Best part first...

"Let us call the airspeed that is required to take off, "take off airspeed" aka "TOAS"."

"For fun replace the conveyor belt and wheel, with a river and floats, much fun to be had."

Good example.

Say the airplane had a "TOAS" of 60 MPH and with it's engine could only move on floats at 80 MPH in still water. If the river flowed at any speed over 21 MPH opposite the takeoff direction the plane could not take off.

This is the reason you take off into the wind. The reverse treadmill and the fast flowing river both act like a tailwind robbing the airplane of air speed. In both cases the reverse speed need not keep the plane stationary when viewed from the side but only need to keep it below "TOAS" to prevent takeoff.

Other notes...

"ex3: engine off, treadmill speed of TOAS backward, free wheels, no headwind = plane does not take off; ground speed is zero, wheel speed is TOAS"

No. The ground speed would not be "zero" it would be approaching negative "TOAS". The plane would be moving backwards. Not relevant to the problem.

"ex4: engine on, treadmill of TOAS backward, free wheels, no headwind = plane can take off; at moment of plane taking off ground speed is TOAS, wheel speed is twice TOAS."

With the magic reverse treadmill the plane's ground speed will always be zero. The length of the treadmill is not relevant since the from the side the plane appears stationary. Lots of noise and exhaust but no flight.

Unless the wings of the plane are moving THROUGH THE AIR at "TOAS" it WON'T take off. Ground or wheel speed is not relevant.

It is not magic. An airplane works in two modes. In the first mode the engines serve as a force to move the plane over the earth surface supported by wheels/floats/skis. The second mode is flight, where the engines provide force to move the wings through the air with sufficient speed to provide aerodynamic lift.

In the case of the reverse treadmill the plane is unable to transition from mode 1 to mode 2 because it can NEVER move through the air with sufficient speed to fly.

Imagine a wing with streamers hanging every 12" from the trailing edge. At perfect speed match on the magic reverse treadmill all the streamers outside any engine blast would hang down indicating the lack of movement through the air.

What a great thing!

I recently merged my Tungsten e, pager and cell phone into a Treo 650. It is amazing how mucked up the operation of the Treo is compared with my previous Palm products. Still better than the Windows version or the touchscreenless Blackberry.

The beauty of the original Palm Pilot was that you could work them with your FINGERS! For text entry a stylus was handy but for finding information your fingers could do the walking. For me this tended to be a one handed process which is impossible on the Treo since firing up the search application requires multiple button presses and a swipe across the screen.

Just give me a big ass touchscreen, Graffiti (original or a suitable SINGLE stroke per letter substitute) , a SIM card and a decent battery. I would be happy.

Hopefully the iPhone will spell the END of the idiotic qwerty keyboard on handheld devices.

Why not develop and deploy unmanned surveillance drones over the roads most used by our troops. Just a fraction of the $5B spent on a fruitless jamming effort could put inexpensive eye in the sky drones just about everywhere.

We could use the 20k "surge" troops to operate them or go with a more netroots operation.

The ideal solution would be a pilot + copilot arrangement operated via standard PCs over the internet. Something like flight simulator controlling a lightweight drone that could destroyed in event of control failure before it fell and caused damage. One soldier should be able to oversee 5 to 10 drone crews much like the cashier at do it yourself checkout lanes.

I bet you could find a lot of volunteers for this effort. Gamers would love it, and so would the relatives of those deployed.

If nothing else more Americans would get a chance to see what is really going on over there.

Unfortunately the article does not differentiate between the concept of fraud by voters and the more dangerous problems of rigging elections.

There is a limit as to how effective using physical persons to vote multiple times, vote the dead and the like can be. They all require a person to show up and commit an illegal act. During the time the polls are open there is a limit as to how many votes a single person can place since, in general, they would have to go to different polling places to avoid suspicion and arrest. Additionally there is a limit to how many people are willing to break the law for any politician or party.

This boogie man argument is another example of "welfare queen" stereotyping.

Much more dangerous is VOTE FRAUD by rigging the system. In the old days you needed multiple people placed throughout the system to add votes by "stuffing" the ballot boxes. This type of fraud was allegedly honed to a fine edge in the 60's by Mayor Dailey in Chicago. It took a big organization to pull this off but it is much more effective than working with individual voters

With the current crop of computerized voting machines it appears that one person can do the work of many. We have seen the sort of numbers that come out of these machines. More votes than registered voters in the precinct, negative numbers and integer overflows.

This evidence points to massive VOTE FRAUD that you won't see many Republicans rushing out to investigate.