There is also the fact that smartphones have the potential to short-circuit the plot of many movie genres -- for example, the group of random people encountering the creature out in the woods, and no one believes their story afterward... except they had smartphones, and they've got more than a dozen pictures of it. Or being lost... except that they have a smartphone, and GPS and Google Maps shows them where they need to go. Or they're injured out in the boonies, and have to try to survive with a crippling injury... except that they have a smartphone, and can just call for help. When the characters in a movie have smartphones, the script has to go through gyrations to set things up so that the smartphone is useless, in order to prevent them from derailing the plot.
Well, after all, _no_ one ever raises their weapon up to eye level so that they can actually _use_ the sights... It would be better to decry FPS developers who have characters pose holding their weapons down so low that the sights would be useless, and then pretend that you can still look down the sights.
There's also the issue that Disney faced with the Expanded Universe of having to deal with a forest of separate creators. If the movie rights to the characters created by the various EU authors were not part of their book contracts, Disney would have had to negotiate separately with the authors for inclusion of individual characters, facing the issue of having to write around both the existing EU canon and explaining the absence of a character critical to that canon if an author decided to try to hold Disney up for a bigger payment for the movie rights to a character they created. Declaring the EU to be 'Legends' pushed all of that to the side, allowing Disney to pick and choose which parts of the EU they want to draw back into the core canon while ensuring that none of it is a 'must have' component that could obstruct new production if the author tries to be obstructive.
Manure-pile fires are nothing new; piling up manure, often mixed with hay and sawdust, is part of the composting process to turn it into fertilizer. The composting process generates heat in the pile, and if not turned over regularly, the center of the pile can reach temperatures high enough to ignite. The composting process requires a minimum ambient temperature for the microorganisms responsible to reproduce well, but higher temperatures do not of themselves raise the risk of the pile igniting.
The concept of the internal capsule that can be ejected in an emergency, sliding out of the body of the aircraft, is inherently flawed. Ignoring the problem with the number of connections that would have to be made to bring power, ventilation, etc. to the capsule, ejecting the capsule not only requires that all of these connections be severed cleanly, but that there is no damage that prevents the capsule from sliding. Take the recent suicide bomber blowing out the side of the plane; if that were in an escape capsule, the torn edges of the capsule blown outward would jam into the shell of the aircraft, preventing the capsule from ejecting.
Making the body of the aircraft an ejectable pod also has fundamental problems. As it is now, the passenger cabin is an integral part of the aircraft. With the passenger cabin as a pod, there will be a limited number of attachment points holding the pod to the airframe, making it possible to sabotage the aircraft by blowing the attachment points, with sabotaging the emergency chutes an additional fillip to ensure 100% casualties among the passengers -- like the Challenger astronauts, aware of their fate throughout their fall to earth.
The Japanese didn't actually _cancel_ the plans to bomb the Panama Canal; they actually produced the I-400 class of submarine, each of which could carry three Aichi M6A Seiran aircraft, and had sent them on a mission to bomb the locks at the canal. Unfortunately, the war ended before they could reach their staging point, so the crews punched holes in the floats of the Seiran aircraft and catapulted them into the water, where they sank, before surrendering to Allied forces. One surviving Seiran underwent restoration at the Smithsonian National Air And Space Museum's Garber restoration facility, and I believe it is now on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center.
You beat me to it; this is something that I picked up from when I was riding Greyhound to go to and from college during breaks that I'll do for truckers, especially at night when it's harder to judge distances. It's a little thing, but it can improve the flow of traffic; I've been a passenger several times when I've seen someone behind a passing semi cut across in the gap between the semi and the car I was in because they couldn't wait for the semi to pull back to the right and the trucker wasn't sure he had clearance to come back
Well, if you've read Grant Callin's novel "Saturn Alia", and it's sequel "A Lion on Tharthee", you'd know why arranging for a pattern like that to develop would be perfectly in character for the denizens of Tharthee...
That was one of the things that immediately struck me about the cyberpunk concept of 'simsense' -- a full-sensory VR experience that completely replaced your normal senses. It seemed that it was a mechanism tailor-made for criminal rehabilitation -- put the convict into a long-term simsense experience that -- because all of the 'people' that they would interact with were computer-generated, could be as patient and unrelenting as needed -- would take the convict through a rehabilitation process over and over again until it 'took', with no way for the convict to harm themselves or others.
Going down the slope into greyer applications, it could also be used for various forms of conditioning that ranged from beneficial -- controlling the urge to overeat, redirecting dietary choices, breaking a tobacco habit, etc. -- to all the different forms of indoctrination to a social or political cause, or to an organization.
This reminds me of the now-defunct 'furnitureporn' website, which went a little further than 'Hot Malm' does, in that it had pictorial sets mimicking cheezy 1970s porn shoots using furniture in place of people ("Hot Louis XIV action!"). Someone with sufficient interest could probably turn it up in the Internet Archive site.
Making the body of the aircraft an ejectable pod also has fundamental problems. As it is now, the passenger cabin is an integral part of the aircraft. With the passenger cabin as a pod, there will be a limited number of attachment points holding the pod to the airframe, making it possible to sabotage the aircraft by blowing the attachment points, with sabotaging the emergency chutes an additional fillip to ensure 100% casualties among the passengers -- like the Challenger astronauts, aware of their fate throughout their fall to earth.
Going down the slope into greyer applications, it could also be used for various forms of conditioning that ranged from beneficial -- controlling the urge to overeat, redirecting dietary choices, breaking a tobacco habit, etc. -- to all the different forms of indoctrination to a social or political cause, or to an organization.