That's what I was going to suggest. They're bound as kids books so they're a little more likely to hold up to being read by a three-year-old than real comic books. They contain basically no words, so he can read them as long as he can figure out to follow the pictures in order. And if he's not quite up to reading them by himself, you can read them together.

Of course, that's assuming that takeoff and landing are 30 minutes. Sometimes I've been on a plane which had to wait out on the tarmack for as long as an hour (and there have been other cases which were quite a bit longer which I didn't personally experience). How do I deal with all that time? Well, if my seatmate doesn't feel like conversing, I usually read a book. I don't think that wanting to read a book when there's nothing else to do means that I have a sad little life, but maybe you think that makes me some sort of information freak or something. Except that books are big and bulky, so I've switched to a happy little ebook reader which is like half the size of a paperback and holds several hundred books. Except that I can't use my ebook reader because it's a gadget, even though, being an e-ink display, its emissions of any sort are really pretty minimal. People don't have to turn off their hearing aids, and those are probably about the same level of emissions. So, perhaps, if they reevaluate things, then I'll be able to read my ebook while waiting patiently and quietly for take-off. Is that really so terrible?

The stuff you'd rather not have breathed is just stale corn starch, nothing exotic. I'm sure it wasn't fun to breathe (I know I didn't enjoy it), but it isn't dangerous.

A lot of the collision sensor for airbags are just bits of mercury in a slanted tube. When there's a sudden enough deceleration, the mercury goes up the tube and makes a connection. But this can also happen if the car hits downwards fast enough. I had this happen in my 96 Camry when I was going quickly down a steep hill and there was suddenly a level train track crossing which acted like a jump ramp. I hit the brakes, but not in time and my front end was briefly airborne. It came down hard and bottomed out the suspension and hit the pavement. It wasn't a really hard hit on the pavement (no bend in the frame or even damage to the steering), but it was enough of a collision when it hit that the mercury got bounced up and Bam! airbags went off. I had my hands at about 3 and 9 or slightly lower and got the hell scrapped out of the skin on the inside of my arms and the whole thing scared the hell out of me, but otherwise, no problems.

I also initially thought that I'd killed the car because the whole thing was suddenly silent and filled with smoke. Of course, it wasn't actually smoke, just the corn starch that they use to lubricate the airbags. And the sudden silence wasn't entirely real. The engine was actually still idling quietly, I just didn't realize it. And the radio had shut off because the sudden pressure from the deploying airbags had pushed the knob in and turned it off. All I had to do was push it again to turn it back on. Really, aside from needing a new front-end alignment (done) and new airbags (which I haven't gotten because they'd cost more than a replacement car), the car was fine.

You're overstating things. Binary liquid explosives weren't even found in anyone's home. It was just an idea that they were considering and hadn't actually carried out at all.

You're going to blame the UN for the failure of Hans Blix to find all Iraqi weapons? If you've forgotten your history, the reason that Blix didn't do that was because the US got impatient and decided to start a war rather than waiting for the end result of the process. He and his team were still working until they got pulled out for their own safety once it looked like the US was going to invade.

And, in the end, after they invaded the country, none of the weapons that the US insisted that Hans Blix hadn't found ever showed up. No nuclear program. No mobile bioweapons labs. None of that stuff. The fact of the matter is that Blix and his team accounted for almost all of the biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, and there were no nuclear weapons. So how, exactly, is that a UN failure?

Please don't try and rewrite history. When the US declared war on Iraq, there had, in fact, been a UN weapons inspection team headed by Hans Blix operating in Iraq until just a few days before. They got pulled out by the UN because it looked like the US was about to declare war on Iraq, and they didn't want their weapons inspectors getting killed. The UN had said "let them in or else" and Iraq had let them in in November of 2002. The only issue which was in question was whether or not Iraq was being fully cooperative with the inspectors or not.

Really? With the train station in Kyoto? Seriously? I've been there, both in the train station and in the surrounding area. It's big, but it's not exactly skyline wrecking unless you happen to live in an apartment which directly faces it. There are plenty of other buildings nearby which are close to the same height and once you get about two blocks away, you can't even see it from the street. If you don't believe me, here's a picture from above which shows the surrounding area. Plenty of other 8+ story buildings in the area. Here's a view from the top of the hotel in the train station. What skyline is it that they're destroying exactly?

Kyoto is a lovely city. It has myriad beautiful temples and gardens and the nearby country-side is lovely. People flock to it to see the cherry trees when they are in bloom. But none of these things are very tall. Most of the famous temples aren't even visible when you're half a block away from them, nevermind part of the skyline. It does not now have an impressive skyline and if it ever did, it must have been centuries ago, and although the train station big enough to be clearly visible for a couple of blocks around, it's not exactly a sky-scraper. Honestly, its width and shininess stand out as much as its height. So, if the person writing the article thinks that the Kyoto train station (which has far more non-shinkansen platforms than shinkansen platforms) is too big or too shiny, then fine, but saying that it wrecks the skyline is just dumb.

For professors, post-docs, and most assistant positions, the standard university contract in the US tends to say that you own the copyright of everything you do and the university owns the patents. This is likely not the case if you're working as an in-house programmer or copywriter or other similar positions, but for academics, they usually own their own copyright.

The thing about this is that the law, as written agrees with you exactly. There's no stipulation in the law that if you own a legal copy of a piece of software that a license is required to use it any more than a license is required to read a book or listen to a CD. Some companies have argued that you need a license since you're copying it onto your hard drive or into RAM, but the actual copyright law says that you have the right to do this if you own a legal copy of the software per 17 USC 117.

So these licenses aren't granting you any rights which you don't already have. They're completely one-sided contracts and should be unenforceable, and yet this isn't how the courts have been finding, mostly because the side with more money to spend on lawyers often wins regardless of what the law says, which is unfortunate.