This shows that the U.S. Federal Government is out of control, acts counter to the constitution and it's own laws. Just from a cursory glance the DOJ has just asked Apple to commit acts which are illegal under the DMCA. Of course that law has nothing to do with copyright, and everything to do with allowing big Hollywood and big Publishing to have ownership interest in the public's computers and digital files. With the DMCA you no longer own a book, you rather rent it from the copyright holder.

All of the above should have been a choice!

I only supplied two of the many recent links about the skigull project. There is more information here http://http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2015/March/16/Rutan-SkiGull , on the antennafilms site (linked from some of the articles previously mentioned) and of course more links http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Burt+Rutan+skigull

So far as the second link in the original post the biggest reason for Burt to be at Airventure is to announce the Skigull has flown. His previous history with Airventure would suggest this is as big or even bigger reason than the 40th anniversary of one of his designs.

A better post would be a paragraph summarizing the release and then one or two links to the main site for the product and the release notes. No way I want to be looking at the post in it's current format on the front page. I would vote -1, but that option seems not be be available.

bsdguy

I learned about doing this back in the Navy in the late 1970s. This is exactly why there are protocols over what electronics can be used when on a warship. Back in the 1980s it was possible to pick up random radiation to discover the position of a ship fairly far away, and if one had the right equipment even in those days keystrokes could be decoded based on the radiation from the keyboards and terminals.

So I have to say that those who do not read history are doomed to learn the lesson again.

bsdguy

You have summed up my thoughts exactly. Yesterday I had a recruiter ask me if I knew LAMP. Mind you Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl are all on my CV.

recruiter: I do not see LAMP do you know LAMP
me: Did you read my CV
recruiter: Yes but I do not see LAMP
me: Do you know what LAMP means?
recruiter: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
me: Do you see those on my CV anywhere?
recruiter: Yes, but I still do not see LAMP

May the Gods save us from recruiters and HR staff like that!

The take off roll is only a matter of seconds at most airports before the wheels are off the deck, unless the pilot is holding it down on purpose as he might do in gusty conditions.

There are of course the exceptions such as Quito where the altitude makes the take off run longer, or of course very hot places like Vegas in the summer where sometimes low power GA aircraft like the Piper J3 have to take off before sunrise.

I do not think the size of electric motors that could drive the wheels of a large jet would have significant impact on takeoff distance. I do think that they would be good for taxi purposes, but since the jets need to be spun up anyway there would probably be little gain of economy.

BSDGuy

As a middle class private pilot who owns his own plane (cheap little one) I can tell you there are plenty of costs to aviation which the public does not directly see. Here is a small list from my experience owning a plane for just a few years.

. annual inspection (about $400 for my little plane, much more for a 747)
. 100 hour inspection - yep every plane in commercial service must be inspected every 100 operational hours at about the same level as the annual inspection
. landing fees - to land and take off from JFK, LGA, or EWR costs over $100 for my little 2 place plane
.fuel of course
.lubrication oil
.replacement parts for time limited parts - ex a gen-set may be rated at 10,000 hours after which it must be replaced even if in perfect order
. mandated engine overhauls - my engine must be given a complete overhaul every 500 operating hours
. recurring training for pilots - for private pilots this comes out to something between $500 and $2000 every 2 years, for ATP pilots (airline pilots) the costs are greater and so is the frequency
.cost of operating slots at major airports - yep the airlines have to pay for take off and landing times at LGA,JGK, LAX, SFO etc.

So while we would all love to see lower costs I can not say it is all due to greed. Something I read several years ago claimed that airlines only made a few percent profit. I have not been part of an airline, but I am friends with owners of small charter operations and I can tell you they have real thin profit margins.

From what I see the best use of hybrid technology in aviation is for small general aviation aircraft like mine, and then the small to medium sized puddle jumpers used by the regional operators and charter operations. The technology does not lend it's self well as a replacement for jet propulsion, so the bigger faster planes will not benefit from this work in the foreseeable future.

BSDGuy

I started out in Unix in the very early 1980s. I was drawn to it because of the toolbox approach and the readability of the configs and startup scripts. I started with BSD 4.2 on PDP 11s, then dualport OSX from Pyramid, followed by some Xenix and Suns running SunOS 3.x (BSD based). Over the years I have worked with pretty much every flavor of Unix, BSD, or GNU/Linux you can think of. Most of them were simple to deal with when moving from one to the other because the configs and startups were readable by anyone with even moderate skill in the art. I could teach a newbie how to understand the startup system and troubleshoot startup problems in very short order.

At some point commercial Unix vendors decided to "make things easier" and we started to get things like SCO Unix overwriting startup files and configs from it's GUI admin tool. It stored stuff in a private DB and just over wrote changes put in files by hand. NOT GOOD. Then of course with Solaris 10, which brought us the great ZFS, Sun decided to go to a monolithic startup database, which if corrupt means the system will not boot. Other commercial vendors have done similar stupid things over the last 10 years.

I think if the Debian core team wants to go against 30+ years of good solid proven engineering then they need to find a surgeon to give them a Rectal craniotomy.

If non-systems administrators can not figure out how to administer a system who the hell cares? Every time I have been called in by startups where the programmers tried to develop code and figure out system administration as well as design how the programs interact with the system it has been a total FUBAR.

The problem these days is everyone who has walked past a computer thinks they are a systems administrator or systems engineer, and vendors as well as, it appears, Team Debian , are feeding that fantasy and in the process destroying the versatility, agility, and maintainability of current POSIX systems. It is exactly this kind of stupidity that makes it more difficult all the time to properly administer systems as well as move between POSIX systems from different vendors.

JUST SAY NO TO FORCED INIT SYSTEM CHANGES.