No, mathematics and logic are about provability. Real-world phenomena can't be proven; they can only be shown to have worked a certain way every time we've observed them so far. (I've dropped this rock 100,000 times, and every time it has fallen ... but I can't prove that it will next time.) If you want absolute proof you need to stick to theoretical phenomena. Or chuck it all and just believe something with absolute faith because it's written in an old book, like the other people who are afraid of their "truths" being subject to challenge.

The notion that climate science or economics can't repeat experiments is not entirely fair. While it's true that we can't conduct isolated double-blind experiments under identical conditions, we can conduct tests under analogous conditions to determine whether a given model is accurate or not, which is the real goal of such science. Given enough instances in which the accumulation of carbon compounds in the atmosphere leads to an overall increase in temperatures, or in which an increase in government spending or low-end wages stimulates economic activity in a market economy, we can make the inference of a correlation, and start looking for a mechanism of a causal connection.

The quality of service no longer meets customer requirements, and customers are rebelling. The airlines and airports have done their best to remove any aspect of comfort or pleasure from air travel, and customers, the people who actually pay the bills, have had enough.

Entitled attitudes don't help. I ended up with bruised knees on a British Airways flight from the person ahead of me refusing to negotiate on seat reclining, with the flight attendants refusing to mediate. On a American flight the passenger next to me went ballistic and very loudly demanded to be reseated, because I was wearing perfume.

On my last long-haul flight (Vancouver to London) I did an on-the-spot upgrade to premium economy and had a good flight. I had cashed in credit card points for the ticket, so the extra $$$ was money well-spent.

I think diverting is a lousy way to handle customer disputes, but it scares me that the airlines may start accepting this as part of the cost of doing business...

...laura

Yeah, kinda: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

We didn't have technology yet when I were a wee lad. I didn't even put my hands on a computer (terminal) until my junior year in high school. There was POTS, but I've never liked telephones. Electric typewriters, but no real fun to be had with those. Xerography, but at 10 cents each, who had that kind of money?

Of course apps are also rejected because they don't meet the arbitrary standards of puritanism that Apple applies, or allow the user to purchase content that doesn't meet those standards. Such as digital comics containing male nudity.

no

* "there would be no significant delay"

"If you're reading the newspaper, you are not going to be able to transition to operating the vehicle in the event the computer gives up and says it's all up to you."

I don't think you understand the topic of conversation here. We're not talking about situations in which the computer says, "Excuse me, Dave, but I'm not sure what to do here. Could you please drive for me?" We're talking about situations in which Dave says, "WTF! You're heading for a cliff!" and chooses to take control. Maybe it takes him some seconds to notice the problem before he takes action, but once he does notice, there would be significant delay before he puts his foot down on the brake and his hands on the wheel.

One of the things that bugs me about so many high-tech devices is the lack of an "off" switch (and in the case of a vehicle, substitute "stop"). On ye olde personal computers, IBM put a big red paddle-switch that summarily deprived the electronics of electricity. Flip that, and it was OFF. (Even the clock.) These days, it's a button (and pretty soon just a contact-sensitive control spot) that asks the system to... not shut off, exactly, but to put itself into a low-power state in which it looks as if it were off. And I've had a few situations where the OS or firmware was so borked up that the only way to restart a device was to physically plug the plug. So for a computer-controlled device that has the physical ability to act as a lethal weapon, I don't think it's unreasonable to insist on a manual "stop" override.

The notion that we haven't had time to "evolve" to adapt to a modern diet is a bit absurd. Because here we are: eating it and living as much as a century on it. It doesn't take millions of years for natural selection to eliminate genetic lines that can't thrive on a particular diet; the mere thousands in which humans switched from hunter-gatherers into farmers has been enough. That doesn't mean that the rapid biotechnological change of the past century or two hasn't produced a diet that we can all do well on – high fructose corn syrup and factory-raised meat are putting a whole new set of selection criteria on H. sapiens – but the typical diet of the 19th century, with a corresponding level of physical activity, plus some modern medical technology to address illnesses that aren't related to nutrition, is the best prescription for human longevity.

The US grid is "quite reliable"... by third-world standards. I live in a city of a quarter million, and my power goes out for 4-24 hours at least 3 or 4 times a year. Every thunderstorm that blows through leaves me wondering if I'm going to get to test the UPSes on my home servers again that day.