

It's time to stop jetting around the solar system on chemical rockets. Designers and funding should be directed towards lofting and running multi-megawatt reactors. They would be used to power multiple ION engines

Yes... let's develop heavy power sources in order to power weak propulsion systems - what a great idea! Multiple ones aren't much better, you still need to power them, and you have to multiply a small number (thrust per engine) by dozens (or more) to get a usefully large number (thrust) for any significant spacecraft. (Which will still be far short, by orders of magnitude, for a useful size for a manned mission.)

Their extraordinary ISP is very attractive from an academic point of view and when considered in isolation... but real world vehicles aren't academic and the engines are but one part of the whole vehicle. When you start to design an actual vehicle and an actual mission, their extraordinarily low thrust-to-weight ratio precludes them from being useful except in a few very specific circumstances.

As an engineer I want to reuse and expand and not throw anything away.

If you were truly an engineer (a real one, not just someone with an overinflated title), you'd know that things age and wear out.
 

NASA can't build tin cans that can survive in space for a hundred years? There are planes from WW2 that are still flying and those rattle.

A real engineer grasps the impact of parts count and complexity. Not only is the ISS not just a "tin can", those planes are orders of magnitude simpler than the ISS.
 
Not to mention that those planes take hundreds of man hours a year to maintain in flyable condition - and man hours in space cost tens of thousands per.
 

Things get at least a hundred times cheaper when they don't have to survive the stresses of liftoff.

Sure, as any engineer knows, you can easily manufacture things given enough infrastructure. Since you're an "engineer", you should be able to estimate the cost of developing a (currently non existent) weightless capable factory complex, and the costs of placing hundreds to thousands of tons on orbit, and the ongoing costs of logistics, support, and maintenance needed to produce those "hundreds of times cheaper" parts. You'll also be able to understand that a space craft is made of hundreds of different kinds of materials, only a few of which are amenable to recycling.

She has every right to delete email she sends and receives. Saying she doesn't is a slippery slope towards making all of us responsible for data retention wrt our own email.

That's the thing, these weren't her emails. They were the official communications of an elected official, OUR emails.

Middle of nowhere? He lives in a county with 250k people and about an average of 650 people per square mile.

Yes, the middle of nowhere. (I live in Kitsap County as well.) That average is misleading because most of the people are concentrated in one of three major 'metro' areas, much of the county is low density or practically empty. (And he lives in one of the low density areas, in an area which county residents regard as being 'backwoods'.)

DSL in his area is CenturyLink. The DSLAM that coves his house is in "Permanent Exhaust" meaning it's oversubscribed so far even CenturyLink won't add more subscribers, and they have made the business decision to NOT increase the bandwidth to the DSLAM cabinet further to be able to support more hardware. I.E. "I'm sorry, we're full. No, we're not adding any more capacity. Ever. Goodbye."

I live in Kitsap County and I looked up his address, and I can't say I'm surprised. He lives in a very low density area, and given current land use restrictions, that's not going to change. There's no money to be had in expanding capacity.
 

And ComCast is flat-out refusing to service his house/area entirely. Full-stop: Since they can't charge him the full line-extension fee ($50-60k) the portion they have to pay by law is too high so they'd rather refuse him service entirely. Welcome to the edge-case downside of regulation preventing the full cost from landing on the end-user.

No, welcome to the "edge case" of living in a very low density area outside of town rather than in a suburb.
 

Point-to-Point wireless no longer covers his area due to a new tall building being built between their regional tower and his subdivision.

He doesn't live in a subdivision - he lives in the woods outside the built up area of town.

Seriously, I've said it three different ways but I'll repeat it a fourth time because it's important to grasp - he lives in very low residential density area outside of town. He doesn't live in the suburbs or a subdivision. I give and grant that Comcast is incompetent - but his options are narrowed and/or blocked as much by the fact of where he chose to live as by any law or regulation. The north end isn't Palo Alto or Mountain View.