July 2009
7 posts
1 tag
F-22 Funding Cut Off
Unmanned aircraft are the future of aviation, so creating more and more F-22’s didn’t make that much sense to me — especially when we have almost 200 of them already. And it’s not like we’ll never know how to make them again — in case we ever change our minds and think we need more F-22’s. So I’m not exactly heart-broken that the Senate voted to...
1 tag
OpenIdea: Underwater Or Bio-dome Prisons
Ok, here’s another crazy idea. Back in the day, countries used to ship off their prisoners and undesirables to undeveloped places… like the US and Australia. We could still do that.. except we’d have to ship prisoners to Antarctica — and the legal questions could be a bit tricky for that (see Cuba?). So instead of shipping off inmates to legal limbo, how about house them...
2 tags
Economic Indicators...
A bunch of economists are saying that “the worst is over” with regard to the economy — but the justifications for this sentiment are somewhat rare (or debatable). NPR ends an article on the topic with an interesting data point, though.
“Manufacturing overtime hours is one of the best leading indicators to monitor if you want to understand where the economy stands in the...
2 tags
OpenIdea: eBay Will Buy This Idea Someday
I saw this new website gdgt.com which aims to one-up sites like Engadget and Gizmodo… but that got me to thinking… something similar would be a LOT more valuable to the eBay community. I’d think that a wiki-like resource that documented all the “hacks” (and other user-generated instruction manuals for gadgets on eBay) would be a great way to promote second-hand...
3 tags
Wind Energy Feasibility
Apparently, if you run a bunch of calculations, you can determine that there’s enough wind energy to cover the world’s energy need 100 times over. I really like the idea of airborne wind generators, but I assume there’s a catch. There’s also enough solar energy to power the world, too, but we haven’t figured out how to capture it economically without blanketing the...
