Except obese people don't have to pay for two seats, as ruled by a Canadian court. The rest of your post is a series of non sequiturs, because there is choice in the same price range. I can buy shirts that fit me for the same price as a smaller person. The materials might be a bit cheaper, or the cut might not be as great, or it might not have a brand attached to it, but it'll fit me. I can do the same for cars, and for anything that's property. An airline ticket is a service, and there is NO choice. I can't decide to trade that second carry-on weighting 20 pounds that every person brings but that I don't. I can't decide to downgrade the seat's materials, or not to have food included, or to have to pay extra for every inch more that I want. I don't have an alternative.

Also, your money comment is absurd. Tall people tend, on average, to make more money than shorter people, but that in no way means that I have a few thousands magically floating in my pockets. I generally have less money instead, because between the clothing, food, doctor visits (for back problems, neck problems, knee problems, you name it) and whatever else, my student money isn't going very far. But don't let that get in the way of a nice juicy overgeneralization.

You can get airline tickets in Europe for under $100. That's often equal to or less than a bus or a train, and yet European flights are generally a bit better than American flights despite the latter costing more for similar distances. You're oversimplifying the matter.

If only stockholders and directors were forced to eat their own dog food (and not first class either), you'd see changes happen overnight.

Bullshit. Why should I pay more for being taller? This isn't a choice, is it? What the airlines are doing is essentially discrimination.

What infuriates me the most though is that I've heard more and more that obese people get special status and the ability to use two seats while only paying for one, but tall people get nothing. Obesity is not inherent to the person, height is.

I'm 6'5" and I am pretty much restricted to emergency exit rows. In rare cases, I'll strike an old plane that wasn't modified (Air Canada Rouge is AC's cheap brand and they use ancient planes without even TVs) and then I'll have plenty of legroom, but anything recent or "upgraded" means I need the emergency row AND I also need to be extremely wary of the person in front of me trying to recline. I generally manage to block it so solidly that they think it's broken or already at maximum recline, but that really is not enjoyable, and some people fight it for a long time (especially fucking children). I can't afford the 2-5x increase to go first class, that's basically corporate area anyway.

I happily invite you to go back to the living standards of the time where the government was not in schools, limited themselves on the roads, did not deliver water and so on. I think you'll find that economic prosperity does not necessarily mean they were living the good life. I sure as hell would never trust a private corporation with my water supply or education, there are way too many juicy corners to cut.

Meanwhile, in Canada, I paid around $9,000 (significantly less if you also count the scholarships I got) for my full BSc. at a university that usually ranks towards the low end of the top 100 - perhaps not as prestigious as MIT, but more than sufficient for most people. If you're poor, you can also get a lot of financial support, enough to make university basically free.

Had something similar. I and a few friends were on a special high school program where the entire classroom had laptops. The laptops were our own, but were bought and administrated by the school so we'd have access to the programs needed and such. They also had a rock-solid warranty program that lasted until you left the school, even if the problem was that you'd put a pencil straight through the screen and hammered it in until it poked through on the other side (it was back when IBM still made Thinkpads, those things were tough) they'd replace it no questions asked for free.

But anyways, what this meant was that the IT at school (who was rather terrible, as is usual) needed administrator access to all the laptops. What we found out was that they'd simply made a local hidden user with administrator access, so we used a cracker software on our own laptops to find the password... and it was the same for all the machines, regardless of classroom or year. We could access anyone's entire drive using the hidden c$ network share, which meant a whole lot of things. We never really used it for anything bad, but technically we could've deleted files, cracked others' passwords in order to gain access to their network share (where students delivered final homework), etc. I think we mentioned it to a few teachers we trusted, but they just told us to shut up. This was something like 10 years ago so if we'd come to the IT guy he'd probably have made a fuss out of it and got us expelled to cover up for his ineptitude.

Mao made the calls himself, with a complete lack of understanding of what the fuck he was doing. Gates largely funds projects he finds interesting; he doesn't have absolute control over the entire country's government and he doesn't actually run the stuff he doesn't understand.

It's also worth noting that Mojang has never contributed code to Bukkit or CraftBukkit. The codebases are therefore entirely separate, except for Bukkit/CB's usage of reverse engineered source, which goes one way only (and not the way that would logically let you assess ownership of Minecraft's server source).

You mean aside from the fact Intel has patent agreements with Nvidia? It's pretty clear to me that Nvidia's trying very hard to increase their share in the mobile market and one way to do it is to get some cash from competitors through licensing agreements. Or maybe they want some of Qualcomm's patents for their own products?

As per usual, /. ignores AnandTech's excellent overview of the situation.

And when I do the exact same thing, I have absolutely no problem. Anecdotes don't mean much.

As much as they'll tell you otherwise, most of those high standing religious leaders aren't all that concerned about their religion. They're not the brainwashed religious fanatics, those are their minions. They're much smarter, and what they're doing is pretty much politics: they want to keep their power base intact. They are fully aware that the indoctrination of the masses, while powerful, wouldn't resist if faced with wide open access to the internet. There are too many opinions, too much information, you could even develop critical thinking *gasp*! It'd be the end of their power trip, and they won't accept that, so they'll drag down their entire country if need be.

I know you mean the US, but the difference is that the US has left the 8th century. A small minority seems adamant in getting them back to the dark ages, but there's a wide chasm between that and the poor souls of the Middle East. To conflate the two and pretend otherwise hinders both issues.

Ebola is actually not that contagious. Its usually high mortality rate makes it slow to propagate, since it tends to kill the host before they can spread it much. You also need extended contact with infected people to be susceptible to transmission (hence why the researchers were amongst the most likely to get it, protection or not, and the lack of treatment or prevention mechanism meant that there was little to do for them once they had it).

An Ebola outbreak in Europe or North America would do little damage as it would be contained swiftly. Unless ZMapp is mass produced before then, the infected would probably be quarantined and left there, but either way you could control it and even in a major population center the damage would be relatively low. An influenza epidemic like the Spanish flu would be far more devastating, despite the fact flu is a much more common (and less "scary") disease.