Symantec, I wonder what goes on there. Hope the engineering is better than the fairly ridiculous adventure I had with customer service. I was reporting a bug in the "Verified" seals for my paying client: the web wizard generates the wrong seals because the product matrix has not kept up with the threeway conversion of Verisign, Symantec and Norton. On the fourth customer service rep I finally had someone who knew what he was talking about. Refreshingly, he was blunt and did not end by asking me if I had any other issues, but just signed off! He sent me the code I needed, but I'm not sure he reported the bug.

Let's hope that means the server security and SSL cert teams are no-nonsense engineers, not bereft souls in a chaotic marketing enterprise.

mobile not ruling -> mobile now ruling

Chrome has it too, but hidden under Settings / Advanced / Privacy / Content Settings / Plugins / click-to-play
Not sure what the default is these days.

Opera is a great browser, but sites with media content can be so complex, I just start with Firefox and the Browser View extension (very simple), and open the page in successive browsers until it works, with IE as a last resort.

The problem with click-to-play schemes is that sometimes there is a smaller Flash controller you don't see or notice. I've been running Firefox with Flashblock for years and this is a common problem, so I imagine it will be hitting click-to-play as bugs. People who use Noscript instead probably haven't noticed the issue, because once you whitelist a page in Noscript, it reloads and the Flash and everything else runs. But with click-to-play, you may need to reload the page whitelisted so all the triggers can fire in whatever js/flash system they have cooked up to keep count of the count-count. Remember when the Count just liked to count, and wasn't such a vampire?

Opera used to be the fastest non-IE browser to open up, so was handy for getting a quick weather report before heading out, but I think that has gone the way of Firefox as a 5MB download. With mobile not ruling the web, maybe we'll get some of that back.

Whatever turned Firefox into 20MB download I assume it should be able to do a good HTML5 emulation of Flash! http://www.oldapps.com/firefox.php (And Flash is monumentally bigger than its old versions too.)

To be clear on jQuery effects, I'm talking about Javascript with no browser plugins, just those big redundant ad js files that often rival the total byte size of the images on a page. Flash is at least compact. (I develop with js instead of Flash, but I try to keep it reasonable.)

JQuery can eat up cycles too. A common replacement for Flash animation is the jQuery "Cycle" plugin. Well, jQuery sets 13ms timeouts by default for effects. If I have two or three of those things running in ads on a page, my laptop's fan kicks on. The parameter, jQuery.fx.interval, is not that well known, and a developer on a decent system would not notice the CPU overuse. The 13ms resolution is not really needed for simple slideshows.

Photoshop 4.0.1, (c) 1996, I run it everyday. Only later features I miss are unlimited undo and editable text. Text always becomes raster. No plugins, but I do re-save files before they go out, using command line imagemagick scripts! That fixes the one big sneaky annoyance of PS 4.0.1: it saves PNG's with a weird color profile.

Unfortunately it's much worse, surgeon with a fetish: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1959332/

*Soviet* shoot-down of KAL007, that is.

Does your stat for 747 include hostile attacks? The 747 seems to have a few outliers, like the shoot-down of KAL007 (269 lives) and Tenerife (583 lives, chaos at a small airport due to a bombing at a large airport), Air India 182 (329 lives, bomb), and Sept 11, 2011. Also, there is the massive JAL123 (520 lives, maintenance error). Airbus came along later, but did get hit by the U.S. attack on Iran Air 655 (290 lives).

Two things come to mind. In previous bad battery situation, the initial run of batteries were fine. Then when they went into production, perhaps with other subcontractors, they got the garbage.

Also, with the extensive testing of the planes, we've got to assume they run them under max power load, with every seat running laptops, playing movies on seatbacks, etc., right? And max use of air circulation, etc. And whatever else makes the batteries cycle to make up for generated power, however it works.

This plane uses a tremendous amount of electricity, see: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/01/boeing-787-electric-fire-grounding/
The li-ion batteries are from a company in Japan, but I wonder where they were manufactured. In the past, subcontractors outside Japan have done shoddy jobs making batteries, such as replacing mylar with paper. Once it's sealed up, how do you test it? Additionally, these batteries use cobolt oxide and are even more prone to overheating than tradition li-ion batteries. The batteries took a long time to certify.

A notorious SwissAir crash over the Atlantic was due to an overheated electrical bus. In a rush to get gambling devices onto seat backs, the airline had gone with a system that required a full computer for each display, which required more power than a more centralized system.

The trial was due to start in a few weeks, contrary to what you say in the second paragraph about no reason for the timing. Also, "US Attorney Chided Swartz On Day of Suicide" is the title of this post.