mumble ... why not block people from putting more than 5% of their post in monospace? ... herpa derpa

Jawohl, mein Herr!

It's like having a leg cut and repeatedly smearing urine all over it because that takes away the pain momentarily, instead of going to the hospital and pay to have it treated^W AMPUTATED.

FTFY.

The PROBLEM with disabling JavaSCRIPT, is that a significant majority of sites use it heavily.

FTFY. Of course you know that JavaSCRIPT has nothing whatever to do with Java, right?

says the moron who has never been at a company where an employee sued for tens of thousands of dollars because one employee decided to look at porn and another employee was "offended".

Summarily fire the twit who, rather than doing his job, was peering at what someone else was doing, trolling to see something "offensive" to his mama's little angel's eyes. At least then that piece of shit will have to find some other place to be offended by what other people are doing that is zero concern of theirs.

But why not just use a lighter-than-air vehicle and stay aloft for months?

Airships only exceed optimized airplanes in transport efficiency for extremely large sizes and severely limited speeds. Solar/battery airplanes can already exceed one diurnal cycle, so there is no reason in principle why they themselves cannot stay aloft for months.

Airships are subject to problems that do not apply at all to airplanes. A major one is that they are subject to serious lift variations due to varying degrees of heating differential to the surrounding atmosphere. This can only be countered via engine power or by expenditure of ballast and valving of gas. This has traditionally been the ultimate limit to their endurance, which has never exceeded 11 days in practice.

If the craft can fly for greater than one diurnal cycle, why cannot it fly indefinitely?

I used ROT520 twice for much extra security.

Yeah, and the first ones to avoid were the CMIs in the early 80s. They actually dumped an artificial reef of them in the ocean, they were so bad. Absolutely true you can't just apply statistics forever. But for the present, Seagates are absolute unmitigated disaster garbage, and WD isn't all that much better. HGST (Hitachi) is the only worthwhile one left in company-wide terms (knock on wood for the future); the GOOD Toshibas; the ones whose design came from HGST; are fine too. But there is no non-anecdotal way remaining to tell them part. I just know that my big bunch of Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB's are definitely HGST's design. I know that because some of them even have HGST on the l;abels, and all of them sport identical firmware, no matter what the labels say.

HGST is only "sort of" independent. They actually got bought out by WD, but it is a wholly-owned subsidiary which so far has operated completely independently and not succumbed to the WD malaise. Hitachi the mother company now owns 10% of WD and designates two of the board seats, believe it or not. Wheels within wheels.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to think that somehow insurance will lower the cost of the accidents. But it's perfectly obvious that, in the long term, that can't possibly be true. The insurance company has to make a profit - PLUS its own overhead costs. - plus of course covering the payouts.

The reason an individual (unless very wealthy) doesn't self-insure is because the things he is insuring against are very low-runner risks, but if/when they do occur, he would be instantly bankrupt. That's not the case for the US government. $110 million is pin money. Petty cash. Pocket change. Rounding error. They can save money by self insuring.

Now, if they didn't build in a cushion to the program to cover such boo-boos, that is entirely a different thing. Then they would be stupid. That doesn't change the equation that in the long run it is always cheaper to self insure.

Mod parent up.

STFU, anonymous cipher. You amount to nothing because you don't have a backbone.

Only eastern Massachusetts is densely populated. The Berkshires are not.

TLC is a kind of MLC. "Multi" means "more than one". Multi does not mean "two and just two".

Apparently these losers don't even own the motor they are using. Stupid. Nevertheless ...

Fly the goddam thing anyway. Fuck Siemens. What can they do? Send a stiff protest and proclaim their assholery to the world even worse than they have done by letting this escalate to slashdot as it is?

If the Greeks had been smart they would have exited the EU...

There is one little problem with that idea. There is no mechanism to "exit" the EU, just as there is no mechanism to kick a member out. Government tends to be like that (ask the Confederacy).