Me again. I was reading Ken’s comment and it reminded me of a story my uncle told me. He’s an avionics engineer at a research institute at Georgia Tech. We were talking about the advances in computing power found in the F-22. He agreed that the Raptor did pack an impressive amount of computing horsepower but he told me a funny – and by ‘funny’ I mean depressing – story. I guess when Lockheed Martin built the Raptor, rather than use a standard 32-bit processor that was compatible with DoD’s standard programming language – Ada, is it? – Lockheed Martin designed a proprietary processor that was a 33-bit processor. They were able to sell this whole scam to the Air Force by claiming that the non-standard nature of the processor was a ’security feature’. Security feature! Yeah – job security for Lockheed Martin.

Alain

Great post, as usual. Unfortunately, given the enthusiasm with which a large segment of the public has embraced ‘Obamanomics’ (as Robert Reich called it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed) I don’t think we are going to ever see government shrink.

Too many people are too willing to put blind faith in the ability of bureaucrats with little or no stake in the system to solve our society’s problems. All the bureaucrats care about is protecting their bureaucratic feifdoms.

Alain

I hate big planes, too! Airplanes don’t scale well, for the same reason land animals sizes are limited (which I’m sure you understand). Everybody knows that, and yet their damn response is “well, fine, but let’s push it!” Every time I get on a jet, and think about the forces involved, I promise myself I’ll get back into flying and buy a Cessna.

I knew someone (actually knew someone who knew someone) who was working for NASA. The job of his dreams – the space program and all that. He got a project to fix a section of code for the shuttle, which because of the intense commenting, review, proving-correct process would be a pretty long project even though the fix was relatively easy.

Anyway, he started getting curious about how his project fit into the larger system, but he couldn’t really find anyone willing to tell him. As it turns out, the entire system wasn’t used anymore. It was cheaper to pay him (and whoever he was working with, and whoever had to sign off on the work) to do this fix than it would be to go through the official decommissioning process for the system. The guy ended up quitting and going to private industry.

So, I think simply “being too careful” is another (or the same) reason why Flying Things avoid changes that we’d all like to see implemented.

Also, big planes freak me out. Things that fucking heavy do not, in most cases, “fly”.