Quoted for truth.

Why the hell would anyone mod parent as "flamebait"? Human cost is every bit as important in policy consideration as environmental cost. Especially when the same side of the political spectrum that promotes environmental consciousness is also (ostensibly) concerned with income inequality and class disparity.

"I've been threatened with too many lawsuits / C&Ds and I'm a pretty small fish, so I'm gonna proactively pull the plug before the $#*!storm hits."

First of all, yes.

Second, back at you: would a kid of any other background have been invited to the White House? (Spoiler: the girl in the above link wasn't.)

If this kid's name had been Seamus or Mordechai or simply Johnny, his arrest (a) would have hardly caught any media attention or public outcry, and (b) absolutely would have not been recognized by the President and resulted in an invitation for a personal audience.

What (if anything) this boy's background had to do with his arrest is anyone's guess, but it has everything to do with his being a media darling, capturing Presidential attention/sympathy, and evoking the unprecedented level of populist white-knighting.

Then could you please explain why Gaza isn't at war with Egypt, and why Gazans aren't "defending themselves" against this "attack" by lobbing rockets at Cairo?

You either have a short memory, or (more likely) are trolling and hoping that others have one.

After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, the one major incident of "killings by the settlers", "The Israeli government...responded by arresting followers of Meir Kahane, criminalizing the Kach movement and affiliated movements as terrorist, forbidding certain Israeli settlers from entering Palestinian towns and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles...Jewish Israelis were barred from entering major Arab communities in Hebron."

In response to a handful of Jewish extremists celebrating the attack, Israel enacted "legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists". Your turn: can you point to a single instance of Gaza or any Muslim nation passing a law like that?

That is a bald-faced lie, but of course you already know that:
"After reviewing the evidence, the Military Advocate General ordered that an IDF Staff Sergeant be indicted with charges of manslaughter by a military court. This decision is based on evidence that the soldier, who was serving as a designated marksman, deliberately targeted an individual walking with a group of people waving a white flag without being ordered or authorized to do so."

As an aside, you also know that the Goldstone report that you refer to has since been disavowed by its author...

Uh, from the summary at the top of this very page: "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out."

Um. With all due respect, when you're coming in with 10 hours of experience, you could go easy on calling another /.er's dead friend an idiot for dying. If nothing else, recognize that bad things do happen to good and experienced pilots - and sometimes to great and very experienced pilots.

If you keep flying, you WILL encounter wind shear. And it will scare the hell out of you. Yes, we've gotten pretty good at predicting shear...at a macro level. At the micro level it's still unpredictable and unavoidable, and probably always will be because wind gusts are chaotic. There is no such thing as "that kind of weather"; sure, there are days when it's more likely than others, but it can and does happen at any time. It's happened to me on both takeoff and final approach on fairly calm days...it's a quick and very effective refresher on respecting safety margins and keeping your wits about you.

That said, the kind of gusts/shear that cartwheel a plane and smash it back into the ground on takeoff are EXTREMELY rare. As in, maybe double digits in the entire NTSB database. A catastrophic blowout on the highway is indeed much more common.

In all my hours in a Cessna 172, I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've hit 124 knots (143mph) without a tailwind.

Typical real-life cruise TAS in a C-172 -- remember, these are mostly rust buckets from the '60s and '70s, so don't go by the published specs -- is 100-110 knots, or about 115-125mph. Which yes, is certainly faster than a typical car (I was exaggerating a bit to make a point), but in general unless something goes wonky on takeoff or short final, you have much more time and space to react to situations in a plane than in a car.

Honest question: have any of these landings that you've seen actually not been successful? Has there been even one that didn't end with the plane either taking off again or taxiing back to the ramp and its occupants getting out uninjured?

99% of the time that I'm flying a plane, I'm more than a mile from anything else in the sky and at least 1000 feet from anything on the ground.

99% of the time that I'm driving a car, I'm within 50 feet of another car and less than 10 feet from something else I can hit. And my car's not going all that much slower than a Cessna.

Well...that's kind of the point, isn't it? There AREN'T as many people who fly small planes as there are people who drive, and those people are generally far better trained/qualified. So sure, if general aviation was totally different than it actually is, it might not be as safe.

Meh. IMO this really isn't a threat to commercial aviation - not even private/charter commercial operators. I think this service is going to be brought down by a lack of adoption (insufficient demand) and a deficit of pilots (insufficient supply). There just aren't very many of us, even fewer who own planes, and fewer still who fly regularly. The aviation industry doesn't need to worry much about this.

Really? That hasn't been my experience at all -- for me and most other private pilots I know, cross-country fully loaded makes up at least half of our non-training time. I mean, I've done a bunch of local scenic stuff too, but loading up and going places is kind of what this sport is about.

Also, FWIW I've only ever met 1 or 2 guys that I wouldn't go up with, and in those cases it was their personality more than their flying skills (honestly, I have yet to come across a pilot who got their ticket but couldn't handle a plane).

I don't know if there's a single pilot under FAA jurisdiction who has never waited an hour for a late passenger/companion to show up for a flight before taking off.

While that is perhaps true *in* the US (though not entirely), all of that -- EVERY SINGLE POINT -- was literally the law of the land where the bulk of Jewish immigrants to the US came from. Some of it until quite recently.

To wit: being (not "effectively" - literally) barred from living in most of the country, being excluded from academic institutions (official policy as recently as 15 years ago), being beaten and killed as a common recreational activity in large areas of the country, with police either ignoring it or actively supporting it, being targeted by a system of racial oppression in campaigns against crime, etc. Not to mention fully one third of their world population being wiped out less than a century ago, and still below pre-WWII levels.

No question that blacks have had a rough go of it in the US. But the claim that "Jewish people in the US have not received anything close to the oppression that black people have", while partially true on a technicality, is both misleading and laughably ignorant. If you gave the ancestors of today's black Americans -- as mistreated as they were -- a good look at the lives of the same generations of ancestors of today's American Jews and offered them to swap, most of them would keep what they had in a heartbeat.

Maybe, but if you want a 100W equivalent, you're out close to $50. And the thing is hideous to boot.

If I'm reading the article right, that entire supply of fuel-grade uranium set us back a total of $17B. If we can produce 10% of our nation's power for 20 years (i.e. supply 2 years' worth of our country's TOTAL electricity needs) on half of what Apple brings in per quarter, why on earth are we bothering with wind farms and solar arrays?

The skeeziest part of that deal actually wasn't Microsoft's attack on Netscape - it was their raw screwing of Spyglass. For those who don't remember this history, Microsoft licensed Mosaic (which they re-branded as Internet Explorer) from Spyglass for a minimal quarterly licensing fee plus a cut of the revenue from every copy of the browser that they sold. They then proceeded to give the browser away for free** with every copy of Windows, thereby not owing Spyglass any of the commission. Spyglass threatened legal action but apparently never took any, opting to settle for an $8M payout for a piece of technology that made Microsoft hundreds of billions.

** I never understood why Spyglass didn't sue Microsoft on the basis that (by Microsoft's own declaration, as AC pointed out) Internet Explorer was an integral part of Windows, and thus some share of the sales revenue for every copy of Windows was de facto revenue from the sale of Internet Explorer. Maybe someone more familiar with the back-story can fill in this blank?

By this definition of "help", the only way that the US can help even a small portion of the "bottom billion" is by becoming part of them, which isn't in the world's interests and certainly isn't in ours. This video explains it very succinctly. At current immigration levels, the US population is slated to reach half a billion people by 2070, and top 625M by 2100.

Forget what this will do to our domestic standard of living -- consider what it will do to our ability to continue helping ANYONE in the developing world. With any luck, we will barely be able to maintain a poverty level here at home above that of today's banana republics.

What the hell is so wrong with having a meritocratic immigration system, i.e. an "open door for the talented"? It gives those people who are genuinely pushing the boundaries of opportunity in their native countries a chance to realize their potential, while also enabling them to contribute to developments that will almost certainly benefit those same native countries. Symbiotically, it gives the US an influx of talent that is somewhat less expensive, enabling those developments to take place more rapidly and thus driving commerce both here and abroad.

We can't take in the "bottom billion", and we won't do anyone any favors by killing ourselves trying. They have to, as the saying goes, bloom where they're planted. The best that we can do to help them is continue to contribute to the global economy, which we can do better with an increased talent pool that's achievable in part by being judicious about whom we take in.