I'm an experienced Linux user. I write device drivers for a living. But I get home, the last thing I want to do is edit configuration files to change settings in my GUI. This is why, after 10 years of using Linux on the desktop, my next computer will be a Mac.

In practice 30% is still optimistic. A 767 weight approximately 180,000 kg, and seats less than 250 people. If those people each weighed 100 kg (220 lbs), the weight of the people is around 12% of the flying mass. What you're mostly paying for is the big metal bird the people are in.

If you want a proportional discount based on weight, your child should only get a discount on 12% of their ticket price. But we also have to pay for aircraft maintenance, the pilot and crew, aircraft lease of purchase service payments, and the airline's other expenses. In reality, the fixed costs of flying an aircraft far outweigh the added fuel per passenger kilogram component of your ticket. Your discount would end up being a low single digit percentage value of your ticket price.

The point of getting fat people to pay more is not due to their fuel consumption. It's due to their space consumption. They're either taking up a valid seat which could be occupied by another human who is splitting the aircraft costs with the rest of the flyers, or crowding people out of the space they paid for.

Oh, haha. I misunderstood your meaning. Good show, then.

It's simple: Airlines don't sell distance per gas consumed. They sell seats. People are not packages. You can't fly more of them in a plane if they weight less in a linear manner. One seat is the minimum allocation unit you can buy. Whether you use the whole seat just put your purse on it is not their business. You're paying for it if you're going to use it. If you're so fat that you cannot fit into the single smallest allocation unit they provide, you will have to purchase two of them (or upgrade to a higher class with bigger seats).

This is no longer true. Most 2x NAND memory manufactured in the past year is 4KB block sizes with 8KB coming soon. That it pretends to be 512 bytes is a function of the SDIO MLC driver IC. Luckily for SD they come pre-partitioned so that the partitions are aligned properly.

I completely agree with you, it is a very real engineering problem that requires serious academic examination. This is a good candidate for something like that Software Engineering Institute. The issue is one of writing software and managing a code base. It is a logistics problem. Maybe it can only be solved by a new language or method of source control or verification. In that area, yes, it's open to computer science to explore. But in general, it's a code architecture, testing, development methodology problem, which is the concern of software engineering.

A Turing machine cannot solve the problem of software maintenance. You cannot model software maintenance as a finite state machine. There is no algorithmic solution. There is no space-time trade-off that you can make improve the situation.

It is not a problem to be solved by computing. It is outside the realm of Computer Science, and clearly in the lap of Software Engineering.

This research was done in Israel, a country that has (*gasp*) nationalized health care.

The poster was stating that OSX calls will be in Obj-C while other (non OSX-specific standard library calls) will be in C. I think your interpretation is a case British English versus American English.

FINALLY! Thank you for cataloging Jane's endless stupidity in this thread. How someone modded her up is beyond me.

You are mostly right.
Back in the day, layoffs used to mean "we can't pay you anymore, so we're putting you on unpaid leave. We are expecting put you back on the payroll once we can afford it." This used to be for unskilled and semi-skilled blue collar workers, often union guys, and very often included some benefits while laid-off (even partial salary).

Today, layoffs are a euphemism for mass firings. However, there is a significance to the term laid-off versus fired. Fired now implies fired-with-cause, which is to say you were fired for being a lousy employee or doing something wrong, whereas laid-off implies you were (generally) fired but not due to your job performance. So, today if you're laid off with no replacement, you're not "fired", but you're also not laid off in the past sense of the word. You are dismissed due to external factors.

Would you rather be downsized?