I was glad to see them succeed, and it's an interesting mix of "old" print media, and the "new" social networking and crowd funding. Like crowd funding a new 8bit arcade game, but less hipster ironic.

Anyway, I prefer the Hobgoblin myself. Pool tables, you see.

I haven't been able to find any of those in a while. The only ones I've found in the last 8-12 months have been for 7" and bigger tablets.

Okay, so the question becomes: What is a better QWERTY phone? He mentions T-Mobile by name, but even better if it runs on all networks. The single requirement is a hardware QWERTY keyboard.

Yeah, I know, almost no one uses a hardware keyboard anymore, it's all on-screen and autocorrect now. But some of us don't like on-screen keyboards and some people do more than poke the Like/+1/retweat button.

Here's my latest Snowden / Binney 2016 bumper sticker art, suitable for printing at 2.75" x 5" cropped size plus a .125" bleed, 300 DPI, on vinyl:
PNG
Vector (LibreOffice Draw)

This is my original artwork, CC BY-NC-SA, so print a pile and spread them around if you like. I use psprint.com, and I recommend searching "vinyl bumper stickers" on DuckDuckGo, where psprint is usually running a coupon in the search results. I haven't received the color proofs for this version yet, but these are corrected from a previous batch and should be pretty good.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo or PSPrint, and Snowden/Binney is (perhaps unfortunately) neither a real nor a realistic campaign. This is just for giggles.

When travelling from the UK to Chile... Flying is pretty much the only sensible option for me right now.
I pretty much hate the entire experience but there are not better alternatives for when you NEED to travel to some places.

When travelling in and around the UK I would never fly if I can avoid it as the entire experience has become pretty inconvenient.

Excellent -- it sounds like you are making all reasonable efforts to cut their cashflow.

>> There's also question of motivation. Why would soldiers waste expensive missiles for some irrelevant passenger plane?

> To shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft. They had already shot down a Ukrainian transport plane and a Ukrainian fighter within the previous week. They were on a roll.

That's the same point looneycyborg was attempting to make; that it was not terrorism because it was not an attempt to target civilians.

Though I agree with your accurate and informative correction regarding the civilian flight route issue.

This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league.

Bob9113 here. Don't tell my potential customers what I can and can't supply. You don't know my inventory, nor my procurement abilities. Though you are right that the price would be substantially above $50,000.

"Travelling can be stressful and our aim is to make the interaction between human (passenger) and computer (check-in) as natural and helpful as possible."

Remember those stickers on the registers at K-Mart, facing the cashier, with the letters, "TYFSOK"? It stands for, "Thank You For Shopping Our K-Mart." The sticker was to remind the beleagured minimum wage employee to recite the words. Did anyone, ever, feel that the person mechanically parroting that catch phrase actually cared? How about the greeters at Wal Mart? (I think they've pretty much gone away, like the TYFSOK stickers)

You can teach an automaton to mimick human emotion, but even when it is an actual human such mimickry is patronizing and irritating. If you want human warmth, hire warm humans (downside; warm humans who can keep their positive mental attitude while working at an airport are expensive and they need time to recover from their shifts).

If you are going to use computers, embrace their natural advantages. Computers are fast, predictable, and emotionless. Those can be good characteristics in a user interface -- particularly when the customer just wants to get the process finished and move on. Work with the entire industry to develop a standard interface and sequence so the user and bang through it without even engaging their brain -- everyone is better off with travellers on autopilot. Painting a computer in whore's makeup won't make it a lover for any but the most desperate.

And, for you air travellers, a quick question: Why are you still endorsing them? Why are you still agreeing to be subjected to the TSA and the awful customer service of the airlines? Have you really made all reasonable efforts to switch to alternatives? If you aren't making significant personal sacrifices to cut their cashflow, you are lending aid and comfort to the enemy. I've driven 6,000 miles in the past year avoiding air travel. What are you doing?

Two-fer-one from this scene: Escaping The Reavers

"Faster, Faster, Faster would be better!"

or, "Kaylee! Heat her up, we got reavers!"

While the EPA is thinking about raising limits on how much radioactive material nuclear power plants can release into the environment there are no limits on what coal plants can release.

"But Teacher! Billy is punching people, so why can't I punch people?!?"

If you have empirical data to present on the risk of the current levels of radiation exposure measured in QALYs, and an argument for adjusting the current regulated level, present it. But saying that we should ease our regulation on this form of harm, merely because you assert that another form of harm is insufficiently regulated, is manipulative and irrational.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.