your [html] skills are not very impressive.

And so, all these "well armed" people. Deluded. Meeting up with other well armed people to talk about being well armed, shooting holes at bogeys in their minds and Ignorantly re-parsing 18th century English texts as their children run around at their feet, loving it, emulating, fingering safety locks and shooting their kid sisters in the head. It's worth bearing in mind that a well-armed militia would be called an insurgency these days and would be met with a well-armed government. It's hard for me imagine any kind of scenario where the "well armed" would actually "win' any kind of serious test of their well-armedness. In short, they'd get their arse kicked.

Maxwell's equations. The goddam speed of light pops out of it. It pops right out of the math(s). IMO it's one of the most startling discoveries ever made and proof of the accuracy of using mathematics to model our Universe.

nicely put.
i'm proud of yer, son,

Wow. Just wow. Modern child, you will die early if it all goes tits up I think...

Yup, Paul Bremmer - CPA1. His first act as Emperor of Iraq. The clumsy and sinister "de-ba'athification of Iraq".

...with all their weapons. Don't forget that part. He didn't disarm them first. No time for shit like that.

Paul Bremmer. Donald Rumsfeld. These two guys really need to put their hands up and say sorry. They fucked it up so bad. It's tragic.

oh yeah, you get time on IM to formulate questions. Lots of time. That's because you are 'talking' to people typing with one finger, whilst simultaneously 'multitasking' (aka not really paying attention anyway). I sit there watching the little pen icon scribbling away thinking, ok , this will be good. Then a 7 word response comes back. It's shit. A chat is so much more efficient. Jot down notes as you talk, then summarise the salient details in an email. Old school? I know it is. But it is simply better work practice.

quick inspection of php known bugs returns a lot of identical code. Would be good to strip out the dupes...

Groupon? Is that still a thing?

I don't think I have ever seen CSRF implemented right. Certainly not on Django. OK that's not XSS but still. There's a lot of cargo cult security out there.

That occurred to me too subsequently. I don't have any specialist knowledge and I haven't even read TFA, I just like studying engineering problems.

To alter the buoyancy there are four main possibilities as I see it. Alter pressure. Alter volume. Alter gas mix, Alter temperature.

The delta pressure that could be achieved is limited by the structural and hermetic integrity of the gas envelope. It's probably quite feasible to build an envelope capable of pressurisation above atmosphere to perhaps 1 bar which would certainly give you a good range of buoyancy control and I think an operating ceiling of 5000m, possibly more, based purely on range of alitudes where neutral buoyancy is obtainable.

Volume changes could be effected with some kind of mechanical bellow. But as this results in a delta pressure it's similar to the above.

Temperature change is the most promising mechanism. Additional lift could be created using hot air balloon principles. You would get fairly fast reaction control

Gas mix changes would allow for trim changes as the craft ascended or loaded / unloaded. It's easy to conceive a system of pressurised gas containers that can be selectively opened to adjust the gas mix. Nitrogen would be the obvious candidate for this. But the problem lies with recovering the helium. Unless you can fit a scrubber system that can selectively leach the gas and return helium, under pressure to the onboard storage. If this device leaks helium - and it almost certainly will - then it is a) evil and b) useless.

But I appreciate this machine is a hybrid and most of the buoyancy issues are taken care of by generating aerodynamic lift. However, they would want powerful trim controls so at least some of the above must be designed in to the craft.

and travelling through clouds too. This isn't a high altitude machine. Bad weather kills it.

hot air is a much better basic principle for this anyway

ok. how do you unload it in the remote location? This is a game of buoyancy. It can't just rock up somewhere remote and unload a cargo. it would shoot up into the air, unless it takes on a new cargo at the same time. This can only be unloaded in dedicated docking stations with anchor tethers to hold the airship to earth when positively buoyant.

That's not really what flying is at all. Sounds more like rocketry. Aircraft accelerate to 500+ mph in a really quite smooth and comfortable way, at least in commercial aviation. And as intelligence might well be defined by an ability to make good choices based on available information the fact that aviation is, currently, both safer than ever and really really safe means choosing to fly, on the basis of piles of "smouldering flames" is really not a dumb decision.

You are right, although it's a lot less likely then this current type of very nasty yet very passive crime. Your scenario requires the perp to commit another crime and it's a crime of a very different nature - visceral, physical and in this context likely very personal as the cockpit victim will also be a colleague.

However, with so many flights, pilots and aircrew operating in budget air space and pilots increasingly looking like interns paying for their own training, it's impossible to discount your scenario. Given time, it will happen, basically. If it can, it will.

All this of course takes place in a context of a massive reduction in risk to passengers in commercial flight. These events are, every time, examples of "availability bias" in human decision making.

The most intriguing part of this, for me, is to what extent this event will foster debate on fully autonomous computer flight systems and remote cockpits. I think we will soon see pilots at the front of the plane removed of final authority to command the aircraft controls. The fact that this is technologically available now, practically off the shelf in a hardware store, makes this, for me, an absolute certainty.

This. They want a semantic web and so far we haven't even got a reliable DatePublished. Technical search is slowly going to shit at the moment on account of this issue. And each lost forum post by bewildered users unable to parse search results for relevance adds further to the problem. Google has date search filters - they should be much more prominent.