According to the Gates Foundation Student Survey, the best predictors of a teacher's success are a) keeping control of the classroom and b) continuously challenging the students, keeping them focused and busy.
As you say, good luck with a video (or even a reasonably sophisticated computer program) doing either of those things.
This looks like a near-clone of the Yuri I (the last successful human-powered helicopter), but slightly bigger and heavier:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caHCbuh_Yyc
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculations say that it won't get more than 1 meter off the ground for any significant length of time. If it was much bigger (2 or 3 times) it might have a chance, but at this small size it will be depending too much on ground effect for extra lift, just like the Yuri I did. Fly too high - over 1 meter or so, if the Yuri I is our guide - and that effect disappears.
They also haven't added any twist or taper to the rotors, so they're not getting any extra efficiency gains there, either.
Name one this century, or last.
I'm afraid I won't be able to limit myself to just one. Remember, we're talking absolute monarchs, otherwise what I said makes no sense. Here's a quote about the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was the supreme ruler of China until 1908:
"During Cixi's time, she used her power to accumulate vast quantities of money, bullion, antiques and jewelry, using the revenues of the state as her own. By the end of her reign she had amassed a huge personal fortune, stashing away some eight and a half million pounds sterling in London banks. The lavish palaces, gardens and lakes built by Cixi were hugely extravagant at a time when China was verging on bankruptcy."
If you want a more contemporary example, do some reading on the only absolute monarch left: His Royal Highness, King Mswati III of Swaziland.
If we go further back in history, when absolute monarchs were more common, the examples come a'tumblin'. Under Phillip II, Spain went bankrupt multiple times. Louis XIV drained the treasury of France: "Some estimates suggest that by the end of Louis' reign half of France's annual revenue went to maintaining Versailles." The Emperors of Russia and Austria bankrupted their respective empires - and ultimately lost their empires - by entering WWI. I'm sure if I knew more history, I could dredge up more examples. If you want, I'll make the attempt.
Making a marriage work requires three things:
Communication, communication and communication.
The dude at the Love Lab disagrees. In his research - which is more serious and rigorous than I'm making it out to be - he's found three marriage styles that last, and in which the partners are satisfied. One of the lasting marriage styles involves two partners who desire low communication levels. They have to respect each other for the marriage to last, but they don't have to communicate, communicate, communicate.
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks.
That laptop you kept dropping is exactly where you could've used the increased reliability of an SSD.
Just sayin'...
Fair enough; RAID was, indeed, developed to deal with (as Wikipedia puts it) "low-cost and less reliable PC-class disk-drive components" rather than any and all rotating media.
However, even with more expensive rotating media, it now enjoys near-universal use whenever data is critical. Notice the common thread: Rotating media. RAID is hardly used outside of rotating media, and almost universally used with it whenever two or more are gathered together in the name of storing data.
And I salute you for making a grammar correction without making a mistake of your own. You still won't get me to be a fuddy-duddy and use "media" with a plural verb, though.
I've had to build more than one server from consumer-class components when money was tight. Once these are down to 70 cents or so a gigabyte with 500GB+ capacities - let's say in two years, if prices keep dropping as they have been - I'll be putting them in servers at first opportunity. With their random read performance, they blow away even the best server-class rotating hard drives.
I can hardly wait. Really. Rotating media is the bane of my existence.
You may not be extremely lucky to get a regular HDD to the 5 year mark, but you are moderately lucky. Lucky enough that I would recommend regular backups rather than depend on your luck with the hard drive.
Wouldn't you?
In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.