Replying from an airport as I wait for colleagues to arrive from another city....

I haven't flown for "pleasure" more than once in the last 15 years. The last pleasure trip before that was Miami to Alaska, and there aren't a lot of good options to get to Ketchikan....

Reflecting this morning, airports have actually gotten nicer in the last 20 years, security theater is more amusing than painful, when the lines aren't stupid long.

However, the sardine packing of the trip itself borders on intolerable... I used to be 6'2" - shrinking past 6'1" these days, but unfortunately getting wider in the seat as that happens, and most of the height compresses from the spine, so my legroom problems aren't improving.

I, personally, would take up air travel for fun again if the 3+3 configurations were switched to 3+2 and a decent legroom pitch were maintained, but none of that seems likely to happen, and it's a shame. If they needed to charge extra for these seats, fine, I'd probably do a 30% premium without blinking, just for the extra space - I don't need a hot towel and a microwaved meal, thanks.

I've got 4 Southwest "free drink" coupons in my wallet right now, but just don't feel like using them on flights that leave at 6am... and the afternoon and evening flights are delayed so often that I'm glad not to be on them, though I will compliment Southwest's mostly "hubless" routing system that provides direct flights between smaller airports, even if it's only once a day, it's nice to have the option.

Now, off to convince my bosses that telecommuting is really more efficient than travel.... seems pretty obvious from this chair.

Somewhere back in the 1990s, Miami popped up as a "high crime" city - above the New York metro area, which was pretty laughable to the large number of essentially dual-residents, people who lived both places off and on through the year. The explanation was in the reporting, NYC cops weren't filing nearly as much paperwork as Miami's "professional law enforcement" were. A decision was made, Miami adopted a more NYC like crime reporting structure, and et-voila' the very next year Miami's crime stats were way down the list.

I lived in the city of Miami during those years, after the switch we had a car stolen from the street infront of the house, had to present ourselves at the police substation (5 miles away, in a bad neighborhood) to report the stolen car. What part of "they just stole our car" didn't they hear? Anyway, got there and had to wait in line 20 minutes before getting the opportunity to report the theft.

But, the associated improvement in crime stats was beneficial for tourism...

There used to be "Business Class" which was more or less the physical space of First, but without the Champagne and Lobster.

For some reason, the three tier aircraft seem to have phased out in favor of two levels of service. In the late 1990s, I flew MIA-SFO several times, and those 767s were still equipped with 3 tier seating, but sold with 2 tier pricing, so if you booked your seats early, you could get business class seats (with economy service) for economy prices - that was quite a good deal, and a major bummer when you missed out booking your seats in time to get the good ones.

Cities (especially big ones like NYC and Miami) have a tendency to under-report crime. Accurately keeping crime statistics only makes them look bad, why would they willingly do that?

How often have you flown on an "unscheduled substitute equipment" flight?

I'm usually happy to have any aircraft to take me to my destination, if the option is spending an unexpected extra night away from home.

Cephalic hypertension is a pretty high price to pay... I'll try Lasik first.

Apollo was short duration, those guys were running on so much adrenaline that any findings about zero G / low G were masked by the novelty, danger and excitement of it all.

You need a big radius, otherwise you'll get a "Gravitron" effect (an amusement park ride)... fluid in the inner ear spins in funny ways, much worse for motion sickness than zero G.

An idea posted above, a big rope with a counterweight (or maybe two sides of the station, attached by a tether), could do it, but docking will become.... challenging (and we know what happened to Challenger.)

Spin the current space station and you'll have a whole bunch of shiny chunks of metal flying away from each other, and no atmosphere inside.

The present design isn't made to withstand even 1/3g loading - maybe a new space station design could handle it, but not the one we've got.

There's that newfangled p-wave detector, only costs $80m to build and $12m / year to operate - if the reactor can be rendered safe within 10 seconds after notice of an oncoming quake, I think they've got a customer....

You might be surprised, my first medical app on Qt was targeted to OS-X, for a whole year, but as Director of Software Development, I chose Qt to hedge my bets against the day that OS-X got thrown under the bus for "business reasons." And, yes, especially in 2006, the Qt App was still in Carbon, while Cocoa was what all the cool Objective C kids were doing that week - and our in-house OS-X champion threw a hissy fit about it. Nobody else cared - it was a good looking app, just not quite up to the minute with latest OS-X styles.

So, two things happened by mid-2007. One, Qt updated to use Cocoa, and 95% of the OS-X champion's complaints about the app were solved for us by the trolls - zero code changes required by us. Two, the suits decided that we were merging our design efforts with a larger project that was Windows based, so OS-X did get thrown under the bus, as predicted. It took about 8 man hours to convert our Qt App from one that was written on OS-X, exclusively for OS-X, never tested on anything but OS-X, to running identically on Windows - and 7 of those man hours were wrapped up in converting OpenGL code....

I'm in medical now, and the primary target is Linux - but lots of use cases call for operation under Windows too....

I suppose it depends on your target market. I've written mostly for medical and military, and they never had complaints about Qt's ui. Even did a server based app with no UI, and Qt still made sense as the library because of the cross-platform requirements - lots of shared memory and other stuff is "wrapped up" and platform details handled by the library. I guess I've always been in small enough companies that "outsourcing to the trolls" was the better option - we'd never have delivered anything cross-platform if we had to hire multiple teams for implementation on each.
   

One thing I have learned to love about QObjects is their family tree and how it (mostly) garbage collects for you, when you use them properly. I really like the fact that my objects clean up their entire child structure as soon as they go out of scope - without a bunch of delete code required.

But, yeah, a testing team with valgrind will usually find a bunch of (trivial) "leaks" in my code, too - I'm talking about single objects that are created once and not destroyed before exit - technically, I don't call those leaks, but valgrind does.

What would slashdot be without arguments over semantics?

A hell of a lot smaller.

Gotta throw my perennial plug in for Qt/C++ for portability. As long as your target is desktop only, Qt is super portable, mature, and relatively complete.

Yes, they are just starting to get into serious mobile support, and I notice a lot of the "completeness" suffering as this transition takes place (old libs like QFtp are now "an exercise for the programmer" to port and include in Qt5 based projects.)

We had a Qt vs Python vs VB/Excel contest once - effort was roughly similar between the three to really do the job at hand, VB only won because the start and end point for the data was in Excel. The thing I find about most language comparisons comes down to "where is it socially acceptable to cut corners?" The scripting languages are very oriented toward the quick and dirty, zero error checking, zero declaration, zero structure programming - and if that's what you want, great. C++ enforces declarations and type checking on you - which, if you're doing anything of size, you actually do want. By the time you beef up a Python script to handle the edge and error cases and do all the stuff that the C++ program is probably doing at default level, then the Python isn't so quick or slick anymore.