I think the preference for youth is really a preference for people who are not risk-averse. When you are over 40 and have a family, the idea of plugging away for months or years on a project/company that goes up in smoke is not too attractive. If you really think about it, the fast-and-loose culture of Silicon Valley is largely about investors and large companies outsourcing risk onto the backs of individuals and small companies. I once worked with a guy who contracted for a wholly owned subsidiary of Borg Instruments. He did R&D development, and let them slide on paying some invoices. It turns out the company was in a hole, and when Borg "flicked them off, like a booger" (his words), he was left with uncollectable invoices and (eventually) a personal bankruptcy. The whole startup / YCombinator game is that process, refined.

X-posted on Wired.com and elsewhere. -- Hey, I think we can solve this thing. Start with this model of what went wrong: After the plane got to cruising speed and altitude, some malfunction (in the altimeter, or autopilot, or gyro) caused it to enter a very shallow dive - like about 1/20 a degree shy of perfect horizontal flight. Flying over the ocean on a moonless night would not have offered anyone on the plane any information about altitude, so if the instruments were lying, the flight crew would not have known. The transponder is squawking ident and position but not altitude. After a while, the antenna receiving transponder squawks (back in Malaysia) goes under the horizon (from the plane's perspective), so at this point, the transponder squawks stop. Everybody is saying it was "switched off". It wasn't, it was too low to be heard in Malaysia. This happens at about the point that they would hand the plane off to Vietnam, which has not picked up any squawks or transmissions, perhaps for the same reason. In any case, the Vietnamese ATC folks are not yet tracking the plane. Nobody on or off the plane knows it, but the plane is flying too low, say ~15000 feet instead of 35000. The plane continues several hundred kilometers past the point of last contact and pancakes, either into the ocean south of Vietnam, or in the swampy southern reaches of Vietnam itself. At the moment of the crash, nobody on board suspects any trouble. The plane is not found because it is a long way from the point of last contact, and the searchers (who in that area are Vietnamese) overlook the debris .. or whatever. It's a big globe, after all. The plane would have skipped across the ocean at 700 nautical miles per hour, so who knows what was left of it? Anyway, this boils down to a math problem. The location and height of the transponder tower should be find-able. The presumptive cruise altitude of the plane is known(call it cA = 35000), and we will assume that at the point it entered cruising altitude(call it pC, point Cruise), was correct. The location of the plane at the point when the transponder went dark is known (incidentally, the plane went dark "too soon" for a plane at 35000 - which fits) (call this point pD, for Darkness). Location and height of the tower are known(tL and tH). Use tH, cA, pC, pD and Earth's curvature to solve for the rate of descent (rD). Use pC and rD and azimuth to solve point X. Done. Anyone want to take a stab at it? If this is still around in the morning I might try myself. Been years since I took any math classes though ... RDeW PS. If the plane hit water at a shallow angle at 700 knots, it would shred. Fuel tanks, which trap air and float, would be confetti in Davey Jones' locker. Seat back cushions would be torn to bits by all that metal. There would be nothing big enough for a searcher to see from the air, far less from space.

Because for non-US born, graduate skool is a ticket to an H-1b visa and then a green card, or perhaps an American wife (bonaza!). In other words it's a way out of the turd world and into the US. For the rest of us, it's just a way to do some professor's scut work and pay tuition for the privelege. Riley