Comeon... if that where 100% true your wife would not be using it all the time. More likely it's bad for customers of businesses who over extend their services. I do 75% off offers all the time I'd welcome 8,500 customers.
Why assume that people act rationally? It's usually not the case. A substantial chunk of America believes in astrology, but that doesn't mean it's real.
Groupon is almost always terrible for the business, and when it's not, it's terrible for the customers.
so basically, she made a completely moronic business decision, but the article's slant is that it is the fault of groupon? Is this woman not aware she could have set these at a price that would have been reasonable as opposed to bankrupting?
I agree that GroupOn isn't to blame here. Almost any time a business gets involved with Groupon it's a big mistake. The alternative is to set up Groupon deals that aren't actually any cheaper than normal rates, in which cases it's the customers who lose. It's possible to find a win-win through Groupon, but it seems that in the vast majority of cases Groupon should be avoided.
Do you pay, let's say, $50K at a state school or $200K at a name brand school? Are you reasonably guaranteed to make back to $150K difference and way more?
It's important to note that the $200k at a brand name school is a volatile number. If your parents don't have a ton of income and chose not to save money in a college fund, that might become $0 at the name brand school while the $50k remains $50k at the state school. Ivy League schools are giving loan-free financial aid to students with family incomes below about $70k, with some variation from school to school. I didn't quite meet those requirements and I ended up with loans, but $30k in tuition plus loans for 4 years in an Ivy League school wasn't bad. It's sort of like shooting the moon, though: if you don't get into one of the Ivies you're going to have to pay far, far more.
I frequently don't have to read words directly because I can detect them through peripheral vision and context.
Perhaps related to this, I frequently get distracted while reading but keep going, understanding the meaning of the language but not becoming aware of the individual words.
Sure, the reason why Obama will never take a stand on this issue is because it's not his job to take principaled stands on issues & thereby encourage the legislative branch to move in the desired direction...
Except that that's exactly what he does on other issues & should be doing here but won't because then the Dems would lose the record labels patronage.
He has taken a strong stand on this issue by appointing several RIAA lawyers to high positions in the DOJ and then having that department, which is directed by the executive branch, mind you, submit friend of the court arguments that call for harsh penalties in virtual property cases.
I have to quote each time this topic pops up those two idiots on slashdot on March 16. 2011:
AnonGCB (1398517) says:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
Containment chambers indeed!
On which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
Beavis and Butthead anyone?
I just read through a lot of that thread. It's really telling how many well-educated, smart people here on Slashdot, who really SHOULD know better, always run and start parroting whatever the media the tells them and sticking their heads in the sand when the shit REALLY hits the fan.
Fukushima is STILL emitting dangerous radiation, and the crisis is STILL far from over, while it may not be over for at least a decade. That's the reality, and that so many people who claim to be in the upper echelons of intelligence choose to ignore it, frankly scares the shit out of me.
The coal crisis begins the moment a plant goes into operation. A coal plant operating normally spreads deadly (carcinogenic and even radioactive) pollution over a huge area. Coal proponents such as yourself accept the damage, even though it's greater than the damage of a nuclear plant by a large margin, because it's spread over a greater area. Whether or not you realize it, you're advocating for the entire world to become an exclusion zone.
Ultimately, they're telling Captain Picard is stealing every time he says "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot". And that's bullshit. He's the fucking captain of the Federation's flagship and he'll copy whatever the fuck he wants.
And it's because of people like you that Earl Grey's children go to bed hungry every night.
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
This kind of problem is present in a lot of menus and the heart of it is the *sometimes*. Yes, sometimes, clicking an option (A) other than the one you've got selected (B)via scrolling has a roughly 50% chance of activating A and 50% chance of activating B. The safer but much slower method is to scroll to the option you want and then select it by hitting E....
Oh, so that's why they needed to defend the name Scrolls from Mojang.
If you try to play with a gamepad it works great - or as well as a gamepad can work. Like in any fps, you turn slowly and imprecisely compared to mouse control, but that's not so bad.
The mouse is another matter. Mouse behavior throughout the UI is inconsistent. It's learnable, but even then it's not entirely predictable. I tried this a bit last night. In many cases I'd place the cursor over an option and click it, but the click either wouldn't register or would happen away from the cursor. The best solution seems to be to jiggle the cursor a bit and try again.
Mouse acceleration is present but can be disabled in the.ini file. Since few people on gaming forums even know what mouse acceleration is, it gets blamed for all sorts of unrelated things like input lag, but in reality it's not a problem. Cursor lag, however, is a bit of an issue. I need to mess around with triple buffering and non-fullscreen modes to look for potential improvements, but with default settings on my rather overpowered system mouse movement seems to have around a 100ms delay. This is common in modern games because gamepads are rather sloshy and don't make input lag apparent due to their inherent slowness. However, cursor movement in menus is actually quite crisp, which is a big improvement over the majority of modern games. That's a big deal and gives me hope that a well modded and patched PC UI could be very satisfying.
The worst and most bizarre mouse input problem, however, is probably the worst mouse input bug I've ever encountered in any piece of software. The y-axis sensitivity is different from x-axis sensitivity. That's not rare in gamepad-based games, since a major concern is keeping console players from accidentally looking excessively up and down while rotating. That's even fixable in a lot of mouse drivers - I can set my x and y mouse sensitivities separately. However, the problem here is, as far as I know, unsolvable without a real Bethesda patch: the y-axis sensitivity is highly variable. If you move your mouse up 2 cm to look at the ceiling and then move a few meters and do the same thing, you're likely to find that looking at the ceiling now takes a 10 cm move. I've heard that this is because y-axis sensitivity is dependent on framerate, but I think that the dependency must be either nonlinear or more complicated than that.
I'm thinking of switching to a gamepad, but then combat is slower paced and it's more difficult to handle groups of opponents by darting between and around them mouse style.
Yes. Their management is well known for doing all kinds of borderline illegal stuff. Seriously, look up stories about how they got started.
Not just borderline. I don't know about this mafia control stuff, but I remember their direct pixel for pixel use or art assets from...was it Age of Empires?
The birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased...
Translation: The game gets harder as you go along.
I think a better translation is: The game offers you more tools for solving problems as it gets harder. Still not earth-shattering, since many games do this, but you oversimplified.
The shame is that you've offered a total of around 5 tools and 5 different problems to solve. After that they're just mixed, which could have been interesting if the simple concept became a complex game (like chess), but instead the tools and problems tend not to interact in a way that makes them greater than the sum of their parts.
It's a pretty well made game. Lots of visual clues, depth of strategy, and a smooth learning curve. Really, while hard to do, it's not that hard to analyze. "Mental model of the strategy component"? I'm thinking your just trying to justify a degree there.
I agree about the visual clues and learning curve, but it's one of the shallowest games I've ever played. It compares well to Pac-Man in that regard, but not to many games in the post-arcade era.
I don't think life expectancy has changed meaningfully for well educated professionals in the last century.
My take: let's plot median age of greatest accomplishment vs. date of birth. On the same plot, show median life expectancy vs. date of birth. Where they cross, innovation by individual contributors will go through a second order phase transition and become increasingly hampered by biology and the complexity required to contribute to modern science.
Basically, yes. O'Leary periodically says outrageous things about the future of his incredibly awful airline but they rarely materialize. It's about publicity.
I have the luxury of mostly interviewing PhDs who have already passed a couple rounds of initial screening. Abstract puzzles have always seemed to me to be weighted random number generators. Problem solving is one of the most important skills of a researcher in my field, but solving a problem without any preparation in 5 minutes doesn't correlate well with solving a problem through research over a few months.
My colleagues and I ask about multi-month or multi-year problems solved by the candidate in the recent past. We evaluate the work, his or her ability to describe that work, and then start probing a lot of the technical and logical details to make the candidate prove that he or she isn't just reciting what collaborators or an advisor did.
When I'm interviewing non-PhDs who don't have much experience to explore, I will ask some puzzle questions, but they're always taken directly from the work in our labs and are the kind of thing that someone in the field should be able to at least intelligently troubleshoot in a few minutes - that is, they're the kind of problems we expect our employees to actually encounter on the job.
As another poster pointed out, a lot of the common abstract puzzle questions aren't even well defined. Half the time it's easy to come up with two or three reasonable answers that are equally valid. In my experience they measure experience with this particular brand of puzzles more than anything else. As someone who's always done very well on that section of interviews, I suggest all interviewers who use them should instead look for ways to evaluate performance in real problems from their field.
I hate interviews, so I started up my own company. Half the time you work for someone else you're thinking you could do their job much better anyhow if only you were in charge. Great thing about having your own company, you get to be in charge, and you get to do whatever the eff you want to do, exactly how you believe it should be done.
And presumably you now have to interview a bunch of people, so interviews are more important to you than ever.
In other words, if those experimentalists would just stop publishing data that contradict our beautiful theories we could stop having to add layers of invisible darkness to our models. What will it be called this time?
Wow, welcome to my foe list.
1) He didn't say or imply that, and prefacing it with "in other words" is just a weaselly way to mischaracterize the implications of his post. 2) Statistics matter. When one study shows an extraordinary new result that is directly contradictory to a multitude of previously published, well understood experimental studies, that result must be backed by very statistically significant results. 3) Regarding your dark matter metaphor, the main alternative to dark matter, MOND, was recently quite thoroughly refuted by new experimental data showing that gravity acts the same at both local and galactic scales, as measured by red-shifting of light climbing out of gravity wells (not the usual redshift due to the light source receding at a rapid speed). Dark matter, in fact, has been amazingly well supported by all new experimental results since the concept was introduced. MOND, on the other hand, has been reformulated periodically because every measurement ever performed to distinguish MOND from the presence of dark matter has shown that MOND is untrue. Then the MOND people go back to the drawing board and come up with yet another variation to account for the new evidence. MOND is the epicycle here, not the "invisible darkness."
After 2 years of using Android, going from love to hate, I returned to iPhone with the 4S. I hadn't even heard of Siri til I was leaving the store with the 4S and noticed Siri mentioned on a poster.
Siri is useful in a very limited number of circumstances. I routinely use Siri to set an alarm. S/he seems to be good at understanding stock market enquiries too. But the natural language parsing can be very random at times. For example, try "set a countdown for 10 minutes" -- sometimes you'll get "I don't understand", sometimes you'll get an alarm clock set for 10 mins from now, and sometimes you'll get what you want which is a timer counting down from 10 minutes. Try "set a timer for 10 minutes" and you'll get the same range of mis-understanding.
I'm fine with Siri being how it is at the moment. I know it will get better and more useful, especially when it can work with maps / businesses outside the US. But it is still definitely a beta product that is usually slower than performing the task yourself.
Siri in a year or two should be great. I'm looking forward to it.
And by the time a year or two roll around Siri won't be the most capable natural spoken language/fuzzy search engine parser, especially since apps such as Speaktoit (not Iris) were already mostly equivalent to Siri before it was even announced. Anandtech's review of the 4s made almost exactly the same point you do, that Siri is useful for alarms and a fun but productivity-eating toy for most everything else.
The nuke waste problem still hasn't gone away. Building new plants is insane.
Pouring it into the gutter outside the plant would be safer than the way waste is handled in a coal plant, i.e., thrown into the atmosphere. Yes, nuclear waste is very dangerous, but the fact that the danger is so concentrated is a good thing. It means we can feasibly contain it all.
Slashdot Mirror
Comeon... if that where 100% true your wife would not be using it all the time. More likely it's bad for customers of businesses who over extend their services. I do 75% off offers all the time I'd welcome 8,500 customers.
Why assume that people act rationally? It's usually not the case. A substantial chunk of America believes in astrology, but that doesn't mean it's real.
Groupon is almost always terrible for the business, and when it's not, it's terrible for the customers.
so basically, she made a completely moronic business decision, but the article's slant is that it is the fault of groupon? Is this woman not aware she could have set these at a price that would have been reasonable as opposed to bankrupting?
I agree that GroupOn isn't to blame here. Almost any time a business gets involved with Groupon it's a big mistake. The alternative is to set up Groupon deals that aren't actually any cheaper than normal rates, in which cases it's the customers who lose. It's possible to find a win-win through Groupon, but it seems that in the vast majority of cases Groupon should be avoided.
Do you pay, let's say, $50K at a state school or $200K at a name brand school? Are you reasonably guaranteed to make back to $150K difference and way more?
It's important to note that the $200k at a brand name school is a volatile number. If your parents don't have a ton of income and chose not to save money in a college fund, that might become $0 at the name brand school while the $50k remains $50k at the state school. Ivy League schools are giving loan-free financial aid to students with family incomes below about $70k, with some variation from school to school. I didn't quite meet those requirements and I ended up with loans, but $30k in tuition plus loans for 4 years in an Ivy League school wasn't bad. It's sort of like shooting the moon, though: if you don't get into one of the Ivies you're going to have to pay far, far more.
Posting to undo moderation accident.
I frequently don't have to read words directly because I can detect them through peripheral vision and context.
Perhaps related to this, I frequently get distracted while reading but keep going, understanding the meaning of the language but not becoming aware of the individual words.
Sure, the reason why Obama will never take a stand on this issue is because it's not his job to take principaled stands on issues & thereby encourage the legislative branch to move in the desired direction...
Except that that's exactly what he does on other issues & should be doing here but won't because then the Dems would lose the record labels patronage.
He has taken a strong stand on this issue by appointing several RIAA lawyers to high positions in the DOJ and then having that department, which is directed by the executive branch, mind you, submit friend of the court arguments that call for harsh penalties in virtual property cases.
I have to quote each time this topic pops up those two idiots on slashdot on March 16. 2011:
AnonGCB (1398517) says:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
Containment chambers indeed!
On which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:
Hey, I know it. But Joe Sixpack is gonna say "But look at their problems now, I don't want that here." Bla bla bla
Beavis and Butthead anyone?
I just read through a lot of that thread. It's really telling how many well-educated, smart people here on Slashdot, who really SHOULD know better, always run and start parroting whatever the media the tells them and sticking their heads in the sand when the shit REALLY hits the fan.
Fukushima is STILL emitting dangerous radiation, and the crisis is STILL far from over, while it may not be over for at least a decade. That's the reality, and that so many people who claim to be in the upper echelons of intelligence choose to ignore it, frankly scares the shit out of me.
The coal crisis begins the moment a plant goes into operation. A coal plant operating normally spreads deadly (carcinogenic and even radioactive) pollution over a huge area. Coal proponents such as yourself accept the damage, even though it's greater than the damage of a nuclear plant by a large margin, because it's spread over a greater area. Whether or not you realize it, you're advocating for the entire world to become an exclusion zone.
The tracks are perfectly executed, and they seem to be designed to be seen from orbit.
Keep in mind most Google Maps imagery comes from airplanes and not satellites*
*No, I did not RTFA or look at the images yet.
I'm not sure aerial photography is smiled upon over Chinese military test grounds.
Ultimately, they're telling Captain Picard is stealing every time he says "Tea, Earl Grey, Hot". And that's bullshit. He's the fucking captain of the Federation's flagship and he'll copy whatever the fuck he wants.
And it's because of people like you that Earl Grey's children go to bed hungry every night.
>>What's wrong with the UI and menus exactly..?
Go to the books menu with a lot of books in your inventory. Use the up and down keys to select books, no problem. Now try clicking on another book when one is selected. Half the time, it will open the original book instead of the one you actually clicked on. Some dialogue boxes have the same problem.
This is the problem with Consolitis - they fucking broke MICE for the PC version.
This kind of problem is present in a lot of menus and the heart of it is the *sometimes*. Yes, sometimes, clicking an option (A) other than the one you've got selected (B)via scrolling has a roughly 50% chance of activating A and 50% chance of activating B. The safer but much slower method is to scroll to the option you want and then select it by hitting E. ...
Oh, so that's why they needed to defend the name Scrolls from Mojang.
If you try to play with a gamepad it works great - or as well as a gamepad can work. Like in any fps, you turn slowly and imprecisely compared to mouse control, but that's not so bad.
The mouse is another matter. Mouse behavior throughout the UI is inconsistent. It's learnable, but even then it's not entirely predictable. I tried this a bit last night. In many cases I'd place the cursor over an option and click it, but the click either wouldn't register or would happen away from the cursor. The best solution seems to be to jiggle the cursor a bit and try again.
Mouse acceleration is present but can be disabled in the .ini file. Since few people on gaming forums even know what mouse acceleration is, it gets blamed for all sorts of unrelated things like input lag, but in reality it's not a problem. Cursor lag, however, is a bit of an issue. I need to mess around with triple buffering and non-fullscreen modes to look for potential improvements, but with default settings on my rather overpowered system mouse movement seems to have around a 100ms delay. This is common in modern games because gamepads are rather sloshy and don't make input lag apparent due to their inherent slowness. However, cursor movement in menus is actually quite crisp, which is a big improvement over the majority of modern games. That's a big deal and gives me hope that a well modded and patched PC UI could be very satisfying.
The worst and most bizarre mouse input problem, however, is probably the worst mouse input bug I've ever encountered in any piece of software. The y-axis sensitivity is different from x-axis sensitivity. That's not rare in gamepad-based games, since a major concern is keeping console players from accidentally looking excessively up and down while rotating. That's even fixable in a lot of mouse drivers - I can set my x and y mouse sensitivities separately. However, the problem here is, as far as I know, unsolvable without a real Bethesda patch: the y-axis sensitivity is highly variable. If you move your mouse up 2 cm to look at the ceiling and then move a few meters and do the same thing, you're likely to find that looking at the ceiling now takes a 10 cm move. I've heard that this is because y-axis sensitivity is dependent on framerate, but I think that the dependency must be either nonlinear or more complicated than that.
I'm thinking of switching to a gamepad, but then combat is slower paced and it's more difficult to handle groups of opponents by darting between and around them mouse style.
Yes. Their management is well known for doing all kinds of borderline illegal stuff. Seriously, look up stories about how they got started.
Not just borderline. I don't know about this mafia control stuff, but I remember their direct pixel for pixel use or art assets from...was it Age of Empires?
I'm still undecided.
Amazon strongly endorses this bill according to a statement I read on Ars today.
The birds are packed with clever behaviors that expand the user's mental model at just the point when game-level complexity is increased ...
Translation: The game gets harder as you go along.
I think a better translation is: The game offers you more tools for solving problems as it gets harder. Still not earth-shattering, since many games do this, but you oversimplified.
The shame is that you've offered a total of around 5 tools and 5 different problems to solve. After that they're just mixed, which could have been interesting if the simple concept became a complex game (like chess), but instead the tools and problems tend not to interact in a way that makes them greater than the sum of their parts.
It's a pretty well made game. Lots of visual clues, depth of strategy, and a smooth learning curve. Really, while hard to do, it's not that hard to analyze. "Mental model of the strategy component"? I'm thinking your just trying to justify a degree there.
I agree about the visual clues and learning curve, but it's one of the shallowest games I've ever played. It compares well to Pac-Man in that regard, but not to many games in the post-arcade era.
I don't think life expectancy has changed meaningfully for well educated professionals in the last century.
My take: let's plot median age of greatest accomplishment vs. date of birth. On the same plot, show median life expectancy vs. date of birth. Where they cross, innovation by individual contributors will go through a second order phase transition and become increasingly hampered by biology and the complexity required to contribute to modern science.
PS - I know this is a wild oversimplification.
soon will lose its access to major credit cards right?
The American and French governments don't have that sort of influence. You're thinking of their corporate masters.
Is he kidding
Basically, yes. O'Leary periodically says outrageous things about the future of his incredibly awful airline but they rarely materialize. It's about publicity.
I have the luxury of mostly interviewing PhDs who have already passed a couple rounds of initial screening. Abstract puzzles have always seemed to me to be weighted random number generators. Problem solving is one of the most important skills of a researcher in my field, but solving a problem without any preparation in 5 minutes doesn't correlate well with solving a problem through research over a few months.
My colleagues and I ask about multi-month or multi-year problems solved by the candidate in the recent past. We evaluate the work, his or her ability to describe that work, and then start probing a lot of the technical and logical details to make the candidate prove that he or she isn't just reciting what collaborators or an advisor did.
When I'm interviewing non-PhDs who don't have much experience to explore, I will ask some puzzle questions, but they're always taken directly from the work in our labs and are the kind of thing that someone in the field should be able to at least intelligently troubleshoot in a few minutes - that is, they're the kind of problems we expect our employees to actually encounter on the job.
As another poster pointed out, a lot of the common abstract puzzle questions aren't even well defined. Half the time it's easy to come up with two or three reasonable answers that are equally valid. In my experience they measure experience with this particular brand of puzzles more than anything else. As someone who's always done very well on that section of interviews, I suggest all interviewers who use them should instead look for ways to evaluate performance in real problems from their field.
I hate interviews, so I started up my own company. Half the time you work for someone else you're thinking you could do their job much better anyhow if only you were in charge. Great thing about having your own company, you get to be in charge, and you get to do whatever the eff you want to do, exactly how you believe it should be done.
And presumably you now have to interview a bunch of people, so interviews are more important to you than ever.
In other words, if those experimentalists would just stop publishing data that contradict our beautiful theories we could stop having to add layers of invisible darkness to our models. What will it be called this time?
Wow, welcome to my foe list.
1) He didn't say or imply that, and prefacing it with "in other words" is just a weaselly way to mischaracterize the implications of his post.
2) Statistics matter. When one study shows an extraordinary new result that is directly contradictory to a multitude of previously published, well understood experimental studies, that result must be backed by very statistically significant results.
3) Regarding your dark matter metaphor, the main alternative to dark matter, MOND, was recently quite thoroughly refuted by new experimental data showing that gravity acts the same at both local and galactic scales, as measured by red-shifting of light climbing out of gravity wells (not the usual redshift due to the light source receding at a rapid speed). Dark matter, in fact, has been amazingly well supported by all new experimental results since the concept was introduced. MOND, on the other hand, has been reformulated periodically because every measurement ever performed to distinguish MOND from the presence of dark matter has shown that MOND is untrue. Then the MOND people go back to the drawing board and come up with yet another variation to account for the new evidence. MOND is the epicycle here, not the "invisible darkness."
After 2 years of using Android, going from love to hate, I returned to iPhone with the 4S. I hadn't even heard of Siri til I was leaving the store with the 4S and noticed Siri mentioned on a poster.
Siri is useful in a very limited number of circumstances. I routinely use Siri to set an alarm. S/he seems to be good at understanding stock market enquiries too. But the natural language parsing can be very random at times. For example, try "set a countdown for 10 minutes" -- sometimes you'll get "I don't understand", sometimes you'll get an alarm clock set for 10 mins from now, and sometimes you'll get what you want which is a timer counting down from 10 minutes. Try "set a timer for 10 minutes" and you'll get the same range of mis-understanding.
I'm fine with Siri being how it is at the moment. I know it will get better and more useful, especially when it can work with maps / businesses outside the US. But it is still definitely a beta product that is usually slower than performing the task yourself.
Siri in a year or two should be great. I'm looking forward to it.
And by the time a year or two roll around Siri won't be the most capable natural spoken language/fuzzy search engine parser, especially since apps such as Speaktoit (not Iris) were already mostly equivalent to Siri before it was even announced. Anandtech's review of the 4s made almost exactly the same point you do, that Siri is useful for alarms and a fun but productivity-eating toy for most everything else.
The nuke waste problem still hasn't gone away. Building new plants is insane.
Pouring it into the gutter outside the plant would be safer than the way waste is handled in a coal plant, i.e., thrown into the atmosphere. Yes, nuclear waste is very dangerous, but the fact that the danger is so concentrated is a good thing. It means we can feasibly contain it all.
It has not detected any of the Zynga games at all.
What you really need is a filter for stupid, but I'm afraid there's no such animal.
The Zynga games are a great filter for stupid.
Blah, I meant hurtling, though hurdles might have explained some things about that flight.