You're describing Bokeh. And yes, it is one of those techniques that done well, can greatly enhance a picture. There are entire web sites and discussion groups devoted to the topic - which lens, camera, technique is best and who is a total poser. There have been numerous attempts to do this in software, all of which have yielded meh results. I suspect that Google's attempt will be another one of these, but who knows. Perhaps they will finally figure out how to let photographers match their $15,000 DLSR rigs with an $800 smartphone and a .99 app.

Talk to the V-22 engineers about just exactly how easy it is to do that... It took them literally decades (the original V-22 was designed in the 1960's) to do that and the thing still crashes more than is desirable. Once you make the engine move, you change the aerodynamics of the entire aircraft. Continuously. Not a trivial problem and one that would likely create more problems than it solves.

When things are going bad, they tend to go bad quickly. Not the time to punch up the videogame. Remember the pilots are trying to do lots of things.

The reason why you can reconstruct an incident like this is that you can spend literally years going over every little detail. That's an advantage that the pilots certainly don't have.

While this is sort of true (you can turn off flight laws in a Airbus), it's not a bad thing. We don't know which approach is better - or if indeed either approach is always better or worse. It's a large scale experiment.

And since both Airbus and Boeing aircraft rarely plummet to the ground, a rather successful one. Yes, there can and should be improvements but the jury is out.

The turn of events that caused AirFrance 447 might well have been interrupted with a Boeing autopilot system. Conversely, the idiot junior pilot that crashed the 777 in San Francisco would probably have been unable to shut the engines down completely before actually landing.

Murphy's law. Remember it.

Time zone I understand. Growing zone is a little harder.

So it's really a server farm?

Corn chips, memory chips. To a politician it's all the same.

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.....

In the long run, there are no allies, just business relationships.

There are no polar bears on Mars. Just sayin.

You know whats creepy? People trying to tell me that other creepy people aren't really creepy because other creepy people really are creepy.

It's creepy all the way down.

Time. Billions of years is a long time to try various and sundry things. Although it probably didn't happen this way (likely there were multiple attempts at 'life'), it just takes once....

Life finds a way.

Even rocket scientists have managers. And managers have VPs and VPs have to talk to the CEO about shareholder value.

As always, shit rolls down hill.

You don't need a giant dish. You see those Iridium handsets? That's all that you need. The newer ones fit in a cargo pocket.

HDD prices are high? Not from any sort of historical perspective. ALL the storage solutions these days are cheap, cheap, cheap!

Bring it on! Toss another SSD onto the cart!

Anybody remember $1000 10 MEGABYTE drives?

Cheap cheap cheap!

For various definitions of 'informed'.