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Comment One half the range of a Cessna 152 (Score 2) 249

but all the other specs are about the same: Cessna 152 specs.

A 152 can take off in 500' and land in 100'. It's Vne is 110mph and it burns fuel at about the same rate.

As a driver or passenger in this Pal-V I would not want to be in a auto collision. They don't seem to offer much protection against hitting or being hit by other cars, and being as narrow and tall as it is I suspect that it would be vulnerable to tipping over due to later wind gusts.

I used a private pilot license as part of my consulting work. It is IMPERATIVE that one makes one hour of preparation for each hour of flight, in order to identify the height of every object along the intended flight path and all secondary paths, where the emergency landing airfields or other places are, and to compute flight envelope conditions as fuel weights change with distance for a given load. The pilot also has to determine the possible weather along his intended flight path as well. The FAA isn't very tolerant toward folks who get trapped into flying into sucker holes.

To not make these plans is to commit suicide. A pilot just doesn't hop into his plane and take off. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are NO old, bold pilots.

Comment Re:The Most Secure Mobile OS (Score 1) 291

The greatest contribution to Win7's security is their obscurity. Win7phone has less than 2% market share, and falling. Microsoft used to own 15% of the mobile phone market share. To fall to 2% means that even their former customers are leaving their products for what they perceive as better ones.

One of the biggist dismissals Windows fans used on Linux was to say that there weren't many threats to Linux because not many used it. That logic can apply to Win7Phone as well.

Comment Re:KDE (Score 1) 319

The bestg way to impliment your recommendations is to use the KDE desktop environment. Using that, pretty much any distro is the same because you learn one DE and maximize its power settings.

I began using KDE with the 1.0 beta release when it came with SuSE 5.3 in Sept of 1998. I am currently running Kubuntu 12.04 Precise, which features KDE 4.8.0. If you like mime and mouse options control and the ability to configure your DE very similar to XP or Win7 so there is less difficulty working back and forth between them then KDE4 is the DE to use.

Comment Re:Ubuntu (Score 2) 319

That assertion is unsupported. Page Hit Rankings are meaningless, and so easily gamed by enthusiasts for various distros.

Actually, DistroWatch keeps track of the OS signatures of visitors. According to that [distrowatch.com] Ubuntu (and all derivatives based on it) account for only 3.2% of the visitors using Linux. The distro with the most users visiting DistroWatch is "Unknown", at 36.3%.

Linux visitors combined account for 41.5% and Windows visitors account for 48.7% of all visitors. So, most of the people visiting that site are curious Windows users, 15.5% of whom are using XP and 29% are using "Windows 2008". 2.3% are still using VISTA!

Comment Dark Matter is an odd duck. (Score 0) 69

Dark Energy and Matter are odd ducks.

In both classical and quantum physics matter radiates electromagnetic energy according to its absolute temperature. To NOT be visible, i.e., NOT radiate electromagnetic energy, Dark Matter MUST be at zero degrees Kelvin, which is impossible to reach because of Second and Third Law considerations. Also, if the Universe were made up of, as some have proposed, 90% of more of Dark Matter, the mean temperature of the Universe would be colder than 2.5 Kelvin. Black bodies are the best known emitters and absorbers of EMR. How could Dark Matter absorb EMR for BILLIONS of years and yet remain invisible? Why has no one posted a picture showing a galaxy partly obscured by a blob of DM if it is so pervasive?

DM reminds me of the 19th century's conumdrum, the "Ether". It's properties were also outsides the boundries of known physics, and proved impossible. So thin as to be invisible, yet so ridged as to allow light to travel at extremely high velocity. Despite that regidity, even Newton established that the Ether could not support planetary vorticies nor imped the motion of comets.

Comment Fairewind comments on AP1000 (Score 3, Insightful) 596

"The NRC thinks the probability of three nuclear reactors having a meltdown within 3 days is ZERO. They chose this to minimize the cost of development of the AP1000 reactor."

That's because the NRC is a sock puppet for the Commercial Nuclear Industry.

https://plus.google.com/107839599438746451936/posts/gEhU26JjGWV

Comment Re:Yes - sounds like "grant time" (Score 1) 285

"IAAMBP (I am a molecular biophysicist) and I actually just finished discussing this article at work before seeing it on /. The parent post is an odd mix of insightful comments and flamebait so I'll respond to the former. BTW the actual research article itself is free for everyone to read, thanks to the authors shelling out an extra 1K$ to allow public access. I'll link it below:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/10/1115323109.full.pdf+html [pnas.org]

If you would prefer having to pay 10-30$ for the privilege of reading what your tax dollars already paid for instead of this commie "open access" stuff, please call your congressman and tell him/her to support HR bill 3699."

So you would prefer that if the taxpayer wants to read published papers about work their taxes funded they should pay the Journals who knows how much for a printed copy MAILED to them. It would have to be priinted and mailed because the text of the law states:

"To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.
        Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
        This Act may be cited as the `Research Works Act'.

SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACTION.
        No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--
                (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
                (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
        In this Act:
                (1) AUTHOR- The term `author' means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.
                (2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term `network dissemination' means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.
                (3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term `private-sector research work' means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.
"

Notice that the forms of prohibited dessemination include "the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement", which would include the putative reader paying for access to a PDF link on a proprietary Journal website.

Also note that the term "private-sector research" is misleading since any research that the taxpayer supports is, by law, PUBLIC research. I suspect that in a couple years, when the data is published, we'll find out that lobbyist for the Journals gave "campaign donations" (a.k.a bribes) to the authors of the bill specially so that the current law would be repealed and reversed. So, instead of one author paying $1K so that the public could download and read his paper, the Journals would rather be able to charge hundreds or thousands of people $50 or $100 or more to get a printed copy of the article via the mail. A nice tidy profit for them, and a reversion to the old paradigm of scientists relying on the Journals to transmit scientific results to their peers and the public, regardless of how many months it would take.

Also, the flamebait you so maticulously tried to avoid you yourself introduced when you dismissed the taxpayers rights with the word "COMMIE".

Since I helped pay for that research I do not feel it right that I have to pay AGAIN, this time to a middle man, for the previledge of reading about the research. And, if you knew as much about OpenSource as you apparently do about biology, you'd know that OpenSource isn't a Marxist philosophy, contrary to the assertions of the Ballmer, who heads the world's biggest monopoly and is in the process of extending that monopoly on PCs with the introduction of the EUFI HD bootlock. Since Windows is as susceptible as ever to malware the only reason for UEFI is to prevent users of Linux from being able to replace Windows with Linux or to dual boot with it. If Microsoft wants to lock up hardware they should take Apple's route and manufacture their own, and not force independent PC OEMs to act as wholly owned subsidiaries of Microsoft. But, if your flamebait meant anything it probably means that you use a Mac or Win7 and could care less if others wanted the freedom to choose another OS. As long as your ox is not getting gored...

Comment That's the excuse, but the reason is ... (Score 4, Interesting) 333

that their licensing agreement with Microsoft, as Barnes & Nobel revealed when they refused to sign the NDA, prohibits them from upgrading to more recent versions of Android. This would lock them into an aging release, which would kill their future sales. With no where is to turn, they would be forced to put WinP7 on their hardware, which is the whole purpose of Microsoft's extortion.

In other news, Nokia's Lumina, their smartphone running Win7, was essentially ignored by consumers after its recent release. Microsoft has spent more than $500 Million in branding and marketing of WinP7, but not to worry. They've used worthless IP to extort about that much in "license fees" from vendors putting Android on their hardware.

Comment Re:AC troll that "kicked my ass" (lol, NOT) (Score 4, Insightful) 227

Wow, windy fellow, aren't you?

Your rant has one HUGE hole. Your citations are about one-off manual attacks against Linux. Not a single case involves a large group of Linux boxes being compromised by with a single email sent out from a spam box.

Most attacks against Windows boxes are carried out by a simple email payload. That's how the 4,500,000+ Windows zombie bot farm was created last year within a couple of weeks. A Linux zombie bot farm was found last year as well. It contained only 700 boxes and it took the group of hacker who created it nearly six months to do so because they had to manually attack each machine. They ran dearjohn against who knows how many machines trying to find those with insecure root passwords. 700 in six months. They immediately secured those machines against all known exploits and used them for C&C machines to control much, much larger Windows bot farms because Linux IS secure. How many C&C Windows boxes have you heard about?

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