Yes, that means they did it right. People carrying seat cushions would have slowed down the evacuation.

I've travelled to 5 continents on dozens of different airlines, no airline has ever suggested using the seat cushions as flotation devices. You have a life jacket under your seat (or in the compartment beside your seat in business class) which you are told not to inflate until you leaving the aircraft as inflating it inside the aircraft slows down the evacuation. Also, the emergency slides are rafts (and you're told to remove all pointed footwear before using the slides.

Silly ideas like "the cushions are flotation devices" are the reason people need to listen to safety announcements rather than assuming that they know everything. On every airline I've flown on, the seat cushions aren't even removable.

I think people dumb enough to think the brace position doesn't help or that flight attendants not need to issue emergency instructions aren't at risk from brain injuries.

No you wont. You'll sue the airline for not making the announcement clear enough. Airline will lose and they'll ban PED completely. Personally, I dont want this scenario.

Are people that afraid to be left alone with their thoughts for five minutes that they cant put their tablets down. The article said,

Why is it that hard for people to put down their tablets for 5 minutes during the most dangerous time of the flight? Are people really that self-entitled these days (and I used to argue against this so I really dont want it to be true).

I'd also like to point out, from the article:

First let me say, I fucking told you so. For years I've been saying the real threat is from tablets and phones becoming projectiles. For years people have been calling this nonsense and I'm going to trust a cabin crew union over a butterfingered tablet owner any day.

Now this is only a significant risk during specific situations such as take off, landing and heavy turbulence. Is it really too much to ask that people demonstrate a little common sense and self restraint... and put the devices away during these specific times. I use my tablet all the time on budget airlines... but I know enough about flying to stow it when things get a little too rough. This is made even worse by the fact people aren't even holding onto their tablets, I mean, who holds a 10" tablet for 6 hours... Fuck no, you lean it against the seat in front or on the tray table, sit back and enjoy your video. As it's only being held there by it's own weight the risk of it becoming a projectile during turbulence is very real.

Finally yes, I've been asked to stow my dead tree based book for take off on several airlines ranging from Southwest to Singapore to Cebu Pacific.

People don't listen to that preflight announcement stuff because they've heard it a hundred times before

Its not the preflight announcement they're concerned about (if you dont listen to that, its the airlines problem) however flight attendants have to issue instructions before takeoff and landing. This is difficult without them being too wrapped up in their Iwotsits as people are arrogant, selfish idiots when they can hear you.

The article specifically mentions the the "flight attendants emergency announcements" not the safety video.

And yes, a flight attendant has to tell several people to put their seatbelt on, tray table away or seat back upright every single flight at the very least even when the flight has gone perfectly. This is why they spend the last few minutes before take off or decent patrolling the aisles.

No, for the love of every deity ever invented by man, no.

You sir, should be banished from flying, or even commented on flying. They cant make instructions interesting, attempts to do so end up with videos so incredibly cringeworthy you spend your time criticising the terrible script writing rather than listening to the message. What they need to do is make them shorter, less music or terrible jokes and more getting to the point.

Technically, spam is unsolicited commercial email. So the ability to unsubscribe from it is immaterial. If you didn't sign up for it, it's spam. The only caveat here is that in many countries, if you cant unsubscribe from it, it's also considered spam but these are separate conditions, either one classes the email as spam.

The problem is, a lot of companies use sneaky methods to get you to opt-in. The most common is the pre-checked box saying "Yes I'd love to receive your delicious spam, email me thrice daily" when you sign up for a service.

I've never seen any of the Google advertisements that the GP claims, so I think it's safe to assume I didn't tick a box that he did. Google are pretty good about unsolicited advertising (most of the tech giants are... I guess even MS hates spam as much as we do).

I'll third it.

In over 10 years of Gmail I've had two pieces of spam reach my inbox, one many years ago and the other just a few weeks back. Having managed spam on corporate email systems that's so far beyond five nines its stupid.

False positives are pretty good also. The worst legit emails that have been caught are advertisements I signed up for.

Not really, the first step in a dictionary attack is to go though the first 1000/10,000 most commonly used passwords. You do the same with pass phrases. If you use a commonly used phrase, its the same as using a commonly used password.

Ironic you should mention that, a lot of Australians are going to the US to get married because the cost of a wedding over there is 1/4 of the cost of one here in Australia.

A $5K wedding in the US is $20K in Oz...

Or someone who considers a divorce to be a low probability but high severity risk... One that is easily mitigated (well for whatever pre-nups are worth these days).

OTOH, being offended at the concept of a pre-nup more or less confirms that party is also thinking about divorce and taking a significant part of your wealth and possessions with them.

This,

Commonly used passwords are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, that doesn't change when you use passphrases. If you use common lyrics or phrases they'll be more vulnerable than random words put together in a way that your brain forms a coherent link between.

Having helped out a few hoteliers with their Wifi setups, a tool that allows them to kick of sleected BT users would actually be a great boon to them. A small hotel can have up to 30 guests and all of them sharing a business grade DSL or if they're lucky a low speed fibre connection (but because fibre is not cheap nor common, it's on DSL or Cable at best) and then you get one or two guests who think its free and they can download the entire internets. The problem is, these people make the service unusable for the other 29 guests. Most hoteliers aren't IT experts but smart enough to run a tool like this. At the moment, their only solution to guests that are abusing the WiFi is to reset the router (although I know one who will get into the router and throttle them) but this is a temporary fix. An additional problem is that they dont want to block bit torrent, people travel and want to catch up on their favourite shows, especially since in many countries there is no legal alternative (try getting the latest US TV series in Thailand, get used to seeing "not available in your country" a lot) so they want guests to be able to do that, but not to saturate the connection.

You would be surprised at the number of people who try to DIY these things with no training or experience.

This is an issue with Hipster cafe's in Oz.

They dont provide WiFi and put up a sign saying "No we dont have WiFi, you'll have to talk to each other" which really means "we're a bunch of hipster tosspots".

It doesn't work because everyone has data on their phones these days. The only people who suffer are those who just need to quckly connect to the office VPN... but end up just tethering their phones anyway.

To put this into perspective, the Netherlands has a population of 16.8 Million people. 150,000 aren't even 1% so that's pretty normal for emigration. Hardly the crisis you're making out.

I'd be willing to bet a good proportion of those would be Dutch retiring to some place warmer with cheaper prostitutes like Thailand (Thailand seems to be the go-to place for European retirees, Americans usually end up in the Philippines, we Australians have infested both places).

For Australian readers, "the size of Delaware" is about 2.8 times the size of the ACT.