No, you really want them to board first.

For the last year, up until last month, I was barely able to walk. I still had to fly for work. I boarded flights with the kids and anyone else that needed help.

The parent doesn't just stow their stuff and sit down. They stow the kids bags, get the kids to sit down, shut up, buckles on, no you can't go to the bathroom, blah, blah, blah.

For me, it took me about 4x as long just to get down the airway. A guy barely walking down the ramp with passengers walking normal speed definitely held up the flow, no matter how much room I tried to leave. I still got held up by the parents with kids, and I didn't care. I'd just sit on the nearest armrest until they were done.

You don't want me, or the parents with kids slowing you down. People are assholes enough boarding planes.

If you wait for them to board last, now you'll have parents trying to stow bags in the last few spots (if there are any), trying to get the kids in their seats at the same time, and having the kid(s) climbing over other passengers.

For me, barely able to walk, if I had to take the window seat, that would mean everyone in the other seat(s) would have to move. Walking on a cane, I wasn't able to just squeeze by anyone, especially if there were no good seats available. It was still hard just to get *to* the window seat.

And before any of you complain, since surgery I can walk fine. The cane is retired at least for another 30 years.

On the plus side, they might actually survive that. If memory serves aircraft helmets (while probably not as concerned with ballistics as infantry ones) are supposed to at least not endanger the pilot, and ideally to protect him, during fairly violent maneuvers like ejection.

That said, I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to find out.

I would suggest that you give more thought to 'races' where outnumbering the opponent and firing anti-aircraft weapons at them from the ground is acceptable...

Even if we suspect that a nasty shooting war with a modern adversary is in the cards, it's a bit of a problem that our current next generation super plane costs so much that we'll necessarily have them in quite limited numbers and be unwilling and (in a conflict of any nontrivial size or duration) unable to expose them to serious risks.

This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard. Obviously the cost of pilots means that the US isn't going to be doing many aerial human wave attacks (short of a WWII-style mobilization); but we certainly aren't going to be fielding larger air forces, or ones better able to resupply after losses, because our fancy aircraft cost north of $100 million a pop.

But where will the US get its supply of mutant kangaroos?

There are techniques that allow searching within encrypted files, but they rely on the client creating the index. You can then search the index for an encrypted search term and, if you know the keys, interpret the answer. Getting this right is quite tricky (there are several research papers about it), so he's right, but it's not impossible.

The main reason that I suspect DropBox discourages encryption is that they rely a lot on deduplication to reduce their costs. If everyone encrypted their files, then even two identical files would have different representations server-side if owned by different users, so their costs would go up a lot.

I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.

Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.

In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.

I don't understand why you think 'yum install gcc' is somehow different from 'download and run the installer for the VS command-line tools'. Especially on a modern Linux distro, where libraries come with -devel variants to save you the 10KB taken up by the headers in the normal install, so you end up having to install a load of headers as well to get the system useable.

I was a consultant for a few years and didn't find that it did. Most of my customers found me, as a result of my open source work (usually to work on the same projects, sometimes to work on projects in similar fields). Contract negotiation didn't take very long (they list some requirements, you mutually agree on a date, you pick a number, if they haggle then you politely decline).

History isn't encouraging, though. They've been pursuing the dream of one windows to rule them all since the days when that involved smearing a crude layer of flayed win95 across winCE and pretending it was a good fit for PDAs.

Now that hardware has advanced they have a much better shot at architectural unification (if memory serves, NT has basically edged out everything else except for whatever CE support they provide for legacy customers); but UI? That won't go well.

From your constant insistence, over multiple comments, that under your proposed system nobody would "have" to work. I consider it a privilege to be able to work to provide for myself and my family, not a burden to be cast off at the first opportunity. My ideal world is one where everybody has the ability and opportunity to work for a living wage, not one where everybody gets free stuff.

As a matter of strict values, I share your vision of a world where nobody goes hungry or cold. But I strongly disagree with your path to getting there. You consider a world where nobody has to work as a utopia. My observation is just the opposite. If you take effort away from people, they tend to become entitled, lazy, selfish, and (ironically, with more leisure time) miserable. They may have enough to eat, but they lose so much of their humanity that they become less excellent as people. There is intrinsic value to hard work. In my experience, people who work hard (up to a certain limit) are happier. A society of bored people is one where crime is rampant and people are full of envy and strife (because nothing begets envy like a sense of entitlement). And that's not even to mention practical issues, like the inflation that dogs basic income economies.

My "utopia" is one where everybody works hard when they're working. When they're not working, ideally, they're building strong nuclear and extended families, raising children with a strong work ethic, and teaching them that when they are able, they should help those whose efforts have been less fruitful than their own. That help involves, for example, helping people through tough times, or giving them a lift while they do something to improve themselves like get an education or start a business. The end goal is always for everybody to get to a point where they can support themselves by their own efforts, so that nobody is dependent on government largess (as opposed to everybody). In fact, government hardly enters into it, except for providing some basic infrastructure and emergency services.

Perhaps that society is not possible in our present human condition, but it is an ideal I would sooner seek after than one where an over-powerful central government deals with poverty by subsidizing laziness.

The CPU and GPU are fine, reports on battery life seem to vary, with excellent results if you turn the 'dynamic perspectives' thing off and don't firefly much, tepid ones if you actually try to use those features; but the screen is genuinely disappointing for a phone in that price range, although the internal storage is better than usual.

There's nothing offensively wrong with it; but the price tag befits a device that is genuinely compelling in some way, which it isn't.