Indeed, in these kinds of class action lawsuits, there is only one big winner, and that is the lawyers who are litigating it.

I'm all for class action lawsuits in principle; companies that do things that are bad for soceity should face some sort of consequences for their actions, and people who were inconvenienced or harmed by the actions of companies should have some sort of recompence. In practice, however, usually what happens is that the people nominally benefitting get just a few dollars (probably not worth the paperwork of making it happen), the charge to the company is perhaps not trivial, but an easily absorbed cost of doing business, and it's a bonanza for the lawyers involved. The rewards system encourages litigous behavior for the sake of litigation, not good behavior on the part of companies nor does it provide any real recompense for people harmed.

This is just like TV Be Gone if it's used by a visitor to a wifi network - a bit cool, a bit controversial. But if it's the wifi network's owner in the coffee shop, fair game!

But wait, you mean two days straight of grapefruit juice and acai chocolate doesn't work?

As the original aim was to record the memories of the event, the best back up is to create new memories as soon as possible. Sit your kids in front of the monitor and subject ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H show them the videos. Provide plenty of glucose and caffeine so that they back up the memories as accurately as possible. Verbal annotations will help too.
If you want extra back-up diversity, invite members of your close family, and then extended family, work, church, sewing club, etc., to multiple showings. Produce fill-in-the-blanks question sheets about key events and run competitions to spot hard-to-see or difficult-to-catch occurrences. This will ensure multiple imprints of the video material in the neuro-cellular structures of the viewer's heads. Indeed, additional augmented memories may be generated by this whole exercise that can be shared later. And if you record those events on up-to-date video recording media, you will have a useful meta-recording to digest and disseminate further!

And how, exactly, is she supposed to put her knees in any other position? The seats are not very wide. Unless she has an empty seat next to her (and, frankly, that's about the only way I can stand to fly any more), if she tries to bend her legs so that her knees aren't right in front of her, parts of them are going to be spilling over into and annoying the person next to her, or sticking out into the aisle and getting run over by the carts that the flight attendants drive trhough trying to get people to buy stupid duty free stuff.

The problem is not inconsiderate assholes. The problem is that 6'2" people are stuck in plane seats that they simply don't fit in. The problem is that airlines have designed coach seats to work for the bottom 30% of the population in terms of size, and are trying to squeeze the entire population into it. Something somewhere's gotta give. The person in back can blame the person in front for reclining their seat (as we've seen in this thread), or the person in front can blame the person in back for having knees (as we've seen in this thread), but *somebody* is going to be unhappy, because the situation is set up so that somebody has to be.

The problem is coach seating. It's just become too small.

The front-page warning says "However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. "

I wonder how they expect people to read it in their browsers without the text of the document being transferred down to the computer on which the browser is running...?

As of 9:32PM PDT the brown list is down. I would say it is slashdotted, but given the dwindling number of readers of this site and the server error it tossed out, I expect it's either been hacked, or is just broken.

Whenever I travel to the UK, I'm impressed and often overwhelmed with the level of visual information that there is when driving - UK roads are fantastically well lined and signposted, they are especially good at night with reflectors/cats eyes down the middle of the road and often different colored ones on the side of the road. As you drive down a freeway/motorway there will typically be at least 4 or 5 signs warning you of a turn-off - two actual directions, and then 100m count-down signs! In the US, you're lucky if there's more than one, and usually that one single sign is just before the turn-off! Of course, computer-driven cars will be able to use GPS/satNav, but driving in the UK is like driving a video game compared to the US. In a lot of Colorado cities, they don't even paint a line across the road at the stop/traffic lights!

If you did high-school physics you may have heard about black body radiation and a thing called a black box - a box that absorbs all light that enters it. This could be a box with a hole in it lined with light-absorbing material, such that any light entering the hole never goes out again. That hole is essentially "black" and can be very, very black indeed. It can be so black, that your mind can play tricks on you as to what it is. This experience occurred to me at work in the, ahem, Gent's, with a toilet roll dispenser. For months, this dispenser (one of those that is stainless steel and holds two rolls, one above the other) had a matt black plastic cover on the front about where a lock was supposed to be, (you can see where this is going). It was absolutely a solid black plastic cover. Quite boring, but clearly covering a hole for some reason. One day, while waiting for nature to, err, take its course I poked the cover and in a flash, found it was a hole! It was a stunning realization that this plastic thing I'd been staring at for months, every day, was actually, nothing. I've subsequently checked this many times and it's an extremely good black box because even when I knew what it was, it still looked like a solid cover. Sadly, last week the facilities folks filled it up with a new lock and ruined a great physical phenomenon. It will be sadly missed.

Sounds like the Pebble or the Toq. Toq has the inductive charging and they both have reflective displays.

Agree with you on lots of these. Interesting about the battery life - why 36 hours? You mention e-ink - but mirasol looks better. Color, high res, high frame rate, great outdoors. With you on the touch screen - I prefer buttons. Could be okay though, but you still have the glove issue when it's cold.

> But I would have a hard time investing a few grand in a watch

Wow, a few grand? These watches will be a couple of ton, maybe a monkey max.

All plastic pod coffee systems should be banned or at least CRV charged on every single pod or equivalent. The only "pods" I've seen that come close to being eco-friendly are the commercial Flavia ones that are just foil in a UFO shape. Plastic creamer pods should be banned too! Those stupid bits of plastic stick around for thousands of years. If you want a quick cuppa, boil a kettle and drink tea or a decent instant coffee.