As someone who has flown from DC and NYC to Bangkok and Phuket multiple times, flights which ranged from 23 hours to 32 hours with layovers, I say thank God for the baby ghetto!

A screaming baby on a 16 hour non-stop flight can be very stressful for everyone. It's massively annoying, you have no chance at getting sleep and it really can drive you temporarily insane. It's the audio version of second hand smoke but worse. They use the sound of crying babies in non-lethal, audio weapons for the military for a reason... it's torture.

You chose to have a kid. You chose to bring them with you. Your right as a paying customer ends at the edge of your seat. If your kid is crying/screaming and annoying 50 people for hours or kicking seats and throwing things then they're ruining the flight for people who represent a far larger portion revenue than you.

Airlines are a business, not some legal right. As a business, why would you let one or a few passengers completely ruin the flight for hundreds of people?

Separating a 5+ year old kid from their family is a bit much. 90% of the time the annoying ones are babies. Shove the parents with their torture devices into the back, behind a bulkhead.

There should be a required bottle of Nyquil on board every plane to knock those noisemakers out.

I meant the CIA Fact Book puts Saudi Arabia at about $600 billion.

@gryt:

Your right, it's way off. Looks like the GDP of MA is around $365 billion for 2009 and the CIA Fact Book puts it at about $600 billion for 2009.

I thought Mississippi was worst in most things with Alabama close behind? I mean, they don't say "thank God for Mississippi" in Alabama for nothing.

I love that Utah has the highest porn usage. Guess that magic underwear isn't so sexy, huh Mormons?

This is what happens when your society is socially and sexually repressed. That and anime tentacle porn.

A while back some guys came up with a computer algorithm that allowed surgical robots to compensate for the movement of the heart so it could be operated on while moving.

I'm sure he could have used similar tech to compensate for movement of the data points derived from the images which created the 3D model of the heart.

Ahh the good ol days when a fag meant a cigarette, gay meant happy and vegan didn't mean hipster douche bag.

Great video though. Far more entertaining then Ben Huh? and his idiotic hat. No one like the hat Ben. I understand that you wear it because otherwise no one knows who you are but knowing who you are and giving a damn are two entirely different things.

$30 to hire more minimum wage, no benefit having sweat shop style workers to take other people's content and slap a Cheezeburger Network logo on it?

There's obviously far more money than intelligence in Silicon Valley. Guess that's what happens when these buyout millionaires realize the $10 million they got isn't really that much and scramble to invest in the next FaceBook to try and make more.

China has only two things going for it: cheap labor and a government which does everything it can to attract international investment of manufacturing capacity.

They don't invent, innovate or discover. The only companies they have which are competitive on a global level are those which completely rely on cheap labor.

As soon as their middle class and general cost of living rises to a point where their labor is no longer considered that cheap, they will see their factories and fortunes move to poorer, developing countries like Vietnam, India and African countries which are just now becoming stable enough to be considered for long term investment.

They simply aren't invested in research and innovation. The way their society operates and their unfair attitude towards foreign ownership of Chinese companies essentially stifles any real research or innovation from being done there. They are a communist country with a thin capitalist facade, nothing more. Their economy does not operate like a true capitalist economy and until it does, they will never see an economy that isn't based on their eroding cheap labor pool.

Korea and Japan were once sources of cheap labor but their democratic and much more open capitalist economies produced universities and companies which have made major innovations in the fields of technology and medicine. Their economies are no longer based on cheap labor and has much more longevity as a result.

And measuring the success of China vs the US based only the size of their economy makes absolutely no sense. But if you want to play that idiotic game: They have over 4 times our population and an economy a third our size. 1 American citizen = 12 Chinese citizens in terms of raw GDP value.

And these numbers mean nothing. The average Chinese citizen has nowhere near the spending power of their American counterpart nor the opportunity to freely start and operate a business or gain a high quality education. China has no where near the national scale infrastructure or environmental protection that we do. They don't have anything close to the raw research potential (labs, universities and talent) that America posses.

Do you think you can run MIT, Stanford, Harvard and John Hopkins level universities and associated research labs in a communist society? Do you honestly think the best minds in the world want to live and work in an environment like that? Either do I.

Nice try China, enjoy the couple of more decades you've got left before robotic automation becomes cheaper than the rising cost of your human labor. Hopefully you'll be smart enough to end your communist government and allow a free society to emerge while you still have enough cash to ride through that transition.

There's actually no river Kwai (buffalo), it's the Mekong River. The Thai government actually renamed a small section of the Mekong "Kwai" for tourists after the movie caused people to go to Kanchanaburi looking for it.

Also, that section of the bridge that's shown in the picture was used in the movie Casualties of War in the scene where the Vietnamese girl the solders kidnapped was killed.

Bottom line is, if you choose to work in a service industry, by definition, you are a "servant". This doesn't mean you, as a person, are beneath your customer or have to be a slave, but it does mean you have to do YOUR JOB and provide service.

Unfortunately, central Paris seems to be one big tourist trap now. A beautiful city wasted on the current generation of French youth who have an intense, unfounded sense of entitlement.

It surprises me that the French government spends nearly 1.5 billion Euro a year to export their culture to other countries yet they have such disdain for outsiders visiting their country or speaking their language.