It’s a promising start for a brand-new commercial airport. Days after announcing their first scheduled airline carrier, Branson Airport officials announced Monday the United States Air Force Demonstration Squadron — better known as the Thunderbirds — will perform at the first ever Branson Air Show, May 9 & 10, 2009.
The Branson Air Show will highlight the grand opening weekend of the Branson airport, the first privately financed and operated commercial service airport in the United States. Also appearing at the air show will be the US Army Parachute Team, the Golden Knights.
“We are thrilled that two of the country’s top precision military demonstration teams will be performing at the inaugural Branson Air Show,” said Jeff Bourk, Executive Director, Branson Airport.
The Thunderbirds are the premier demonstration squadron of the most elite air and space force the world has ever known. They fly Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcons, a multi-role lightweight jet fighter originally developed by General Dynamics for the United States Air Force. The famed Air Force precision flying team begins their 56th season in 2009.
The Golden Knights have been wowing audiences at air shows, competitions for 50 years. The two demonstration teams travel all over the country performing aerial demonstrations at air shows and special events, as well as competing at national and international skydiving competitions. They are the most successful US Department of Defense sports team.
“To have the Thunderbirds, and the Golden Knights, along with many other internationally famous air show acts, will surely make the Branson Air Show one of the very best in the country,” said Bobbi Thompson, Event Director, Branson Air Show.
The first annual Branson Air Show will be an amazing two-day event featuring many of the top aviation performers in the nation including the AeroShell Aerobatic Team, Patty Wagstaff, John Mohr, and many more. A number of static historical aviation displays will also be featured including a Sea Fury, Lockheed Constellation “Connie”, B-25, P-51 Mustang, and a Medal of Honor AC-47 Gunship.
Tickets for the Branson Air Show are available online, with Adult tickets priced at $16 for advance purchase.
The first thing you’ll notice about 2.7 is its new interface. From the top down, we’ve listened to your feedback and thought deeply about the design and the result is a WordPress that’s just plain faster. Nearly every task you do on your blog will take fewer clicks and be faster in 2.7 than it did in a previous version. (Download it now, or read on for more.)
Next you’ll begin to notice the new features subtly sprinkled through the new interface: the new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.
Digging in further you might notice that every screen is customizable. Let’s say you never care about author on your post listings — just click “Screen Options” and uncheck it and it’s instantly gone from the page. The same for any module on the dashboard or write screen. If your screen is narrow and the menu is taking up too much horizontal room, click the arrow to minimize it to be icon-only, and then go to the write page and drag and drop everything from the right column into the main one, so your posting area is full-screen. (For example I like hiding everything except categories, tags, and publish. I put categories and tags on the right, and publish under the post box.)
For a visual introduction to what 2.7 is, check out this video (available in HD, and full screen):
It’s all about you. It’s the next generation of WordPress, which is why we’ve bestowed it with the honor of being named for John Coltrane. And you can download it today.
Last, but certainly not least, this may be the last time you ever have to manually upgrade WordPress again. We heard how tired you were of doing upgrades for yourself and your friends, so now WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.
(As with any interface change it may take a little bit of time to acclimate yourself but soon you’ll find yourself whizzing through the screens. Even people who have hated it at first tell us after a few days they wonder how they got by before.)
The Story Behind 2.7
The real reason Coltrane is such a huge leap forward is because the community was so involved with every step of the process. Over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.
For some of the back story in the development of 2.7, check out these blog posts (thanks to WeblogToolsCollection for the list):
This was interesting to us, a blogging software release we actually blogged about, but the process was hugely informative. Prior to its release today Crazyhorse and 2.7 had been tested by tens of thousands of people on their blogs, hundreds of thousands of you count .com. The volume of feedback was so high that we decided to push back the release date a month to take time to incorporate it all and do more revisions based on what you guys said.
For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.
The Future
Those of you following along at home might have noticed this was our second major redesign of WordPress this year. Whoa nelly! While that wasn’t ideal, and I especially sympathize with those of you creating books or tutorials around WordPress, there’s good news. The changes to WordPress in 2.5 and 2.7 were necessary for us to break free of much of the legacy cruft and interface bloat that had built up over the years (gradually) and more importantly provide us with a UI framework and interface language we can use at the foundation to build tomorrow’s WordPress on, to express ideas we haven’t been able to before. So at the end of 2009 I expect, interface-wise, WordPress to look largely the same as it does now.
That said, we couldn’t be more excited about the future with regards to features. Now that we’ve cleared out more basic things, we are looking forward in the coming year to really tackling media handling including audio and video, better tools for plugin and theme developers, widgets, theme updates, more integrated and contextual help, and easier integration with projects like BuddyPress and bbPress.
For the past 30 years the U.S. auto industry has been like your alcoholic Uncle Bob: his self-destructive habits seem beneficial to him, despite the harm they cause him and the pain they inflict on his family and friends. You want to help him, but don’t know the best way to do so, and you know that if you confront him he will deny it and become angry and violent. You know deep down that Uncle Bob is a drunk bully, but the thought of a confrontation is so painful that you stay quiet and follow a strategy of conflict avoidance. Plus you know that the only way his health will improve is if he is the one who realizes that his habits are self-destructive and that he wants to change. At some point, the issue comes to a head, and the question becomes whether or not you have the courage to tell him what he needs to hear, for his own good and for the good of those who love him.
The issue coming to a head right now is that the U.S. auto industry has been unhealthy for decades. Chrysler’s 1979 bailout did not change that. The Big Three cannot compete with Asian and European manufacturers, particularly in the production of high-quality, reasonably-priced, fuel-efficient cars, because their labor costs eat all of the possible margins (GM and Ford manufacture such cars for sale in Europe, so it’s not a design problem). We have known this for three decades, and have followed a strategy of conflict avoidance.
In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, David Yermack wrote a brilliant article: Just Say No to Detroit. His argument is peppered with extremely disturbing facts:
GM and Ford are two companies that made the most money-losing investments in the 1980s; between them they “destroyed $110 billion in capital” in the decade, according to an analysis from the careful and renowned economist Michael Jensen.
Over the most recent decade, “the capital destruction by GM has been breathtaking,” $182 billion, and Yermack estimates that the aggregate capital investment in GM and Ford since 1980 has let to a net reduction in capital of $465 billion.
This is what I find particularly disturbing: with that $465 billion, “GM and Ford could have closed their own facilities and acquired all of the shares of Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen.”
“When a company makes money-losing investments, the cost falls upon all of society.” This observation means that we have already reduced our future economic well-being by $465 billion by his calculations, due to the persistence of these firms and their poor business decisions.
Yermack makes other important observations, including one that is crucial for policymakers to remember: if any or all of the Big Three were to declare bankruptcy, that decision would not destroy the physical assets and physical capital of the industry, but would instead free it up to be purchased by others and to be redeployed in a more productive way.
But what about the human cost? I share Will Wilkinson’s and Megan McArdle’s combination of sympathy with people in changing circumstances and expectations that can create hardship, but also with the painful reality that none of us — none of us — has any guarantees in this world. That includes job guarantees. And in this case, a bailout would mean job guarantees for now, at a great cost to everyone else, because it would mean the perpetuation of the extremely flawed business practices of the U.S. auto industry as a whole.
Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Jon Kyl of Arizona said it would be a mistake to use any of the Wall Street rescue money to prop up the automakers. They said an auto bailout would only postpone the industry’s demise.
“Companies fail every day and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down,” said Sen. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.
“They’re not building the right products,” he said. “They’ve got good workers but I don’t believe they’ve got good management. They don’t innovate. They’re a dinosaur in a sense.”
Added Sen. Kyl, the Senate’s second-ranking Republican: “Just giving them $25 billion doesn’t change anything. It just puts off for six months or so the day of reckoning.”
What’s the alternative? Let the firms fail. Use bailout money to provide unemployment assistance, education grants, and relocation grants to individuals who lose their jobs. In the long term, not only is that approach more compassionate, honest, and courageous, it’s also cheaper than perpetuating the uncompetitive business models in this domestic industry that has shown a colossally abysmal inability to adapt to changing market conditions. As Will said in the post linked above, “There is no justice, and great harm, in diminishing the whole array of future opportunity to save a few people now from a regrettable fate.” I hope we have the courage to take the bottle from Uncle Bob and tell him that we are doing it for his, and our, long-run health.
GALVESTON, Texas (NNS) — USS Nassau (LHA 4) weighed anchor Sept. 23 to return to her homeport in Norfolk, Va., after a week of supporting local, state and federal civil authorities in Galveston’s recovery effort in the wake of Hurricane Ike.
Nassau’s Sailors and Marines accomplished a variety of disaster relief tasks set out by local officials. They distributed 16,440 meals ready-to-eat; 13,835 cases of water; 25,285 bags of ice; took part in emergency debris removal, clearing 1,075 cubic yards of debris; delivered medical aid for 12 minor medical cases; and assisted in bringing critical infrastructure, such as the Port of Galveston and Scholes International Airport, back on line.
“Our Sailors and Marines were able to come to the aid of their fellow Americans,” said Capt. Bob Lineberry, commander, Amphibious Squadron 6. “Disaster relief and humanitarian assistance is a capability that we take around the world, and it was just as important to help our own citizens. We will sail away from here proud of our accomplishments.”
Amphibious assault ships like Nassau have unique capabilities and can provide a variety of assets that can support recovery efforts following natural disasters. Nassau brought two MH-60S Knighthawk search and rescue helicopters from the “Dragon Whales” of Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 28, Detachment 4; Tactical Air Control Squadron 21; four landing craft utilities from Assault Craft Unit 2; Beachmaster Unit 2; Amphibious Construction Battalion 2 (Seabees); and Fleet Surgical Team 2 to Galveston.
The ship also deployed Galveston Assistance Team – Overhaul Recovery (GATOR) which is a team of more than 300 Sailors from the ship who volunteered to provide additional manpower ashore.
U.S. Fleet Forces directed Nassau Sept. 17 to proceed to Galveston following Hurricane Ike’s landfall. U.S. Fleet Forces is the maritime component command of U.S. Northern Command, Department of Defense’s lead supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The ship was already underway conducting routine training operations off the coast of Virginia when called upon to prepare for possible disaster relief efforts for Hurricane Ike.
Nassau’s mission is to embark, deploy and land a Marine landing force by helicopter, attack aircraft or amphibious vehicle. This multipurpose ship has a highly trained crew and ready capabilities to perform many types of missions, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
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