Keyboard phones sound good on paper but when people actually tried them the reality hit home.

Yes, and the reality is that if you are someone who works with text -- a programmer, a sysadmin, a writer -- a keyboard phone completely fscking rocks, putting a remote terminal/text editor device in your pocket. I can sit at the bar and work on an essay, or ssh in to the server at work for a quick bug fix or server restart. (Yes, it's nice to have a tablet or laptop or desktop but those don't fit into my pocket.) "Swipe" keyboards are useless. You can have my Epic 4G when you pry it from my cold dead hands...or replace it with another phone with a hardware keyboard. There is no substitute.

Russia is definitely, without a doubt or a question, the villain here.

Your statement assumes there is only one villain.

Russia is a villain. The U.S. is a villain. The current fascist-riddled Ukraine government is a villain. The prior authoritarian Ukraine government is a villain. And in the end, the ethnic Russians of Eastern Ukraine are fucked.

Not to mention if chemical weapons were a casus belli, just about every country in the world would be a legitimate target.

Exactly. Like marijuana and copyright infringement for foreign policy.

Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.

Can you quote me the part where I was being hypocritical? Can you show me where I said that I supported our funding of Egypt or Saudi Arabia? Or are you just trying to falsely discredit me because you don't like my opinion?

Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.

Not for me. For me, the problem is that my government arms Israel. I accept that many nations handle their regional bood-debt feuds with more bloodshed. It's stupid and self-propagating, but fine, go ahead, if that's your thing. But if you blow my paycheck on your cock-waving bullets, you become subject to my judgment of your actions.

And the company is totally within their right to enforce that policy and deny the free "upgrade".

Getting the family off the plane and illegally threatening them, on the other hand...

Hyperopia and astigmatism :(

http://www.usaeyes.org/faq/sub...

Or, they could become less obstinate in blocking FOIA requests.

Why not have a herd of magical pink unicorns travel to DC and explain the problem to them. That seems like a more likely solution.

To be a real dick about it: Nobody moved your cheese, the cheese is simply no longer there.

Cheese, to extend the metaphor, does not simply disappear. If it's no longer there, someone moved it.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of free cheese in the form of torrents. The more the copyright cartel tightens its grip, the more content will slip through its fingers.

Here's my latest Snowden / Binney 2016 bumper sticker art, suitable for printing at 2.75" x 5" cropped size plus a .125" bleed, 300 DPI, on vinyl:
PNG
Vector (LibreOffice Draw)

This is my original artwork, CC BY-NC-SA, so print a pile and spread them around if you like. I use psprint.com, and I recommend searching "vinyl bumper stickers" on DuckDuckGo, where psprint is usually running a coupon in the search results. I haven't received the color proofs for this version yet, but these are corrected from a previous batch and should be pretty good.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo or PSPrint, and Snowden/Binney is (perhaps unfortunately) neither a real nor a realistic campaign. This is just for giggles.

When travelling from the UK to Chile... Flying is pretty much the only sensible option for me right now.
I pretty much hate the entire experience but there are not better alternatives for when you NEED to travel to some places.

When travelling in and around the UK I would never fly if I can avoid it as the entire experience has become pretty inconvenient.

Excellent -- it sounds like you are making all reasonable efforts to cut their cashflow.

>> There's also question of motivation. Why would soldiers waste expensive missiles for some irrelevant passenger plane?

> To shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft. They had already shot down a Ukrainian transport plane and a Ukrainian fighter within the previous week. They were on a roll.

That's the same point looneycyborg was attempting to make; that it was not terrorism because it was not an attempt to target civilians.

Though I agree with your accurate and informative correction regarding the civilian flight route issue.

This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league.

Bob9113 here. Don't tell my potential customers what I can and can't supply. You don't know my inventory, nor my procurement abilities. Though you are right that the price would be substantially above $50,000.

"Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."

Remember those stickers on the registers at K-Mart, facing the cashier, with the letters, "TYFSOK"? It stands for, "Thank You For Shopping Our K-Mart." The sticker was to remind the beleagured minimum wage employee to recite the words. Did anyone, ever, feel that the person mechanically parroting that catch phrase actually cared? How about the greeters at Wal Mart? (I think they've pretty much gone away, like the TYFSOK stickers)

You can teach an automaton to mimick human emotion, but even when it is an actual human such mimickry is patronizing and irritating. If you want human warmth, hire warm humans (downside; warm humans who can keep their positive mental attitude while working at an airport are expensive and they need time to recover from their shifts).

If you are going to use computers, embrace their natural advantages. Computers are fast, predictable, and emotionless. Those can be good characteristics in a user interface -- particularly when the customer just wants to get the process finished and move on. Work with the entire industry to develop a standard interface and sequence so the user and bang through it without even engaging their brain -- everyone is better off with travellers on autopilot. Painting a computer in whore's makeup won't make it a lover for any but the most desperate.

And, for you air travellers, a quick question: Why are you still endorsing them? Why are you still agreeing to be subjected to the TSA and the awful customer service of the airlines? Have you really made all reasonable efforts to switch to alternatives? If you aren't making significant personal sacrifices to cut their cashflow, you are lending aid and comfort to the enemy. I've driven 6,000 miles in the past year avoiding air travel. What are you doing?

Uh, yeah, we can measure -1. The charge of an electron. The distance along the x-axis that I travel when I walk one meter west. The effect on a wave when it encounters an identical one 180 degrees out of phase.

Not at all. None of those things "are" -1. They are observable phenomena that we tag with the human invention, the word/concept, "-1". Mathematics is not an aspect of objective observable reality, it is a language that we have found useful for describing our observations.