This technology does scale down. The SportCruiser LSA that I fly from time to time warns me when I get down to 500ft from the ground. This is a 2-seat airplane. However, there are lot of old GA aircraft out there (often 30+ years old) that do not have modern avionics.

Am I the only one thinking of the latest South Park episodes?

How many of the astronauts would be considered flight crew? So long as they're "flying", it would seem they'd be covered by 14 CFR 91.17, which is the 0.04% and 8 hour bottle-to-throttle rule. Oh, IANAL, but IAAP and wondering how many of the FAA regulations apply.

While he may have never actually said it, years from now the world will only remember one thing:

"64 fart apps ought to be enough for anybody"

-- Alan Panezic

it's hard to see how a double-blind study could even be designed in this area

In the medical field, it means that both the patient and the doctor evaluating the symptoms don't know who received a placebo.

For this experiment - setup two antennae in front of some seedlings, have a different dude turn one of them on. The person measuring the seedling growth doesn't know which were exposed to radio waves. That's all you need to make sure the study doesn't have some bias in it.

I think ITA made a great deal of hype around their NP proof, but the complexity of the search was known by many and was known before ITA published their results. For example, Tom Holloran (United Airlines) published a paper at AGIFORS in the 1980's that showed the equivalence to a set covering / set partitioning problem.

Sabre's fare search engine was rewritten from scratch in C++ & Java starting about the same time ITA started. The search engine runs on a Linux cluster, and independent benchmarks show that it is the leader in finding the lowest fares. In fact, pretty much *all* the major players in fare search run on x86 clusters. You could look this up online too :-)