Are there at least windows behind the screens so that they can be moved out of the way in the event of a problem?

That would defeat the point of deleting the cockpit window, which is to save weight (aerospace glass is very heavy), simplify and strengthen the structure, eliminate a potential point of failure for cabin pressurization, and improve aerodynamics.

What is needed to increase your comfort level is redundancy -- a backup camera in case the primary is damaged by, say, a bird strike, and a backup power source in case the primary power source fails.

If you've never watched "Seven Minutes of Terror," which explains the crazy but successful scheme to lower the Curiousity rover onto Mars, do yourself a favor and go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

It's the best video the U.S. Government has ever produced.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I've seen so much over the top hype and hysteria from the climate change deniers

I don't pay attention to hype or hysteria, but I do pay attention to this reasoned comment from James Lovelock:

"The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened."

Hobbyists and amateurs will always be free to create content; but a professional news-gathering organization, or a site like C|NET that attempts to provide impartial product reviews, needs ad revenue. Heck, even Slashdot needs some revenue to keep the lights on.

Early predictors of the tuition bubble: John Stossel and Matthew Continetti http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

In the news this week, Mark Cuban on the tuition bubble: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Making the bubble worse: the current Administration, by nationalizing the student loan industry and further removing market forces from individual decisionmaking: http://heritageaction.com/2013...

Remeber, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Most of the content on the web is seemingly free, but only because advertising covers the costs of creating new content and keeping old content available.

Without advertising, how do you propose to cover those costs? If your solution is, "everyone who is paid to create web content should become a government employee and be paid with tax dollars," I reject your solution a priori.

You may be right that they aren't issued cutting-edge laptops. Nonetheless, think about this: thanks to incomes growing faster than the rate of inflation, basic commodities, like a gallon of milk, consume a significantly smaller fraction of a family's income than they did a generation ago. (This is known as Engel's Law.) And that effect is orders-of-magnitude larger for technological commodities, like a gigaflop of computing power.

Government services, too, ought to be costing a smaller fraction of a family's income. (Especially because government uses technology to provide its services. Most government workers sit in front of a computer all day.) But government services are about the only thing that is bucking the trend, and consuming a larger fraction of a family's income!

Actual competition is nirvana to free market capitalists; those who oppose it, like NADA, are not free market capitalists. FTFY.

Most news reports seem quite accepting of the story that the emails are irretrievably gone because Lerner's local hard drive crashed.

Is it just because journalists are ignorant of how enterprise email systems typically work (messages stored on an Exchange server with offsite backups)?

Or is it the ultimate proof of the mainstream media being "in the tank" for the Administration?

I've worked at places where the size of my mailbox was, literally, limited to 25 cents' worth of hard drive space.

Granted, hard drive prices fall rapidly; maybe when the quota was first imposed, it was the equivalent of 25 dollars' worth of hard drive space, and the policy was never revisited while storage costs fell by two orders of magnitude. Still, a $25 limit on one of a professional's most important tools is very stingy. I could expense $25 for a single breakfast if I wanted to (although I never have).

Another policy that doesn't make sense. It's easier to audit an employee's email interactions with the public, than his or her telephone interactions with the public.

More miniturization equals greater reliability, because smaller components always do better at surviving shock and vibration than larger components.

In an absolute sense, yes. In a relative sense, some fruit will always be lower than others.

Everyone except me, as that's the exact scenario I've been advocating for years.

Even the simplest living organism is so complex -- dependent on correct interactions between hundreds of proteins, and the instructions for synthesizing each of those proteins are quite cleverly encoded in its DNA -- it's obvious that the first living organism could not have simply assembled itself out of random chemicals dissolved in the "primoridal soup."