There is a point where supply and demand meet, and this is your maximum profit potential. Price is one of the primary factors influencing demand. Reducing price effectively increases demand, and as long as you can produce the supply to meet that demand it's a net gain.
For example, toothpaste. Say you have the world's best toothpaste, but it costs $150 per tube to make. Lets say you get 1,000 people to buy a tube of your toothpaste in a month at $155 per tube. You net $5,000 a month, which is not a particularly spectacular profit. Now lets say you revolutionize your process, and it only costs you $50 per tube to make. You could leave the price at $155, for a net profit of $105,000 per month (a 2000% increase), OR you could drop your price down to $55. By dropping the price, now 100,000 people are willing to buy a tube of your toothpaste, and you've got a net profit of $500,000 per month (a 10000% increase).
The increase in demand is never linear to the change in price - $5 toothpaste tube would get tens of millions of sales for a 90% price drop, in the next stage of my example.
There is a point where you've saturated the market, but until you get close to that point (and you won't know for sure till you get there) dropping prices increases revenue if you keep your margins the same.
That's what will happen if fuel consumption drops by 70%. We definitely have not saturated the market - a hell of a lot more people would fly if they could get a ticket across the country for $100. You probably couldn't saturate the market until you got prices down to $50 a ticket. Hell I'd fly every couple of weeks if prices were like that, but as it is I never fly (well, except for work).
Indeed, since he's only using hundreds of billions for the propping up of criminals, instead of the nearly 2 trillion figure that was actually allocated to prop up banking criminals, plus the fact that he ignores the criminals in congress who created the situation that forced the bankers into committing such crimes just to allay the massive risk that had been forced on them over the years, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet he's a commie pinko liberal left-wing nut.
Wow, that ETA is actually designed to use its massive wing flex as an advantage - they said it didn't do as well as it should have at the World Championships because the weight limits prevented them from adding enough weight to generate the proper wingloading.
That's impressive. Though it'd be pretty disconcerting to see the wings flex that much if it were a passenger plane. The "Oh no, they're supposed to do that" you'd get from the flight attendants wouldn't help much.
they are willing to put up with fuel costs of 25-30 mpg
It's more like the actual real dollar cost savings between 30mpg and 40mpg is significantly lower than the difference between 20mpg and 30mpg. 30-35mpg is the sweet spot really, much more than that doesn't translate into significant savings in a year unless you are driving 2,000-4000 miles a month.
In my situation, it isn't worth buying a new car to go from 12mpg (I have a moderate size pickup) to 30mpg, because I drive maybe 200 miles in a month. Switching would save me a few hundred dollars a year, and cost me a few thousand a year in car payments. It's a big net loss. Same thing for the average 30mpg car vs a 40-50mpg car, the extra savings are pitiful, rarely worth the trouble unless you are buying a new vehicle anyway.
when my first car (86 Honda Accord) got 28 MPG, and a 2010 gets 31
Youre 2010 is also putting out significantly more horsepower, and is capable of higher speeds and a peppier driving experience, and has oodles more safety equipment installed. All at 3 more mpg, no less. If you practiced efficient driving techniques, I'd be willing to wager you could get over 50mpg in your 2010, and far less than that in your 1986.
It's never a fair comparison when you only look at one part of the equation.
50% today, 70% if a few new materials technologies pan out, and if a few more expected improvements in propulsion technology come about as anticipated.
If it's clever and fuel efficient enough, people will buy it.
It's called innovation, and it happens. Just look at wingtips - those went into most commercial planes almost overnight (relatively speaking, of course) despite the dramatic costs to retrofit, yet it was worth it for the significant fuel savings such a simple design change provided.
The wings are thinner, not longer. The fuselage is a squatter double-bubble design that makes the wings look longer than they are. They are actually smaller (though I doubt shorter) than current 737 wings.
Meh, you just have to build them stronger to begin with, sorta like diesels. They have to be much stronger than gasoline engines to handle the higher pressures, but the result is that they are also much more reliable than gasoline engines.
It will cost you some weight with the first generation, most likely, but I think that's a big part of where the 70% figure comes from - stronger, lighter materials useful for engines and fuselage structures would cut the fuel consumption by another 20%, I'd guess.
You're assuming that the double-fuselage requires the same total volume to handle the same number of passengers. That may not be the case - in fact I can envision a number scenarios where the MIT design might be able to cut the overall volume while still handling the same number of passengers and luggage.
In other words, it may increase usable space while decreasing overall volume. It also looks like they are using the cabin itself as a squat wing, which would add to the overall lift and counter-act a little extra weight.
You're forgetting the other half of that as it relates to air travel: Double the airspeed, half the travel time (i.e. half the duration drag is acting on the aircraft). Ergo, flying twice as fast doubles, not quadruples, the fuel consumed for the distance traveled. It also doubles the number of flights you can make in a day.
Because of this, and because all combustion engines have an ideal efficiency at a fairly narrow point (it changes by engine type and size), there is a definite point where you are at optimal speed with relation time, distance, engine efficiency, and drag. Airlines spend a great deal of time optimizing the speed down to the proper mph per plane per route. More than likely reducing the speed of a conventional airplane would result in a net gain in fuel consumption as well as a net loss in revenue.
Not exactly an easy sell, when it does the opposite of what you want it to do.
It wouldn't be cheaper, since trips would take days instead of hours you would have to pay for room and board aboard the craft. It would be more like a flying cruise than a mode of point-a to point-b transportation.
Still though, it would be frickin sweet, I'd take a flying cruise in a heartbeat.
Of course, this all assumes the D-Series is the same size as a 737
It is (180 passenger), says so in the article.
They also have a hybrid-wing design to replace the 777 (350 passengers).
So unless you assume they are only saving fuel and weight by dumping all the luggage, you can safely assume they have similar lift characteristics.
It appears to my untrained eye that the double fuselage design makes the plane squatter, reducing the surface area for drag, while the more wing-like shape adds a small boost to lift (or huge boost, I don't know). Longer, thinner wings cut weight while providing the same (or greater, I dunno) lift, and possibly less drag. Smaller double-tail would be a weight and drag saver as well.
It all adds up to a 50% fuel savings at 10% slower speeds with current aircraft technology, and 70% fuel savings for the expected state of technology by the time these things are actually supposed to be built.
Not really, in Russia these sorts of arrangements just mean the spammer keeps on spamming while influencing government spam policy. It's how it's done over there.
You're ignoring pressure. Objects under pressure hold together more tightly.
The big bang is thought to have started from a state of extreme pressure - imagine the entire universe crushed into a space smaller than the size of an atom. That's the state of the universe pre-Big Bang, and it is sufficient to hold the universe in a state of matter.
What is unclear is what triggers the release of all that massively pent up energy, which is what sent the universe into the high-energy state prior to the re-formation of matter and anti-matter, which happened when the Universe expanded far enough to start to cool back down. Matter was converted to energy, then cooled enough to re-create matter and anti-matter, which destroyed each other almost completely, all before the universe was even close to the size of the head of a pin.
To get an extremely tame but somewhat similar example, look at what happens in a hyper-nova - The super-massive star's fusion slows down enough that it cannot maintain its shape, and crushes on itself, which creates a black-hole, which has far too much matter coming in than it can handle, so it explodes releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of extremely powerful gamma ray bursts. The Big Bang is a similar idea, just infinitely larger.
We've known for a long time the Standard Model is wrong, it never fit the large-scale observations well even though it fits the small scale observations almost perfectly. This just confirms that it's the model that is wrong - that matter and antimatter should be created in equal amounts - and not our interpretation of the observations - that there must be a matter bias, or the universe would not exist. The trouble is we still don't have anything better than the Standard Model to describe these relationships, and yet another patch is going to be made to fix the part where it doesn't work. This limits its ability to predict currently un-observed behavior. It might predict something, but you can't be at all confident in the prediction until you can actually observe it.
Also, unlike other truly successful models of reality, the Standard Model is extremely obtuse and complicated. To write the equation out by hand requires several pages. Compare that to the relationship of matter to energy and the foundation for general relativity - e=mc^2 - which is all of five characters long (including the equal sign). That equation describes just as much about the physical universe as the Standard Model, yet the Standard Model is a thousand times more complicated.
A lot of scientists have this nagging feeling that there is an equation just as simple as Einstein's to describe sub-atomic particle movement, it's just that nobody has found it yet.
Is an ultraviolet catastrophe a math term, or a physics one?
Physics, the Boltzmann Equation describes the behavior of gas. "Ultraviolet catastrophes" don't happen, so if the equation allows for them (or similar bad behavior), then the equation is wrong.
What they've shown is that it still accurately describes gassy behaviors that were hitherto unknown until a few years ago.
The key to decrypt the data on the phone is itself encrypted by the password (8 characters minimum) that I use to unlock the phone. Screw that password up ten times and the phone wipes. It also locks itself on power-up.
An 8 character password isn't that hard to crack (I imagine people who go over this are rare), and the 10 entry limit is just an inconvenience, it's no protection.
A bit for bit copy of the phone and data will allow as many tries on the password as you like, just re-set after 10 tries. Since they are likely they have emulators for the phones they could easily run this in parallel until the password is cracked.
It makes it significantly harder, but passwords and encryption have never made hacking into things impossible - just impractical in most cases.
This would seem to be an effective countermeasure against the "Faraday cage" remote wipe work-around.
Except when you remove the battery, which is also part of the procedure. No power, no wipe, Faraday cage or no Faraday cage.
This protects it until they can get to a forensic lab, where they can pull the data off without running the phone's OS (where all the handy wipe triggers and software are).
Slashdot Mirror
There is a point where supply and demand meet, and this is your maximum profit potential. Price is one of the primary factors influencing demand. Reducing price effectively increases demand, and as long as you can produce the supply to meet that demand it's a net gain.
For example, toothpaste. Say you have the world's best toothpaste, but it costs $150 per tube to make. Lets say you get 1,000 people to buy a tube of your toothpaste in a month at $155 per tube. You net $5,000 a month, which is not a particularly spectacular profit. Now lets say you revolutionize your process, and it only costs you $50 per tube to make. You could leave the price at $155, for a net profit of $105,000 per month (a 2000% increase), OR you could drop your price down to $55. By dropping the price, now 100,000 people are willing to buy a tube of your toothpaste, and you've got a net profit of $500,000 per month (a 10000% increase).
The increase in demand is never linear to the change in price - $5 toothpaste tube would get tens of millions of sales for a 90% price drop, in the next stage of my example.
There is a point where you've saturated the market, but until you get close to that point (and you won't know for sure till you get there) dropping prices increases revenue if you keep your margins the same.
That's what will happen if fuel consumption drops by 70%. We definitely have not saturated the market - a hell of a lot more people would fly if they could get a ticket across the country for $100. You probably couldn't saturate the market until you got prices down to $50 a ticket. Hell I'd fly every couple of weeks if prices were like that, but as it is I never fly (well, except for work).
Indeed, since he's only using hundreds of billions for the propping up of criminals, instead of the nearly 2 trillion figure that was actually allocated to prop up banking criminals, plus the fact that he ignores the criminals in congress who created the situation that forced the bankers into committing such crimes just to allay the massive risk that had been forced on them over the years, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet he's a commie pinko liberal left-wing nut.
Wow, that ETA is actually designed to use its massive wing flex as an advantage - they said it didn't do as well as it should have at the World Championships because the weight limits prevented them from adding enough weight to generate the proper wingloading.
That's impressive. Though it'd be pretty disconcerting to see the wings flex that much if it were a passenger plane. The "Oh no, they're supposed to do that" you'd get from the flight attendants wouldn't help much.
they are willing to put up with fuel costs of 25-30 mpg
It's more like the actual real dollar cost savings between 30mpg and 40mpg is significantly lower than the difference between 20mpg and 30mpg. 30-35mpg is the sweet spot really, much more than that doesn't translate into significant savings in a year unless you are driving 2,000-4000 miles a month.
In my situation, it isn't worth buying a new car to go from 12mpg (I have a moderate size pickup) to 30mpg, because I drive maybe 200 miles in a month. Switching would save me a few hundred dollars a year, and cost me a few thousand a year in car payments. It's a big net loss. Same thing for the average 30mpg car vs a 40-50mpg car, the extra savings are pitiful, rarely worth the trouble unless you are buying a new vehicle anyway.
when my first car (86 Honda Accord) got 28 MPG, and a 2010 gets 31
Youre 2010 is also putting out significantly more horsepower, and is capable of higher speeds and a peppier driving experience, and has oodles more safety equipment installed. All at 3 more mpg, no less. If you practiced efficient driving techniques, I'd be willing to wager you could get over 50mpg in your 2010, and far less than that in your 1986.
It's never a fair comparison when you only look at one part of the equation.
50% today, 70% if a few new materials technologies pan out, and if a few more expected improvements in propulsion technology come about as anticipated.
What's so hard to understand?
If it's clever and fuel efficient enough, people will buy it.
It's called innovation, and it happens. Just look at wingtips - those went into most commercial planes almost overnight (relatively speaking, of course) despite the dramatic costs to retrofit, yet it was worth it for the significant fuel savings such a simple design change provided.
The wings are thinner, not longer. The fuselage is a squatter double-bubble design that makes the wings look longer than they are. They are actually smaller (though I doubt shorter) than current 737 wings.
Meh, you just have to build them stronger to begin with, sorta like diesels. They have to be much stronger than gasoline engines to handle the higher pressures, but the result is that they are also much more reliable than gasoline engines.
It will cost you some weight with the first generation, most likely, but I think that's a big part of where the 70% figure comes from - stronger, lighter materials useful for engines and fuselage structures would cut the fuel consumption by another 20%, I'd guess.
You're assuming that the double-fuselage requires the same total volume to handle the same number of passengers. That may not be the case - in fact I can envision a number scenarios where the MIT design might be able to cut the overall volume while still handling the same number of passengers and luggage.
In other words, it may increase usable space while decreasing overall volume. It also looks like they are using the cabin itself as a squat wing, which would add to the overall lift and counter-act a little extra weight.
double the airspeed, quadruple the drag.
You're forgetting the other half of that as it relates to air travel: Double the airspeed, half the travel time (i.e. half the duration drag is acting on the aircraft). Ergo, flying twice as fast doubles, not quadruples, the fuel consumed for the distance traveled. It also doubles the number of flights you can make in a day.
Because of this, and because all combustion engines have an ideal efficiency at a fairly narrow point (it changes by engine type and size), there is a definite point where you are at optimal speed with relation time, distance, engine efficiency, and drag. Airlines spend a great deal of time optimizing the speed down to the proper mph per plane per route. More than likely reducing the speed of a conventional airplane would result in a net gain in fuel consumption as well as a net loss in revenue.
Not exactly an easy sell, when it does the opposite of what you want it to do.
It wouldn't be cheaper, since trips would take days instead of hours you would have to pay for room and board aboard the craft. It would be more like a flying cruise than a mode of point-a to point-b transportation.
Still though, it would be frickin sweet, I'd take a flying cruise in a heartbeat.
Of course, this all assumes the D-Series is the same size as a 737
It is (180 passenger), says so in the article.
They also have a hybrid-wing design to replace the 777 (350 passengers).
So unless you assume they are only saving fuel and weight by dumping all the luggage, you can safely assume they have similar lift characteristics.
It appears to my untrained eye that the double fuselage design makes the plane squatter, reducing the surface area for drag, while the more wing-like shape adds a small boost to lift (or huge boost, I don't know). Longer, thinner wings cut weight while providing the same (or greater, I dunno) lift, and possibly less drag. Smaller double-tail would be a weight and drag saver as well.
It all adds up to a 50% fuel savings at 10% slower speeds with current aircraft technology, and 70% fuel savings for the expected state of technology by the time these things are actually supposed to be built.
Plucto absurdum
Hey, go pluck your own abdomen, asshole!
Yeah, GP still hasn't figured out he needs to be running the simulation with the computer unplugged.
Use the Force man!
Not really, in Russia these sorts of arrangements just mean the spammer keeps on spamming while influencing government spam policy. It's how it's done over there.
See, the whole point of the "In Soviet Russia" joke is to flip reality around into something nonsensical.
It doesn't work right if reality is already flipped around into something nonsensical.
You're ignoring pressure. Objects under pressure hold together more tightly.
The big bang is thought to have started from a state of extreme pressure - imagine the entire universe crushed into a space smaller than the size of an atom. That's the state of the universe pre-Big Bang, and it is sufficient to hold the universe in a state of matter.
What is unclear is what triggers the release of all that massively pent up energy, which is what sent the universe into the high-energy state prior to the re-formation of matter and anti-matter, which happened when the Universe expanded far enough to start to cool back down. Matter was converted to energy, then cooled enough to re-create matter and anti-matter, which destroyed each other almost completely, all before the universe was even close to the size of the head of a pin.
To get an extremely tame but somewhat similar example, look at what happens in a hyper-nova - The super-massive star's fusion slows down enough that it cannot maintain its shape, and crushes on itself, which creates a black-hole, which has far too much matter coming in than it can handle, so it explodes releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of extremely powerful gamma ray bursts. The Big Bang is a similar idea, just infinitely larger.
We've known for a long time the Standard Model is wrong, it never fit the large-scale observations well even though it fits the small scale observations almost perfectly. This just confirms that it's the model that is wrong - that matter and antimatter should be created in equal amounts - and not our interpretation of the observations - that there must be a matter bias, or the universe would not exist. The trouble is we still don't have anything better than the Standard Model to describe these relationships, and yet another patch is going to be made to fix the part where it doesn't work. This limits its ability to predict currently un-observed behavior. It might predict something, but you can't be at all confident in the prediction until you can actually observe it.
Also, unlike other truly successful models of reality, the Standard Model is extremely obtuse and complicated. To write the equation out by hand requires several pages. Compare that to the relationship of matter to energy and the foundation for general relativity - e=mc^2 - which is all of five characters long (including the equal sign). That equation describes just as much about the physical universe as the Standard Model, yet the Standard Model is a thousand times more complicated.
A lot of scientists have this nagging feeling that there is an equation just as simple as Einstein's to describe sub-atomic particle movement, it's just that nobody has found it yet.
It's a safe bet, given that it's an American website and most of the posters are American.
If it were a French website, it would be a safe bet to replace "Americans" with "French" in the statement.
Frankly, all the European assholes can go fuck themselves for all I care.
The cordial Europeans are free to stay. ;)
Is an ultraviolet catastrophe a math term, or a physics one?
Physics, the Boltzmann Equation describes the behavior of gas. "Ultraviolet catastrophes" don't happen, so if the equation allows for them (or similar bad behavior), then the equation is wrong.
What they've shown is that it still accurately describes gassy behaviors that were hitherto unknown until a few years ago.
In other words, it still works. :)
That would be frickin awesome!
The key to decrypt the data on the phone is itself encrypted by the password (8 characters minimum) that I use to unlock the phone. Screw that password up ten times and the phone wipes. It also locks itself on power-up.
An 8 character password isn't that hard to crack (I imagine people who go over this are rare), and the 10 entry limit is just an inconvenience, it's no protection.
A bit for bit copy of the phone and data will allow as many tries on the password as you like, just re-set after 10 tries. Since they are likely they have emulators for the phones they could easily run this in parallel until the password is cracked.
It makes it significantly harder, but passwords and encryption have never made hacking into things impossible - just impractical in most cases.
This would seem to be an effective countermeasure against the "Faraday cage" remote wipe work-around.
Except when you remove the battery, which is also part of the procedure. No power, no wipe, Faraday cage or no Faraday cage.
This protects it until they can get to a forensic lab, where they can pull the data off without running the phone's OS (where all the handy wipe triggers and software are).
That's the procedure, just sometimes they forget, and get reamed by their bosses for losing evidence.
RTFA man.