Howzabout...

...make the entire aircraft able to fit inside a drainpipe as the upper stage of a missile-like launch vehicle? The wings could pop out on a nice strong spring once the rockets are exhausted, with elevons at the back being used as aerodynamic control surfaces.

As for missing the balloon, I reckon whatever guidance system you're using should take care of that. Some small control surfaces set into the first stage exhaust stream should give you enough manouverability to go from a horizontal to near-vertical flight path. If you can make a movable rocket nozzle (or just a tube) durable enough to last a few seconds then go for that instead. By the time any second stage kicks in (if indeed there be a second stage), you're probably going fast enough for the Vulture 2's elevons to be used as canards to maintain a generally upward direction of travel. So long as your guidance system can tell ground from sky (I'll give you a clue: the ground is generally warmer than the sky), the end result should be much more reliable than simply mounting it at an angle and praying the wind doesn't blow it too hard.

Of course, test at a low altitude on a small scale with little C class engines or therebouts before sticking some whacking great Ms in the finished article. I'm no artist but if I can get something scrawled together I'll email some sketches.

PARIS, LOHAN...

And now PAMELA? And she's probing Van Allen?

The mind boggles.

Keeping balloons (or just one balloon) under control on the ground

Grab your mallets and hammer a nice long metal stake or three into the floor. Use them to keep your assembly attached to terra firma without any danger of SPB team members going on an unexpected stratospheric joy-ride. There, now you can use a triple-triplet config!

I also don't think some people here appreciate just how huge a latex balloon can get at altitude. I'm pretty sure a lot of people know about the infamous expanding capabilities of condoms though? Well, this is the same stuff on a vastly larger scale. Wikipedia quotes a 100:1 expansion ratio. Think about a balloon so large that you could stick a couple of Jumbo Jets inside of it, and you're getting to the sort of size a latex weather balloon will expand to before bursting.

Dunno how Lester thinks that three balloons will only go as high as one. You would only have to inflate each balloon a third as much, and that's not including any other triplets also attached to the launch platform. I know my idea was a triple-triplet set-up where each triplet can lift the entire platform on its own, for a little added redundancy. Inflate the upper set the least.

Anyway, as for deciding when to launch, there are a number of ways. One is the obvious pressure switch. Use a solid state barometer and have it used to initiate launch sequence when air pressure readings drop below X, indicating you are Y feet above sea level. This could be backed up by some system to detect a sudden altitude drop of say, more than 1000 feet. Just in case a single-balloon set-up bursts early. The good thing about going solid state, is that it has no moving parts to freeze up and screw with the release like with PARIS.

Another redundant system, which could also provide some other benefits: I know the Reg Guys were thinking of (but eventually never bothered with) tracking via telescope for PARIS. What would be the chances of not only tracking optically with a telescope, but pointing a radio dish in the same direction and keeping a live communications link with the thing? Everyone gets to see the telescopic view, plus with a singular balloon platform you can see yourself if your only lifting device bursts and can hit the big red button for a manual launch from ground control. Maybe creatively re-engineer a couple of TV satellite dishes for the purpose? What's the regulations in Spain with regards pointing a few watts of radio energy into the sky?

Oh, I know I keep saying this, but CAMERAS EVERYWHERE. Two on the Vulture 2 for forward/rearward footage, preferably with the rearward camera able to see any rocket-pod-jettison action if indeed there be any to see. At least two on the launch platform. One pointing downward toward the Vulture 2, the other upward toward the balloons to capture the burst and parachute deployment. Maybe an extra one pointing sideways towards the expected direction of travel for the little spaceplane.

I keep making long posts don't I?

Whole goddamn site written in Flash?

For fuxache, why? I think any hacking attempt would be an improvement!

Soon to arrive in Ballmer's inbox.

Hi.

We notice that your Bing search engine is currently violating 235 of our patents. This could result in various legal headaches for not only you, but your customers and anybody that licenses any violating technology from you. We're not going to tell you which patents we have identified you as being in violation of, but rest assured that our legal team has assured us that we have a very solid case.

We are reasonably compassionate though. We suggest that you leave Android and its associated Linux kernel well alone, and pay us a yearly license fee of (insert seven figure sum here). In return, if we do decide to start suing anybody, we will look the other way as far as your products are concerned.

Yours very VERY cheerily

Google

Diameter problem

Launch near-horizontally. Have your guidance system point the nose up at 45 degrees as of say, 0.5 to 1 seconds after ignition and hold it there for the duration of the rocket burn. Then you can use as many balloons as you like!

The tractor design seems a bit iffy. Nothing wrong with a little bizarreness, but this is going to mean that you have burning hot exhaust gasses flowing over your aircraft. Not to mention the Wikipedia link on pendulum rocketry that RayG posted! Don't forget that the tractor escape system on various NASA rocketry has never been put to use, and they probably have a much bigger budget to make sure it would work properly! If you're worried about getting up to a speed where control surfaces will work, then can't you put, say, a "sacrificial" flap or two in the rocket stream? Doesn't matter too much if they burn up, so long as they last long enough to get you going in the right direction. That or make the rocket nozzles directable.

I still think balloon clusters would be an idea. You don't just have one cluster with all the balloons touching. The idea is that if an entire cluster does go bang, you still have redundant clusters. Have a heavily inflated lower set, a normally-inflated middle set and an upper set only just inflated enough that they will lift the rig on their own. You get the ballocket through all that turbulent weather nice and nippy-quick, plus footage from an upward-pointing camera of the staged balloon bursts would be pretty awesome. Plus the rig will most likely go higher, as the upper set only needs to just-about-barely carry the weight of everything. I would also think it pretty obvious that a cluster of three balloons needs to be inflated vastly less than a single balloon, and therefore will go much higher before burst.

Off the shelf rocket motors also tend to have an ejection charge in the tip, and I don't know what that would mean with them mounted in a tractor config like that. It seems like you'd need your own extra method of removing the tractor scaffold after the burn completes. Mounted to the side or underneath in a more normal fashion, you could use the ejection charges to blow your rocket modules clear in a Shuttle SRB style.

The folding wing idea is something. Perhaps have a design where the force of the air sweeps the wings back like a fighter? You're going to need something to keep wing surface area to a minimum during the rocket burn, as otherwise you will more than likely rip both wings off (or at least, limit your potential maximum speed) even up at that rarified altitude. Don't worry too much about fitting ailerons to a moving wing. Elevons work extremely well for controlling both pitch and roll, and you reduce your servo count by two. A simple V Mixer (available from most model shops for about a tenner) can turn your aileron/elevator signals into elevon signals easily enough. Just like this, and yes, that is me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x2mbEVqJW4

Finally, and I've already said this but it bears repeating: Cameras. Cameras and more cameras. On the launch rig. On the Vulture 2. Hell, on the rocket boosters too. Cameras everywhere!

The answer:

Rather than just scraping headlines and sending extra traffic to newspapers for free, you launch a new service with a "special offer".

"With our new tracking service, we can increase the viewing figures of your site. Pay us £99 per year and we will intelligently index your headlines with a short flavour text, driving viewers to your articles and helping you to massively increase ad revenue. Sign up before the end of this year and you get your first year of service ABSOLUTELY FREE!"

There.

(also yes, isn't Google doing the same thing as Meltwater?)

Still don't know why it can't be boosted to GEO

It's not like it can't be done. It'd be a great test for the ion thruster technology. If it were just crashed into the sea, that'd be an awful lot of mass that would have to be re-launched next time a group of countries want an orbital research base.

So basically...

...this attack could be defeated by telling the crypto chip to do random math while it works? Maybe have a second, very small slice of silicon in the package, attached to the same power pins, continually producing pseudorandom numbers seeded from a leaky diode/reverse biased transistor?

Fragmentation is a problem?

Someone had better tell all them PC game devs. I don't think I've ever seen two PCs with the same hardware configuration outside of an office. If a game doesn't work on your no-name, Intel-onboard-graphics Wintel box, do you complain to Microsoft?

Xperia Play looks like a nice concept, but it really does need a bit more support from Sony. Currently it just looks like an "oh we also do this" product. It needs some exclusive, killer games, and Sony to start licensing the "playstation certified" moniker out to other manufacturers.

OnLive? Yeah, maybe when we all have 100mbit unlimited mobile connectivity.

A realistic target?

Something to aim for: Go so fast and high that the civilian GPS craps out. You'd then need your own altimeter and airspeed indicator, and a three-axis magnetic compass wouldn't go amiss. I've already skimmed over the details of those in other posts.

Think you could get Vulture 2 going over 1050mph? Think you can afford the titanium-geared servos required to move control surfaces/rocket nozzles at that speed? Think you could track the thing with a telescope/radio dish for real-time telemetry?

Want to find out?

So it's big...

...really big, and we won't believe just how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is?

Still waiting...

...on 2.3 for this 7" 3G Tab.

No Samsung, "buy a new tablet" is not an acceptable answer. Especially not some ten inch giganto-slab that won't fit in a pocket.

"Back then, letters were printed on telephone dials to aid automatic calls."

Uhm, they were then and are now. Just that the dials are buttons and people use thm 2 mk awfl txt spk lk ths. Letters on phone dials/pads might have fell out of fashion in the UK at one point, but they've always been available and the mobile market has brought them back into the public consciousness big time.

Been a while since I last used the service though. It was on 8081 back then. It's 123 now, I think!

Less of a headache?

How is "I own this software and have a license to run it on X number of PCs from now on until the world stops turning" more of a headache than "did I pay the rent on the software this month?" Or even better, "what's the rental pcm going to be THIS financial year?"

Somehow I suspect that there is still going to be a hefty tome of EULA to read through, whether you own the disks or are dependant on someone else's servers not fucking up that day.