This makes perfect sense. Who are people eligible for retiring? People who have worked for the government longer than 30 years (lesser time depending on age). Thus a lot of the records having to deal with these employees are on paper, because that was what was in use when they were hired.

So there are two options - spend a ton of money all at once and digitize everything, or simply process the old paper records only as needed when those long-term employees retire. The first option is very inefficient because a significant number of the records will not be needed by the Office of Personnel Management for individuals who have died or no longer work for the government.

As time goes on, more and more people retiring will have all digital records, and eventually the whole paper thing can go away. As the article quickly glosses over, only 15% of the cases require referencing the old paper records actually stored in the mine. And that number will constantly be dropping as those older employees retire.

So the current method is more cost effective and will naturally "go away" on its own after another decade or so.

Computers do not feel empathy. Perhaps the empathy humans feel when seeing others in pain overrides any minor inconsistencies in the visual side of things. Further, humans do not "analyze" one others' faces to identify an emotion. We see faces (even if it's the same ones over and over) so many times that it's just an automatic, generalized classification. If people often faked painful facial features, and there was some strong motivation to identify that fact, then I'm sure we would be more adept at it. The only time I can think of in a real-world setting where people fake painful facial features is in jest or to be funny or "sarcastic" in some way (not counting football (aka soccer) matches). Thus the overall context totally reveals the expression to be fake and thus visual side of things is just an afterthought.

The fire theory is wrong, and it is not the simplest explanation in any shape or form. Not only was transponder switched off, but ACARS was too. Here's the thing - ACARS kept transmitting for 7 hours!! That system was fully functional - it had power, it was still transmitting to the stations. That is how we know the plane did not crash immediately. It was manually switched to a mode in which it no longer actively sent data.

If there was a fire on board, then it magically: Took out all radios instantly, switched ACARS operating mode (plus ACARS can also be used to send messages, and the system was still working, yet it wasn't utilized to report an emergency either), killed the transponder, shut down the preprogrammed autopilot course, flew the plane for 7 hours with multiple heading changes and many "abnormal" altitude changes (flying above flight ceiling for the aircraft, flying lower than normal over Malaysia, etc), instantly killed every passenger (because no cell phones were switched on or even passively connected while flying lower than normal over Malaysia), allowed the pilot to manually fly the plane for hours (multiple altitude and course changes that were very strange) but without trying any other methods of communication (cell phones, ACARS messages, etc), and it all started IMMEDIATELY after Malaysia air traffic controllers turned over control of the aircraft as it was leaving their airspace. That is not the simplest explanation by any stretch of the imagination. The simplest explanation is: Someone with a technical knowledge of the aircraft decided to do whatever the hell they wanted with it at the very first opportunity when the plane was not longer being monitored by Malaysian flight controllers.

Personally, I believe one of two things had to have happened immediately after the "event" began (when the plane was released by Malaysia air traffic control) - 1) the pilot managed to kill all the passengers extremely fast - for example by flying at a very high elevation (above the service ceiling even) and depressurizing the plane (at that elevation people lose consciousness in under 8 seconds), or 2) none of the passengers suspected anything was wrong until far out into the Indian ocean and out the range of all land-based cell towers.

What are you talking about? Tesla didn't pay them a cent to make this video. I hear they do like their new Roadsters though.

It's not a fake commercial. It's a real commercial. They just made it without having been asked or paid.

Summary says he released early builds, then it says he leaked "Windows 8 code". Code and builds aren't the same thing. So which was it?

I have absolutely no idea what the summary is talking about, but I did recognize the word "Linux" at least. And "DRM", but apparently it's not that DRM.

Were I a Parisian I would have a custom tag comprised of only letters, thus avoiding the even / odd rule. "SMOG" would be a fitting choice. (yeah yeah, I'm sure custom license plates are mainly an American thing)

You changed my words "of an" to "and". I said "government of an entire country" meaning the federal government of a country, NOT "government and entire country", as you twisted my words around. Certainly state controlled media speaks for the federal of government of that country. So yes, what I said is exactly right.

The difference is that Limbaugh doesn't speak for a state-controlled news agency, and thus Limbaugh's opinions are only that of a single man with a microphone and do not represent the government of an entire country.

To answer my own questions, Flight 370 was a Boeing 777-200ER. See the "ER"? That means Extended Range. It has a range of 7,700 nautical miles (compared to the non-ER version with a range of 5,235 miles). The distance from Kuala Lumpur, where the flight originated, to Jerusalem (simply chosen as a place in Israel) is 4,729 miles - well within Flight 370's range of 7,700 miles. Note that the plane first flow north for a while before changing direction, so the overall flight would have been longer than 4,729 miles, which would have put it out of the range of a regular (non-ER) 777. Interesting that the plane that just happened to disappear was an Extended Range version (or are they simply more common? I don't know).

Also, the final northwest heading was towards the middle east, which aimed it squarely at a number of political / religious hotspots (Israel, Pakistan, Kashmir area, etc) where there are ongoing suicide attacks taking place on a daily basis (Pakistan at the moment). As for the plane actually reaching Israel, that's pretty much impossible. It would have had to have flown over Saudi Arabia / Iran to get there, and surely the unidentified plane would have been intercepted by one of those two countries. Then of course the Israelis would have shot it down for certain had it actually made it close to their border.

I mostly agree with you - I also feel there was some ulterior motive (hijacking / ransom / obtaining the hardware, etc). However, there are still very likely suicide scenarios that could explain the evidence.

Why do people stand on the edge of a bridge and contemplate for hours before killing themselves? Why do people do "suicide by cop"? Because not many people have the nerve to actively cause their own death. The pilot(s) could have disabled tracking and just kind of flown around for a while (upping the ante and the stakes - trying to get beyond some point-of-no-return), and passively commit suicide by simply sitting back and waiting for the plane to run out of fuel and thus crash. The reason they would have turned off the tracking devices is to prevent intervention of some kind (scrambling military jets to see why the plane was off course and not communicating, etc).

Then there is also the suicide martyr religious fanatic type situation, where the intention was to not just kill themselves, but take something else out in the process. Does anyone know if Israel was within range of the jet, or if the course deviation took it in that direction?

It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. We're just talking about pinging tiny little packets of positional data every few minutes.

MMS texts (and images) come through but only if sent from a Sprint phone. I was rather surprised one day when I received one - I assumed google finally added support for mms. It wasn't until after a lot of trial and error and sleuthing that I figured out it was only if the mms was from a sprint phone.

The article is correct - google voice should be alerting someone (sender or receiver) the message wasn't delivered, but my hunch is that Sprint is providing the connectivity for Google Voice and they just throw away 3rd party MMS messages as part of the contract in order to keep bandwidth down.

Surely there are cards out there that say "Thinking of you" that show a big slice of pie on the front.