John Boehner just released a statement: "This incident clearly proves pilots are not essential and we can get by without them. Let us furlough them, profit destroying, union joining, commie socialistic, moochers."

Most upscale hotel customers are business travelers and their corporate employer is picking up the tab. They don't even look at the bill. If they do it is to make sure the correct euphemism is used for the porn bill. So in some sense they get everything free.

Again the real big businesses get into large contracts with the hotel chains and they get a different rate. But then the hotels get smart and add "service" fees. And the next round of contract talks things get negotiated. The cycle goes on.

In all our travel, if there is no free parking, free breakfast and free wi-fi, I am not even looking at the hotel. They get filtered out.

No it actually thought you wanted to buy "purloined" leather gloves. The programmer is a Sherlock Holmes afficianado.

Human memory is a funny thing. It does not really remember what we saw, except for a few savants with photographic memory. What we generally remember is what we felt. I will cit two personal examples.

When I was in seventh grade I saw a movie with a typical bollywood number set on the Moon. Craters and boulders and stuff with the leading pair dancing and singing. I remembered it as a magnificent big set. After some 40 years I happened to see the same sequence, in an old is gold DVD set. The set was cheesy, tacky, at most 40 feet by 30 feet, craters were of just two sizes, nearly perfect circles, in a kind of semi uniform spacing. The leading pair looked horribly over made up. The only thing that was still great was the song. I was humming it for a couple of days. [*]

Whan I was young my dad used to take to the bank and I used to think the tellers were sitting on very tall chairs behind impossibly tall counters. Turns out that was just the perspective of a child who has to look up at everything. Once I grew up these counters seemed quite normal, at most 4 or 4.5 feet tall.

The point is, even if we unearth all those missing 106 episodes, the actual episodes might not stand up to all the hype and expectation heaped up on them.

[*]: For the Desis out there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6UeorX-aVo

It is not the farmers' losses that drives up the insurance cost for the rest of us. The cost passed to us do not come from these farmers. They have the same cookie cutter homes that is totally unsuitable for tornado alley, miles and miles of exurbia. Farmers have a reason to live in the middle of tornado alley far away from everyone. What about those office workers who prefer to stay in half-acre lot 25 miles from city center? They contribute to the maximum amount of tax payer subsidized disaster relief. This sprawl would not happen if we ask them to pay for the full cost living like that. They would congregate into tight clusters of concrete buildings if they are paying for the whole thing.

And those urban sprawl would do greatly once they revert back to farmland.

It will let people survive to rebuild in an area unsuitable for human occupation again and again. They will take our tax dollars through FEMA again and again. Unless people are asked to pay full price of their decisions, such shelters would lead to more financial pain, tax burden to others. People who decided not to live in plywood boxes in tornado country, or in wildfire area or below the sea level between a lake and the sea, or below the river level etc should not be asked to shoulder the burden of supporting people who made foolish decisions on where to build their homes. One unexpected natural disaster? We all should pitch in. But supporting unviable habitation through taxes, insurance subsidies, and disaster relief on known and predictable disasters distorts the marketplace.

You want the freedom to live anywhere in America? Go for it, and pay full price for it. No disaster relief, no insurance subsidies. FEMA should annonce phased withdrawal of tornado support in known tornado regions, wildfire suppression in scrub country, flood insurance in known flood prone areas, or hurricane relief in known hurricane prone coastal areas. Emergency relief is only for areas where the disaster is very infrequent. It is not a routine operation.

Probably the right solution for tornado country is to stop the stupid urban sprawl, create towns with a nucleus of concrete condos, two or three stories tall, tightly built in a circle with a pool and courtyard in the middle. Windows with aluminium shutters that can be closed, cars parked at ground level below these condos. You need concrete structures to survive tornadoes and do the compromise necessary to do it. Or pay full price for freedom. I am sick and tired of supporting your unnatural life style choice to live in plastic and plywood boxes in tornado country.

First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your .mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."

Yes, the cheaters who knew this have not been caught. It does not mean they don't exist. I am sure there is a whole bunch of them pissed off by this greedy hack who have derailed their gravy train they have been riding for a long time.

I think it would be New England Patriots coach who really really wanted this.

The law mandates comparable, fair market value wages for the starting salary. H1B is for three years, extendable to six years and if a green card application is filed, it is extended infinitely. No requirement to even give COLA for those years. And in practice, they hire H1Bs in Tulsa OK, and transfer them to Boston or Chicago or New York. It is a joke. H1Bs lower American salaries, there is no question about it.

But that is the lesser of the two evils. The businesses have a knife at the throat of America and are saying, "Gimme H1B here or I export the job to Bangalore, Bangkok or Beijing". At least these H1Bs get nominally American wages, live and spend some of it in USA and pay taxes to the USA.

From the article:

The "It" in this quote is the auto dealers, a very well known group to be the paragons of virtue and personification of integrity when it comes to selling automobiles and providing accurate information.

Henry Ford fought the cartel of car manufacturers called American Motor Manufacturers Association which claimed patent rights to the automobile and demanded royalty payment for all car makers. Ford defied them, fought them all the way to the Supreme Court and won back in 1900s. Hope Musk fights the dealers, their cartels and their political shenanigans and win. As soon as I can afford it, I will buy a Tesla.

The drones as used by the US now a days are on very long loiter and patrol missions. More than six hours. Fighters have limited range, limited loiter time, and limited combat time. F16 drones might be very good research platforms, but not very useful operationally. Further drone pilots like the stable slow reacting planes. May be there are some training opportunities with a fast agile plane as drone. But still it operational use is not very clear.

When this future arrives, the taxi fare will be zero. But there will be a video camera that will record you in the cab all the way, and a robot will rifle through all the papers and bags you are carrying and record it. Then it will upload it all to your google+ account and nag you to share it with rest of the world. And somehow it will figure out from all this, what you want to buy next and pitch ads to you all along the ride.

Wow! I think the highest profit margins ever recorded in an android universe must have been this project in Nokia. Just a couple of engineers writing a few header files, and one middle manager producing a presentation of a product development plan, one double agent ratting it out to Microsoft ..., boom, the take over negotiations with Microsoft goes at combat speed and the offer bumped up by a billion or two!

Well done, Nokia, you have learned the lessons of all those municipalities and governments threatening to go to Linux to wrangle a better deal from Microsoft well.