Agreed, and this is already how the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) works, but it records for a lot longer (around 24 hours, IIRC). Personally, as a pilot I wouldn't mind a 24-hour circular video buffer that's stored on the airplane and not automatically archived unless there's an incident - in that situation, I'd wanna have as much data available as possible, as that improves the chance of preventing a future occurrence. Preferably not just a wide-angle lens inside of the cockpit, but also perhaps a closeup of the instrument panel so that indications displayed to pilots are clearly visible.
ATC operators are already being filmed left and right (in addition to voice recorded) when they're at their stations and the footage is archived as well, so why should pilots not be similarly scrutinized is beyond me.

Future efforts are likely to concentrate on the ppc64le architecture variant, which is little endian. There are still some differences to x86_64 at the C level (chars are unsigned by default, but you can compile with -fsigned-char), but it is reportedly not too difficult to port over C/C++ application code.

Agreed. The ONLY effective punishment for a CA that breaches trust or competence this poorly is to mark its roots as permanently untrusted. In a world that has set aside morals and ethics (or redefined them into doublespeak meaninglessness), the only punishment that will actually make corporations change their behavior are penalties that significantly exceed the full gains of breaking the rule or law. The related challenge is raising the certification bar, so this doesn't become a "whack a mole" with CCNIC2, CCNIC3, TOTALLY_NOT_CCNIC, etc...

These companies can also share data with law enforcement that points to the perpetrators, helping to identify them. After all, the perpetrators will just move on to a new tactic if they can no longer abuse the police for their purposes.

The NSA capabilities are still classified (leaks do not change that). Using classified capabilities for law enforcement purposes is difficult, both for operation reasons (you don't want to document publicly what is possible) and legal reasons (parallel construction is required to avoid disclosure).

http://musescore.org/ Curiously missing in the article

It is likely that your friend is not alone with her condition. Try to discuss it with others who are affected, and who have already been through the stages that lay ahead of her. People with motor control issues successfully use vertical mice, touch screens, keys for navigation, gaze trackers, voice recognition, non-standard input methods such as the Dasher accessibility tool, or tailored input methods.

Fully agree here, a solar-powered blimp might actually not be such a bad idea, especially when your goal is primarily loitering for hours on end over something like a race track, or conducting traffic surveillance. However, for transport, especially mid- to long-distance transport, it's a horrible idea. It's akin to placing solar panels on roofs of cars and expecting to be able to use it practically, except much worse due to the much higher drag and power requirements of airplanes.

Please do give me a call when your imagination figures out a way to break the laws of physics. There's no problem with having your head in the clouds, as long as your feet are firmly on the ground. No amount of inventive imagination is going to let you circumvent things like conservation of energy.

No, a Boeing 777 is built for efficiency and "good enough" speed. High speed rail is already killing short-haul aviation in many places around the world.
Anyway, let's play this game. How slow is slow enough? The Solar Impulse cruises at 35 knots true airspeed - given upper altitude winds, your actual ground speed might in fact be negative on many days. Just to give you a taster of the energy requirements of "slow" flight (I have the actual manufacturer perf tables): at the lightest loadout (10000 lbs) and lowest and most economical cruise power setting, a 19-passenger Beechcraft 1900D airliner cruises at 25000 feet at 209 KTAS and requires 502 kW of power to do so (2 x 1400 rpm x 1266 lbft). It's surface area is probably less than 1/10 of that of the Solar Impulse. So even assuming 100% efficient power conversion, you're more than an order of magnitude removed. And that's assuming huge concessions to the lightness of the airplane (~3t empty airplane to carry 19 passengers - totally unrealistic), which given current electrical component & battery weight is just pure science fiction.

Oh yeah, the safety is a whole other matter :) The reason I took it from a physics angle is that if the basic physics isn't there, we don't even need to consider the question of safety and risks (which are, to a much larger degree, qualitative). It'd be like discussing the safety implications of intergalactic wormhole transportation technology.

I know they charge during the day and use that to run during the night, however, that's not really addressing the basic power requirement problem.
I'm glad to see you acknowledge that this is probably not realistic to power an airliner and I'm sorry to put a dampening on your hopes for this being used to power on-board systems. The electrical draw in an airplane is minuscule compared to the mechanical load of just moving the airplane through the air. As I've calculated, the 777 requires about 100 MW of power to cruise. I'd be surprised if the electrical load was anything more than 1/1000 of that (100 kW) - pretty much a drop in a bucket when it comes to the engines. A much higher load, in fact, are things like bleed air (used to pressurize the cabin, among other things) and anti-ice systems. The electrical load is in fact so small, that modern commercial airliners have a thing called a RAT (Ram Air Turbine), a miniature windmill electrical generator, that serves as a backup should all on-board power generation fail (which is triple-redundant in the 777) and is capable of providing several kW worth of last-resort backup power for things like avionics, electrical hydraulic pumps and emergency lighting.

If the Solar Impulse project is anything to go by, it's hopelessly dependent on good weather to be able to sustain flight. For example, if you were dealing with aviation on a regular basis, you'd know that there are these things called "upper altitude winds" which regularly reach speeds in excess of 100kts even at fairly low altitudes (~10000-15000 ft) and given that the Solar Impulse's cruise speed is around 35 kts, it'd simply get blown all around the place, almost like a balloon. At that point, you might as well just junk the idea of heavier than air flight and just stick your comms antennas on a solar-powered blimp. And given the atrocious coverage such a system would provide vs. space satellites, means you'd need probably like tens of thousands of those in constant upkeep, just to give you decent coverage. For global "satcom" phone coverage, it's much easier to just launch 20-30 small polar orbit satellites, which are on stable orbits and give you global coverage at the same time - and we've already done that. For internet access and broadcasting, just build radio masts, which are cheap as heck and require almost no maintenance, or a couple of high-power GEO satellites to cover a whole continent - and we've already done that too. And as for NGOs and high-altitude surveillance, what you want is a blimp, not an airplane.
Put simply, solar-powered airplanes are a solution in search of a problem.

I love the forward thinking and positive view of technology including solar power, but there's no way there are ever going to be purely *directly* solar powered commercial airplanes in the future. The power requirements are just so far removed from being able to fly at anywhere near the speeds you may want to travel at to make it a viable mode of transport. Just to give you a taste of the energy requirements needed for air travel, let's have a look at a modern airliner, .e.g a Boeing 777-200LR. From experience, I can tell you that its engines run at about 40-45% of maximum rated sea level thrust in cruise at a speed of about M0.84, which at 35000 ft pressure altitude comes to around 480 knots true air speed or about 250m/s. Max sea level thrust on the GE90-115B is ~500 kN, so at say 40% thrust those engines are producing about 400 kN total. As you know, work = force x distance and since power = work / time, the power consumption required, just to keep the airplane in cruise is 400000 x 250, or about 100MW. Now assuming even a 100% efficient solar panel (about 1kW/m^2), you'd need about 100000 square meters of panel, or about a third of a kilometer on a side. Meanwhile, the actual top-down looking surface area of a 777 is approximately 2 orders of magnitude less than that. And any increase in surface area beyond that dramatically increases drag and the resulting energy requirements. And that's with a hypothetical 100% efficient solar panel (in actual fact, best lab results are about 35-40% efficient). Put simply, even from first principles, the idea of a solar-powered commercial airplane is just a non-starter.

Also describable as the "zero-flexibility principle". In Objective-C extending existing code is super trivial. In C++, unless the author of your library *expected* what you're about to do, you're pretty much SOL. For example implementing a native RPC mechanism in Objective-C is about as complicated as implementing -forwardInvocation: and ferrying the serialized NSInvocation object between sockets. In C++, it just can't be done (well, unless you're willing to write some sort of custom VM!). Also, in practice, the overhead of Objective-C's dynamism is pretty much negligible (speaking from experience having written some pretty heavily real-time code for video streaming in Objective-C that's running the server-facing portion of a few dozen thousand STBs in the field right now). 90% of the time you're running 10% of your code. Write that portion in highly optimized pure C and the rest in objects and you'll get the best of both worlds.

TBH, I've never seen the logic of this statement. Given that most code written in pretty much any app is just high-level scaffolding around a few really core high-perf algorithms, why try and shoehorn the same language into these two completely different usage scenarios. That's IMO asinine and C++'s extreme levels of complexity and sheer volume of features is a testament to that fact.

I stopped paying attention to C++ by the time the spec document collapsed under its own gravity to form a black hole.