I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to fly in it until it's certified for commercial operation. Unless you're way better connected than I am. It's a pretty silly point to make.

Given that this is a jet and not a piston-powered aircraft, that would be "one continuous controlled flame". No explosions involved, sorry.

Does Cringely have some kind of seedy business relationship with Slashdot's parent company?

Another issue to consider would be the differences in digestion efficiency between the digestive tracts of different people. People who have trouble losing weight might just be much more effective at extracting usable calories from food consumed.

Are you suggesting that the human body somehow violates the laws of thermodynamics? Because that would be much stupider than what you seem to be mocking.

Slashdot is a great engineering community; what other insights do you have on the bridge situation?

No, Slashdot is mostly made up of computer janitors; the greatest insight you'll get out of most of the posters here is, "hurrr durr, the bridge must've been running Windoze! LOL!", with maybe a little "omg the twin towers were collapsed by EXPLOSIVES!!!!"-style conspiracy theory and "THE GOVERNMENT IS BAD!!!" braindead libertarianism thrown in for color.

Laminar flow? Where do you see boundary layer phenomena here? And tripping "boundary layers" of people into "turbulent flow"? Do you even think about things before you just blurt them out on the internet?

Absolutely not. Next question.

Which UAV? There isn't just one design of UAV, there's a whole slew of them in service, on the market or in design. Some of them are rather large, think roughly the size of an A-10. There's no fundamental reason that something the size of a 747 cannot be flown in an unmanned configuration.

who mails cheques these days, cheques died out ten years ago

Clearly, you've not been to the United States in the past ten years. We still make almost all of our non-retail payments with checks here in the financial Third World. My company, for example, still issues checks for expense reimbursement.

Yes, but your assumption (CPU speed is no object) is ridiculous.

All of those can be accomplished in Fortran 90/95. There is even direct language support for the third requirement (private members of derived types), and I do it all the time; it works just like other public/private declarations, just placed inside the type definition. Inheritance and polymorphism (I'm guessing this is what dynamic binding means from a quick look at Wikipedia) are a bit trickier, but the techniques have been worked out and documented by these fellows (Viktor Decyk's page is also quite helpful). If you prefer to avoid typing out a certain necessary amount of boilerplate to do this, you could use Drew McCormack's forpedo preprocessor (described in detail on MacResearch). So, it's not necessary to wait for 2003, and in fact, many people haven't but have managed to write and maintain very large codes in Fortran 90/95. Good luck!

You don't even know that there were two presidents named "Roosevelt"? I hope you're not American, because that would be shockingly stupid.

Don't you mean the door population?

It's only a matter of time now before Indians discover Lawn Darts and color television!