"Like any modern weapons system, something this complex is going to have a LOT of teething problems."

...but I did not shoot the descender.

240 passengers? Naah, we can just tighten up the seat pitch an inch or two — nobody will notice that — and I bet we can get 300 people in there and make even more money per flight.

...and one or the other just running out on the marriage.

I venture to doubt that Prince Charles has never undressed himself; I don't believe that the Royal Navy, in which he served for five years, makes that much of an exception to the responsibilities of its officers for royals.

There are similar arguments that suggest that the stereotypical difference in shopping behavior between men and women is similarly connected to the difference between hunting and gathering. When you go out hunting, you go out to where you expect to find prey, search there to find it, kill it, and bring it back; when…

I don't know; I think it would be instructive to see the utter and complete deadlock that the legal system, both police and courts, would fall into if a zygote were defined to be legally human at the moment of conception — with the concomitant requirement for a police investigation of every miscarriage to determine…

To be fair, that provision in Van Halen's rider wasn't a quirk of the band, it was the contractual equivalent of a miner's canary — if they find brown M&Ms in the bowl, they have a reasonable suspicion that the rider was not read carefully, and that there are likely to be shortcomings with the rest of the setup.

Actually, you could pay someone to put you on a plane a hundred years ago — the Wright Brothers had been allowing passengers to fly with them since May 14, 1908; Signal Corps Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, on September 17, 1908, achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first passenger to die in the crash of an…

Its radar signature still gets huge when the landing gear or bomb bay doors are opened, which is why the bomb bay doors have high-power hydraulics to open and close them quickly, so that the time the pilots spend waving a gigantic "Here I am, shoot me" sign is minimized — the doors pop open, the weapons are released,…

"A little thought on the reader's behalf works just as well."

Style over substance. It doesn't matter whether your [object] is sheathed in carbon-fiber weave, as long as it is perceived to be sheathed in carbon-fiber weave.

Where ebooks come out clearly above printed books is in addressing the "compression of the midlist", where authors that sell steadily but not well get pushed off shelves in favor of the latest blockbuster — it's not printing costs or shipping costs or author's payments that hit publishers the hardest, it's storage…

"This is their only saving grace; they deliver the back story that everyone waited years to see."

...particularly the way most productions have been done, with 3D added as a post-production "gosh-wow" enhancement. Avatar's 3D worked well because Cameron built the whole production around filming in 3D, which limited the issues with 3D to the "focus goes where the producer wants you to look, not where you're…

"I'm sorry, technomom1, but I'm afraid I can't do that."

Don't forget the [adjective][animal] naming convention for Ubuntu Linux, also in alphabetical order (after the first two), with 'Lucid Lynx' out last year, 'Natty Narwhal' and 'Oneiric Ocelot' out this year, and 'Precise Pangolin' due out next year. You could make the argument that neither Apple's nor Android's…

It's not the e-reader functionality that they make you turn off your Kindle for, but the Wi-Fi/3G connectivity, for the same reason that they make you turn off your cellphones. There's no way to know if the transmissions will affect any of the electronics on the plane, but the adage "Making something difficult is no…

People have gotten used to paying it, and its an additional source of income for airlines in the depressed economy. The almighty 'bottom line'.

Test to see how much it interferes with the touchscreen, but slipping your tablet into a ziplock-type storage bag will keep the screen from getting kitchen crud on it (whether it's little drops of oil, spills, drips, or whatever).