AdamSmith

Wikipedia's little bagatelle on the composite failure called delamination: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delamination

In this project Boeing also (think I repeat myself from some time earlier in this thread) did something a lot of manufacturing enterprises try to avoid if possible: they radically changed both the product and the production processes at the same time. BMW for example has what it calls, characteristically Teutonically, an "iron law" never to make both those changes on the same car program.

To be serious, not quite that bad--the FAA certification regimes are pretty rigorous. But the dearth of experience with these novel materials employed at this scale does seem to keep engineers awake wondering what all they just don't know about them yet.

I would fly on one if booked, but the thing is going to be effectively an airborne test lab for the first few years.

While the teething problems have been the batteries and now that electrical-system-shutdown programming glitch, some of my engineer friends inside Boeing remain most anxious about that composite airframe. Specifically that (1) they don't know as much as they would like about long-term fatigue life of large-scale composite structures, (2) inspection techniques for composite materials are primitive, consisting mainly of thumping the skin with a rubber mallet and listening for 'funny' sounds, (3) they may have missed some failure modes related to how composite panels interact with their fasteners over time, (4) etc., etc.

...clean their shoe if they step in dog poop while part of a team using your house & grounds for a shoot. (True Fact.)

Me too!

God'll get me for this. http://emotionalfitnesstraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/offensive-jokes.png

See also: youse guys the third mutation of the pronoun you in the dialect between boston and philly used to emphasize a point Youse guys have no friggin idea how bad i'm gonna beat your skulls in for this! http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=youse+guys

Thank the gods no resemblance to John Bolton.

Sometimes Friday just won't wait. http://www.strangecelebrities.com/images/content/5500.jpg

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y204/Badyin/image0022.jpg

PS Joan recounted one time being at a dinner party with some of her truly stratospherically wealthy friends, and one said to her, "Oh Joan, you don't have to think about money any more than the rest of us do." Joan said she replied, "I promise you I am the only person in this room who is playing Cleveland on Saturday night!"

Getting way off the OP here, but another thing about Joan that came out in 'A Piece of Work,' and in the many reminiscences and articles after her death, was how hard she worked, worked, worked for her dough. Not from fear of poverty but, as she herself said, from loving the work itself, and also from not wanting to 'pull it in' and live more modestly. What also came through in all that coverage was how generous she was to friends and acquaintances.

...[Joan] Rivers has had three big relationships since Edgar. “Spiros was my first one, my Greek shipping tycoon. That lasted four years.” Then there was Bernard, the cheap one. “He wouldn’t get a car and driver. A man who had $150 million. I was standing there in the pouring rain at Lincoln Center and he said to me, ‘You are so spoiled.’ I remember saying to him, ‘If you were an actor, Bernard, and had no money, we would be on the subway and I wouldn’t be saying a word. But you have $150 million, Bernard. And I’m wearing $700 shoes, and this is silly. What are we proving here?’ Bernard carried the ketchup back and forth to the Hamptons. Does that tell you everything?” http://nymag.com/movies/features/66181/index6.html

Think that's true. Uber's pitch to drivers is that you already have your car sitting there with its attendant expenses, and the only expense that really shoots up dramatically from what it would have been otherwise is gas.

My experience with Uber to date has been that their drivers have been rather a good deal more normal-seeming people and safer drivers on average than taxi drivers. See also the case of CBS reporter Bob Simon killed in a crash caused by his livery-car driver, who was supposed to have been checked out by the car service but turned out to have a very sketchy driving history, all on the record.

Don't see any reason for this. Once you schedule the pickup through your Uber app, it tells you the driver's name and car make/model. You would just phone your escort to tell him what kind of car to look for, then he would wait at the designated pickup point for the Uber car, just as you would. The escort could easily identify himself as you (using your first name) to the Uber driver, if the driver even asks. Uber does not have your picture on file, nor does the driver ask for the pickup's ID.

Seconding everything BG said. I've seen Andres half a dozen times or a bit more. On one of his visits to Boston I ended up seeing him 3 nights in a row. Never a mechanical or uninvolved or un-spontaneous moment. Just aren't too many like him!

Yes. :o ...It was not a choice Between, but of... http://www.poetryfoundation.org/uploads/authors/wallace-stevens/448x/wallace-stevens.jpg

Hilarious. "A cat is just a snake in furs." Dorothy Parker

So much kerfuffle re nada. Battery problems will be fixed pronto. If the problems had arisen in the composite airframe then the 787 program would have been in deep doodoo. But this electrical stuff is easy to fix. Aren't there any engineers on this forum?

Having posted a bit of negative stuff here, let me backtrack. Lithium batteries that work can be had; they just cost a lot and need a lot of manufacturing attention, then quality-control attention. The latter of which numbers of Boeing engineers have been grumbling about having gone somewhat to the dogs in many parts of the 787 program. The trouble is essentially all the competent producers of LiIon battery technology are in Singapore or Korea. They know it, and they charge commensurately. U.S. auto makers for one are furiously investing in university and private research to try and catch up, but it looks to be a long time coming. See A123 for just one example.

Agree with KMEM that if you are really all that worried, just take a horse to wherever you have to get to. However (Japanese: 'keredomo' ), the local Seattle press + some industry rags are starting to report rumblings of what I've heard for some time from engineer acquaintances inside Boeing: that they had to over-extend themselves to fix subcontractors' problems, THEN once production commenced, Boeing management chose to ramp up production faster than those internal engineering groups -- still engaged with making sure the subs knew what they were doing -- felt they could pivot back to adequate focus on inspection/quality-control of subs' supplied product. There has been inside Boeing a fair amount of 'This wouldn't have happened under Mulally.' If these 787 'issues' fester on much longer, I would wager stock money on some management shakeup. (P.S. My work is advising Boeing et al. on what engineering software to buy and how to use it. So one has some firsthand visibility into all this disfunction.)

Anyone been to Secrets recently? Still a going concern? Worth a visit?