Specialist

Flash, we'll agree to disagree. I never lived on the Mexican border. I did, however, live in Austin, Dallas, and Fort Worth for quite a number of years, and I've spent time in Tampa Bay and El Lay. To date, Charley Brown's is the best I've found anywhere. Second place probably goes to Pancho's in Manhattan Beach CA.

I keep thinking I should check out the Tapas Cafe. The problem is that they're right next door to Charley Brown's, home of the best Tex-Mex on the planet! (At least for my money, that I've found ANYWHERE...)

The Nuclear Winter hysteria was ca. 1982. The original study was debunked very thoroughly when the Russians pointed out that Turco, Toon et al had not considered atmospheric scavenging by lake effect snow. The problem was that Turco, Toon et al calibrated their models against Martian data, and Mars doesn't have lake effect snow, because it doesn't have lakes (or oceans) DUH! There's also the annoying fact that the Thera explosion didn't glaciate the planet, despite having put a LOT more debris into the atmosphere than the Nuclear Winter scenarios envisioned. There's also 1800-And-Froze-To-Death, The Year With No Summer. What's REALLY hilarious: the driver for The Coming Ice Age (I do remember the hysteria) was supposed to be uncontrolled release of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, and the proposed solution was to put carbon emissions under strict controls. Funny, that's exactly what they're now proposing for Global Warming...

Guys, an electronic acquaintance is about to embark on his first trip to Bangkok. He will be leaving from "Western Australia" (no, I don't know any better than that), arriving in early March, almost certainly flying Coach. He'll be staying at least a week, probably closer to ten to twelve days. Anyone have a gut feel for what he's likely looking at paying for airfare?

T minus 10 weeks and counting. Landing at Swampy late Friday 6 March, DEROS Saturday 21 March. Current plan calls for me to be in a seminar the first week, but that is not completely definite at this point.

In 1961, children across the United States of America learned to read in FIRST grade. Not third. FIRST. ALL children. I can speak from firsthand knowledge, of schools in both an affluent suburb of Seattle (where the teachers got frustrated because the boys liked to play with paper airplanes and the parents had to remind the teachers of what those boys's fathers did for a living - design and build the world's best flying machines), and of an almost-rural suburb of Waco (the houses across the street from us backed up onto raw wilderness, complete with Western diamondback rattlesnakes).

Special case. I am 59 years old and somewhat mobility-impaired. (I walk with a cane, and I don't have the range I used to have.) I would sit. If a monk came, I would stand up and offer the seat. I am fairly routinely offered seats on the skytrain. If the person offering is female, I generally decline. (Western upbringing.) If I'm just going one stop (usually Asoke to Nana), I'll decline. If I'm going Asoke to Siam, I usually accept, and thank them.

Coss, you have to understand Muslim thinking. Allah provides all. Even technology.

There is, or at least there was. I saw an article about it, that gave the keystroke sequence to bring it up. If you entered the correct sequence, you found yourself running a flight simulator, complete with visual scene. Supposedly, if you then flew to a particular location, you found yourself flying over a huge slab, with the programmer's names inscribed on it. Out of curiosity, I tried the keystroke sequence on my PC at work. And there I was, flying. It was real. I think it has since been removed.

Have you tried rebooting into Safe Mode with Networking, updating MalwareBytes, then running the deep scan from there? What you describe could be any of a number of things.

Yes, they have helped, in some areas, considerably in a few. When I was inpatient at National Jewish Hospital in Denver CO several years ago, my roommate for a day or so was a union guy. We had a long talk, and I came away with considerable respect for his particular union. However, unions were not the reason why the 40-hour work week became standard. Economics were what made it happen, when the early adopters saw their profit margins IMPROVE with the shorter hours. The real problem is that this story is not taught in the schools, with the result that a whole lot of managers believe that the best way to get more profit is to work your employees longer for no extra pay. Jerry Pournelle's wife's father or grandfather (I forget which) was a union organizer on the railroads. His house was dynamited by the Pinkerton goons. I heard that story from Jerry, who heard it from his wife, as part of family history.

I have. The problem is that I have also had access to primary sources, people who were actually there, who I could ask what really happened, to cross-check what is written in some of those books.

Simply false. Back in the day, labor relations were BRUTAL. Union organizers frequently found their houses dynamited and their families targeted by goon squads. If management didn't want the union, the union didn't get anywhere. 12-14 hour work days were considered normal, and those workers were EXHAUSTED, long before the end of the day. Tired workers make mistakes. Mistakes cost money, injuries, and machine damage. The first few companies that adopted an 8-hour day and a 40-hour week saw their scrap, rework, and accident rates decline dramatically, almost instantly, because the workers were no longer dead on their feet. This caused their profit margins to skyrocket, which allowed them to cut their prices to their customers, and wage all-out business war on their competitors. The 40-hour work week became the norm, at least in the United States, because the competitors, still on the old system, realized that there was no possibility of their surviving the business war unless they adopted the same, enlightened policies. Women working is a much more recent thing. It is a direct result of World War II, in which every able-bodied man was needed for the military, and the women were literally all that were left to build the needed war materiel. The fact that today's US economy effectively REQUIRES all women to work is an economic abomination, caused by outrageous tax, interest, and inflation rates. We have thousands of years of history that shows that the traditional stay-at-home mother, or at least one stay-at-home parent, is far better for taking care of children, and we have a few decades of data now that shows that households where there is no stay-at-home parent, for whatever reasons, tend to have BAD outcomes, at far higher rates.

They're still working on Dollhouse. Hopefully, it will be ready in time.

"Flying" magazine used to have a column titled "Aftermath". They'd present a radio transcript, of a scenario that ended in a crash, and go back through to point out what went wrong. One month, they did it differently, and presented a transcript of a save. Cargo 707, something went wrong during takeoff, and the crew saved it. Reading that transcript was interesting. That crew did a superb job, stayed absolutely professional, and you could tell that they all knew that it was ALL on the line right then, with NO margin for anything. The feeling of relief when they knew they had the airplane back on the ground, everyone safe, nothing broken, was OBVIOUS.

Accidents truly caused by "pilot error" are in fact very few and far between.

No. Hydrogen is not a fuel, in the conventional sense. It is a battery. There are no hydrogen wells. You either manufacture it by reforming natural gas (expensive!) or by electrolysis from water (FIENDISHLY expensive!) Hydrogen has nowhere near the energy per unit weight or unit volume of gasoline or natural gas, and is a LOT harder to handle than either of them. (Cryogenic liquid, very hard on materials: Google "hydrogen embrittlement", I think.)

There was actually a case of an F-16 that landed itself on a golf course. Airplane happened to be lined up on a golf course, engine flamed out, backup battery for the flight controls came on, pilot put the landing gear down, then decided he didn't like how it felt and ejected. So there the airplane was, canopy gone and cockpit empty, descending (gliding) straight ahead, gear down, lined up on a golf course. It landed PERFECTLY, rolled out, and if it hadn't been for an unfortunately-placed tree, there wouldn't have been a scratch on it. I was working at GD Fort Worth at the time. A coworker had a copy of the pilot's manual, and we checked the instructions for that situation (engine out, unable to restart). It says, in so many words, if there is ANY doubt about your ability to control the airplane, EJECT.

Short final. Means final approach to landing was short (and probably steep). Another way to say it is that he's CLOSE and will be landing very soon. That pilot did a beautiful job.

Not a chance, Flash. Not a chance. Human pilots are STILL better at figuring out incredibly creative ways to get crippled airplanes back on the ground, frequently with everyone still alive and healthy. The DC-10 that basically lost its tail feathers when the tail-mounted engine blew is an example. Quite a few people died in that one, but a lot more lived. That one was darned near a flat-out miracle. Sully's dead-stick water landing comes to mind. Ditto the Gimli Glider. There was a similar case, of a crew who dead-sticked a 737 safely down onto a levee a few years ago.

Me too.

Missy, it always helps to remember your audience. Some of us are old enough to remember when China and the Soviet Union adopted their "No First Use" propaganda platforms. At that time, both nations held conventional SUPREMACY (not just superiority, SUPREMACY) over everyone that they were likely to get into a fight with. NOBODY was about to start a conventional war with either of them, and anyone they chose to attack would have had NO chance, would not even have slowed them down, if they were restricted to conventional weapons. The Soviets could have lined up a skirmish line of tanks and infantry from basically the Baltic to the Med, and rolled west, and NONE of the conventional armies between there and the Atlantic Ocean could have made a dent in their advance. The ONLY way to break such an advance would have been tactical nuclear weapons. That would have almost certainly escalated to strategic weapons, and the results would not have been pretty. EVERY war-planner on the planet knew this, as did anyone who could be arsed to pay attention. The conventional force disparities were not something that could be kept secret.

Missy, you would be truly amazed at the number of total fuggheads you can find in a population of over 300 million. I am continually amazed at the number of people I encounter who have no clue whatsoever about what an economy actually is. Some years ago, the US experimented with a luxury tax on big yachts. They figured that the 1% wouldn't mind their toys getting more expensive, and they'd collect lots of money for buying votes. It didn't work. Yacht purchases got postponed, or went offshore and out of reach of the tax man. Meanwhile, the boatyards that would normally be storing and servicing those yachts, providing jobs to a lot of 99%ers, got hit HARD. Lots of people got laid off, because the boats they would have been working on were never purchased. No boats means no boatyard services required means no service fees coming in means no money to pay salaries means NO JOB. The luxury tax on yachts did not generate one penny of revenue. Instead, it COST the government a FORTUNE, in unemployment compensation and lost income taxes. It was repealed.

Balloon gas supplier? That's the best-known common use for helium.

Here's the Wikipedia page, which is decent. First line: "Gordon Richard England (born September 15, 1937) is an American businessman who served as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense and twice as U.S. Secretary of the Navy in the administration of U.S. PresidentGeorge W. Bush." I should add something: From firsthand personal observation, while I worked in avionics at GD/FW, Gordon's personal integrity is absolutely impeccable.