Re:Waging mental battle with a proof
on
Pure Math, Pure Joy
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So, this is the deal with science and making it attractive to folks, so they see the importance of it. How do you impart the feeling of accomplishment and how efforts of pure thought impact the world?
I thought this photo essay did an admirable job of conveying what thinking for a living is like, yet how does one make this approachable to the general population? I had a conversation with a film director once sitting in an airport (forget his name), but he was asking me what it was like to be a scientist and how one would impart that feeling in film. I responded that he would probably be best by following a scientist for a couple of weeks and shooting lots of time with rather tired looking individuals who had much passion for what they do but who spend lots of time thinking, applying for grants, staring through microscopes, writing code, writing papers, giving talks and talking with colleagues and above all, no matter what they are doing (eating, running, showering etc...), they are thinking. How do you impart that on film? I had some ideas, but he was probably thinking of an action movie.
All told however, this article with the accompanying photo essay was well worth the time spent, it would have been nicer to have a more in depth article however.
I am not sure I want a bunch of Clippy's running around in my everyday world second guessing what I want to do. Rather, I would prefer technologies that can do what I want when I invoke them. For instance, standing in your kitchen talking to your SO about a vacation, you say, "computer, find me the best airfare and hotel rates in say, San Francisco for the weekend of the...." The computer would then list those for you. I don't want my fridge saying "it looks like you are out of milk, I therefore ordered 1gal of milk for you" when I am going out of town for a week.
No, the x-rays penetrate only about 1/10 (0.1) inch of the skin.
Oh, great. Then we are getting full body ionizing radiation that only goes.1 inches into our skin. That means we only get skin cancer rather than bone cancer or some other form of cancer caused by DNA damage from ionizing radiation. Not all forms of radiation are equivalent you know. X-Rays are not good to be exposed to long term.
Aside from the rather titilating views that these folks will be getting I am wondering about the health risks that constant bombardment of X-rays to frequent flyers. What about kids, infants and pregnant women?
Man, perhaps purchasing that new Cessna Skylane is getting more attractive.
Re:Gibson said it DID come true yesterday...
on
Gates and Security
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I read that article. I would add that for the common-man or other (non-U.S., or U.K.) governments it is getting harder to keep a secret. However, at the same time, the U.S. and U.K. governments are making significant efforts to keep secrets by concealing their actions and plans making government less accessible to the people and repealing more individual rights making these countries somewhat more secure (I guess) but less trustworthy.
Man, I just got back from Philadelphia for business and I cannot tell you how much businessspeak and cliche's I heard. Reading this post was like a flashback with phrases like "Partnering for Success" and "cost center" and "consequence based thinking". I can't tell you how sick I get from hearing folks spout off tripe like "world class" etc... And most commonly I hear this stuff from folks that are absolute knuckleheads, but they have mastered the businessspeak vocabulary so they sound good to people who are not looking for real meaning.
I know all businesses are not like this, but what is wrong with simply working hard and producing your product with craft and skill and not resorting to all sorts of "strategies for success"?
I had a desktop UNIX (Solaris) running on my desktop 64-bit hardware (Sun Blade 100) a couple of years ago.
Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time. Now with OS X, I can do all this and network seemlessly with Wintel and UNIX machines while maintaining my sanity by only having one software library to keep up with and have one system on my desk instead of three. Oh, and when I am on the road (like now on the other side of the country), I can take all of this with me by using a Powerbook.
No other company has been able to give me these tools, and for that.....I have to say, "Thank you Apple Computer".
The amazing thing here is that for less than $13k (cheaper educational), I can get a system with 2 big flat panels that absolutely SPANKS the $40k SGI Octanes. There is absolutely no reason that anyone in the sciences and engineering fields should consider any other workstation provided the software is available. Even that has been mitigated by Apple's inclusion of X11 in Panther now.
Why redesign it at all? It's more or less perfect as it is. Maybe remove the blinking gifs but that's all. There's nothing more diappointing than seeing a relatively usable site get "redesigned" with bad javascript, pointless flash animations, badly designed tables and frames.
Thank you for your input, and I want to assure you, we want to explicitly avoid any javascript or flash or frames etc... with the redesign as I would like to make is stricty an html driven site that is clean and fast. What I meant by the redesign is simply a cleaning up of a few bad links, getting rid of the backgrounds that we thought were so clever 10 years ago and in general making it more appropriate for an online text and include a more accessible table of contents which is surprisingly difficult to properly implement for online text books.
People speaking to people directly. That's the Web, that's what it's for, that's what the megacorps would love to curtail or corral. But the Web will always be about people speaking to people. In that context, small works.
About the only interest from people interested in money is requests we have received from companies wanting us to pay them to get links. No thanks. Our small site concerns retinal anatomy and function and gets approximately 35 thousand hits/day. This is not a for profit site and all material is contributed freely for dissemination etc... Of course the site design is about ten years old and when I can spend some time I will redesign it, but it has been run for no essentially no money and is hosted on an old G3 iMac running OS X, but everywhere I have gone for vision conferences, people know about Webvision or have borrowed material from it for their presentations. It's niche specific impact has actually surprised me.
Still, that's really, really wrong. It is most likely to upset even more people that ended up buying a computer with "slow" USB as the salesperson will probably not know this subtle text difference.
This is another bonus to Firewire or iee1394. You've got Firewire400 and Firewire800 with speeds as advertised. You know what you are getting.
Boy, given that Apple was shipping wireless on their computers back in 1999, it is interesting to see that they don't seem to be represented here. It could be due to a small market share I suppose, but Apple has paid the price for leadership again and again by innovating and then everyone else jumping on board.
I don't normaly reply to/. posts that reply to mine.
Hmmmm. I see.
I'm using it right now on my iBook, hence my name iFlynn.
Right. I thought it had more to do with Isil. Yes?
Look. It's apparent we differ on perspectives. I offered examples and evidence to back my claim of innovation. All I would ask of my colleagues and those I communicate with is the same.
How many times have you told a joke that you didn't make up yourself? Why? You knew it would get laughs because you saw people laugh when you heard someone else tell it.
I don't tell jokes as they are a basist form of humor. I prefer more sophisticated means of humor.:-P
Look at OS X. I can't count the number of times I've heard about how innovative it is. If you look past the flash (which I admit can be difficult) it's easy to see it's nothing new.
I guess that this perhaps is not a troll, but simply uninformed talk. Therefore, I will respond.
You have never used OS X, have you? My history of computer use has included pre-DOS machines, DOS machines, Solaris, IRIX, Windows, Classic MacOS, OS X etc.... and I can certainly tell you that OS X is new in many respects that are oft repeated on these discussion boards. Here we have a *NIX OS that is capable of running in X-Windows just about any *NIX application ever written. In addition to that I can run it exclusively from the command line or from the GUI. Even further, I can run in addition to all those *NIX apps, the major productivity applications that everyone uses. For these reasons alone, I was able to replace a WindowsPC and an SGI and an older Macintosh with a single G4 workstation with the big Cinema Display thus saving me huge amounts of space. I have consolidated into one workstation a server hosting a couple of sites and my primary workstation and my *NIX environment. The ease of administration is amazing and it is pure plug and play. How many *NIX computers can you say that about?
My point is that Apple is no more or less innovative than anyone else.
Lemme see. What has Apple introduced to the PC market or been the first to use?
1. Color with the Apple ][ 2. 3.5 in floppies with the Apple ][ 3. The first mass market PC with the Apple ][ 4. The first GUI in a PC with the Lisa then the Macintosh. 5. The first plug and play interfact card protocol with NUBUS. 6. The first to have networking built in to their computers with Appletalk. 7. Built in sound with the Macintosh 8. Self configuring networking with the Macintosh. 9. The first trackpad with Powerbooks 10. Truetype fonts with MacOS. 11. The first to ship a mouse with a PC 12. Drag and drop application installation. 13. Built in speech in the OS. 14. First with a laser printer. 15. First with true desktop publishing. 16. First to support multiple displays in the OS. 17. First with a multimedia application platform with Quicktime. 18. First with color matching built into the OS with Colorsync. 19. First to ship CD-ROM drives in PC's 20. First to ship integrated DSP's in PC's 21. First with the PDA with the Newton. 22. First with handwriting recognition with Newton. 23. Invented Firewire. 24. First to standardize on USB 25. First to implement wireless networking back in 1999. 26. First with systemwide support of anti-aliased fonts in OS X. 27. First to support boot from CD. 28..........
I could go on and on here, but the point is, I don't think you know what you are talking about. I have been using computers now for over two decades and have watched the industry evolve. Apple, more than any other company has driven innovation.
The ONE BUTTON MOUSE
So, buy yourself a freakin' multi-button mouse and plug it in. Guess what? They are supported and have been for years. The one button mouse is an Apple design asthetic that not all Mac users appreciate, so Apple is supporting them by supporting multi-button mice.
Pay attention. If you argue, I guess your entire collection will be stored in non-transferablae WMA's.
Hardly. All of the music on my music server is on hard drives contained within a Macintosh. iTunes allows you to purchase songs encoded in AAC with no DRM associated with them. Pretty nice. Give it a try.
Boy, they had better get a different acronym for the US market as there are more than a few folks here that want nothing to do with Digital Rights Management.
If I had a bunch of pain-in-the-ass investors who were likely to tear apart my presentation then I would try to keep them as-involved in the process as possible, rather than leaving so much to a single meeting where they can rip you to shreads.
In this situation, potential investors have every right to be critical of a product. After all, it's their money right? Additionally from an academic perspective, this sort of thing is kind of like a thesis defense where it is your committee's job to be critical, ask the hard questions and get you to think about your work and it's applicability. But again, a dissertation defense, like a product into to investors needs to have the presenter maintain control of the meeting.
There is no excuse for bad manners in any setting,
This is true, but I suspect that Jobs had spent more than a little time and effort analyzing this product. Given that he would be a potential investor, he should have some say in how the product is manufactured and distributed. Kamen might have done well to listen to him a little more carefully as the points he raised were valid, especially with people reverse engineering. After all, the rest of the computer industry has been copying Apple Computer for years right?
Additionally, people like Jobs are efficient and can get things done with a modicum of effort through established workflows and relationships. So, when it is obvious that someone else (and a potential business partner no less) is screwing up, it is hard to be patient especially when you can see the shortcomings of the proposal.
Well, bioinformatics is certainly the hot field right now (for those who want a little background I wrote a little introduction to bioinformatics here), (although it is biased towards Macs in bioninformatics).
To answer part of your question, there are many parallels between biology and computers, however some biological systems are much more complex and can only be modeled to a limited extent right now. Some systems are more easily examined in terms of circuitry, but we are still only half way to knowing what the components are and how they are wired (in the retina for example). Eventually, there will be hybrid bionic systems that can function as computers for certain tasks, but we are a long ways away from understanding all of the molecular paths as well. So the question in this case really becomes, at what level are you talking of integration? One could examine the molecular level using DNA and its associated proteins as a computational tool, or you could talk about integrating things at the systems level such as with a hybrid bionic/biological vision replacement device.
Gee, reading that article is like listening to a GW Bush speech. Perhaps it's just my browser, but everything.....is.....broken.....up.....into....ea sily.....digestible.....pieces with few sentences or paragraphs that are conjoined conceptually or grammatically. I guess this is how one appeals to the common person (average reading level in the US is eighth grade), but I hope I don't see this sort of writing and reporting get any more popular.
Well, a number of manufacturers would love to be able to get these kinds of data for the purposes of designing better cars and some companies (namely Volvo) have had accident investigation teams for years that actually go out to the accident scene to investigate. However, like any data that is accumulated there is the potential for abuse particularly in these times of Total Information Awareness......Oh, excuse me Terrorist Information Awareness. Seriously though, forensic investigation depends upon data and if it is available, it will be examined.
I should also have added that this approach could lessen our reliance on oil from the middle east that has us in Iraq right now and make both an electrical based and hydrogen based economy more feasible.
It's the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome. Everyone thinks these ideas are great... as long as it's not where they live. If you want the benefits though, someone has to live with the negatives.
So, I've actually wondered why we don't just build a huge nucelar power complex in Nevada someplace on land already owned by the federal government and then ship that power nationwide. All of the nuclear waste could be shipped fairly locally on (again) federally owned and operated land, the environmental impacts would be minimal (relatively), the federal government could sell the power and thus balance out this huge $44Trillion debt that is going to bite us in the ass in the next few years especially with these tax cuts, and we could stimulate the economy. No more wind farms crowding the views of hill tops and no more coal burning power plants that put out significant radiation into the atmosphere, no more dams to block up water ways and impede fish migration etc...etc...etc....
Does the simulator keep track of how fast the virtual airline is burning up cash, and how long before they go bankrupt?
I know this is funny, but the interesting bit is that those airlines who have standardized on a single airframe type (say, the 737) are actually doing quite well. They only have one type of aircraft to train crews on, one type of aircraft to purchase parts for, one type of aircraft to pay gate fees for etc...etc...etc...
Now, I am no fan of flying on Southwest, but it does make for a compelling business model.
Hey, what I have always wondered about Slashdot is some of the stats and demographics of the Slashdot crowd. Not from a business perspective (although I am sure some would kill for that info), but from a purely academic perspective. Additionally, I've wondered if there is any social science thesis work behind the growth and evolution of the friends/foes dynamic of the Slashdot crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
So, this is the deal with science and making it attractive to folks, so they see the importance of it. How do you impart the feeling of accomplishment and how efforts of pure thought impact the world?
I thought this photo essay did an admirable job of conveying what thinking for a living is like, yet how does one make this approachable to the general population? I had a conversation with a film director once sitting in an airport (forget his name), but he was asking me what it was like to be a scientist and how one would impart that feeling in film. I responded that he would probably be best by following a scientist for a couple of weeks and shooting lots of time with rather tired looking individuals who had much passion for what they do but who spend lots of time thinking, applying for grants, staring through microscopes, writing code, writing papers, giving talks and talking with colleagues and above all, no matter what they are doing (eating, running, showering etc...), they are thinking. How do you impart that on film? I had some ideas, but he was probably thinking of an action movie.
All told however, this article with the accompanying photo essay was well worth the time spent, it would have been nicer to have a more in depth article however.
I am not sure I want a bunch of Clippy's running around in my everyday world second guessing what I want to do. Rather, I would prefer technologies that can do what I want when I invoke them. For instance, standing in your kitchen talking to your SO about a vacation, you say, "computer, find me the best airfare and hotel rates in say, San Francisco for the weekend of the...." The computer would then list those for you. I don't want my fridge saying "it looks like you are out of milk, I therefore ordered 1gal of milk for you" when I am going out of town for a week.
No, the x-rays penetrate only about 1/10 (0.1) inch of the skin.
.1 inches into our skin. That means we only get skin cancer rather than bone cancer or some other form of cancer caused by DNA damage from ionizing radiation. Not all forms of radiation are equivalent you know. X-Rays are not good to be exposed to long term.
Oh, great. Then we are getting full body ionizing radiation that only goes
Aside from the rather titilating views that these folks will be getting I am wondering about the health risks that constant bombardment of X-rays to frequent flyers. What about kids, infants and pregnant women?
Man, perhaps purchasing that new Cessna Skylane is getting more attractive.
Yes, I read that article. I would add that for the common-man or other (non-U.S., or U.K.) governments it is getting harder to keep a secret. However, at the same time, the U.S. and U.K. governments are making significant efforts to keep secrets by concealing their actions and plans making government less accessible to the people and repealing more individual rights making these countries somewhat more secure (I guess) but less trustworthy.
Man, I just got back from Philadelphia for business and I cannot tell you how much businessspeak and cliche's I heard. Reading this post was like a flashback with phrases like "Partnering for Success" and "cost center" and "consequence based thinking". I can't tell you how sick I get from hearing folks spout off tripe like "world class" etc... And most commonly I hear this stuff from folks that are absolute knuckleheads, but they have mastered the businessspeak vocabulary so they sound good to people who are not looking for real meaning.
I know all businesses are not like this, but what is wrong with simply working hard and producing your product with craft and skill and not resorting to all sorts of "strategies for success"?
I had a desktop UNIX (Solaris) running on my desktop 64-bit hardware (Sun Blade 100) a couple of years ago.
Yeah, me too. But unlike the Mac, I could not run Office, Photoshop, function as a web server, surf the web, compile code, run bioinformatics searches, do molecular modeling and have wonderful text aliasing all at the same time. Now with OS X, I can do all this and network seemlessly with Wintel and UNIX machines while maintaining my sanity by only having one software library to keep up with and have one system on my desk instead of three. Oh, and when I am on the road (like now on the other side of the country), I can take all of this with me by using a Powerbook.
No other company has been able to give me these tools, and for that.....I have to say, "Thank you Apple Computer".
The amazing thing here is that for less than $13k (cheaper educational), I can get a system with 2 big flat panels that absolutely SPANKS the $40k SGI Octanes. There is absolutely no reason that anyone in the sciences and engineering fields should consider any other workstation provided the software is available. Even that has been mitigated by Apple's inclusion of X11 in Panther now.
Boy, if SGI and Sun were in trouble before.......
Why redesign it at all? It's more or less perfect as it is. Maybe remove the blinking gifs but that's all. There's nothing more diappointing than seeing a relatively usable site get "redesigned" with bad javascript, pointless flash animations, badly designed tables and frames.
Thank you for your input, and I want to assure you, we want to explicitly avoid any javascript or flash or frames etc... with the redesign as I would like to make is stricty an html driven site that is clean and fast. What I meant by the redesign is simply a cleaning up of a few bad links, getting rid of the backgrounds that we thought were so clever 10 years ago and in general making it more appropriate for an online text and include a more accessible table of contents which is surprisingly difficult to properly implement for online text books.
Best,
People speaking to people directly. That's the Web, that's what it's for, that's what the megacorps would love to curtail or corral. But the Web will always be about people speaking to people. In that context, small works.
About the only interest from people interested in money is requests we have received from companies wanting us to pay them to get links. No thanks. Our small site concerns retinal anatomy and function and gets approximately 35 thousand hits/day. This is not a for profit site and all material is contributed freely for dissemination etc... Of course the site design is about ten years old and when I can spend some time I will redesign it, but it has been run for no essentially no money and is hosted on an old G3 iMac running OS X, but everywhere I have gone for vision conferences, people know about Webvision or have borrowed material from it for their presentations. It's niche specific impact has actually surprised me.
The short summary is, 'these guys are professional litigious bastards -- be exceptionally wary.
I guess this might make more than a few folks here leery of posting anything critical of these bastards eh?
Still, that's really, really wrong. It is most likely to upset even more people that ended up buying a computer with "slow" USB as the salesperson will probably not know this subtle text difference.
This is another bonus to Firewire or iee1394. You've got Firewire400 and Firewire800 with speeds as advertised. You know what you are getting.
Boy, given that Apple was shipping wireless on their computers back in 1999, it is interesting to see that they don't seem to be represented here. It could be due to a small market share I suppose, but Apple has paid the price for leadership again and again by innovating and then everyone else jumping on board.
I don't normaly reply to /. posts that reply to mine.
Hmmmm. I see.
I'm using it right now on my iBook, hence my name iFlynn.
Right. I thought it had more to do with Isil. Yes?
Look. It's apparent we differ on perspectives. I offered examples and evidence to back my claim of innovation. All I would ask of my colleagues and those I communicate with is the same.
Best,
How many times have you told a joke that you didn't make up yourself? Why? You knew it would get laughs because you saw people laugh when you heard someone else tell it.
:-P
I don't tell jokes as they are a basist form of humor. I prefer more sophisticated means of humor.
Look at OS X. I can't count the number of times I've heard about how innovative it is. If you look past the flash (which I admit can be difficult) it's easy to see it's nothing new.
I guess that this perhaps is not a troll, but simply uninformed talk. Therefore, I will respond.
You have never used OS X, have you? My history of computer use has included pre-DOS machines, DOS machines, Solaris, IRIX, Windows, Classic MacOS, OS X etc.... and I can certainly tell you that OS X is new in many respects that are oft repeated on these discussion boards. Here we have a *NIX OS that is capable of running in X-Windows just about any *NIX application ever written. In addition to that I can run it exclusively from the command line or from the GUI. Even further, I can run in addition to all those *NIX apps, the major productivity applications that everyone uses. For these reasons alone, I was able to replace a WindowsPC and an SGI and an older Macintosh with a single G4 workstation with the big Cinema Display thus saving me huge amounts of space. I have consolidated into one workstation a server hosting a couple of sites and my primary workstation and my *NIX environment. The ease of administration is amazing and it is pure plug and play. How many *NIX computers can you say that about?
My point is that Apple is no more or less innovative than anyone else.
Lemme see. What has Apple introduced to the PC market or been the first to use?
1. Color with the Apple ][
2. 3.5 in floppies with the Apple ][
3. The first mass market PC with the Apple ][
4. The first GUI in a PC with the Lisa then the Macintosh.
5. The first plug and play interfact card protocol with NUBUS.
6. The first to have networking built in to their computers with Appletalk.
7. Built in sound with the Macintosh
8. Self configuring networking with the Macintosh.
9. The first trackpad with Powerbooks
10. Truetype fonts with MacOS.
11. The first to ship a mouse with a PC
12. Drag and drop application installation.
13. Built in speech in the OS.
14. First with a laser printer.
15. First with true desktop publishing.
16. First to support multiple displays in the OS.
17. First with a multimedia application platform with Quicktime.
18. First with color matching built into the OS with Colorsync.
19. First to ship CD-ROM drives in PC's
20. First to ship integrated DSP's in PC's
21. First with the PDA with the Newton.
22. First with handwriting recognition with Newton.
23. Invented Firewire.
24. First to standardize on USB
25. First to implement wireless networking back in 1999.
26. First with systemwide support of anti-aliased fonts in OS X.
27. First to support boot from CD.
28..........
I could go on and on here, but the point is, I don't think you know what you are talking about. I have been using computers now for over two decades and have watched the industry evolve. Apple, more than any other company has driven innovation.
The ONE BUTTON MOUSE
So, buy yourself a freakin' multi-button mouse and plug it in. Guess what? They are supported and have been for years. The one button mouse is an Apple design asthetic that not all Mac users appreciate, so Apple is supporting them by supporting multi-button mice.
I'm bored with this now.....
Pay attention. If you argue, I guess your entire collection will be stored in non-transferablae WMA's.
Hardly. All of the music on my music server is on hard drives contained within a Macintosh. iTunes allows you to purchase songs encoded in AAC with no DRM associated with them. Pretty nice. Give it a try.
Boy, they had better get a different acronym for the US market as there are more than a few folks here that want nothing to do with Digital Rights Management.
If I had a bunch of pain-in-the-ass investors who were likely to tear apart my presentation then I would try to keep them as-involved in the process as possible, rather than leaving so much to a single meeting where they can rip you to shreads.
In this situation, potential investors have every right to be critical of a product. After all, it's their money right? Additionally from an academic perspective, this sort of thing is kind of like a thesis defense where it is your committee's job to be critical, ask the hard questions and get you to think about your work and it's applicability. But again, a dissertation defense, like a product into to investors needs to have the presenter maintain control of the meeting.
There is no excuse for bad manners in any setting,
This is true, but I suspect that Jobs had spent more than a little time and effort analyzing this product. Given that he would be a potential investor, he should have some say in how the product is manufactured and distributed. Kamen might have done well to listen to him a little more carefully as the points he raised were valid, especially with people reverse engineering. After all, the rest of the computer industry has been copying Apple Computer for years right?
Additionally, people like Jobs are efficient and can get things done with a modicum of effort through established workflows and relationships. So, when it is obvious that someone else (and a potential business partner no less) is screwing up, it is hard to be patient especially when you can see the shortcomings of the proposal.
Well, bioinformatics is certainly the hot field right now (for those who want a little background I wrote a little introduction to bioinformatics here), (although it is biased towards Macs in bioninformatics).
To answer part of your question, there are many parallels between biology and computers, however some biological systems are much more complex and can only be modeled to a limited extent right now. Some systems are more easily examined in terms of circuitry, but we are still only half way to knowing what the components are and how they are wired (in the retina for example). Eventually, there will be hybrid bionic systems that can function as computers for certain tasks, but we are a long ways away from understanding all of the molecular paths as well. So the question in this case really becomes, at what level are you talking of integration? One could examine the molecular level using DNA and its associated proteins as a computational tool, or you could talk about integrating things at the systems level such as with a hybrid bionic/biological vision replacement device.
Gee, reading that article is like listening to a GW Bush speech. Perhaps it's just my browser, but everything.....is.....broken.....up.....into....ea sily.....digestible.....pieces with few sentences or paragraphs that are conjoined conceptually or grammatically. I guess this is how one appeals to the common person (average reading level in the US is eighth grade), but I hope I don't see this sort of writing and reporting get any more popular.
Well, a number of manufacturers would love to be able to get these kinds of data for the purposes of designing better cars and some companies (namely Volvo) have had accident investigation teams for years that actually go out to the accident scene to investigate. However, like any data that is accumulated there is the potential for abuse particularly in these times of Total Information Awareness......Oh, excuse me Terrorist Information Awareness. Seriously though, forensic investigation depends upon data and if it is available, it will be examined.
I should also have added that this approach could lessen our reliance on oil from the middle east that has us in Iraq right now and make both an electrical based and hydrogen based economy more feasible.
It's the "Not In My Back Yard" syndrome. Everyone thinks these ideas are great... as long as it's not where they live. If you want the benefits though, someone has to live with the negatives.
So, I've actually wondered why we don't just build a huge nucelar power complex in Nevada someplace on land already owned by the federal government and then ship that power nationwide. All of the nuclear waste could be shipped fairly locally on (again) federally owned and operated land, the environmental impacts would be minimal (relatively), the federal government could sell the power and thus balance out this huge $44Trillion debt that is going to bite us in the ass in the next few years especially with these tax cuts, and we could stimulate the economy. No more wind farms crowding the views of hill tops and no more coal burning power plants that put out significant radiation into the atmosphere, no more dams to block up water ways and impede fish migration etc...etc...etc....
Does the simulator keep track of how fast the virtual airline is burning up cash, and how long before they go bankrupt?
I know this is funny, but the interesting bit is that those airlines who have standardized on a single airframe type (say, the 737) are actually doing quite well. They only have one type of aircraft to train crews on, one type of aircraft to purchase parts for, one type of aircraft to pay gate fees for etc...etc...etc...
Now, I am no fan of flying on Southwest, but it does make for a compelling business model.
Hey, what I have always wondered about Slashdot is some of the stats and demographics of the Slashdot crowd. Not from a business perspective (although I am sure some would kill for that info), but from a purely academic perspective. Additionally, I've wondered if there is any social science thesis work behind the growth and evolution of the friends/foes dynamic of the Slashdot crowd.