*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.

An indictment, esp. in the U.S. system, is necessarily one-sided, even if endorsed by a grand jury. I don't disagree with reading source material, I just wanted to point out the usefulness of journalism, or whatever that ZDNet article was. Probably I came off too harshly.

As I understand it, in civil code countries (not the U.S.), charges are brought only after some deliberation by a magistrate, after which a trial before a judge results in a likely conviction. In the U.S. the prosecutor leads the grand jury to an indictment (supposedly "could indict a ham sandwich"), and makes a maximal case. At trial it's more likely the charges get denied by the judge or petit jury, compared to a trial in a civil code country. But things have changed over time. U.S. prosecutors once used more discretion rather than trying to rack up convictions even if unjust. Or that's what I've read.

So reading an indictment is roughly equivalent to reading a blog arguing one side of the case.

Rather than read the indictment, or press releases from his side, I prefer actual journalism. Here's a well-written and informative article:
http://www.zdnet.com/hacker-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide-7000009725/

Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.

And in fact:

It looks like Busboys and Poets are having tech difficulties. We are looking for an alternative feed that we can pick up.

Sorry for the connectivity problems, we are currently working on the broadband issues. The full sound and video will be available on YouTube tomorrow. Stay tuned.

http://nader.org/2012/11/03/to-view-third-party-debate-at-busboys-and-poets-nov-4/

The debate is supposed to have started at 7:30pm Eastern. The sites are not working.

Docked in port is often more dangerous, to the ship at least. This storm came in on a wide hook so it would have been hard to pick a time to leave, assuming they were ready to go when the first warnings came.

The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/

Agree there's too much crying wolf but the actual numbers are pretty bad. Here is an analysis of why the predicted 11 foot tide at the Battery in lower Manhattan is bad news for the subway: http://kottke.org/12/10/hurricane-sandy-comin The alarms have been indiscriminate though, so there is a lot of noise in the signal. The recent eagerness to close the subway is particularly irksome. The "officials" would never close a large road system because in 24 hours it would be covered in seawater. The people making these decisions see things from the tinted windows of limousines. The first time the subway was closed for weather was only in 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Subway_flooding

Extreme combo of crying wolf and actual superlatives. The reliably sober NOAA is cited by Reuters, "It could be the largest storm to hit the United States." Its official NWS prediction is for a "major to historic" NYC flood. On the other hand, NYC has stranded million of subway riders 24 hrs. ahead of the predicted surge. Here on the edge of the storm in Virginia, the university that used to pride itself on never cancelling classes has indeed cancelled because parents can't work because the grade schools are closed because...

Rain. High near 51. Breezy, with a northwest wind 18 to 24 mph, with gusts as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible.

Seamonkey is also convenient is you want to run another Mozilla browser alongside Firefox and not have to take any measures to keep the profiles separate. So it adds one to the number of browsers you can just install and run with no special setup and thereby split some of the advertiser & Facebook tracking that is so annoying.

Seamonkey and Thunderbird also keep the Mozilla team somewhat coherent in developing the common codebase, though increasingly build issues are wasting a lot of time for those two now unpaid projects. Mozilla has three projects it supports with paid developers: Firefox, the Firefox OS and Firefox Mobile. It dropped Thunderbird recently from that group and it's not clear how the TB team is going to handle rapid release vs. extended service release. Lots of tricky work for unpaid developers to keep up with an intricate codebase continually special cased for the three paid products, and to match Chrome innovations.

Seems to me Seamonkey developers are the ones most concerned with making current features work predictably for users.