In my experience, the best and most enlightening learning has come through study of both the arguments for and against a specific topic, theory, solution, etc. I feel more confident in my opinions when I have heard all arguments and seen all evidence. If any of the evidence or arguments are hokey, let me be the judge of that. If I judge that argument A is a joke and B is correct, my conviction regarding B will be stronger than if a counter argument to B were never presented to me.

Ever seen the movie About Schmidt? The actuary who retires after decades of dedicated data collection and interpretation? When he retired they boxed up his priceless data and sent it to the landfill. Nobody else cares about your data no matter how precious it is to you (unless it's a journal and you have descendants). True story.

There is a much cheaper solution. Just issue a dashboard placard based on vehicle, driver age and gender. It will forcast the conditions just prior to any accident. Here are some examples:

1) Male, age 35-50, sedan: 4th gear, 40mph, 2,300rpm, failure to stop, talking on phone with office, mishandling hot beverage.
2) Female, age 25-35, SUV/van, 4th gear, 36mph, failure to yield, comforting toddler in back-seat.
3) Male, age 17-25, import hatchback, 2nd gear, 6,400rpm, 50mph, failure to negotiate turn. Excessive speed.
4) Female, age 17-25, compact coupe, 3rd gear, 3,000rpm, 42mph, failure to stop. Texting and shuffling music CDs.
5) Male/Female, age 78-88, large domestic sedan or Toyota Avalon, 1st gear, 4,500rpm, 12mph, indicating right turn while accelerating through store front.

"The Internet? We are not interested in it"
-- Bill Gates, 1993

I scrolled through all the traffic looking to see if anyone else was thinking this too. I've had snakes as a kid and had friends with various species of snake. None would ever eat carrion. If it didn't twitch or scamper it was off the menu.

Yep...
I have a personal acquaintance who's a falconer. He's had a bird abatement contract with the USAF since I first met him 16 years ago.

There are over 30,000 commercial flights per day in the USA alone. Assuming the article is only discussing fires on US carriers (doesn't specify, but we'll give it to them). That means that even if all 22 fires happened this year the chances of a fire on a flight is 0.0002009%. Or in other words less than 1 in 497,727 thousand flights. The simple answer is know where the fire extinguisher is. Problem solved. Since in actuality only 1/2 the 22 fires were in the past 3 years the odds today are about 1 in 2.98 million. Compare that to the odds of me having to share a row with a fatty or a stinker which are about 1 in 3.

Hi everybody. Just wanted to stop by and say you are welcome. My now obsolete Eee non-touchscreen netbook was delivered yesterday. My decision to finally purchase thus ushered in this new generation of netbook (2 days later) for you all to enjoy. I'm getting tired of waiting for Android phones too so I better go buy a G1 so that 3 new Android phones will be released the next day. Otherwise we'll just have to keep waiting indefinitely.