That's odd, that page says the E-4B flies as backup to the VC-25, I thought they used the second VC-25 as the shadow (perhaps if the second one is being worked on they use the E-4B, could be why the order for the VC-25 replacements is 3 instead of 2 airframes?)

Korean Air isn't going to scrap their 10 747-8's.

Plus it's probably easier to add to the 747 Missle defense and reuse the radiation hardened avionics

Yes to the first, no to the second. The 747-8 uses the 787 avionics suite which is an all digital setup, almost nothing is common between the old 747 and the 7474-8 from that perspective.

The only thing they're regulating is how government money is being handed out to telecom companies. You government is evil people are so odd.

Uh, they changed the standard so that those who are milking on the USF can't continue to give their customers 1990's internet speeds with your money...

You can't stream HD video on 4Mbps, you can't get large patches is a reasonable time with 4Mbps, you can't Skype in HD with 1Mbps of upload, it takes forever to seed a cloud backup with 1Mbps (I put a few hundred GB in Crashplan and it took a month, I have more data than that but I had to pick the important data because my upload was so limited), etc.

You apparently have no left-wing friends on facebook.

This reminds me of a lot of Christian friends who say how great it is that Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sunday and that's so Christian of them and all that. These same people usually point this out while eating in another restaurant on Sunday.

And, yet, some guy named Elon Musk - who never worked at Ford, GM, Honda, the guy's a nobody - is the one who's making all the money in electric cars right now. Why?

Now and then industries that have been around for 100 years get so stuck in doing things the same way and simply scaling it can't get over the hump where you have to say "we can't scale this way of doing it, we have to start from scratch". They also have a huge patent catalog related to their current way of doing things, a huge number of engineers who know this method inside out, etc. There's considerable inertia to overcome, and few companies overcome it.

That's why when things change it's often the newcomers who do it.

Here's another one - Vizio. Ever heard of them 15 years ago? They never made a CRT-based television. The founders came from a monitor manufacturer and decided to start making TVs based on LCD technology. They went straight to Sam's and Costco to sell them. They pretty much own that market now.

Meanwhile, where's Westinghouse? Or RCA? They turned out a ton of tubes back in the day, but they're gone. Nobody wants a freaking X-ray generator in their house now.

Honestly, I think a shakeup like this is long overdue in the elevator business. You say there are so many moving parts to your caterpillar drive - do you have any idea of how many moving parts are in a standard elevator. Your idea cuts the moving parts down to perhaps 1/10th of what there is now. Getting rid of counterweights is a huge deal. You can even keep the counterweight and change the traction to your idea and there are still far fewer moving parts.

Elevators were first made when a tall building was 10 stories. The idea that a radical overhaul in design isn't needed for buildings that are 20 times that tall is laughable.

So, yes, I think you're absolutely wrong. An outsider is almost certainly what is needed to scale elevators up like this.

You can get around this by using an array of lasers, each of which is individually rather harmless, but focused together would be enough to destroy such a target. The "danger area" would be restricted to the focal point. Anything outside/beyond/inside that point would receive much less laser power and likely escape damage.

Now if your drone is using active terrain masking, that makes it more difficult to hit at range. However, such a system would probably require a human remotely controlling it, making that susceptible to jamming. I don't think automated terrain avoidance (in real time) is practical just yet for anything a non-military entity could get its hands on. And in any event, such a terrain-avoidance system would likely need its own sensors (radar/lidar) which could be detected, jammed, or both.

Or you could have an array of relatively low-powered lasers that focus on a target point to collectively do their damage. Any misses would be harmless due to them being outside/beyond the focal point.

So what's your point? That a more capable drone is also bigger? So? So what? That's obvious. Do you think the added size/complexity of such a thing would be any impediment whatsoever to a determined aggressor? If you want to penetrate controlled airspace to do something nefarious, you're perforce going to want something that's difficult to detect, difficult to jam, difficult to shoot down, and has enough payload to carry whatever you need to cause the damage you're looking for.

Really? Then let's hear your alternative options. I already covered sensors and weapons, but let's recap. Radar is vulnerable to stealth, so it won't do the job alone. Lidar is too short ranged to do the job alone. Acoustic is even worse. But put together, a web of such sensors would be very difficult to overcome. If there are other sensors out there that are even remotely applicable, please enumerate them.

As for weapons, you have only three options: ballistic, missiles, or directed-energy weapons. Ballistic weapons have all kinds of downsides, from trajectory computation to wind to limited ammo, not to mention the inevitable collateral damage from misses (of which there will be MANY). Missiles have similar downsides. DEW's have (almost) none of these, the sole one being the potential for (minor) collateral damage in the case of a miss. You could even potentially mitigate this by using an array of low-power lasers, individually almost benign, but focused together to take down a drone.

This assumes you can get a good doppler signature on the rotors at all. I'm not an expert on radar/stealth construction, but I know a fair bit about it. A rotor made of radar-transparent (or absorbent) material would make it rather hard to detect, at least until it was well within range to do damage.

You must be confused. iPhones are free. It says so right on the top of this contract I just signed. Sure, I have to pay more than $2000 over the next two years but the phone is free! It says so right here!

Would the phone company lie to me?

That's why God invented single mode fiber.