I don't think this is quite correct. Win8 isn't single-handedly tanking the entire PC market; it's helping keep it depressed, sure, but it's not the only factor. There's two more factors: 1) mobile devices, including iPads. Lots of people just want to read and write vapid comments on Facebook all day long, and iPads are much smaller and more convenient than laptops (or desktops) for doing this. 2) the lack of progress in hardware and software overall. PCs really aren't significantly faster now than they were 5 or more years ago. It's not like the late 90s when everything was doubling in speed or size every 12-18 months; everything's hit a wall. Mfgrs are more worried now about energy efficiency than speed. A brand-new computer will not seem any faster, running a web browser, spreadsheet, etc. than a 5-year-old PC. As a result, people just aren't upgrading any more, unless their software requires it. Of course, this might not apply to certain applications (namely high-end games), but those are a small fraction of the market. There's tons of people now chugging along just fine with 10-year-old PCs running XP. and of course 3) the economy sucks and tons of people are out of work.
Wrong, absolutely wrong. Ballmer isn't going anywhere; why should he leave his own company?
Microsoft isn't a normal company where there's a board of directors, controlled by the shareholders, who appoints a CEO, and if the CEO pisses them off he gets fired and replaced with someone new. MS has been run by the same bunch of guys since they started: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer (who's BG's best friend). There's no way for him to be fired, no matter how badly he does. If MS were a normal company, they would have had a new CEO a decade ago.
Personally, I'm glad and I hope they don't figure out a way of convincing Ballmer to move on. I like watching MS implode (even though really, their revenues are still pretty healthy thanks to their monopoly position and especially their business products like Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.). I'm hoping to live to see a future where Microsoft no longer exists as a company, and if they got a better CEO there's no way that'd happen in my lifetime.
Irrelevant. Joe Schmoe won't think about these things ahead of time (as he won't even be aware of them), so he'll only find out the hard way, after he needs data recovery services, what a problem this is. By then it'll be too late.
Sure, Joe may be pissed when the local computer shop tells him he's out of luck in recovering any data because of secure boot, but what's he going to do? Sue Microsoft? Take his OS business elsewhere? I don't think so.
Finally, maybe I'm missing something, but how does secure boot prevent you from recovering data direct from the HD? Shouldn't you still be able to just pull the HD and pop it into a SATA cradle on another system, just like you do now? I thought secure boot was a motherboard/BIOS thing, preventing you from easily loading another OS at boot-up. Hard drives don't care about that stuff.
Someone who loves flying won't care that much about this.
"it's freaking boring" "People just don't want to do it"
This isn't cleaning toilets we're talking about. There's no shortage of people who absolutely love to fly.
The real reasons for any "shortage" of pilots is these: "You're not paying enough" "It's expensive and time consuming to get into" and maybe "Too much time away" but really the first two.
But really, there's no shortage at all, otherwise pay would be much higher. The truth is, there's no shortage of people willing to rack up loans to try this career path, because they haven't yet found out just how horrible a career path it really is. Aviation schools will not tell you the real story, which you're all reading here in these comments from people in the industry; they hype it up and talk about a "coming pilot shortage", which is a total lie. And by the time kids figure out the truth, they figure they're too invested now to make a change.
Wrong. A trip from Phoenix to Boston actually costs about double what you said, about $250:
I honestly don't care about your Google search results, because I just booked the trip for that price ($130/ticket). Google isn't God. Granted, it was a "wanna get away" fare, and leaves early in the morning, so it's not the average fare for that route, but it is (or was, probably no longer) available.
Shareholders only care about short-term profits, so it's really irrelevant. It's not like they can win a lawsuit against the executives for not colluding with their competitors to restrict service.
I refuse to be treated alternatly as a terrorist and then livestock so I gave up flying.
Good for you. Very few people can do that. Of course, along with giving up flying, you've also given up on things like vacations to Hawaii or Europe (unless you have a lot of spare time for a transatlantic cruise perhaps), so have fun being stuck in the United Police States of America.
pretty much none of them complain at the volume level that Slashdot does
That's probably because they don't fly very often: they don't have jobs that require them to travel, and they, like you, don't travel for vacation or family. You mention extended family: many professional people don't live near their extended family, they live across the continent from them, because their careers took them far away from their families. For those people who do visit their families once a year or more, having "interesting places to stay within just a few hours drive" doesn't help them much when their families are 2500 miles away.
So, once again, you're confusing the Slashdot echo chamber with how Joe Sixpack thinks.
When did I ever say anything about Joe Sixpack? I'm on Slashdot, so I'm looking at things from the viewpoint of professionals, not blue-collar workers who never leave the state or town they were born in. Obviously, people who never travel aren't going to complain much about TSA, at least not until they're forced to go through security lines every time they try driving outside their city.
I call bullshit on this one. I think it'd probably be more expensive than flying.
We already have passenger rail in the US: we have Amtrak, and we have lots of light rail in certain urban areas. Obviously, these trains are quite slow, but slow is cheaper, right? Well, all these trains are horribly expensive in my experience.
Go to amtrak.com and check out prices for a trip between, say, LA and Seattle. Now compare to economy airline tickets. Amtrak is almost certainly far more expensive. Or look at light rail prices; I was in NYC recently and got tickets from Penn Station to New Jersey on the light rail, probably a 5 mile ride. It was almost $20 per ticket! I just bought airline tickets from Phoenix to Boston on Southwest, and it was about $130 per ticket, and that's probably 2500 miles I'm guessing.
In my experience, rail travel is very, very expensive in the US, compared to air travel. Putting in HSR isn't going to fix this, it's going to be exactly the same. The fundamental problem with rail is that it generally needs to be done either by the government itself, or by a single utility corporation that's regulated by the government (like MTA in NYC, where a short ride costs you about $2 now). By contrast, with airlines there's dozens of them, all in competition. There's no competition with trains, due to their fundamental nature (can't exactly build dozens of parallel tracks), and while effective government regulation would make them cheap and efficient, we don't have that in this country, we have blatant corruption.
As far as I'm concerned, HSR would be an expensive boondoggle here in the USA.
It's illegal. You can't force someone to work for you; that's called "indentured servitude". It's one step above slavery. That sort of thing has been illegal for over a century.
Trains are, in theory, slower, but that theory becomes somewhat dubious when you have to wait at the airport for two hours before your flight
The TSA is already working on inserting themselves into passenger rail operations, so pretty soon you're going to have to wait 2 hours at the Amtrak station before your train ride as well.
There's two kinds of travelers: business travelers, and non-business travelers (usually people traveling to meet family, or for tourism). On top of this, we (Americans) live in a country that is geographically very large, and where a lot of economic activity takes place in cities on two opposite coasts. In short, we frequently need to travel between destinations that are over 1000 miles apart.
With business travelers, time is money; if you're a professional and your business wants to send you to a customer site to deal with an urgent problem, they are NOT going to put up with you wanting to take 3 days to drive there because you don't like the TSA. They'll find a new employee; either put up with gropings or get a new job.
With non-business travelers, many of us don't have a lot of vacation per year; many jobs only give you a pathetic 2 weeks/year. If you take a week of that to have a vacation, you're not going to want to spend over half that time driving.
So, flying is by default the only option, due to a lack of time.
And what are they going to do about it, shut down in protest? Then their competitors will get more business while the protesting airlines go out of business.
This is what happens with government regulation, and a perfect illustration of how it levels the playing field in a market economy. If companies won't do the right thing, the government can step in, institute regulation, and force the right thing to be done even though it's bad for short-term profits. But it's a double-edged sword: if the government steps in and institutes bad regulation, everyone is forced to suffer with it. The fault is with the voters, for electing a bad government.
I disagree. The OP said the airlines are giving us what we wanted most, which is cheap flights. The airlines are not giving us gropings and treating us like terror suspects. That's the Federal Government doing that. The airlines have no part in that, and surely would prefer something else. Treating customers that way isn't good for business. Cramming in cattle cars, sure, they do that because it lowers costs, and we go along with it for the same reason. Many airlines even offer an option, called "business class" or "first class" where you get nice big comfortable seats, but the cost is so much higher that very few of us choose that option. But don't blame the airlines for gropings, only the government (and Obama) deserves blame for that.
They don't need more pilots. Pilots have extremely low salaries, in relation to how much it costs to get the required training. Low salaries = low demand. If there were really a shortage, salaries would be through the roof.
Machine-driven cars, for example, seem to be less lethal already,
This is because human drivers are mostly morons and are completely untrained for the most part, at least here in the USA. It's a totally different situation from pilots, who have tons of training, and have specifically been trained to deal with emergencies and mechanical failures. Car drivers are not, they're really not trained at all in any way, they're just given keys, and quick lecture on the rules of the road, and allowed to pilot a 6000 lb vehicle at high speed in busy traffic among millions of other such vehicles and drivers.
Wrong. Those are hours, true, but they're not in-type hours. Employers may have requirements that you have X hours in the type of aircraft that they'll be flying (on top of the requirement for Y hours PIC, which can be in any aircraft), or at least in a similar aircraft. A crop duster is not like a 757.
The highly experienced pilots aren't leaving in droves, at least that's not what I've heard. They're actually making good money, though they're all close to retirement. The problem isn't people leaving, it's a lack of people going into the profession, and enough of them partway through so there's a large enough pool of experienced pilots to do the work.
This pilot shortage flap sounds just like the claims of an "engineer shortage" that comes around every so often, and also of a "nursing shortage". Companies complain there aren't enough of some highly skilled worker, but they absolutely refuse to raise salaries, even though Economics 101 dictates that when there's a high demand of something that's in short supply, prices must go up.
Secession would probably be a bad choice for Texas or any other state.
Hey, shut up! We don't want to dissuade them.
there is probably still a lot of countries in latin america that would love the opportunity to join the US.
The US already has enormous problems with infighting preventing any progress. We can't even decide if we want to teach our kids math and science or religious fantasies. How is adding a bunch of countries with a totally different culture and different language (which many in the US really don't like) going to help things? It's only going to increase tension and infighting. Worse, adding those countries will make the US extremely socially conservative. You think it's bad right now with the right-wingers? You haven't seen anything; add the Latin American countries in and suddenly abortion is illegal, contraception is possibly illegal, gay marriage is illegal, gay rights are gone, everything the liberals have been fighting for is gone. Nepotism and corruption would be far, far worse than what we already have (Latin American countries are famous for their corruption), and you can kiss the middle class goodbye (there's no middle class in those countries, just a ton of dirt-poor people and a few ultra-wealthy tycoons).
What the US needs is to break apart into a handful of smaller countries. Smaller countries equals less infighting, and less infighting equals more progress. Let the southeast break away and form a theocracy, while other regions form tech powerhouses.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this is quite correct. Win8 isn't single-handedly tanking the entire PC market; it's helping keep it depressed, sure, but it's not the only factor. There's two more factors:
1) mobile devices, including iPads. Lots of people just want to read and write vapid comments on Facebook all day long, and iPads are much smaller and more convenient than laptops (or desktops) for doing this.
2) the lack of progress in hardware and software overall. PCs really aren't significantly faster now than they were 5 or more years ago. It's not like the late 90s when everything was doubling in speed or size every 12-18 months; everything's hit a wall. Mfgrs are more worried now about energy efficiency than speed. A brand-new computer will not seem any faster, running a web browser, spreadsheet, etc. than a 5-year-old PC. As a result, people just aren't upgrading any more, unless their software requires it. Of course, this might not apply to certain applications (namely high-end games), but those are a small fraction of the market. There's tons of people now chugging along just fine with 10-year-old PCs running XP.
and of course 3) the economy sucks and tons of people are out of work.
Wrong, absolutely wrong. Ballmer isn't going anywhere; why should he leave his own company?
Microsoft isn't a normal company where there's a board of directors, controlled by the shareholders, who appoints a CEO, and if the CEO pisses them off he gets fired and replaced with someone new. MS has been run by the same bunch of guys since they started: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer (who's BG's best friend). There's no way for him to be fired, no matter how badly he does. If MS were a normal company, they would have had a new CEO a decade ago.
Personally, I'm glad and I hope they don't figure out a way of convincing Ballmer to move on. I like watching MS implode (even though really, their revenues are still pretty healthy thanks to their monopoly position and especially their business products like Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.). I'm hoping to live to see a future where Microsoft no longer exists as a company, and if they got a better CEO there's no way that'd happen in my lifetime.
Irrelevant. Joe Schmoe won't think about these things ahead of time (as he won't even be aware of them), so he'll only find out the hard way, after he needs data recovery services, what a problem this is. By then it'll be too late.
Sure, Joe may be pissed when the local computer shop tells him he's out of luck in recovering any data because of secure boot, but what's he going to do? Sue Microsoft? Take his OS business elsewhere? I don't think so.
Finally, maybe I'm missing something, but how does secure boot prevent you from recovering data direct from the HD? Shouldn't you still be able to just pull the HD and pop it into a SATA cradle on another system, just like you do now? I thought secure boot was a motherboard/BIOS thing, preventing you from easily loading another OS at boot-up. Hard drives don't care about that stuff.
I've never seen them. All the light rail systems I've seen are pretty much flat-rate.
Here in Phoenix, they want $5 for a round-trip; it's far cheaper to own a (older) car.
"it has no respect"
Someone who loves flying won't care that much about this.
"it's freaking boring"
"People just don't want to do it"
This isn't cleaning toilets we're talking about. There's no shortage of people who absolutely love to fly.
The real reasons for any "shortage" of pilots is these:
"You're not paying enough"
"It's expensive and time consuming to get into"
and maybe
"Too much time away"
but really the first two.
But really, there's no shortage at all, otherwise pay would be much higher. The truth is, there's no shortage of people willing to rack up loans to try this career path, because they haven't yet found out just how horrible a career path it really is. Aviation schools will not tell you the real story, which you're all reading here in these comments from people in the industry; they hype it up and talk about a "coming pilot shortage", which is a total lie. And by the time kids figure out the truth, they figure they're too invested now to make a change.
Wrong. A trip from Phoenix to Boston actually costs about double what you said, about $250:
I honestly don't care about your Google search results, because I just booked the trip for that price ($130/ticket). Google isn't God. Granted, it was a "wanna get away" fare, and leaves early in the morning, so it's not the average fare for that route, but it is (or was, probably no longer) available.
The shareholders will be so proud!
Shareholders only care about short-term profits, so it's really irrelevant. It's not like they can win a lawsuit against the executives for not colluding with their competitors to restrict service.
I refuse to be treated alternatly as a terrorist and then livestock so I gave up flying.
Good for you. Very few people can do that. Of course, along with giving up flying, you've also given up on things like vacations to Hawaii or Europe (unless you have a lot of spare time for a transatlantic cruise perhaps), so have fun being stuck in the United Police States of America.
pretty much none of them complain at the volume level that Slashdot does
That's probably because they don't fly very often: they don't have jobs that require them to travel, and they, like you, don't travel for vacation or family. You mention extended family: many professional people don't live near their extended family, they live across the continent from them, because their careers took them far away from their families. For those people who do visit their families once a year or more, having "interesting places to stay within just a few hours drive" doesn't help them much when their families are 2500 miles away.
So, once again, you're confusing the Slashdot echo chamber with how Joe Sixpack thinks.
When did I ever say anything about Joe Sixpack? I'm on Slashdot, so I'm looking at things from the viewpoint of professionals, not blue-collar workers who never leave the state or town they were born in. Obviously, people who never travel aren't going to complain much about TSA, at least not until they're forced to go through security lines every time they try driving outside their city.
Good luck getting a bunch of different corporations to agree to that. Any that did would probably face a shareholder lawsuit.
That it's a fuckton cheaper than flying?
I call bullshit on this one. I think it'd probably be more expensive than flying.
We already have passenger rail in the US: we have Amtrak, and we have lots of light rail in certain urban areas. Obviously, these trains are quite slow, but slow is cheaper, right? Well, all these trains are horribly expensive in my experience.
Go to amtrak.com and check out prices for a trip between, say, LA and Seattle. Now compare to economy airline tickets. Amtrak is almost certainly far more expensive. Or look at light rail prices; I was in NYC recently and got tickets from Penn Station to New Jersey on the light rail, probably a 5 mile ride. It was almost $20 per ticket! I just bought airline tickets from Phoenix to Boston on Southwest, and it was about $130 per ticket, and that's probably 2500 miles I'm guessing.
In my experience, rail travel is very, very expensive in the US, compared to air travel. Putting in HSR isn't going to fix this, it's going to be exactly the same. The fundamental problem with rail is that it generally needs to be done either by the government itself, or by a single utility corporation that's regulated by the government (like MTA in NYC, where a short ride costs you about $2 now). By contrast, with airlines there's dozens of them, all in competition. There's no competition with trains, due to their fundamental nature (can't exactly build dozens of parallel tracks), and while effective government regulation would make them cheap and efficient, we don't have that in this country, we have blatant corruption.
As far as I'm concerned, HSR would be an expensive boondoggle here in the USA.
It's illegal. You can't force someone to work for you; that's called "indentured servitude". It's one step above slavery. That sort of thing has been illegal for over a century.
Trains are, in theory, slower, but that theory becomes somewhat dubious when you have to wait at the airport for two hours before your flight
The TSA is already working on inserting themselves into passenger rail operations, so pretty soon you're going to have to wait 2 hours at the Amtrak station before your train ride as well.
There's two kinds of travelers: business travelers, and non-business travelers (usually people traveling to meet family, or for tourism). On top of this, we (Americans) live in a country that is geographically very large, and where a lot of economic activity takes place in cities on two opposite coasts. In short, we frequently need to travel between destinations that are over 1000 miles apart.
With business travelers, time is money; if you're a professional and your business wants to send you to a customer site to deal with an urgent problem, they are NOT going to put up with you wanting to take 3 days to drive there because you don't like the TSA. They'll find a new employee; either put up with gropings or get a new job.
With non-business travelers, many of us don't have a lot of vacation per year; many jobs only give you a pathetic 2 weeks/year. If you take a week of that to have a vacation, you're not going to want to spend over half that time driving.
So, flying is by default the only option, due to a lack of time.
TSA is already starting to get involved in rail transport, and also highway transport.
And what are they going to do about it, shut down in protest? Then their competitors will get more business while the protesting airlines go out of business.
This is what happens with government regulation, and a perfect illustration of how it levels the playing field in a market economy. If companies won't do the right thing, the government can step in, institute regulation, and force the right thing to be done even though it's bad for short-term profits. But it's a double-edged sword: if the government steps in and institutes bad regulation, everyone is forced to suffer with it. The fault is with the voters, for electing a bad government.
I disagree. The OP said the airlines are giving us what we wanted most, which is cheap flights. The airlines are not giving us gropings and treating us like terror suspects. That's the Federal Government doing that. The airlines have no part in that, and surely would prefer something else. Treating customers that way isn't good for business. Cramming in cattle cars, sure, they do that because it lowers costs, and we go along with it for the same reason. Many airlines even offer an option, called "business class" or "first class" where you get nice big comfortable seats, but the cost is so much higher that very few of us choose that option. But don't blame the airlines for gropings, only the government (and Obama) deserves blame for that.
They don't need more pilots. Pilots have extremely low salaries, in relation to how much it costs to get the required training. Low salaries = low demand. If there were really a shortage, salaries would be through the roof.
Machine-driven cars, for example, seem to be less lethal already,
This is because human drivers are mostly morons and are completely untrained for the most part, at least here in the USA. It's a totally different situation from pilots, who have tons of training, and have specifically been trained to deal with emergencies and mechanical failures. Car drivers are not, they're really not trained at all in any way, they're just given keys, and quick lecture on the rules of the road, and allowed to pilot a 6000 lb vehicle at high speed in busy traffic among millions of other such vehicles and drivers.
Wrong. Those are hours, true, but they're not in-type hours. Employers may have requirements that you have X hours in the type of aircraft that they'll be flying (on top of the requirement for Y hours PIC, which can be in any aircraft), or at least in a similar aircraft. A crop duster is not like a 757.
The highly experienced pilots aren't leaving in droves, at least that's not what I've heard. They're actually making good money, though they're all close to retirement. The problem isn't people leaving, it's a lack of people going into the profession, and enough of them partway through so there's a large enough pool of experienced pilots to do the work.
This pilot shortage flap sounds just like the claims of an "engineer shortage" that comes around every so often, and also of a "nursing shortage". Companies complain there aren't enough of some highly skilled worker, but they absolutely refuse to raise salaries, even though Economics 101 dictates that when there's a high demand of something that's in short supply, prices must go up.
One of the crashes they focused on was Colgate Air 3407 crash in Buffalo, NY
Well, what do you expect when you put a toothpaste company in charge of a safety-critical service?
And having to come into contact with those morons in TSA.
You and other industry insiders may understand that, but common people do not. The timing looks very bad on the outside, like a vote of no-confidence.
Those aren't little countries, if you look at their population rather than their land area.
If the US split up into, say, 3 separate countries, each one would probably be comparable to Germany, Italy, and Japan in terms of population.
Secession would probably be a bad choice for Texas or any other state.
Hey, shut up! We don't want to dissuade them.
there is probably still a lot of countries in latin america that would love the opportunity to join the US.
The US already has enormous problems with infighting preventing any progress. We can't even decide if we want to teach our kids math and science or religious fantasies. How is adding a bunch of countries with a totally different culture and different language (which many in the US really don't like) going to help things? It's only going to increase tension and infighting. Worse, adding those countries will make the US extremely socially conservative. You think it's bad right now with the right-wingers? You haven't seen anything; add the Latin American countries in and suddenly abortion is illegal, contraception is possibly illegal, gay marriage is illegal, gay rights are gone, everything the liberals have been fighting for is gone. Nepotism and corruption would be far, far worse than what we already have (Latin American countries are famous for their corruption), and you can kiss the middle class goodbye (there's no middle class in those countries, just a ton of dirt-poor people and a few ultra-wealthy tycoons).
What the US needs is to break apart into a handful of smaller countries. Smaller countries equals less infighting, and less infighting equals more progress. Let the southeast break away and form a theocracy, while other regions form tech powerhouses.