Sure they suck. But would it suck worse for the government to mandate first class seats throughout?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy. It's not "worst possible seats ever" versus "personal cocoon of comfort with hot towels".

Yes, airline travel is far more convenient than any other long distance travel. But there should be some minimum standard of passenger space and comfort.

If more than half the population physically cannot get into your seats, adjust their position, or cross and uncross their legs ... then I think seats are way too small. Some seats are so damned small you literally are unable to move the entire time without elbowing your neighbor.

And, really, half is way too low.

Because, really, who wants to ride like you're in a Jeepney from Mumbai while in an airplane?

As I recall, it's not free ... it's available to people who are already Comcast subscribers.

In other words, this should be no different from any other context in which you connect to the interwebs via your Comcast service.

Except Comcast is letting the people who host the routers pay the electrical bill, and injecting even more ads into it.

And I definitely agree that modifying other people's content is getting into a sketchy area of copyright, and possibly stealing the ad revenue from those site owners.

Because, if the people who actually own the sites aren't having their ads serves, but suddenly someone else's ads are showing up, then isn't Comcast just skimming from someone else's stuff?

What isn't tolerable in any way, shape, or form is confiscation of my property because some dimwitted, local yokel cop *thought* about drugs while looking at my car.

I'm no longer willing to accept "dimwitted local yokel".

I go straight to assuming they know damned well they can do it, that they benefit from it, and since they don't really require any proof, why not do it and make themselves look good? I don't believe it's credible they do this in good faith.

And, of course, I'm sure they skim a little off the top for themselves.

The rest of the police complain that it's a few bad apples who do this, and that it makes the rest of them look bad. If the honest cops want to stop this perception, start arresting the crooked ones.

Right, and presumably if they did find such a prosecutor, all of the people who profit from this scheme would just find reason to harass said prosecutor?

Congratulations, America, you've jumped the shark.

Think it is about time to curtail our police state and defund the and repeal the laws that make this possible.

The question is ... is it legal?

Or is this just one of many ways in which law enforcement no longer considers themselves subject to the law?

Desert Snow contract employees took in more than $1 million over six months from drivers on the state's highways, including Interstate 40 west of Oklahoma City. Under its contract, the firm was allowed to keep 25 percent of the cash.

When Caddo County District Court Judge David A. Stephens learned that Desert Snow employees were not sworn law enforcement officers in Oklahoma, he denounced the arrangement as "shocking," and he threatened to put David in jail if it continued.

The state's American Civil Liberties Union chapter called for an investigation of the district attorney and criminal charges against Desert Snow employees for impersonating law enforcement officers.

Wait, so these guys are doing traffic stops and seizures (where they benefit from it) and they're not actually law enforcement?

So basically they're a shakedown racket? The more they seize the more profit they make? That's RICO level stuff there.

This kind of stuff is appalling, and it just means that a lot of stuff is being put into the private sector so they can ignore all of those pesky laws.

Unbelievable.

Eventually if nobody fits in the seats, then people will stop booking seats on that airline.

Assuming of course the airline actually publishes their seat sizes and seat pitch (and that that isn't just a best-case). And it assumes that there is another airline servicing your airport which gives you choice. And that it won't be a zillion times more expensive.

In my case, my shoulders are at about the physical limit of seat width in many economy seats -- I mean my actual skeleton here. And I'm not what I consider especially broad in the shoulders.

But, really, another half inch or so, and the person next to me and I are going to have to cuddle during the flight. There's simply no more room for me to have less room to fit into.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to have a "Skinny Ass Airlines" where you publish that all of your seats are 12" wide, but when airlines are talking about cramming an additional seat or two into a row -- you're quickly reaching a point where an awful lot of people physically do not fit into the seats.

There's a reason why it's called "Cattle Class". And some of the airlines are going out of their way to give less service for more money, not give a damn if they don't uphold their contract, and act like they're doing you a favor.

calling for government regulation of airplane seat spacing

You know, I can't speak to the rest of this, but the airline industry has been steadily making seats smaller and smaller for a long time now.

Eventually, you reach a point where your seat is smaller than at least half of the population -- some seats are reaching the point where they barely fit your average teenager.

Throw in people who are deciding that they can choose whether or nor people can recline the seat they paid for ... and air travel has become a really shitty experience to be avoided.

And that's before we get to the shitty customer service, overselling aircraft, and everything else. I wouldn't fly United Airlines unless there was no recourse and I absolutely had no choice, because they've gone from bad, to terrible -- and even then, you probably get a shitty regional carrier who does an even worse job.

Yo, Dawg ... I hear you like review panels ...

Is it the ads? For all that site operators hate Ad blockers they forget to look at the bandwidth and compute resources their own advertisements take up. Especially flash ads.

They don't forget, they simply don't care.

There's a huge difference. The guys in marketing want their fancy ads and their impressions, they don't care about your bandwidth.

Someone rushes a product to market, with absolutely zero thought about security.

This sounds like some pretty epic incompetence (or laziness).

That they then roll this out to 9 million students is pretty sad.

If you read the blog entry, this is talking about Windows 3.1's BSOD. A screen I honestly did not know existed

LOL, then I can only conclude you never actually used Windows 3.1.

Back in '92 or so, it took less than a week of using Windows on a newly purchased PC to cause my ex to ask me to install Linux on her machine for her.

so Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked

I'm not sure what it's technically called, but it was more like "if you have three things running, they each get 1/3 of the CPU ... whether they need it or not at the moment". It was pretty terrible.

Meanwhile, some of us were running real multi-tasking Linux machines, running X. Ahh, good times.

Nothing like installing Slackware from 100+ floppies.

Oh, I don't know ... Slashdot's "varnish cache server" is up there. :-P

LOL ... that's it ... Bennet is essentially Gilderoy Lockhart!!

You, sir, are brilliant!

You know, these are the same people who have put the meaningless error messages like "something bad happened, if this problem persists contact your administrator".

Gee, thanks, it's my fscking machine, I'm the admin ... how about you tell me something meaningful about the issue so I can try to find it?

Microsoft seems to be eternally stuck between dumbing something down so far as to make debugging impossible, and spitting out gibberish messages that you need a wizard level guru to decipher.

And, more on topic ... Big Fair Hairy Fscking Deal ... Ballmer re-wrote the text of the terrible error message, are we supposed to be impressed or something??? Now, if only they'd spent as much time in eliminating the terrible error in the first place.

If you're polishing your turd, you're doing it wrong. It should not be no no, when the system crashes completely, it should be in 17 point helvetica. At that point, it's like wall papering over the giant hole in your wall.