I remember a cross country flight in late 90s (I think maybe a bit later) that had a crappy VHS player for the movie, the kind that had the jitter noise on the bottom. it was unwatchable, but they would not turn it off as the flight was billed as showing a movie.....

Burn more than you consume means to use more energy (calories) than you eat.

You car gets 30 mpg.

You have 10 gallons of fuel in the tank.

You drive 90 miles, burning 3 gallons, so now you have 7 gallons in your tank.

You stop and put 2 gallons into the tank, so now you have 9 gallons in your tank.

Your car used more energy than it 'consumed', and is now 1 gallon lighter than when you started out.

Right now, in most parts of the world, there isn't an actual shortage of fresh water. The problem is managing and distributing the water that is available there, and managing the usage. So it's generally cheaper to buy & transport water, or reduce usage, than to build and operate a desalination plant. There are some exceptions, like some newly built cities in the Middle East.

That's pretty cool actually. Would love to actually try them, even if the quality was awful.

Last time I was on an airplane they had the pneumatic headphones. Just 2 holes that you plugged hollow rubber tubes into with headphones on the end. It sounded just as shitty as it sounds. This would have been around 1990/91.

It's not hard or difficult. It's just that clean water is really really cheap under usual circumstances. So using electricity to make clean water usually ends up costing more than the water is worth.

To be honest, I don't even bother using the entertainment system if the ride is less than 3 hours, so I wouldn't remember what was on the shorter flights connecting to the actual transatlantic ones.

It is not hard, it is just very expensive because of how energy intensive it is. When it comes to anything, but especially water, cost is king, in regards to mass adiption.

If the water cost is double to irrigate crops, that is a big problem.

Perhaps. I had the double one on at least two intercontinental flights. Maybe more often and didn’t even notice. So yeah, they’re still around.

Thank you!! How well did these work??

The operating system is told that the "4" key has been pressed. The operating system (keyboard driver) then must determine what to do with the keystroke. If it is part of an operating system meta code (for example ctrl-alt-delete) then the operating system will execute that portion of code, otherwise it will pass the keystroke on to the active program.

Generally the program will receive the keystroke as an ASCII (or unicode if your prefer) character. It just so happens that the ASCII code for "4" is 0x34 (or 0b00110100 in binary). If your program wants to treat this is a number, then all it does is subtract 0x30 from 0x34 leaving 0x04 (or 0b100 in binary). If the program receives a 4 and 1 as keyboard strokes, then it will perform the following:

(0x34 - 0x30)*0xA + (0x31 - 0x30) = (0x04)*0xA + 0x01 = 0x28 + 0x01 = 0x29 = 41 in decimal

This conversion is frequently done via a library function call. When displaying a number on the screen, a different function call is used to do the reverse and convert you binary number into a sequence of ASCII digits.

TL/DR-

When the computer is doing math is does so in binary. When you are entering or reading the results, the computer uses ASCII. Simple software algorithms (generally a prebuilt library) are used to convert between binary and ASCII.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/auavkd/remember_when_airline_headphones_were_just/

Delta, Lufthansa, KLM, SAS, United are the ones I've typically used. I've been to three different continents. Guess I just got lucky?

Oh yeah, Air France on my most recent trip to the US. Single 3.5 there too.

Yes, closer to a geologic timescale. Some of the groundwater we’ve extracted won’t be returning in our lifetime, especially where compaction is a factor.

lol

You know what fat is? It's a store of energy. If you eat more than you burn, your body stores it as fat, the reverse also works.

I knew Google was going to be successful when I typed in a search for a word that I wasn't sure how to spell, and one option was "did you mean XYZ?"

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Contactless and contact methods have different processing flows.

https://www.uspaymentsforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Optimizing-Txn-Speed-WP-FINALV3-October-2017.pdf

See Page 9 for Contact and Page 21 for Contactless. You don't need to know the exact specifications, but look at the pink box between the card/device and the reader. For Contact, observe there are 3 round trip communications; for Contactless, there are 2.

Most people don't say their thoughts out loud at all. Of the minority who do talk to themselves, I'm sure very few have a habit of whispering.

The 3.5 mm earphone jack is far older than 1979. It was popularized by transistor radios in the 1950s. But it was mono not stereo. When they designed stereo airplane audio there wasn’t a 3.5 mm stereo standard yet. So they simply used two mono 3.5 mm earphone jacks for stereo headsets. Not much different than what they did with the air driven airplane headsets.

>We called them “witching sticks” too. And yes they work.

No they don't.

Did he also drill wells everywhere that the rod didn't indicate? You know, to demonstrate that there was no water there and that the rod actually worked?

Another answer is that airlines will rent you the earphones to use with the two-pin jacks. They make money by NOT letting you use your headphones.

(I don't see the two-pin jacks much any more -- last time I travelled with an entertainment system, there was a traditional 3.5mm jack. )

Most people I know say "bless you" after someone sneezes. Do you think that keeps the sneezing person healthy?