I find product reviews made by different people who have done other product reviews on disparate types of goods much more valuable than product reviews on a website where users can make up names. I can think of other examples where, as a consumer of products and information on the Web, I appreciate the use of real names. Sending someone money would be an example, instead of sending money to some random email address.

OS X has the only tolerable PDF viewer already (Preview.app). If anything, the other platforms are worse off with PDF support.

I believe our club pays a couple hundred bucks per month per T-hanger, which is nice but not strictly necessary, even in the winter. I've brushed snow off of the plane several times when I was using flight school planes tied-down outside. Tie-downs are much cheaper. But, our airport is on re-purposed farm land in SW Ohio. You SF Bay Area folks have to pay for your beautiful climate, culture, views, job market, etc., somehow ;)

There is an official policy, I believe something like 3 hours / day on a long holiday weekend, 2 hours / day on a normal weekend, and 0.5 / day during the week or something, but I have taken a couple multi-day trips, haven't met the minimums, and it hasn't been a problem. I think it's one of those policies on the books to throw at people who are not aligned with the spirit of the club. There's also a 100 hr / year max rule as a result of someone essentially tying up one club plane the whole year by flying it for business. I don't think this rule has been enforced since that one guy.

You only control your own decisions and motivations, not others'. So, unless you want to be taken advantage of, attempting to get the biggest savings and make the biggest profits is the best we can do. Furtively wishing that contract negotiation looks like the market scene opening Disney's Beauty and the Beast is not realistic.

Note that I am describing people negotiating on price. I do not suggest that people lie, cover up flaws, collude, or participate in other similar immoral activities to achieve this maximization.

Depends on the club, I guess.

I paid a one-time fee of $650 to get in, $60 / month in dues, and that gives me access to two C-172s, (about $80 / hr), an Archer II (~$80), Dakota ($120) and Saratoga ($140). All rentals are "wet", meaning that they include fuel. The 172s and Archer cannot take full fuel and four people, but the Dakota and Saratoga certainly can - about 800 lbs of people and baggage with full fuel.

The 172s are great for two people though; my wife and I flew direct from the Cincinnati OH area to Raleigh NC a few weekends ago in a Skyhawk. 3 hours each way, about the same cost as airline tickets, beats the hell out of the 10 hour drive through Charleston WV (there is no good route by car), and the view was better.

A hundred hours of flying in rented / club planes, instruction, FAA fees, etc., to get your Private and Instrument Rating will set you back around $10k - $12k. A 200 MPH kit like the RV-7 will set you back around $100k.

It's not cheap, to be sure, but it's not a millionaire sort of thing. I don't mean to be argumentative, just to realign the elitist image many non-pilots have of the small piston airplane crew.

If you are willing to settle with 130 mph instead of 200, a serviceable used Skyhawk can be had for less than the price of a decked-out F-150, and get similar fuel mileage.

If you fly on the airlines into places with clouds under a thousand feet or so, the pilots likely have their arms crossed and are watching an airplane, designed and built by a private company, flying itself onto the runway. (It's called a CAT III ILS if you want to research.) Sure the FAA checked it out, maybe reviewed the code, etc., as would the NTSB or DOT with the Google cars.

You could successfully argue that people would balk even if the computer crashed the car 1/100 as frequently as humans do, but to say you wouldn't feel as safe with a calculated, reviewed computer system compared drunk, tired people with limited vision and slow reflexes texting and shaving their lady-bits while driving... that's silly.

In a country like Japan (i.e. Not North Korea), I do assume that primary sources are providing pretty much accurate information. I noticed your username after I posed the first time; in light of that, it seems appropriate that you make doom and gloom assumptions of corporate and government cover-up. I will give my best attempt at getting the facts and avoiding the rhetoric (as another poster noticed the words "NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE" are being used as thousands are without power, food, water, and are looking for loved-ones. Seems to distract from the real issue at hand.

Alright, alright - enough with the word inflation. The actual earthquake may have been a catastrophe, the tsunami certainly was, but a nasty industrial accident in which no one has been killed and workers are still remediating is not close to the same magnitude.

Like the recent economic recession is billed as "The Economic Crisis", this kind of linguistic drama does a disservice to the people who really got screwed, e.g. Haiti in their earthquake, Japan in the tsunami, etc.