They have those already - at least the sonar one. It pings for up to 30 days once it hits the water. The issue is that you have to be relatively close to the plane to hear the pinging. Even with Air France 447 when the ACARS data told us where the plane was as it was crashing, it still took almost two years and several searches to find the hull of the plane. In this case, it appears everyone spent the last several days looking in the wrong place, because the military either didn't report or no one listened to their report of spotting the plane in a very different, unexpected location over an hour after it disappeared off the civilian radar. I hope someone in charge wrote down that lesson.

As for the cost of the devices: How much is this search costing the countries involved? It's probably enough to pay for installation on quite a few airliners at this point...

You don't see the difference? Google Maps, Waze, etc. provide a useful service to the user in return for that information. Repo camera databases don't.

Yep. Also, I recently got life insurance, and one of the questions they asked me was, "Have you been aboard an aircraft other than as a passenger on a commercial airliner?" I wonder how much a "yes" answer would've cost me each month. I'd love to do it, but we're talking about $6000-$8000 just for the license, daytime, single engine only. How much more for any of the other certifications? I drive past an airfield every day on my way home from work and look longingly...then remember how much it costs.

Sport pilot would be cheaper, of course. But as you pointed out there are quite a few expenses aside from just the license.

And, it's not like you can, say, fly yourself to vacation to save money. A friend of mine has his license and his own plane (owned one before he even could drive, in fact), and still flies commercial whenever he needs to actually go somewhere.

It's not working...this is the first I've noticed ANYTHING, and I usually check /. a couple times a day. I have tags turned off, because they're useless, and I'm logged in. I may have looked at beta once or twice a while back.

I just looked at it and didn't care for it, though. What's with the useless, unrelated pictures - a compass for the article about GPS dead reckoning in cars? A picture of LEGO on an article about coding? Useless. I don't get the top "block" of three stories or whatever... what happened to the summaries of those? The menu bar is of little use to me - I don't browse by topic, and I doubt many others do, either. And the narrow comments isn't good, either - as deep as this thread is, my comment would be about one character wide in beta...all kinds of fun for reading! There is a trend amongst web designers to make everything very narrow, ignoring that the interruption while your eyes move to the next line makes the text harder to read and comprehend.

We get the Sunday Washington Post, which includes a free subscription to their website that can be shared with a second person. The coupons we get more than pay for the cost of the subscription, and I get the Sunday comics to read...on Saturday. My wife also checks the ads for sales on stuff we'll need soon. The newspaper itself goes right in the recycling bin, unfortunately. (Side note: this tells me there's a market for a service of just delivering coupons like the papers do, but it would make more money than the newspaper by ignoring the news!)

Seriously? You can find reviews of plenty of other domain registration sites. I use pairnic.com (which is part of pair.com hosting...they've been around 18 years, according to the email they sent me the other day), and pay $14/year for domain names, without any of this crap, and I've been using them for at least 10 years. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones, too. Don't reward an abuser.

A poor implementation doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If it was, Yugo would have killed the market for automobiles.

Well, how many times has the government been sued for that very same issue until now?

My Yahoo email address (yeah, I know, and I'm moving away from it - I've had the account since 1995 or 1996, but this latest mail interface redesign is finally getting me motivated to stop using it for anything other than junk mail) often receives legitimate mail intended for other people. My favorite incident so far was when a wife tried to email their password spreadsheet to her husband, but sent it to me instead. I let her know of the error, and she thanked me and said her husband was pretty pissed at her for the mistake. I deleted the message, though: if their accounts were broken into, I wanted to be able to say, "I deleted the message and the attachment."

I usually just ignore the messages and delete them. If it keeps happening I'll often respond and let them know they have the wrong person. I really want to slap the lawyers that have "if you are not the intended recipient of this email, delete it immediately!" at the bottom - I mistakenly received a message with that at the bottom once, so I responded per their directions and included a bill for my fee of $200 for the service. I never heard from them again, and if their little disclaimer was legal than my bill probably was too. I wonder if my point got through...probably not.

I would be careful about saving anything that could open you up to liability - the password spreadsheet above is a perfect example. The odds are excellent you'd never have a problem saving something compromising, but it only takes one idiot, and even if you're innocent, the hassle wouldn't be worth it.

Our Honda requires us to press a button to agree to the license terms for the nav system every time we start the car. I hadn't previously considered that Honda would be collecting that data - GPS itself is one-way data transfer only; apparently at least Ford overcame that, apparently by simply storing the data until the next dealer visit.

I'm not - I spent most of the snowboarders video trying to scroll around to get back to a normal forward view, and failing. Part of any kind of art is trimming the raw material down to the gold nugget inside. We're not impressed by a hunk of stone, but we are impressed when someone takes that stone and carves an elephant from it. This camera just gives you all the raw video in every direction, like that hunk of stone. Other than inside a 360 degree theater like in Canada's pavilion at Epcot (the only one I've ever seen), it's hard to understand the appeal of this camera... I'm just not seeing it.

Yeah, it was what I recommended as well. I have a version 1.1 floating around; I stopped using it just last year, after buying an n-capable router with gigabit ethernet (I often move large files around my network, so the n network speeds were a useful upgrade). Unfortunately, that router sometimes won't let devices connect and has to be rebooted, a problem I never had with my WRT54G... sigh.

You're right - the first and third ones are fixtures, but the second is definitely a bulb replacement. It's quite possible we're seeing different results.

I did look at those bulbs, but it's a hack...I'd rather have a fixture that replaces it. Well, I'll just keep waiting for now. Thanks for the info.

I don't have inside information into 60 Minutes programming, but my guess is that 60 Minutes' primary audience these days is older people. I don't know the politics, if they even have a bent one way or the other. I doubt many people under 40 watch it. It used to be one of the better investigative journalism shows - I remember a tagline that said something like, "You know it's going to be a bad day when... there's a 60 Minutes news crew outside your office." I have no idea what they've been doing more recently; I haven't watched an episode in years. It's supposed to be in depth news, rather like reading an article out of a weekly news magazine, where you get in-depth analysis, history, etc., instead of a shorter, simpler summary of events like you'd get out of the daily newspaper.