Yep right next the in seat TV there was a USB port. I've seen it on about half the flights I've been on over the last couple years. Though I'm usually flying transatlantic so perhaps it is only bigger planes or longer flights that they bother to provide it. Pretty sweet when they have them tough: you arrive at your destination and your gadgets are all still fully charged. No: I need to go to the hotel for a couple hours to get my phone/tablet charged again.

No I need the space to prevent serious cramping/bruising. They need the space (for the most part) because they want to take a knap. Pain wins over knap time.

Yeah. If Monsanto gets a hold of it and has their way every coffee would taste the same, the agri-gestapo will be suing farmers because they collected their beans rather than buy new ones every year etc.

Wrong. 36" between seats. Just measured it I'm 30" from ass to knee sitting with my ass right against a wooden seat. The other 6" is the thickness or close enough not to matter of the chair. It isn't 36" leg room it is 36" from one seat to the same spot on the seat in front so the thickness of the chair is a factor too. I can just barely not touch the seat in front if when I seat down I sit perfectly straight and press with my legs back to flatten my back padding as much as possible. Anything short of that and I'm touching the seat in front.

They absolutely must be placed there because they are attached to my leg. I can't raise my feet off the floor and to my chest for a 10hr flight without touching the seat in front sorry not going to happen. Why I do this is more times than not people start to move the seat back and feel some resistence. They look back see that there is a 6'3" person behind them and that it is my knees they are hitting and then they push to try to still get there seat back. Sorry jackness if we are in a pushing match I win. I'm not getting bruises on my knees so you can recline your sit 10 degrees.

Probably reasonable. The problem is the first time you fly with an airline you have no idea how crammed they are versus the competition. Add to that they keep changing the configuration of the planes and you have no idea. I flew recently to Prague on Air Transit. On the way there the most comfortable I've flown yet other than when in an emergency aisle (and in a way better since the seat in front was close enough that I had access to a usb charger). On the way back: cramped as hell with about 20 3 yr olds in the surrounding 5 rows front and back. Same airline and route 1 week apart. You never know what you are getting for your $1000 and that isn't right.

When a dude tries slamming their sit into my knees I press back. I'm 240lb 6'3" and a muscular frame. I win more times than not and the jackass in front of me gets a sore back for their troubles.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-u...

Thank you come again. Didn't know a lot about NetWare but I gather from Wikipedia/the time of when I was playing around our network was likely NetWare 2.0 with a few 386 and 486's that had just come in the last couple years. Sim City (original, or at least the first one I'd ever saw) was 32 bit I think. The FAT was loaded in memory which wouldn't have worked for 286 computers because they don't support 32bit addressing so kaboom.

Oh but I also deployed Office 95 I think it was and OCR'd the course catalog for a teacher. So: teachers liked me, administration not so much.

Then installed SimCIty on the school network and in doing so brought the network down (unintentional, SimCity had a different bitness than the network and supposedly it didn't like it too much). Got admin rights and used Novell messaging stuff (forget what it was called) to taunt the sysadmin. Wiped the Apple IIe's and IIc's that we had in the library because it annoyed me that the librarian was such a Apple fanboy he replaced the PCs with 10year older macs (could my earlier hijack of the network been part of the reason ;)).

To get proposals funded you need to point to something already existing for the most part and say how yours is very similar to that/likely to succeed. So yeah the funding and financial steering is towards things that are not very innovative. However there are a few a compensating factors. 1) Doing something similar both verifies theories/that we actually understand what we thing we do and has the chance of something different happening which either invalidates the theory or adds nuance. 2) Most people aren't really that capable of innovation: science has their equivalent of timecard punchers too: lots of people are smart enough to do science, few are able to do it well, and even fewer will come up with the new ideas. 3) Even those that are innovative aren't going to come up with that many new ideas. Take Einstein, he was a theorist so didn't have as much of a time requirement in terms of designing ordering and using equipment etc. Still (I might miss something) he only had a 3 really big ideas: energy matter equivalence, Brownian motion, and arguably relativity (GR and SR are really just consequences of energy-matter equivalence + the invariability of the speed of light). 3 ideas in a 50 year career.

Once the idea is out there the timepunchers (relatively, still very smart people and they might be innovating techniques that make things more accurate, quicker etc but they aren't the one with the big foundational ideas) quickly become able to run the experiments that build up the data and there are much more of them. So naturally the job of allocating resources focuses on sending the money to the timepunchers not to the innovators: they'll likely hack something together with equipment they already have on the weekend for free anyways, be theorists so not need a lot of resources, or for biomed go the private financing/corporate route.

The technology in them is probably dirt cheap (and may have been at the time of release) a low res grayscale ~2" screen plus enough processing power to solve relatively simple math probably all of $5 cost. The rest is usability and brand recognition. That said there is something to being able to visualize things in your head. Perhaps not everyone is wired the same way but I managed my way through an honours physics degree with nothing better than a $10 basic scientific calculator: graphs, intersections, roots of a function etc I know how to calculate them and am pretty good at once I know where they are visualizing how the graph should look. Regardless of how common it is I suspect you never are going to be among those skilled at math intensive fields if you need to consult a calculator some times. Sometimes you just need to be able to figure out from the direction of current in a wire which direction the magnetic field will be generated and thus what direction the induced field in the second conductor will be traveling sort of like a sense of direction: if you don't have one don't be a cabby (though GPS makes that easier now I suppose).

Yeah beauty of technology. Back in the day I'm guessing dashboard cams were recording to magnetic media (VHS) which would be kind of hard to carry around when you are chasing someone. Now with (still magnetic) but solid state storage and digital cameras ... much much smaller. I think a lot of the resistance is that there is a lot of choices being made by the cops that they don't want double guessed all the time. Was the taser really needed seeing as the suspect was all of 120lbs and there were two officers on the scene already? You let this guy off but nailed this other one ... why? etc. I guess cameras can protect you from being treated unfairly but it also makes it hard for the cop to give anyone a break since their actions constantly are under review.

Just move the dashboard cams to the police officer. Back in the day I'm assuming the reason for dashboard cams was the size. Now that they can fit on a helmet or whatever that is where they should be. How often does stuff happen that just doesn't happen to be in front of the car? Or they flee and the real action happens a few blocks away? Or the cop themselves are blocking the shot with their body. At least putting another camera in front of the cop would help.

They are doing a job that is likely to end up being discussed in court. It isn't just about catching cops acting bad it is preventing the case from getting thrown out because the cop forgets to write something down, or multiple subjects and the cop is chasing one while the other one gets rid of a gun or something where they couldn't see but a camera might (especially if they keep the dash cams).

Storage cost arguments are just silly. You can get 1000+ hours on a 1TB drive. We know have 8TB drives. You would just have to save things where an arrest or "incident" happened not the whole day of the cop riding around. So what are we saying we can afford the car and the cop, the judge, jury, ADA, the court appointed attorney for the defendent and all the lab work to collect evidence but say $1000 per officer for the camera every couple years and storing 100MB of data and relevant to the arrest is too expensive?

No I'd say that is a theory explaining the physical evidence: sun doesn't collapse on itself, is hot, heavier elements exist. Detecting the neutrinos is yet another piece of physical evidence supporting an already existing theory.