Planes are constructed very differently from birds, bats or insects. Evolution can often be a very messy designer, engineers are much cleaner. We can look to nature for ideas, but not neccessarily solutions.
Supply and demand is only a part of what airlines do. Primarily, airlines make money by differential pricing - i.e squeezing the most from customers who are willing to pay, and luring the rest with cheap tickets.
That's why they have all those bizarre rules for discount fares like "leave on a tuesday and stay at least 1 saturday", or whatever. These act as filters, screening out business travellers from their cheapest fares. Airlines pay people tons of money to come up with better filters all the time.
Incidentally, this is also why Priceline is good for sellers - they sell at whatever price the buyer is willing to pay rather than what price would lead to maximum sales. Amazon is trying the same thing.
First of all, life does not require 2 "matching pieces of genetic material". Clearly, RNA/DNA are highly evolved. The origin of life requires auto-catalytic systems (a chemical reaction whose products catalyze the reaction). These reactions then "evolve" so that they become more efficient and accurate, and ultimately become as complicated as a cell.
Secondly, it is not likely that the arrangement of amino acids into a chain ("polymerization") just happened in primordial soup. People have specualted that water droplets in clouds, surfaces of charged minerals (iron pyrites or fools gold is currently favored) form areas more conducive to polymerization. Also, lipids (fatty acids which are the constituents of cell walls) spontaneouly for membranes in water, thus producing concentrated areas where certain chemical reactions could be more likely.
The origin of life is a highly complicated topic, but biochemists have learned a surprising amount. For a good intro, see "The major transitions in evolution" by Maynard-Smith and Szathmary.
As the Sci Am article pointed out, it seems that the origin of cellular life may actually be very easy, based on the fact that it seems to have happenened so quickly on earth. However, for 3.5 of the estimated 4 billion years that life has been present on earth, life was unicellular. The difficulty is the origin of multicellular and intelligent life.
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Vish
Re:IS the traditional OS-sales business model dead
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 1
Quote: Shouldn't the next logical step be a common OS architecture? There already IS a common OS architecture. Its called Win-32.
I agree this is definitely not good news. I think Brittanica should not have made their information free - maybe selected portions of it. It will be a shame if they go out of business - information of the quality and depth they provide cannot be replaced by decentralized sources like the WWW, or cheap but glitzy sources like Encarta. However, like the dumbing down of evening news, it is probably inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Planes are constructed very differently from birds, bats or insects. Evolution can often be a very messy designer, engineers are much cleaner. We can look to nature for ideas, but not neccessarily solutions.
Supply and demand is only a part of what airlines do. Primarily, airlines make money by differential pricing - i.e squeezing the most from customers who are willing to pay, and luring the rest with cheap tickets.
That's why they have all those bizarre rules for discount fares like "leave on a tuesday and stay at least 1 saturday", or whatever. These act as filters, screening out business travellers from their cheapest fares. Airlines pay people tons of money to come up with better filters all the time.
Incidentally, this is also why Priceline is good for sellers - they sell at whatever price the buyer is willing to pay rather than what price would lead to maximum sales. Amazon is trying the same thing.
Vish
First of all, life does not require 2 "matching pieces of genetic material". Clearly, RNA/DNA are highly evolved. The origin of life requires auto-catalytic systems (a chemical reaction whose products catalyze the reaction). These reactions then "evolve" so that they become more efficient and accurate, and ultimately become as complicated as a cell. Secondly, it is not likely that the arrangement of amino acids into a chain ("polymerization") just happened in primordial soup. People have specualted that water droplets in clouds, surfaces of charged minerals (iron pyrites or fools gold is currently favored) form areas more conducive to polymerization. Also, lipids (fatty acids which are the constituents of cell walls) spontaneouly for membranes in water, thus producing concentrated areas where certain chemical reactions could be more likely. The origin of life is a highly complicated topic, but biochemists have learned a surprising amount. For a good intro, see "The major transitions in evolution" by Maynard-Smith and Szathmary. As the Sci Am article pointed out, it seems that the origin of cellular life may actually be very easy, based on the fact that it seems to have happenened so quickly on earth. However, for 3.5 of the estimated 4 billion years that life has been present on earth, life was unicellular. The difficulty is the origin of multicellular and intelligent life. ' Vish
Quote: Shouldn't the next logical step be a common OS architecture? There already IS a common OS architecture. Its called Win-32.
George Soros is indeed a generous philanthropist having donated billions of dollars to third-world countries and Russia. Get a clue. Vish
I agree this is definitely not good news. I think Brittanica should not have made their information free - maybe selected portions of it. It will be a shame if they go out of business - information of the quality and depth they provide cannot be replaced by decentralized sources like the WWW, or cheap but glitzy sources like Encarta. However, like the dumbing down of evening news, it is probably inevitable.