Patrick: I don't have any special inputs into passenger ergonomics or amenities, but how about this? One of the major reasons that US planes are so crowded and uncomfortable, service is so bad and so forth, is that the airlines have been driven to the very bottom line by the bottom line -- the endless, cutthroat competition for dollars.

However, at the same time, news stories about air travel say that more people are flying than ever before, overbookings becoming more common and so forth. That tells me that ticket prices should be going UP, not down! I know that there are laws about this sort of fix, but do you think things would improve if all the airlines got together and decided that from now on, all flights on aircraft designed to carry more than x number of passengers (exempting the smaller puddlejumpers and regional carriers) will have their ticket prices raised by, say, $50? Getting more revenue for the same number of passengers (or the same revenue for fewer passengers, assuming some are turned off by the higher airfares) should remove some of the concern about fuel prices, allow fewer seats, better pay for crews & attendants and so forth.

We could call it "Dignity Air" (an idea I had for a boutique airline in which all passengers got better service and a more comfortable flight, with the express understanding that they would be paying noticeably more for their tickets). Think it would work, especially on overcrowded routes that pretty much fill up all the time?

Actually, rumor has it that the US Marine Corps started this whole thing with a patched copy of the old "Doom" first-person shooter. It occurred to somebody that, since you can design your own settings in the game, that somebody should create digital models of all our Embassies, which the Marines are responsible for guarding. That way, if any Embassy was seized and Special Operations Forces went in to recapture it, they'd have a 3-D model of the place that they could "walk through," and know how long it takes to run down a certain corridor, which way a door swings, how high a certain window is off the ground and so forth.

These days we have dedicated digital planning tools for just such uses, but it's another example of somebody finding a new use for something that already exists, then the new idea becomes mainstream (and profitable).

As for the comment about Google Earth, true enough; we've found commercial overhead images of US and UK bases in Iraq on captured insurgent computers, with things like command posts and ammo dumps labeled with coordinates (probably for mortar fire). The images were usually outdated, but big targets like those generally don't move around much. I gues we aren't the only ones who adapt and innovate...