Just great...

We cant smoke, we cant get plastered, we have to put up with screaming children and NOW we will have to put up with annoying twats yelling into their phones as well.

Remind me why i want to fly again?

Its not related to the Heathrow landing

I wish people would stop bringing up the Heathrow crash-landing in relation to this when talking about the 777's safety record.

The 777 has a great safety record, this grounding is not because of something unsafe on the 777 but because United cut corners on their maintenance. ANY aircraft will become unsafe if you dont perform the necessary maintenance to keep it airworthy.

I think the biggest story here is that an airline actually admitted a mistake and grounded its fleet in order to do the repair, rather then a) trying to cover it up and do a piecemeal inspection or b) being ordered to ground the fleet by the FAA. Also, ive read elsewhere that the FAA had grounded a number of other United aircraft on an unrelated matter (also failing to do some maintenance I've heard but i cant confirm that). My question is why the hell didnt the FAA do a complete audit of United once they found them cutting corners on ANY aircraft maintenance!

Who cares?

Frankly, the double clickers work for an annoying Adware company (oh sorry advertising serving company). The less of 'em the better!

@ Anonymous

"On the one hand, the US gets blamed for interventionism, on the other everyone expects it to be the world policeman. It's pretty much a no-win situation"

I have one word for you - LIBERIA...

But then again they didnt have any oil, did they?

Damn a BILLION years

I cant even imagine working for the same company for 5 years in a row, imagine being stuck working for them for a billion years.

You die, you go to St Peter "Sorry pal, you signed a billion year contract. Over that way with the other suckers." He points to a group of other souls in no mans land looking really unhappy chained to typewriters doing whatever the fuck it is that Scientologist employees do.

"Guess you should have read the fine print a bit better, eh?"

Come on folks...

Lets face it who doesnt want there own main battle tank sporting frickin' laser beams!

@ AJ Stiles

I honestly cannot agree with some of your comments AJ.

Firstly, assume you've spent 3 months creating a program. Thats 3 months worth of research, development, testing and writing. All of which costs you money. So naturally, you have to sell that program at a price that allows you to recoup the money it took you to develop the product over the previous 3 months.

If you then, hand that finished open source code to someone else and they go along reverse engineer it, edit all the comments that say you wrote it, to say that they wrote it, maybe add a couple of minor changes in function to make it a tiny bit less obvious that it is just your rebadged code. Say this process takes only one month. They can then price their rebadged product so that they only need to recoup one months costs. This will obviously make them a LOT cheaper. Sure they'll be a month behind you but when the difference in product cost is 1/3 your going to lose a lot of money.

Most closed source products AREN'T because a company is trying to hide bad code but because there trying to prevent competitors gaining an unfair advantage by being able to copy their products without going through the months/years of product development that they had to pay for.

Surely a better measurement

Would be not per capita but per computer user or per broadband connection!

I kinda doubt that Toklau or Nuie are really king pin nations of spam...

@ reinforcing the gear

Sorry, but wont work.

The whole way an aircraft functions is by a combination of forces on the aircraft, these are thrust, lift, drag and weight. In cruise they balance out nicely so your aircraft stays in the air and maintains a nice and comfortable speed. On the ground, the thrust from the engines still produces lift on the wings and this lifts the aircraft slightly off the undercarriage thereby reducing the weight felt by the undercarriage.

Hence, by dragging the aircraft around the whole time without the engines running, you add a significant amount of weight that the undercarriage has to carry and which it hasn't been designed to carry whilst in movement. This leads to an increase in fatigue, and fatigue is what limits the life of aircraft.

At present, fatigue limits for your undercarriage are known based on huge amounts of simulations, calculations, stress data and fatigue testing of the aircraft/undercarriage systems (completed over years and years of testing), but the moment you start dragging them around this changes and where before you might have thought you only needed to check for cracks every 500 landings* you now have a crack forming and reaching critical length in under 500 landings, this means your undercarriage will fail, the aircraft will crash and people will be hurt/killed. This is generally considered a bad thing.

*figure pulled out of my ass for lack of desire to go searching for the exact figure

So whilst it may be an idea for future aircraft to be designed with undercarriage that are rated for this sort of activity it is impractical for in service aircraft.

Oh and before some one suggestions recalculating the fatigue limits - this is not an easy task, it takes years to do. The C130J Hercules fatigue test aircraft is STILL undergoing fatigue testing as we speak (24hr a day cycling for years on end) and how long has it been in service?

Come on folks...

If Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear can cross the channel in a Toybota then i think a fully kitted out, modified EX-car ferry re-engineered to carry nuclear fuel should be ok.

I'm interested what people's objections to this really are. Is it just you would prefer them to wait a bit until these high winds die down? Do you not want them to ship it at all? Do you want a fully armed military escort? What part of the process are you complaining about?

Analogy with car industry

I don't believe very many companies would be willing to give their code to independent sources for verification as suggested by AJ Stiles. This is because code is usually proprietary, expensive to develop and protected IP that companies will go along way to keep secret.

If you make the assumption that your software code is like a car, the car manufacturer is not going to give all of the details of the car, its manufacture, new technologies and design criteria to another independent car manufacturer just to prove that its safe. As that would soon see a very similar car out on the market probably at a much cheaper price because the 2nd company doesnt need to develop the technologies independently.

What happens instead is that the car manufacturers join forces and have an independent regulatory body that the car details are provided to and who make a decision on just how safe the car is (usually by crashing it into a brick wall at high speed).

What the software industry needs is a single independent qualification body that will accept code, maintain that code's secrecy, test the code and then award appropriate security qualifications which the whole industry accepts. If the code is particularly bad, it will be rejected as unsafe and cant be released until fixed. This would need all software company's to sign up to it and abide by it (which will probably render it nothing more then a flight of my imagination) but it would be a good solution to the problem of poor security in programs.

From other news sites

It appears he did two things -

a) He "accidentally" mailed to Korea a training manual that was not supposed to EVER leave the training compound (ie pretty sensitive stuff)

b) Was found in possession of another training manual which he had no authority to possess.

Sounds to me like he did a lot of dodgy stuff which certainly leads one to suspect espionage. I guarantee the only reason he isnt in a russian prison somewhere for it is because a lot of money changed hands from the Koreans to the Russians in order to allow the Koreans to save face.

Malaysian religious politics

Having lived in Malaysia i can tell you its a strange place. Freedom of religion and belief does exist for everyone except ethnic Malays (there are 4 main ethnic groups in Malaysia - Ethnic Malays about 50-60% of the population, Ethnic Chinese - 20-30%, Ethnic Indians - 10-15%, Indigineous Malaysians - 5%) Ethnic Malays are by law born Muslims and it is illegal for them to change religion.

Law in Malaysia is a 2 tiered thing, A form of Sharia Law (which is relatively modern and advanced, not Saudi Medieval style Sharia Law) is the governing law for the Ethnic Malays, and a seperate Common Law exists for everyone else. Naturally this gets really complicated when something takes place where malays & non-malay's are involved and im not going to go into that here.

When i was living there back in April there was a case going on where a malay woman was fighting in the courts to be recognised as a christian and not a muslim. This was rejected and she was imprisoned for apostasy (and received MULTITUDES of death threats).

Quite frankly any religion that fears people leaving the religion so much that it imprisons or murders them for trying obviously does not have a great deal of confidence in its own ability to keep people in worship by anything other than fear! Speaks to me of desperation, no?

Lets Face it...

Anyone DUMB enough to WILLINGLY put themselves in front of people who want to kill them at the first opportunity probably isnt the most tuned-in person in the world.

@ Mike Richards

You've completely missed the one company that is the world's leader in commercial launches - EADS (Or more specifically Astrium who build the rockets, EADS just launch them, and get the customers).

EADS have been the world leaders in commercial rocket technology for the better part of the last decade for the very reason you mentioned. They're good reliable tech rockets and they are designed for launching commercial satellites and so are not hugely expensive like the US military ones.

I would disagree that NASA's are hugely expensive because they do purely military stuff. NASA are one of the prime commerical launches as well and so for regular non-military launches they use a less expensive launcher.

I still stand by what i said - good luck to him but i doubt very much that he's going to be cheaper then the EADS or NASA launchers of the same size/capacity.

The War of the Worms

Not quite the same ring to it as War of the Worlds.

How about The Malware Malefaction? Battle of the Bots? Rise of the One True Zombie Horde?

And if they ever get diplomatic

The United Rootkits of Malware?

@ AC

The high res image satellite gets LAUNCHED later this year, so yeah not really surprising that we dont have any high res images of the lander yet. Also as the high res satellite has only a res of 1m your still not going to get to see the flag, and maybe only a bit of a dodgy blur for the lander.

So the kooks are still going to claim the yanks never landed and everyone else will just groan and ask NASA to hurry up and get back there...

Cheap Rockets - reliable?

I can never understand how people can turn around and say "We're going to make these really cheap rockets and there going to be extremely reliable. More reliable then those tried and tested ones which are way more expensive."

Do people really think that the current rocket manufacturers make the rockets more expensively then they have to? And considering that NASA, ESA & The Russians have been building rockets for a long long time you think that if they could be made cheaper THEY would be the ones coming up with the cost saving...

Good luck to him but i guarantee he's not going to end up being cheaper then the current field of rockets...

£250 keep dreaming

Even a pretty standard remote control CAR costs more then £250, a plane large enough to carry any load your looking at would cost a lot more than that. Then you've got the explosives themselves (plus all the literature and training to learn how to make the explosives and the isolated patch of farm land/forest to test such explosives), the electronic equipment required to turn the remote control aircraft into a self piloted aircraft (because remote controls in cities have an effective range of bugger all minus a bit), plus the training to use said equipment to turn the remote control into a self piloted aircraft, then there's the costs of a second and third remote control plane (because i guarantee your going to cock up and crash beyond repair at least the first 2 planes you try this on).

Once you've got the hang of it, maybe you could bring it in at under £1000 per aircraft but by that stage the cops will be looking around pretty sharpishly to all the remote control supply stores and your likely to get knicked before you get much in the way of mass destruction happening.

Oh and for the people who suggested anthrax and bio-weapons - do you really think that if terrorists had bio-weapons they would wait until they've developed a complex and expensive robot delivery mechanism rather then some more standard simpler method of say an aerosol can or a bomb?

Big ups to the German Federal Constitution Court

Finally a High Court willing to stand up to government attempts to remove our privacy. Hope our local high courts take some notice and grow some backbone!

You all seem to have missed a point

in the article (or deliberately chose to keep quiet on the fact), that the guy had been pepper-sprayed prior to being tasered and that the pepper spray had had no effect. i.e he was violent when they went to arrest him, they pepper sprayed him and he remained violent, so they tasered him.

Don't really have a problem with that since they used pepper spray first. Anyone DUMB enough to keep trying to resist arrest after being hit by pepper spray deserves a few thousand volts (preferably administered via the testicles so that we can remove them from the gene pool - though admittedly with this guy were probably too late to stop him infecting the gene pool with his own pond scum).

Ups to the cops for following CORRECT procedure.

@ Chris Williams

I'd hardly say that leaders claiming to be guided by God(s) is a new thing. The pope claims divine guidance, the middle age kings of england (as head of the church of england) claimed divine guidance, the roman emperor's claimed divine guidance, the egyptian pharoahs claimed to be divine, televengelist claim divine guidance.

It's nothing new to claim your leadership is inspired and ordained by a higher power. In fact god is inspiring you to send the sum of $10,000 to my bank in Nigeria to help me obtain the millions from my great uncle Wombossi's bank account, which i will happily share with you once it has cleared...

Wretched is perhaps not the word your thinking of

Wretched

Adjective -er -est

1. despicable, contemptible, or mean: a wretched miser.

2. poor, sorry, or pitiful; worthless: a wretched job of sewing.

Not quite the word i would use to describe the victim Trisha.

[Insert 2c here]

I fail to see how you can hold the company executive responsible. The hiring officer yes but the CEO? It's not like he personally interviews each of the drivers, he has a department head that does that. If the department head is the one held responsible fair enough but the CEO... that's taking things a little too far imho.

[/end 2c]

Hasnt anyone heard of a technology demonstrator

Sure it wasnt made from algal biofuels, sure there was no-one on board, and sure everyone can say of course it was going to work. But had anyone actually done it before - NO!

Sure, an aircraft should fly but it still took 100's of years for the first one to be made and another hundred years to get to where we are now!

This is just the first step, and i say congrats Mr Branson. You've put at risk (and until something is done for the first time there is still a risk no matter how much mitigation you put in) a £100 million aircraft to try out a technology which when fully functioning may reduce emissions from aircraft by a significant percentage.

Congrats on taking that first step.

OK from a dictators point of view...

I can understand sacking the cleaners, the directors, maybe even the news crew and the camera guys, but why the journalists?

They just wrote the story's i doubt they had much to do with the cockroach!

PS Why would you sack people over ONE cockroach? A true dictator's lack of being in touch with reality me thinks...

A simpler solution

Surely, a simpler solution would have been to just trim the tree back a bit, maybe remove those branches which were shading the solar panels rather then removing the whole bloody tree?

Utter toss pots...

I cant understand

the US Judiciary decisions on this. The judiciary are as power hungry as any other branch of the US government, but allowing warrantless wire tapping DECREASES there power in the government, it basically sidelines them.

You would think they would be all over this like pigs on shit for trying to cut them out of the loop!

@ Brym

Apologies for the snappiness of my comments yesterday, Our coffee machine at work had broken down. It is now working fine again. Normal service shall now be resumed...

PS I agree that the majority of this probably does come down to a lot of willy-waving on the part of the US but i can still see some definite reasons of keeping tech a secret in shooting it down...

One final comment, people saying why cant the DoD get NASA to step across with the shuttle - remember NASA is civilian, the DoD is military. The DoD probably dont want even NASA to know the capabilities they have...

I dont know about the US

But here in Aus, you are not allowed to maintain the proceeds of any crime you've committed so if your found guilty of a crime, you lose the ability to make money from it or to keep any money from it.

Take David Hicks (Australian guy who ended up in Guantanamo after fighting for the Taliban), if he sells his story to the media then the government gets all that money because he'd be profiting from his crime.

So same deal with this guy, he committed an illegal act (hacking) if found guilty of that then the $300,000 goes to the government because its the proceeds of his crime.

Cant believe you guys dont have the same sort of thing, but then again that would make most of your company and government execs bankrupt so i guess i can understand it...

& the future reads thus

In a weeks time the sun will report that the public's reaction of fear and disgust to pictures of the Snakehead amounts to racism against the Snakehead fish and that the poor fish pulled from the river was a victim of child abuse and traffickers and just wanted a fresh start in a new country but was vilified and persecuted by the government and the anglers association.

The brainless masses will believe this and start a campaign to allow the family of the Snakehead to move to the UK and take up lodgings in the river from which the Snakehead was abducted by those evil anglers. Claims that the Snakehead was a hard working piscine and that he made a great contribution to british society will be made by a bunch of so-called experts (i.e people who had never met nor heard of the Snakehead until this story came to light).

The government deciding that it must do something will organise for the family of the Snakehead (after of course a hugely taxpayer expensive investigation which really doesnt find the Snakeheads family but picks up some other Snakeheads from a quite possibly different south american country) and delivers them into the river where they promptly eat all of the native British fish and breed copiously in a rather anti-social way. This is spun to the sheep-like public as a great addition to the ethnic diversity of British waterways, and that the loss of the British fish cannot be blamed on the Snakeheads but is due to a clash of the piscine cultures. The public is assured that no expense will be spared to integrate the Snakeheads into British piscine society. Additionally anglers are prevented fishing in any location where the Snakeheads are believed to be so that their vile vilification of the new migrant fish is put to an end.

Joe Public is happy and content and a new season of Big Brother starts and so Joe Public forgets all about the Snakeheads which go on to kill all of the fish species in any river they can get their hands on.

The end...

PS Yes i know i have way too much time on my hands!

@ David Benoit

I think you may have missed the "joke alert" icon back there champ...

Turn on your humour sensors and try again...

Welcome to the new world order

Where freedom of speech, honesty, integrity and refusing to follow the company/government line when said company/government line is illegal/immoral are now crimes to be punished and censored at every opportunity.

Welcome to 1984...

@ AC - Story Telling Time

Ok, your physics sounds a bit rusty.

What happens when a liquid reaches boiling point, it becomes....

.... come on i know you can do this....

....

Thats right, a gas. You have first choice of toy for playtime AC.

Hydrazine Gas is a very nasty little gas which can be dangerous to people. I'm not saying i believe the theory that it's so deadly that they need to prevent it from reaching the ground by blowing it up in LEO, but just cause something is a liquid and gets heated up past its boiling point doesnt mean it disappears completely now does it?

@ Brym

"I don't think they'd blow it up after throwing so much money at it."

That is an extremely naive (or possibly just plain stupid) comment.

Given that the US DoD HAS spent millions on this satellite and millions more developing the tech inside it, i think they'd be MORE willing to blow it up rather then see that tech land in a foreign country. Even if there's only a 1 in a million chance of it surviving re-entry and landing (or crashing is perhaps a better word) would you want to risk that the brand spanking new technology you've spent millions developing would end up in foreign hands where they can reverse engineer it and be on the same technological standing as you for next to nothing.

@ Damian Gabriel Moran

"Children are smart because I do not know one child with a job and kids." You obviously havent been down the Isle of Wight lately! Oh wait you said a JOB and kids. Sorry your right...

Honestly, i have no sympathy for any of these guys - who in their right mind hooks up with a random chick on the internet (or anywhere for that matter) and doesnt wear a condom! Your just asking for unwanted things (VD, pregnancy, etc). Frankly, if a girl says she doesnt want you wearing a condom or that its not necessary than frankly that should be raising the big yellow warning flags right there!

@ lucmars

Because the moon is like soooo 1960's!

Big ups to the chinese exec

I just love the fact that we have a PR exec in this article who says what im sure all PR people would love to say when confronted by a particularly stupid, inane, unresearched questions

"Bullshit!"

@ Ambo guy

I know that here in Aus ive seen printer docks (where you hook up a digital camera straight to the top of a printer and print out your image without need for a comp) for only about A$50 (thats about £20). And there usually only about the size of a shoebox or even smaller so space isnt a huge worry. They may take a bit more time since obviously its not the same speed as a polaroid (which is instantaneous) but hey as your driving to the hospital sit your camera on the dock press go and booyah by the time your at the hospital you'll have a nice printed digital image of the gory scene to pass on to the medicos.

Problem solved...

the 1953 case

Now that the details of the 1953 are released, can the families go back and sue the government for lying or something? Surely something should happen to punish the military and the government for blatantly lying and just waiting till all the people involved are dead before admitting "Yep we made it all up".

Surely something has to be made of that case, else what's to stop the government from declaring everything a state secret and basically preventing ANY justice from happening?

Funny

Funny, I've lived in a multitude of countries and the only ones I've ever felt unsafe in are the ones where people are allowed to have guns. Ban guns and you significantly reduce gun crime! Who would a thunk it!

Take Aus for example, we still hold the record for the most number of people killed in a psychotic gun rampage (outside of the military of course! And depsite America's repeated attempts to take back the title). After the Port Arthur Massacre we introduced much tougher gun laws and we have not had another mass shooting incident since. Its only been 12 years though so i guess its just not soon enough for any actual conclusions to be drawn, eh?

Motorcycle uses take a chill pill!

I think the whole point the author was making was that a bike has much lower safety standards then a car (Department of the Bleeding F$%king Obvious at your disposal). If a bike had to meet a cars safety standards, well there wouldnt be any bikes on the road. So the problem the author has is taking what is effectively a car minus a wheel and not making it meet a cars safety standards.

A motorcycle does need a seat belt (in fact the ability to jump off a bike can sometimes be extremely useful), that means the ZAP wont actually need a seat belt by law. Nor will it need to be able to hit an object at xx mph (sorry dont know the exact figure) and not kill everyone in the immediate vicinity of the inside and outside of the vehicle. That's where the objections lie.

If it looks like a car, is enclosed like a car then it should be regulated like a car! It should not be regulated like a motorbike just because some dastardly boffin has decided to take a wheel off so he doesnt have to meet the stringent safety criteria for cars.

@ System

Thats the dimensions when you lay the Tribeca down on , for example, a bed - 6.5 ft long and 2.2 ft high... ;)

As my aerospace lecture liked to joke

The perfect cockpit of the future will have 2 occupants - A Dog and a Pilot. The Pilot's job is to feed the Dog. The Dog's job is to bite the Pilot if he tries to touch anything.

I have no problem with the autothrottle having precedence over a pilot as is the Airbus philosphy as in 99.9% of cases, a crash is caused by a problem on the aircraft being exacerbated by the pilot. The computer has a much better idea of what exactly is happening on the aircraft then the pilot and so it can usually react much faster and better then a pilot, its only in these extremely isolated instances when a problem occurs in the computer that a pilot comes in handy...

Simple solution

If your company isnt paying your overtime, dont work it! When the jobs arent being done and they demand you work overtime, demand you get paid for it. If they wont pay, work doesnt get done. Eventually they'll start paying...

I find it hard to believe that it would be legal for IBM to do this, but then this is taking place over the pond there in the "good ol' US of A".

Way to go western hackers!

Finally western hackers doing something!! You always read about Russian, chinese, *insert non-western nation here* hackers taking down websites for opposition political parties or governments. Now its the west's turn!

To quote Churchill:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other ones that have been tried."