Yeah, it probably depends on the flight attendant and/or the airline. Last week, for example, the flight attendants on multiple United and Lufthansa flights never said a word.

It's strange that none of the articles about this topic in the tech press have mentioned this.

Although there is a lot of talk about e-readers, tablets, phones, etc., I have not seen any mention of noise cancelling headphones. In my experience, passengers (such as me) tend to turn them on right before take off, and not turn them off until after the aircraft lands. Although they are clearly electronic devices, rarely does a flight attendant ask a passenger to turn one of these units off.

Yeah, but if the pilot suspects that their tablet was causing interference they can quickly turn it off. It would take a lot longer to locate an interfering device that's stored away in a random passenger's brief case.

I agree, and in fact I have been on several long haul overseas flights in business class where the flight attendants did not ask passengers to turn off noise cancelling headphones during take off and landing. These flights were on a US domestic airline, too. I suspect that this was not an official airline policy, but rather individual flight attendants who were cutting business and first class passengers some slack, since these passengers are usually business professionals who paid a lot more for their tickets.

The intent of the new law is to make it more difficult for someone who intends to commit mass murder to be successful. The "two-feature" test never accomplished this. I'm not saying that the "one-feature" test is better, but let's stop pretending that the old law was effective.

Do I have data? No. But since Nate (and Sam Wang) both have a good track record, my guess is that the Republican big shots are very worried about their base becoming discouraged and staying home. That's why Rove and company are say so many bad things about Nate.

In other words, if the far right stays home, that jeopardizes the Republican party's hold on the House of Representatives, as well as many other races.

Many cable companies already implement Switched Digital Video where only the channels that are actually being watched are sent down the wire. This may actually explain the couple second delay that you have experienced when changing channels. This allows the cable companies to offer more channels than their system has the capacity to support.

It seems to me that Switched Digital Video is a reasonable way to manage the limited channel capacity on cable, even though Cisco tuning adapters initially were garbage. How expensive is it to deploy SDV in a mid size market?

650 million tons of water is about 150 billion gallons. Not that much, really.

Looks like you never listened to Pink Floyd.

Kodak is currently trying to sell a large number of it's imaging patents. Maybe they see this lawsuit as a way to motivate one of the defendants to buy these patents. Or maybe they see this as a way to increase the worth of those patents.

I never said that kids don't need email. Not even close. I commented on the parents' behavior. Thanks for misquoting me.

I'm a parent. All of my school age children have email accounts. I made a conscience decision not to create Gmail accounts for them, because due to their ages it would have violated Google's terms of service. In other words, I read Google's rules and then decided to go elsewhere. It took me less than fifteen minutes to find an alternative email service that allowed my children to have accounts.

I do feel sympathy for the kids who lost their accounts, but I feel zero sympathy for the parents who created those accounts and are now whining instead of admitting their mistake.

Five years ago? Really? Try about a month ago. But why did you even mention this? Does it add to the discussion? Is a comment in some way less worthy if it comes from someone who does not submit comments at a specific frequency?

If you want to disagree with me, that's fine. But if you are going to do so in public, you should at least try to respond to what I actually said.

Let me get this straight... here we have some parents who created Gmail accounts for their young children, fully aware that this was in violation of Google's teams of service. Then they became upset when Google deleted the accounts. How is this Google's fault? Clearly these so-called adults are missing the whole point. They lied about their kids' ages, and got caught. And instead of accepting responsibility for breaking the rules, which would be the mature thing to do, they got mad at Google. It's disappointing that these parents set such a bad example for their children.

Polaroid was selling ultrasonic sensors and an experimenters kit that could be used for this purpose thirty years ago. While there are definitely applications where this type of technology is useful, I agree that a tape measure works great for most purposes.