Exactly! And they didn't really even do that - they just converted the drop down menus into the "ribbon". They didn't rethink the logic. For example, it still throws me - after using Word for at least 15 years - that page numbering is on the "Insert" menu/tab. I can see "inserting" page numbers the first time I add them to a document, but most of the time I need that control, it's because I'm editing page numbers that are already there, so "insert" is not the menu I think of when I want to do that. It should be a "page layout" option - it's something that's usually fixed on every page, in a defined layout, regardless of what else is on the page, like headers, footers, margins, etc.

In short, Microsoft didn't take the time to rethink how people use Office and see if they could perhaps improve efficiency, with a cost of a learning curve while people learned the new way. Instead, they just converted the menus to buttons and sold it as a huge upgrade, at the cost of the learning curve for the ribbon with no net gain in the end.

The shells aren't, but often the frames are, or are close to it - they're just steel. (Airstream owner here, although ours is a relatively young one, built in '95. I do have quite a few friends with vintage units from the 60s and before, though. Some of them had to do shell-off restorations, starting with the frame, to get them usable again.)

I'm going to Vienna, Austria (from the US) in a few weeks for work. My work-supplied credit card doesn't have the chip, so I asked about getting one with it. The area that handles the cards in my office said, "You're the first to ask about them," and called the credit card issuer. The CC company came back and said, "No, we don't issue them." Oddly enough, I have a personal CC in my wallet with the chip, issued by that same company. That card will be going with me to Europe.

They used to have an entire section for politics, then it would be easy to remove those stories from the feed. This, for inexplicable reasons, is filed under "Hardware".

I'm not sure mass transit is self-supporting anywhere in the world. But people see the build cost + maintenance costs and flip out, ignoring that roads also have a build cost + maintenance cost + police cost + etc.

Uh, Apple does make an adapter for it... I know it's $30, but it's at least a solution. (Our car has a USB port, so it's just a matter of changing the cable for us.)

Are you sure? Android phones now use something called "MTP", which most devices don't seem to support (neither of our car stereos do, one is a factory Honda, the other is a Pioneer; similarly, my Macbook Pro *still* can't connect to my S3, a year and a half after I bought the phone). Did you try a standard USB drive? I bet it'll work.

They have those already - at least the sonar one. It pings for up to 30 days once it hits the water. The issue is that you have to be relatively close to the plane to hear the pinging. Even with Air France 447 when the ACARS data told us where the plane was as it was crashing, it still took almost two years and several searches to find the hull of the plane. In this case, it appears everyone spent the last several days looking in the wrong place, because the military either didn't report or no one listened to their report of spotting the plane in a very different, unexpected location over an hour after it disappeared off the civilian radar. I hope someone in charge wrote down that lesson.

As for the cost of the devices: How much is this search costing the countries involved? It's probably enough to pay for installation on quite a few airliners at this point...

You don't see the difference? Google Maps, Waze, etc. provide a useful service to the user in return for that information. Repo camera databases don't.

Yep. Also, I recently got life insurance, and one of the questions they asked me was, "Have you been aboard an aircraft other than as a passenger on a commercial airliner?" I wonder how much a "yes" answer would've cost me each month. I'd love to do it, but we're talking about $6000-$8000 just for the license, daytime, single engine only. How much more for any of the other certifications? I drive past an airfield every day on my way home from work and look longingly...then remember how much it costs.

Sport pilot would be cheaper, of course. But as you pointed out there are quite a few expenses aside from just the license.

And, it's not like you can, say, fly yourself to vacation to save money. A friend of mine has his license and his own plane (owned one before he even could drive, in fact), and still flies commercial whenever he needs to actually go somewhere.

It's not working...this is the first I've noticed ANYTHING, and I usually check /. a couple times a day. I have tags turned off, because they're useless, and I'm logged in. I may have looked at beta once or twice a while back.

I just looked at it and didn't care for it, though. What's with the useless, unrelated pictures - a compass for the article about GPS dead reckoning in cars? A picture of LEGO on an article about coding? Useless. I don't get the top "block" of three stories or whatever... what happened to the summaries of those? The menu bar is of little use to me - I don't browse by topic, and I doubt many others do, either. And the narrow comments isn't good, either - as deep as this thread is, my comment would be about one character wide in beta...all kinds of fun for reading! There is a trend amongst web designers to make everything very narrow, ignoring that the interruption while your eyes move to the next line makes the text harder to read and comprehend.

We get the Sunday Washington Post, which includes a free subscription to their website that can be shared with a second person. The coupons we get more than pay for the cost of the subscription, and I get the Sunday comics to read...on Saturday. My wife also checks the ads for sales on stuff we'll need soon. The newspaper itself goes right in the recycling bin, unfortunately. (Side note: this tells me there's a market for a service of just delivering coupons like the papers do, but it would make more money than the newspaper by ignoring the news!)

Seriously? You can find reviews of plenty of other domain registration sites. I use pairnic.com (which is part of pair.com hosting...they've been around 18 years, according to the email they sent me the other day), and pay $14/year for domain names, without any of this crap, and I've been using them for at least 10 years. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones, too. Don't reward an abuser.

A poor implementation doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If it was, Yugo would have killed the market for automobiles.

Well, how many times has the government been sued for that very same issue until now?