I actually dug out my old Model M last year. Aside from the fact that the rubber.insulation had flaked off the keyboard cord, it still worked perfectly. And it was every bit as good as I remembered it being for typing, and if I replace the cord it will last forever.

There's only one problem with the thing: it's so damn loud. Every damn keypress is accompanied by a loud "POK!" Forget about annoying other people, *I* was annoyed. Years of typing on pretty good Thinkpad "scissor switch" keyboards had accustomed me to a low, pleasant sussuration.

Cherry makes a "brown" switch that is not quite as loud as the classic buckling spring. I have a cheap nixeus keyboard that uses "brown" knock-offs. They're pretty good and not so loud as to be annoying. I wouldn't use this keyboard in public, at a Starbucks or in the library, but it's fine in my home office.

This. Exactly this. Inexperienced typists just don't get it.

To convey proper nuance in text, I don't always want exactly 1 letter "A" when I press the "A" key. Using uniform whole letters can seem jarring and mechanical, particularly when writing personal email. Sometimes a message composer only wants, say, 0.95 "A", just to soften the letter out. Other times, it's nice to smooth the letter out a bit, letting it fade out genty across the length of the word instead of being uncomfortably square.

These mechanical keyboards are usually tuned to be "warmer", as well--when you press that "A" key, it has overtones and harmonics from other vowels. A little bit of "E" goes a long way, but true "golden fingers" agree that plenty of "O" adds mellowness and roundness.

The adoption of these digital, non-mechanical keyboards is also one of the major reasons why emotion and subtext - especially related to humor - are so often lost in text-based messaging.

http://www.planecrashinfo.com/...

Commercial aircraft go down anything up to 20 times a year, even in modern times. Back when you were a kid, likely 30 times a year or more.

Already we have this lot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

That's one every two weeks. One of the ones you hint at was, what, July and over an entirely different continent anyway.

Learn some statistics. You soon find that people have selection-bias on what they see in the news, what they perceive as a "close fact" (being a plane heading TO Malaysia crashing in another continent, instead of one heading from Malaysia that crashes near Malaysia... very different things), and what they want to lump together to form some kind of extraordinary circumstance.

This has more to do with the way the US hub and spoke model is designed. If you travel between Europe and Asia or Asia and America the A380 is quite popular. Its taking over a lot of the routes that 747's were used for. QANTAS is replacing it's custom 747-ER aircraft with stock A380's for it's pacific routes.

The A380 has a bigger issue that gates at older airports need to be upgraded to accommodate the A380. Despite this, Airbus have delivered 147 airframes since release. Its really the 747-8 that is floundering.

And what some people are going to hate is, this approach works in the UK and Australia.

DUI in Australia carries a mandatory license suspension in most cases. The only way you get away with just a fine is if you're just over the limit and it's your first drink driving infraction in 3 years...

The UK is nowhere near as lenient, so much as 0.00001 over and you're off the road for a month or more.

Drink driving incidents have decreased significantly.

We also use Alcohol Interlock Devices here in Oz, but this is only for people who have recorded multiple DUI convictions.

Parsing through translation computer...

But to answer your question, a lot of people use it to share thoughts, experiences, photographs and information with friends and family.

Its convenient and most people also don't give a shit about metadata mining.

Facebook decided my best "year in review" photo was one of my car accident. Sure I took a screenshot and used it as a joke but I can imagine how people being show pictures of their dead child would upset them. Facebook at least acknowledged that have removed it for now, as of a few hours ago Facebook is no longer showing me the mangled back end of a DC5S.

Also, I'm pretty sure more than one person complained. Its only one getting media attention.

More precisely it was Indonesian AirAsia, which is a separate company to AirAsia BHD as Indonesia prohibits majority foreign ownership on airlines. Indonesian AirAsia has its own staff, management and maintenance.

It should also be noted that AirAsia BHD practically owns Indonesia AirAsia as they completely funded the holding company that owns the other 51% of the stock.

Do Not Track was always useless.

Why the fuck are we still talking about it years later? And why the fuck have browsers taken it even semi-seriously?

It's the "evil bit" for the Internet - nothing more than a joke. Let's treat it like that.

So it seems the branches have different needs, and really need three different variants of the same aircraft, so their necessary differences aren't all trying to compete. Perhaps we could have one with room for an internal cannon, one with STOVL capability, and one with folding wings and an arresting hook. I wonder where we could find such a craft?

I'm going to have to defer to the Pentagon, who clearly believe the A-10 is not what's needed for the future, rather than an armchair commander who thinks that the 1970s were good enough.

I'm not privy to the discussion behind changing deadlines, but in two decades as a software developer, I've never seen a project that was at deliverable quality prior to the main testing cycle.

As planned, though, the first software version to deliver basic air-to-air and air-to-ground capability will be Block 2B in mid-2015. Full capability won't be supported until Block 3F in mid-2017. In short, software development is a difficult problem for a plane that is significantly computer-controlled. Go figure.

The total program cost is estimated at $400 billion. Spread that out over the 18 years it's been running, and you end up with less than 1% of the federal government's annual budget. That's hardly enough to cause noticeable disruption, let alone bankruptcy.

I take photographs each year at SXSW, just walking the street and looking for interesting people. Many of those people pose for me when they see the camera. Facebook picked one of those pictures for the cover of my album, so apparently they think my year is summed up by a group of people I don't know, one of which is giving a fake blowjob to a green balloon dildo.

I didn't share the album with my friends and family - or open it at all.

Very little useful learning goes on in school. And the top students need time outside of school to visit libraries, pursue intellectual hobbies, do independent reading, and generally do all the academic stuff that will actually matter in their lives later on (and matter to society later on).

By continually extending the school day and the school year, we increasingly ensure that we lock our best and brightest into mediocrity by tying up all of their time in institutionally managed busywork designed to ensure they don't deviate from the mean, which is pretty piss-poor.

I have a sneaking suspicion you don't actually want answers to your questions, but I'll provide them anyway.

Not really. A-10 development took 10 years, F-18 took 8, and the F-15 took 13, all measured from program start to initial production. The F-35 began its production run in 2008, 12 years after its program started. I haven't found timelines for the earlier planes' IOC milestones, but I'm under the impression that they followed similar schedules, with production running for a few years before pushing the planes out into use. Yes, the F-35's timeline is drawn out because they're trying to design three planes at once, but that was also expected from the start.

Because it's not required to work until next year, at the earliest. What's in use now would be good enough to fly and work out other problems, but it's not suitable for combat use.

Rain isn't the problem. It's actually lightning that the F-35 isn't currently allowed to fly near, because the initial production run did not have the lightning protection applied, as it would interfere with testing. That'd be another thing to be added for IOC.

Because the A-10 is an expensive one-trick pony. You call it a "Swiss Army knife", but that's really just because its one trick is very useful. The A-10 only does close air support in an area-denial situation where the most recent anti-aircraft threat was built by the Soviet Union. It takes far more training and maintenance support to operate, and that training and logistics expense is only applicable to that one aircraft.

In comparison, the bulk of the support for an F-35 is shared across the three variants, so the total cost to run the fleet is greatly reduced. A maintainer can switch variants with minimal additional training, and a single base can support any F-35 that stops by. We're also not going to be dealing with Soviet-era defenses for much longer, with China and Russia making gestures that they're willing to sell modern SAMs to anyone who opposes Western interests.

...After only 36 years, for the US. The F-4 is still in service in other countries, primarily those that don't need to worry about modern SAMs. The F-4 was originally not a multi-role fighter. It was designed as a fighter-bomber, reworked to be an interceptor, and finally upgraded to do close-air support almost a decade later.

Just well enough to get the job done. What we've learned since the Gulf War is that fighting is expensive and complicated. To support the dozens of different single-role planes, we have to mobilize thousands of support crew to ensure that we can support any kind of mission we need. A multi-role fighter, designed to meet the potential needs, will still be able to handle lesser threats. The F-35 is being built to handle anything China or Russia might produce, but it will be perfectly capable of supporting campaigns in Africa, the Middle East, or North Korea.

Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."

This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.

This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.

I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work is just not a good use of anyone's precious attention.

When I write poetry I do so in a pretty technical way. If people don't appreciate that, sucks to be them, because they are not my audience. I'm the same way in scientific communication: I write for my peers, and everyone else does the same. Let the popular science authors do the translation. They need the work.