Another flying car. This one from Terrafugia.
It appears to be very much on the “roadable plane” side of the roadable plane/flying car divide, and I rather expect that it will be like the rest: single digit production followed by an exit of the business.
In any case, here is a vid of their first flight.
It really appears to love the ground a lot, but that may be because of its relatively long wheel base relative to dedicated aircraft, requiring more force to rotate.
About 1 ¾ years ago, I wrote about how Boeing was looking into putting an Infra-Red Search and Track (IRST) on the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet by fitting it to the front half of a center-line drop tank.
Well, Boeing has completed successful flight tests on the system, which is supplied by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control*.
There hasn’t been an aircraft in the US inventory with an IRST for air-to-air since the F-14 Tomcat was retired, but Russian and European fighters have embraced this technology.
The advantages of going passive are real, though I would wonder about the reliability of the system under the very turbulent and vibration laden environment beneath the Super Bug.
*Full disclosure, I worked at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in the late 1990s.†
†Yes, I have worked everywhere. Maybe I can’t hold down a job, but more likely this has been my role as “technical hit man”, where you are parachuted in to take care of a specific need.
It appears that there have been some upgrades and/or fixes to China’s Chengdu J-10 canard-delta fighter.
If you look at the top (newer) image it appears that an Infra-Red Search and Track (IRST) unit has been added just forward of the cockpit, and that the inlet has been modified from the original aircraft (bottom).
Douglas Barrie thinks that there may have been vibration or air flow instability issues with the original inlet, but it looks to me more like an attempt to reduce RCS in the forward aspect.
Or maybe it’s a buff with photoshop.
Watch this crash of an SU-24 at what I think is an Iranian air show, and you will believe, as Stephen Trimble notes, that the performance of their ejection seats in impressive (crash at about 1m30s):
It’s a coaxial tilt rotor, and Baldwin Technology is pitching it as a cargo UAV capable of carrying a 3000 lb capacity pallet.
The first is more the test models, the 2nd more operational concept.
So it now appears that foul play has been ruled out in the Tsvangerai crash, and MDC official Roy Bennett has been released from custody.
That being said, Mugabe’s attempts to maintain his political power have gotten truly surreal:
On his first day as education minister in a government so broke that most schools were closed and millions of children idle, David Coltart said he got a startling invitation.
“Come and get your brand-new white Mercedes,” an official told Mr. Coltart, a veteran opposition politician, as President Robert Mugabe peered down from a portrait on the minister’s office wall.
The offer of an E-Class Mercedes to every minister in the month-old power-sharing government was vintage Mugabe, an effort to seduce his political enemies with the lavish perks he has long bestowed on loyalists.
(I would have offered him silver, or metallic blue, myself.)
I’m an optimist, and see this as a sign of weakness.
Mugabe had previously dismissed the MDC entirely, and how he is trying to bribe them.
It appears that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd have differences in the future course of regulation.
Specifically, Frank favors giving the Federal Reserve the job of managing “systemic risk” under any new regulations, and Dodd thinks that the Fed, with its history of unresponsiveness and opacity is ill suited to the task.
Well, it now appears that much of the smear campaign against Dodd may have come from Larry Summers, who would be first in line to be Federal Reserve chairman if Obama does not reappoint Bernanke, and so he went after Dodd in order to strengthen Frank’s hand in making the Fed the chief regulator.
I’m beginning to think that anyone who has “friend of Robert Rubin” on their resume should be barred from any position of authority.
Un-dirtyword-believable.
It looks like Senate Republicans have decided to do whatever is possible to slow the AIG bonus bill.
Why?
I’m not sure, but never stop your opponent from stepping on his own dick.
It looks like US and British authorities are investigating possible criminal activity.
Here’s hoping they find some, and send him away for a very long time.
The former chief economist of the IMF has an Op-Ed in the New York Times, and he makes the point that removing the “geniuses” who created the problem has to be the first step of fixing the problem:
A.I.G. can hardly claim that its generous bonuses attract the best and the brightest. So instead, it defends the payments by arguing they’re needed to retain employees who are crucial for winding down transactions that are “difficult to understand and manage.” In other words, only the people who stuck the knife into the American International Group can neatly extract it for a decent burial.
There is no reason to believe this.
Similar arguments made during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when currencies and stock markets collapsed in much of Southeast Asia, turned out to be a smokescreen to protect the executives who were partly responsible for the mess. Recovery from that crisis required Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand to close or consolidate banks. In all three countries, bankers protested, claiming that their connections with borrowers were critical to recovery.
…
The lesson of all this is that when insiders have broken a financial institution, the most direct remedy is to kick them out. Traders are hardly in short supply, and you don’t need to rely on the ones who made the toxic trades in the first place. Companies must always plan around the potential departure of even their star traders, or they are certain to fail. A.I.G. does not need to keep all of its traders, especially since it takes far fewer people to unwind a portfolio than to build it up.
The longer that we put this off, the worse it will be.
*Charles de Gaulle, a man not known for his own sense of personal dispensablity, coined this bon mot.
So, we have the government looking to legislation giving them the authority that the FDIC does when it shuts down banks for not bank entities, such as bank holding companies and hedge funds.
And in related news, the FDIC is looking for additional authority to acutally write regulations, a function which is currently does not have.
It has strong enforcement powers, but, “but only the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision and National Credit Union Administration can write the regulation it enforces.”
It’s about time.
Well, it appears that Senator Evah Bahy’s (DINO-IN) new moderate caucus is getting some pushback from their constituents, and they are crying like a bunch of “girlie men”, to quote the governator.
It appears that Rachel Maddow covered this, and called them “conservadems”, and they are getting some calls from voters in their states telling them to get with the program.
How many calls are they getting?
Maddow’s five-minute “conservadem” segment last Thursday provoked at least 20 calls Monday to Udall’s office and more than a dozen e-mails to Democratic Party headquarters in Colorado.
So now they are crying about how awful people are to them.
Seriously, these folks are used to obstructing progressive programs, and then getting a pat on the head from villagers inside the beltway, but now, with someone pointing them out as trying to stifle change, they get 20 phone calls and more than a dozen emails, and they are whining about how people are mean to them.
Listen, if you suck up to Wall Street, who destroyed our 401(k)s, and you suck up to large food processors, who put poison in our peanuts, because they contribute to your campaign, you deserve whatever flak that you catch.
Cry me a fracking river.
So, the commodities markets surged as a result of the Fed’s quantitative easing, which means that they are expecting inflation there, which has, among other things, put oil at a 4-month high,
The fact that the 2009 US budget deficit has just been revised higher may also be contributing to traders’ positions.
Of course, Bernanke is primarily interested in preventing deflation, so this is a good thing, though I wonder how effective he will be.
Case in point: investors requested only $4.7 billion out of $200 billion available for the Fed small business and consumer lending program, the TALF.
It’s a confidence problem, and I really think that the first step to restoring confidence needs to be removing the malefactors in finance who screwed this up in the first place.
The dollar rose today, largely on the belief that yesterday’s drop indicated a time for profit taking.
His bail was denied.
Bill Would Allow Texas School to Grant Master’s Degree in Science for Creationism
Seriously, just how stupid are some Texas legislators.
[on edit]
I don’t mean to say that all Texas legislators are mind boggling stupid, just that when a Texas legislator decides to do “te stupid” he goes all Texas sized about it.
Andrew Cuomo just got a ruling to compel Bank of America to turn over all the names of Merrill Lynch big bonus recipients.
He’s also looking to do the same with AIG.
As a matter of public policy, maybe any bonus or salary more than 40 or so times the median wage should be public information.
Quoth Mark Twain:
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
I wish that I had half his wit.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism calls for aggressive criminal investigations, and I agree.
It’s clear that there was a lot of outright criminality, and the broken window theory of law enforcement works with white collar criminals too:
Of course, it isn’t clear whether deterrence works against white collar criminals, but the flip side is William Bratton style zero tolerance policing was successful in seemingly ungovernable New York. The theory was that allowing minor infractions, like window breaking, to go unpunished sent a very visible signal that misdeeds were tolerated. Of course, zero tolerance wasn’t the only technique used by Bratton (he also was big on flexible deployment, shifting officers to neighborhoods that suffered an increase in crime), but it is considered to be an effective policing tool. And Wall Street is so far from having any meaningful policing that it’s a joke.
It seems anything short of regulatory or legal moves that limit career options (read future earning power) is an insufficient disincentive to risky trader and investor behavior.
I would argue that the Wall Street crooks have more to lose than a corner dope dealer.
After all, if they get caught, thrown in jail, and their assets,and possibly those of their spouses and perhaps their children’s college funds, are forfeit, that’s a lot more to lose than getting 3 to 5 in a prison when you had nothing before.
She has accepted the offer to be the undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, and this means that a line is already forming for the special election.
This is a safe Democratic district, so let’s hope that she is replaced by a member of the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party.”