Its funny you mention the micro-USB adapter. On my desk my Mac has 2 Thunderbolt -> DVI adapters sticking out of the, power adapter and a USB -> Ethernet adapter. While my Dell gets dropped into the dock and "just works". I can't imagine how Steve ever thought this was an acceptable solution. Maybe its time that we standardize on a dock configuration so that its not just Lenovo and the enterprise class Dells that have ports for this. UWB seems like a good solution!

It'll be a long slow death, commercial aviation has been in this position for decades and most commercial ops still require a crew of 2. There are a lot of factors that can go wrong, especially when co-mingling autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles. What you will see though is wage pressure and those jobs will pay less.

I can see how the alternator and starter were removed and replaced with more modern components leveraging the electric assist, Keep in mind that the timing belt did not go through this kind of transformation. Instead the designers used a timing chain instead of a timing belt, this is a common design practice across ICEs and shouldn't be attributed to the electric motor.

Credit Suisse did their own inhouse development that they spun off in DynamicOps which is now VMWare's vCAC product

I actually invite automatic and 0-tollorance speed enforcement. This is for a couple of reasons
1) I'd like to see the speed limits changed to what people actually go but the casual enforcement doesn't get people outraged that the speed limit on a road designed for 75 is 55 (US Rt3 in MA)
2) This puts an end speeding tickets as revenue enhancers for the town/city/county/state as the incidences of speeding would drop considerably
3) Its very infrequent that someone going egregiously fast actually gets pulled over, which is a true safety problem. This would address that.

Every law enforcement agency in the land has learned the value of sensationalizing the war on drugs. Every time they take more than an ounce of pot off a college kid there's on the news talking about what a great bust this was. Given that in the last 11 years passengers en route have subdued no less than 3, people in a position to take down the plane :

Shoe bomber
Underwear bomber
Nutzo pilot on Jet Blue

Clearly passengers and crew can handle a wide range of threats in the air. During this time TSA has had exactly 0 of these kinds of press conferences regarding stoping a plot AT the airport what value is the TSA adding again?

On a side note air-charter (14 CFR Part 135) opperators do not have their passengers screened by the TSA, were never required to install bullet proof doors at the cockpit and can and do opperate the same aircraft types that scheduled air cariers opperate.

Civilian __TRANSPORT__ category aircraft certified under 14CFR25 which are most large commercial aircraft (Dash8, 767, etc...) are able to takeoff and climb on a single engine. Light twins (Piper Semonole, Cessna 310) generally are not, as the 2nd engine just buys you time until the forced landings. This is interesting since the F/A18 would be considered to have longitudinal thrust as neither engine inop can put the aircraft into a spin below a critical speed.

Infact I can't remember the last time I saw a TSA press conference where they were claiming victory for foiling a plot to down an airplane. I can remember quite vividly at least 3 occasions in which triumphant passengers subdued lunatics that could have downed airplanes. How bout we leave the security to the people who's asses are on the line and send the not-quite-good-enough-to-be-a-cops home?

They're already taking care of this for minor offenses in Massachusetts. Want to contest a speeding ticket? Cough up 25 bucks just to get a hearing with a magistrate. Clearly innocent until proven guilty. They say its to deter people from frivolously contesting tickets, if they charge $25 for a 10 minute appeal I wonder what they'd charge for a whole week's trial if people starting excersizing their rights in full. http://www.boston.com/Boston/metrodesk/2011/09/mass-high-court-upholds-fees-for-traffic-ticket-appeals/UxDFWrKT8yeNDmGMa1y41H/index.html

I always look to the "not in my job description" work as an opportunity to grow, either by acquiring new skills for use within the organization or to use on my resume for my next organization. With "lots of down time" I would question how many of the agreed upon hours were actually performed each week and if what you call off the clock time is actually off the clock. In organizations I've run we don't do 9-5, in fact I don't really care when most people work as long as they actually __work__ and get their projects accomplished. The stars in my teams are the people who take it upon themselves to go out and find ways to improve the product, present them in a clear well stated proposal and then can work to implement them. The people who wait for work to be handed down from above aren't headed anywhere. Think of the IT system as your product, you may work mainly in 1 area but you're clearly smart enough to think of ways to improve others. Its all about attitude, and this attitude that you're entitled to extra cash for working in other areas even though you already have "lots of down time" would cause me to run not walk you to the door. Now with the attitude of pitching in and working to make the whole thing better, I would look at you as someone who "gets it" and probably look to help you move up in your career track provided you had done other impressive work. If you're looking to be an IT director some day this is the kind of work you'll be needing to do day in day out not just what you're asked to.

After 6 landings and 1 missed approach my last flight taxied to the ramp. It was on time in that it arrived at the time I intended it to, it also departed on time for the same reason. The best thing was my trip through the security checkpoint since they don't exist for General Aviation.

Actually most GA aircraft have a secondary static system which while less accurate because the input is in the cockpit instead of outside the plane is fully functional. For pressurized aircraft there are redundant ports on the outside of the craft. The difficulty is in determining the instrumentation failure and responding to it correctly. The private pilot training material is very specific about the kinds of issues that arrive from clogged pitot static ports.

I've been wondering what would happen if someone appeared to be visibly enjoying the pat down. Maybe instead of a boycott we should all have a mass fake orgasm day

Its pronounced like Fiat but with an See instead of an Fi. But I lived in Europe for a while

So where is the responsibility to familiarise one's self with the vehicle you're driving? For years there were at least 2 common ways of engaging the high-beams in a passenger car one by pulling on the directional stick until it clicked the other by pushing it forward. HID changes are not uncommon and I would fault the driver for a lack of familiarity with the vehicle.