What you describe is similar to the current hybrid cars. The question to ask is why the automobile companies who actually had to commercialize these things chose to do things as they did, rather than as Mr Lovins suggests.
I would never defend the quality of MS products but anyone who has worked on large products with many existing custoemrs in a large software company like an Oracle, Microsoft or IBM will understand that it is simply impossible to only hire expert programmers whose work never needs to be checked by anyone else and who don't need any supervision.
Not to mention that any such company has a responsibility, driven by enlightened self-interest, to turn Jr. programmers into expert programmers.
Besides being completely off topic, this has nothing to do with a BSD kernel vulnerability. How, exactly, a BSD kernel vulnerability would be very important to the linux community is behind me, other than issues of sympathy.
Who needs a blast furnace for making jewelry or robotics parts? Unless, of course, you are making them out of steel and all you have is a bunch of coal or coke and iron ore
Actually, the 757 & 767 were separate projects. They ended up shoe-horning the 767 cockpit layout into the 757 relatively late in the design in order to offer airlines the prospect of reduced training requirements to certify pilots on both aircraft.
The 777 is also a significantly different aircraft than its predecessors, and well it should be, coming 10-15 years later.
It is true though, that all are variants on the basic twin engine arangement dating to the 737. All share the basic flexibility of wing mounted engines.
Agreed though, botht he 380 and the BWB are radical departures, as is the Sonic Cruiser.
"So how exactly does this benefit the consumer? How much do airlines currently spend on fuel? How much does one flight cost other than the fuel?
I suppose if fuel costs would be 1/3 less per person and the number of flights required per day would be cut in half, the savings per passenger would be somewhere in the 33% to 50% range, but how much of that are we likely to see?"
Well, considering that the airline industry is an economic mess, and pretty much always has been, anything that can bring costs down has to help get things back in order.
The benifits for the consumer. Well, being able to fly. The potential for some competition on all routes, so we don't end up with a solution to the airlines woes that takes the form of a few airlines who stifle competition in order to force prices up to a profitable level.
As for the rest of it. You seem to be assuming that you know more about the building airplanes, and the economics of the airline and aircraft industries than say, boeing, or an aviation reporter. I bet you don't.
Planes have to fly on paper before they ever go into production.
With commercial airliners, this means that the manufacturer has to make its case to potential customers before moving on to more intensive design.
Every manufacturer does this. They have to. Developing a new airplane is too damn expensive not to do this. Bringing a plane to market, only to discover no one wants it would break the company.
"all-wing" design has been notorious for being unstable except with computer help and "fly by wire" controls."
Fly-by-wire is already present in new passenger aircraft and has been used to control inherently unstable airframes in military aircraft for over a decade.
I worry that an unholy alliance is going to form between the entertainment/media industry, the software industry and "national security" interests to push computers into becoming closed systems that can only play games and run software approved by a relatively small number of large organizations.
These restrictions would be justified on the baisis of national security as a way to:
1) prevent sinister interests from finding and exploiting weaknesses (security through obscurity)
2) prevent sinister interests from launching distributed attacks against such weaknesses.
3) provide a "secure" backdoor for use in monitoring sinister interests.
All of which would serve the entertainment and software industries desire to control who gets to view media, and how.
I am not convinced that building your own PC is really going to save you a lot of money.
The PC market is very competitive. Big manufacturers like Dell get excellent deals on parts and keep their overhead low with tight supply chains.
Small dealers keep prices low by operating on slim margins and favorable terms with suppliers.
You will save a bit on labor+ markup by assembling yourself though.
The real advantage is that you get exactly what you want. Mail order vendors, like Dell create unbalanced configurations to either make you think you are getting more than you are getting, or forcing you to get a more expensive machine in order to bring a certain feature up to the level you desire.
One example, they may use a big but slow hard disk. If you were building it your self, you could opt for a smaller (but still) huge disk with a higher spindle speed instead. Rather than having to choose the next model up, which may only be available with an excessive sound card.
Lots of people have mentioned the various sources of additional costs that can come from having a multi-vendor system environment.
There are potential savings as well:
1. Better rounded employees will be better able to assess the benifits subtle differences in technologies for different applications.
2. Ability to attract good people with established skills on one platform who want the chance to transfer those skills to another platform.
3. *ability* to scare vendors when necessary into giving you a better deal because you already have in house expertise on competing systems. This can be very valuable when negotiating upgrades, new systems and renewed maintainance contracts. Just be careful when and how you wield it. If you are too heavy handed, they may just decide that they are going to loose you and try to milk all they can from you during the transition. It is probably best as a subtle threat wielded when trying to do a deal with them at the end of a tight quarter when their sales team is driven more by tactics to maximize short term revenue at the possible expense of strategic influences on pricing.
The only way we will get over it pretty quick will be if we die off in large numbers, which we may well do because we won't be able to bring food to market, or even grow enough food since we are dependant on chemical intensive agriculture that is based on petrochemicals.
The rapid and complete depletion of our oil resources would lead to huge disruptions that I would expect would greatly cripple our ability to create and deploy replacement. In the US these days, Oil is principally a transportaion fuel, but that would probly be enough.
This suggests another regulatory pathway as well.
on
New Amino Acid Discovered
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This "new amino acid" is coded for by a triplet that formerly was only observed to be a stop codon. That is, when the translation machinery came upon the base sequence on the RNA it was reading to build the peptide chain, it ended the chain.
Now consider this. What if the cell produced the matching tRNA and associated "new amino acid" only intermittantly. When it was available, this stop-codon wouldn't be a stop codon at all and translation would continue, but when it was missing, translation would stop.
This raises another interesting question (that may already be answered). Some organisms can not synthesize all the amino acids and must obtain some of them from dietary sources. These amino acids are referred to as the essential amino acids for that organism. If their diet is deficient in these essential amino acids, they can't make all the proteins they need, and bad things generally happen.
So, the question is, what happens at a translational level in this situation? Does translation just stop, leaving shorter peptide chains? Are their situations where the products of partial translation have biological activity?
Slashdot Mirror
Patent terms are 20 years from filing date. They filed this in October 86, which gives them about 2.5 years.
I imagine they can sue for back royalties. Anyone know if that right expires along with the patent?
Perhaps now we will have laws that those guilty of corporate or government frauds can be sentenced to life in prison too.
Ethanol, at least as produced today, requires more petrochemicals per gallon to produce than it replaces.
What you describe is similar to the current hybrid cars. The question to ask is why the automobile companies who actually had to commercialize these things chose to do things as they did, rather than as Mr Lovins suggests.
I doubt it is because they are stupid.
I would never defend the quality of MS products but anyone who has worked on large products with many existing custoemrs in a large software company like an Oracle, Microsoft or IBM will understand that it is simply impossible to only hire expert programmers whose work never needs to be checked by anyone else and who don't need any supervision.
Not to mention that any such company has a responsibility, driven by enlightened self-interest, to turn Jr. programmers into expert programmers.
Besides being completely off topic, this has nothing to do with a BSD kernel vulnerability. How, exactly, a BSD kernel vulnerability would be very important to the linux community is behind me, other than issues of sympathy.
Well, I guess 1984 wasn't like 1984, but it sounds like 2002 is.
a VCR's main purpose is playing rented video tapes (just as it was 10 years ago)
It was expected that VCRs would be used for time-shifting. Indeed, this prospect terrified broadcasters.
Of course, by 10 years ago, the pattern you describe had been set.
I hope it still sounds great 12 months or so after the IPO.
Who needs a blast furnace for making jewelry or robotics parts? Unless, of course, you are making them out of steel and all you have is a bunch of coal or coke and iron ore
Actually, the 757 & 767 were separate projects. They ended up shoe-horning the 767 cockpit layout into the 757 relatively late in the design in order to offer airlines the prospect of reduced training requirements to certify pilots on both aircraft.
The 777 is also a significantly different aircraft than its predecessors, and well it should be, coming 10-15 years later.
It is true though, that all are variants on the basic twin engine arangement dating to the 737. All share the basic flexibility of wing mounted engines.
Agreed though, botht he 380 and the BWB are radical departures, as is the Sonic Cruiser.
"So how exactly does this benefit the consumer? How much do airlines currently spend on fuel? How much does one flight cost other than the fuel?
I suppose if fuel costs would be 1/3 less per person and the number of flights required per day would be cut in half, the savings per passenger would be somewhere in the 33% to 50% range, but how much of that are we likely to see?"
Well, considering that the airline industry is an economic mess, and pretty much always has been, anything that can bring costs down has to help get things back in order.
The benifits for the consumer. Well, being able to fly. The potential for some competition on all routes, so we don't end up with a solution to the airlines woes that takes the form of a few airlines who stifle competition in order to force prices up to a profitable level.
As for the rest of it. You seem to be assuming that you know more about the building airplanes, and the economics of the airline and aircraft industries than say, boeing, or an aviation reporter. I bet you don't.
McDD is the one that died that day. Boeing management are the ones that survived. Boeing commercial aircraft are the ones with a future.
Planes have to fly on paper before they ever go into production.
With commercial airliners, this means that the manufacturer has to make its case to potential customers before moving on to more intensive design.
Every manufacturer does this. They have to. Developing a new airplane is too damn expensive not to do this. Bringing a plane to market, only to discover no one wants it would break the company.
Think about it, fewer than 50% of the people on an average 737 or 757 get window seats anyway. The portion on widebody aircraft is even smaller.
In fact, many flyers deliberately choose aisle seats so they have a little more room.
"all-wing" design has been notorious for being unstable except with computer help and "fly by wire" controls."
Fly-by-wire is already present in new passenger aircraft and has been used to control inherently unstable airframes in military aircraft for over a decade.
No way. Most math problems are N-dimensional. Try to visualize a Jacobian ;-)
We are talking about elementary and high school aged kids here. I doubt that N>3 or 4.
what a lame spelling error for me to make
I worry that an unholy alliance is going to form between the entertainment/media industry, the software industry and "national security" interests to push computers into becoming closed systems that can only play games and run software approved by a relatively small number of large organizations.
These restrictions would be justified on the baisis of national security as a way to:
1) prevent sinister interests from finding and exploiting weaknesses (security through obscurity)
2) prevent sinister interests from launching distributed attacks against such weaknesses.
3) provide a "secure" backdoor for use in monitoring sinister interests.
All of which would serve the entertainment and software industries desire to control who gets to view media, and how.
I am not convinced that building your own PC is really going to save you a lot of money.
The PC market is very competitive. Big manufacturers like Dell get excellent deals on parts and keep their overhead low with tight supply chains.
Small dealers keep prices low by operating on slim margins and favorable terms with suppliers.
You will save a bit on labor+ markup by assembling yourself though.
The real advantage is that you get exactly what you want. Mail order vendors, like Dell create unbalanced configurations to either make you think you are getting more than you are getting, or forcing you to get a more expensive machine in order to bring a certain feature up to the level you desire.
One example, they may use a big but slow hard disk. If you were building it your self, you could opt for a smaller (but still) huge disk with a higher spindle speed instead. Rather than having to choose the next model up, which may only be available with an excessive sound card.
Lots of people have mentioned the various sources of additional costs that can come from having a multi-vendor system environment.
There are potential savings as well:
1. Better rounded employees will be better able to assess the benifits subtle differences in technologies for different applications.
2. Ability to attract good people with established skills on one platform who want the chance to transfer those skills to another platform.
3. *ability* to scare vendors when necessary into giving you a better deal because you already have in house expertise on competing systems. This can be very valuable when negotiating upgrades, new systems and renewed maintainance contracts. Just be careful when and how you wield it. If you are too heavy handed, they may just decide that they are going to loose you and try to milk all they can from you during the transition. It is probably best as a subtle threat wielded when trying to do a deal with them at the end of a tight quarter when their sales team is driven more by tactics to maximize short term revenue at the possible expense of strategic influences on pricing.
You think a womb is a really silent place?
Oh please.
The only way we will get over it pretty quick will be if we die off in large numbers, which we may well do because we won't be able to bring food to market, or even grow enough food since we are dependant on chemical intensive agriculture that is based on petrochemicals.
The rapid and complete depletion of our oil resources would lead to huge disruptions that I would expect would greatly cripple our ability to create and deploy replacement. In the US these days, Oil is principally a transportaion fuel, but that would probly be enough.
This "new amino acid" is coded for by a triplet that formerly was only observed to be a stop codon. That is, when the translation machinery came upon the base sequence on the RNA it was reading to build the peptide chain, it ended the chain.
Now consider this. What if the cell produced the matching tRNA and associated "new amino acid" only intermittantly. When it was available, this stop-codon wouldn't be a stop codon at all and translation would continue, but when it was missing, translation would stop.
This raises another interesting question (that may already be answered). Some organisms can not synthesize all the amino acids and must obtain some of them from dietary sources. These amino acids are referred to as the essential amino acids for that organism. If their diet is deficient in these essential amino acids, they can't make all the proteins they need, and bad things generally happen.
So, the question is, what happens at a translational level in this situation? Does translation just stop, leaving shorter peptide chains? Are their situations where the products of partial translation have biological activity?
Why would you give Geo Lucas any more of your hard earned money, much less your precious free time? Didn't you learn anything from Phantom Menace?
Or are you just a bunch of sheep?