Remember, AA was the first airline who wanted to be more "equitable" about distributing the fees and started charging fees to check bags.

Ostensibly they did this to be more fair to the people who didn't check bags.

Of course the other major carriers quickly followed suit.

My experience has been that the whole flying experience was heavily degraded by this misguided decision. Even when I pay the fee to check my bags, I'm forced to wait while people who were too cheap to do so try to shove their bags into overhead compartments they just won't fit in. Thus, the checked bag fee slaps me twice - once when I pay it, and again when I have to deal with people who should have, but didn't.

American Airlines came up with that idea, and I don't think I will ever set foot on one of their planes again as a result.

I've worked at several different banks that had software in place to disable the USB ports to prevent this exact sort of thing from happening. In one case they built the software in house so that certain USB devices that were issued by the firm could be unlocked, but nothing else. CD writers, if available on the host, were also locked down by the software and could only be used with prior approval. From what I know of the banking industry, this is pretty standard practice.

But computers holding sensitive government data don't even have that level of security?

Microsoft was sued for breach of contract around their JVM - they had a contract with Sun allowing them to produce it. Presumably Apple had some similar sort of agreement.

That's because the US educational system is so bad at explaining variables.

I struggled with Math for the entire time I was in the educational system. At the end of each struggle, when the light bulb went on, I almost always thought 'This is so incredibly simple, why didn't they just explain it this way?" I've never seen a math textbook from another country as the article compares to, but I can certainly state that I think the ones written in the US are about at the level of a man page - if you already know the content and just want a quick refresher on some infrequently used bit - they're fine. If you're trying to learn something new for the first time - forget about it!

I remember seeing on a TV program about the Voyager project how serendipitous the timing of the launch was - where you could hop from planet to planet to planet using the gravity well of each planet to jump to the next one. Basically the alignment of the planets when Voyager launched made this possible, and such an alignment isn't going to come around again in our lifetime. So you'd need to build seperate probes to go to each planet, instead of being able to send one probe to many of them.

They actually have a device for climates where you need colder air and more humidity. And they're a lot cheaper to run than an air conditioner from what I understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_cooler

I've worked at a two different "small IT shops" where the owners offered out shares to hard working employees to keep them around. Not one of those employees is still on speaking terms with the owner of either company. Lawsuits were not involved with the departure of all of these people, but enough of them did end up involved in suits that I personally would never accept stock in a small IT shop where I was working. In fact, watching what said shops did to many close friends - I don't think I would even work as an employee at a small IT shop again!