The A380 will find a market. Crowded airlanes and gates mean bigger planes save a lot of space at critical points. Some are arguing that Boeing dropped the ball on this one.
But the flying within the US is poised for a huge shift. NASA has been working on their Small Aircraft Transportation System is designed to allow safe flight outside the big crowded airlanes and between the small uncrowded regional airports. And direct flights, even with slower planes, mean shorter flights with no transfers and less ground transportation. Once this is off the ground it will completely cannibalize the first and business class market from the big planes for anything less than trans-continental, hub-to-hub, or international flights. All that will be left will be the cattle-carrier flights for the more efficient big planes.
In otherwords, the A380 will in the near future be mainly in use for low-margin economy passengers. And they even lose a large chunk of those passengers against the inherently shorter and simpler small/medium airport direct flight.
Re:getting OT somehow
on
In the Year 2020
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Years of experience with foreign film and television had conclusively demonstrated that Sturgen's Law applies. This includes chinese cinema. 90% of chinese movies suck - then again, 90% of everything sucks. They may seem innovative to a neophyte, but watch a little more and you'll see that in the context of their own kind most are as predictable and shallow as anything Hollywood turns out.
In particular, I've noticed how plot coherency/novelty is often ignored in favor of eye candy. (I suspect dialogue suffers as well but I'm not really qualified to evaluate that). A word of advice: overuse of rich color is neither clever nor novel nor enough to qualify as art.
Same goes for: Hollywood, Anime, New Wave French Cinema, Independent Film, Film Noir, Bollywood, Japanese Ultra-violence, English Period Drama, and all the other sacred cows of videophiles.
Fortunately, 10% of any genre is not crap, so there's still good stuff to watch. Just keep in mind, while no other film center may be as widely distributed as Hollywood, they can make films that are just as crappy or good.
Wow, look at all that weathering. I see lots of creeks and rivers flowing through mountains, hills, and flats to and lakes and/or seas. Those stones look really worn too - lots of smooth round objects on the ground.
Pirated DVDs actually bring money into the local/Chinese economy and encourage trade. Online piracy doesn't, since no money changes hands. So from a Chinese perspective, this guy really was hurting the economy for much the same reasons as the *AA claims, just with the added irony of those reasons being themselves illegal in a much more conventional sense.
I watched and loved TRON as a kid. I actually tried to make a Halloween costume with glow in the dark paint that would look similar at one point. I looked back on it with fond memories for a long time, until one day in college when I decided to rent it for old times sake...
What a piece of crap!
The plot was total jibberish. The techno was all babble. All it had going for it was the look, and the look had become pretty dated. If they're going to redo TRON, they're going to have do a pretty extensive rewrite, because people know waaaaay more about computers now than they did then. Frankly, the whole concept is bogus - all the software I know is brain-dead, the whole idea of interacting like people inside the machine is bogus. Maybe if the characters were Users and new AIs, up against a super-AI MCP, I would buy it. But don't try to pretend that current software has brains, even if it would be fun to anthropromorphize (A fat Microsoft Office, a shifty Kazaa, old Mosaic web-browser... the possibilities are endless).
And speaking of politics... as a Mac user I cringe at what a Pixar-spurned Disney might have to say on that subject. OTOH, if Pixar were in charge of the project I think it might actually be decent (Pixar is the only company that has actually done 3D animation right so far) and at least neutral, if not amusingly pro-Mac.
For a semi-amusing look at another anthropomorphized computer-themed show, check out an anime called "Buttobi CPU", known in the American market as "I Dream Of Mimi". The bad guys are all Nacintosh computers, the good guys being... some Japanese brand. Did I mention the computers are all hot chicks who get naked a lot and have interesting ways of "interfacing" and getting "upgraded", amongst themselves and their masters?
1) Cheap good mac for computer labs. Existing monitors and peripherals work with it, which really adds up.
2) Switcher bait. On their website they suggest getting one of those boxes that lets you share your peripherals between two machines. The idea being a side-by-side comparison of the two architectures. Pretty bold.
3) The "Extra" computer. Low cost makes it easy to buy. Very small size makes it easy to use and carry anywhere. Something for the kids or the wife. Potentially, Xgrid-using mac apps could easily leverage the processing power of this machine or other macs on the network, making your home network much more powerful also. Easy networking helps also.
4) Media center trojan. So you decide to upgrade to latest and greatest, what do you do with your still functional mac mini? With a few minor adaptors and a remote these could potentially be rather capable media centers. They already support analog video, and don't most new HDTVs have firewire? A hard drive upgrade and a superdrive could make for a formidable machine.
They should have canned TextWrangler and lowered the price of bbedit.
Now all they've ensured is that people who have been using bbedit lite all these years get an upgrade to something almost as good as bbedit (like me... I was sometimes switching to SubEthaEdit but that slows down on big files), and low-end bbedit users will go with the free TextWrangler instead.
Formula D is obviously capitalizing off of popular anime Initial D. The manga version of which is sold at Radio Shack next to the RC cars. So there's plenty of geek interest there.
As for Girls Gone Wired... that's just another example of how patheticly detached from reality our culture has become. It'll be boring though.
(Side note: In terms of which anime is appropriate for kids to watch and which aren't, Initial D is #1 on my list for teens not too watch. That last thing you need is for them to display "imitiative behavior" and illegally race cars down treacherous mountain roads.)
Put this in perspective for me... how does it compare to SolidWorks? I found that super easy to use, but perhaps not as powerful as some other packages.
On a semi-related note, another SF book that would make for an interesting game would be "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame. The book was so-so... but it would make for a sweet MMORPG. The basic premise is that all the gods and monsters exist by virtue of human's raw belief in them and their attributes. They go stronger and weaker because of them, and go wherever their followers go. The central conflict is between the old forgotten and weak gods - Oestre, Odin, etc. - versus the new and powerful ones - Cars, TV, etc.
A MMO game would have players randomly assigned actual historical gods - each player gets a unique one - with all their unique abilities, attributes, and needs. The goal is to curry "worship" from the NPC humans, in conflict and cooperation from other gods. So you could be Joseph Smith, and every time someone commits polygamy, or converts, you get a boost, and so forth.
Another novel of his, "Neverwhere", is similar in many respects but has a different background. In that one, the world is full of unusual people who are simply unnoticed by normal folks, and who live in places where no one ever thinks to look.
I already went into this a while ago in a journal entry. In a nutshell, efficient p2p solutions similar to BitTorrent can greatly defray the costs of distributing content, making directly offering your movies and shows online a viable solution for small production companies, or in fact anyone. The middlemen - networks, cable providers, DVD distributors, theater chains - could be cut out entirely. With an integrated payment system and appropriate DRM, shows could cost less to the consumer, make more profit for the producers, and have convenient simultaneous worldwide releases. As the mechanisms mature, fan websites would assume the role of the networks to help popularize, filter, and organize different shows into playlists and collections. Good shows can find their fanbase without being squashed by idiot executives, and bad ones can die quickly. The concepts of "rerun", "timeslot", "syndicated", and "out-of-print" would become irrelevant. A well designed system would allow devoted fans to allow wider spread of content, by fansubbing (independently subtitling) untranslated shows from overseas, or even more complex modifications.
The best part is, it costs very little to jump on the bandwagon once the set-top box is set up to take advantage of this style of delivery. All you need is to encode and package your existing show for online distribution. You'd be foolish to ignore this easy source of existing revenue - unless of course the exising middlemen decide to play hardball while they still hold the cards. But their strong-arm tactics won't work on the tiny producers who can grow the medium.
Tivo may not succeed in their endevour, but I think this is where the nature of mass media is heading.
You are correct - pangenesis was proposed by Darwin as a possible means of heredity, and is semi-Lamarkian. Mendel filled in that crucial piece of the puzzle. I had forgotten that aspect, it's been a while since I learned it.
However, pangenesis is NOT part of the venerable biology of Darwin, it's a theory of his that was proven wrong, is of interest only to historians of science and would rarely get more than a sentence or two in your average biology textbook. One he himself regarded as provisional. Choosing that long-discredited provisional theory as representative sample of his work is disingeneous. You think Einstein and Heisenberg never vetted a wrong idea? The present incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity means at least one of them is oversimplified, incomplete, or flawed. Those two men didn't even agree with each other - Einstein flat-out rejected Heisenberg's interpretations of the quantum. Future generations of scientists may yet look back on Einstein and his cosmological constant in the exact fashion you are regarding Darwin now.
Einstein and Heisenberg, I might add, were developing theories that were neither accessible nor threatening to the sensibilities of the layman in the 20th century. Darwin, on the other hand, and all the later students of evolution have had to constantly defend against entrenched religious and political authorities that regard evolution as a mortal threat to their existence since the 19th century. And while you'll find plenty of inspirational posters of Einstein, ask a thousand random people and you'll find hardly anyone who has ANY idea what he actually worked on (good luck finding people who have even heard of Heisenberg). The basic theory of evolution is taught at the high school level everywhere, and and even the people that have forgotten/ignored the basic mechanisms know quite well what the implication is - diverse and complex creatures and systems can arise without any direct intervention. Darwin also did quite a bit of fieldwork to develop and back up his theory - and sailing around the Earth in those times definitely took some balls. Einstein mostly worked on paper. Heisenberg probably got his hands dirty - leading the German atomic bomb project during WWII.
So, who again is supposed to be the inspiration?
And as you have indirectly pointed out, the theory of evolution goes well beyond Charles Darwin even if the core insights and original evidence did originate with him and the voyage of the Beagle. I don't know what PhDs you hang out with but I've while I hear plenty of debate over the minutia of the process I've yet to meet a single biologist who had any objections to the central tenets. I've met quite a few - I am a biologist. Hell, I work upstairs from a guy that evolves novel enzymes from only random sequence and selective pressure on a regular basis. Pray tell, if the PhDs you know think evolution as a theory has a long way to go, just how much further do they think it needs to go and what alternative hypotheses are they proposing?
I see two distinct possibilities here: A) you're Yet Another Intelligent Design Guy parroting faulty arguments you pulled off of sites like this or B) you're a pure physics/math/engineering snob who regards the relatively messy field of biology with unwarranted disdain. Please enlighten me in this regard.
Not really, just if you know she's honest then you can go by the less subtle and easier to read signs, such as when she goes "YES, YES, OH GOD DON'T STOP, DON'T STOP, aah, Aah, AH-AAAAaaaAAAAAaaAAAAHH, AAH, Aah, aahhhhhh..." and collapses. That's detectable even when it's dark.
Regardless, I know no lack of people with gay biological parents who reproduced because they felt social pressure to enter into heterosexual relationships.
Wouldn't that be a good argument for a steady increase in human homosexuality? After all, if we just followed our animal instincts any (male) gay allele would weed itself out of the gene pool. But if society/rational thought/etc. overrides that tendency, the function of that gene becomes less relevant or irrelevant, and there is less to no selective pressure for or against the various alleles, including the gay one. The distribution of alleles would then tend towards a new equilibrium.
So in this fashion, society's censure of overt homosexuality could be a key enabler of the spread of a biological cause.
I have no reason to believe so and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. I certainly wish it were true, though. Until we have a grand unified theory that says otherwise I'm going to hope anyway.
First, because strictly according to Darwin's biology if I go out and run several miles every day and then have a child, my child will be born with the uncanny ability to run well
That's a Lamarkian theory of evolution, not Darwinian.
>>>The vaginal contractions at 0.8s intervals would be very difficult to fake also. >> >>And if they're only at 0.9 s intervals, what then? > >She's overclocked?
LOL! Good one... but wouldn't that be underclocked? Either way, the real issue is whether you like your women fast or slow.
Granted they're defintely lights-on-and-facing kinds of signs. But you don't have to look for them every time (although I like seeing them), just enough to know she's not a faker.
No offense, but I feel sorry for any woman you date.
Why, because I can tell if they're enjoying themselves and work for it? I don't think it would be fair to them if I were the one having all the fun. They certainly weren't complaining about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The A380 will find a market. Crowded airlanes and gates mean bigger planes save a lot of space at critical points. Some are arguing that Boeing dropped the ball on this one.
But the flying within the US is poised for a huge shift. NASA has been working on their Small Aircraft Transportation System is designed to allow safe flight outside the big crowded airlanes and between the small uncrowded regional airports. And direct flights, even with slower planes, mean shorter flights with no transfers and less ground transportation. Once this is off the ground it will completely cannibalize the first and business class market from the big planes for anything less than trans-continental, hub-to-hub, or international flights. All that will be left will be the cattle-carrier flights for the more efficient big planes.
In otherwords, the A380 will in the near future be mainly in use for low-margin economy passengers. And they even lose a large chunk of those passengers against the inherently shorter and simpler small/medium airport direct flight.
Years of experience with foreign film and television had conclusively demonstrated that Sturgen's Law applies. This includes chinese cinema. 90% of chinese movies suck - then again, 90% of everything sucks. They may seem innovative to a neophyte, but watch a little more and you'll see that in the context of their own kind most are as predictable and shallow as anything Hollywood turns out.
In particular, I've noticed how plot coherency/novelty is often ignored in favor of eye candy. (I suspect dialogue suffers as well but I'm not really qualified to evaluate that). A word of advice: overuse of rich color is neither clever nor novel nor enough to qualify as art.
Same goes for: Hollywood, Anime, New Wave French Cinema, Independent Film, Film Noir, Bollywood, Japanese Ultra-violence, English Period Drama, and all the other sacred cows of videophiles.
Fortunately, 10% of any genre is not crap, so there's still good stuff to watch. Just keep in mind, while no other film center may be as widely distributed as Hollywood, they can make films that are just as crappy or good.
Wow, look at all that weathering. I see lots of creeks and rivers flowing through mountains, hills, and flats to and lakes and/or seas. Those stones look really worn too - lots of smooth round objects on the ground.
Pirated DVDs actually bring money into the local/Chinese economy and encourage trade. Online piracy doesn't, since no money changes hands. So from a Chinese perspective, this guy really was hurting the economy for much the same reasons as the *AA claims, just with the added irony of those reasons being themselves illegal in a much more conventional sense.
Dude, cheesy movies are why video stores were invented. I rented it on a whim off NetFlix.
I watched and loved TRON as a kid. I actually tried to make a Halloween costume with glow in the dark paint that would look similar at one point. I looked back on it with fond memories for a long time, until one day in college when I decided to rent it for old times sake...
What a piece of crap!
The plot was total jibberish. The techno was all babble. All it had going for it was the look, and the look had become pretty dated. If they're going to redo TRON, they're going to have do a pretty extensive rewrite, because people know waaaaay more about computers now than they did then. Frankly, the whole concept is bogus - all the software I know is brain-dead, the whole idea of interacting like people inside the machine is bogus. Maybe if the characters were Users and new AIs, up against a super-AI MCP, I would buy it. But don't try to pretend that current software has brains, even if it would be fun to anthropromorphize (A fat Microsoft Office, a shifty Kazaa, old Mosaic web-browser... the possibilities are endless).
And speaking of politics... as a Mac user I cringe at what a Pixar-spurned Disney might have to say on that subject. OTOH, if Pixar were in charge of the project I think it might actually be decent (Pixar is the only company that has actually done 3D animation right so far) and at least neutral, if not amusingly pro-Mac.
For a semi-amusing look at another anthropomorphized computer-themed show, check out an anime called "Buttobi CPU", known in the American market as "I Dream Of Mimi". The bad guys are all Nacintosh computers, the good guys being... some Japanese brand. Did I mention the computers are all hot chicks who get naked a lot and have interesting ways of "interfacing" and getting "upgraded", amongst themselves and their masters?
The iMac looks like a 3-pronged attack:
1) Cheap good mac for computer labs. Existing monitors and peripherals work with it, which really adds up.
2) Switcher bait. On their website they suggest getting one of those boxes that lets you share your peripherals between two machines. The idea being a side-by-side comparison of the two architectures. Pretty bold.
3) The "Extra" computer. Low cost makes it easy to buy. Very small size makes it easy to use and carry anywhere. Something for the kids or the wife. Potentially, Xgrid-using mac apps could easily leverage the processing power of this machine or other macs on the network, making your home network much more powerful also. Easy networking helps also.
4) Media center trojan. So you decide to upgrade to latest and greatest, what do you do with your still functional mac mini? With a few minor adaptors and a remote these could potentially be rather capable media centers. They already support analog video, and don't most new HDTVs have firewire? A hard drive upgrade and a superdrive could make for a formidable machine.
They should have canned TextWrangler and lowered the price of bbedit.
Now all they've ensured is that people who have been using bbedit lite all these years get an upgrade to something almost as good as bbedit (like me... I was sometimes switching to SubEthaEdit but that slows down on big files), and low-end bbedit users will go with the free TextWrangler instead.
There is a very very slim chance that you may one day bang Angelina Jolie. But you will never ever bang Lara Croft.
Still a big difference between fantasy real girls and fantasy fake girls.
Formula D is obviously capitalizing off of popular anime Initial D. The manga version of which is sold at Radio Shack next to the RC cars. So there's plenty of geek interest there.
As for Girls Gone Wired... that's just another example of how patheticly detached from reality our culture has become. It'll be boring though.
(Side note: In terms of which anime is appropriate for kids to watch and which aren't, Initial D is #1 on my list for teens not too watch. That last thing you need is for them to display "imitiative behavior" and illegally race cars down treacherous mountain roads.)
Put this in perspective for me... how does it compare to SolidWorks? I found that super easy to use, but perhaps not as powerful as some other packages.
I was going to say that.
On a semi-related note, another SF book that would make for an interesting game would be "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman of Sandman fame. The book was so-so... but it would make for a sweet MMORPG. The basic premise is that all the gods and monsters exist by virtue of human's raw belief in them and their attributes. They go stronger and weaker because of them, and go wherever their followers go. The central conflict is between the old forgotten and weak gods - Oestre, Odin, etc. - versus the new and powerful ones - Cars, TV, etc.
A MMO game would have players randomly assigned actual historical gods - each player gets a unique one - with all their unique abilities, attributes, and needs. The goal is to curry "worship" from the NPC humans, in conflict and cooperation from other gods. So you could be Joseph Smith, and every time someone commits polygamy, or converts, you get a boost, and so forth.
Another novel of his, "Neverwhere", is similar in many respects but has a different background. In that one, the world is full of unusual people who are simply unnoticed by normal folks, and who live in places where no one ever thinks to look.
I already went into this a while ago in a journal entry. In a nutshell, efficient p2p solutions similar to BitTorrent can greatly defray the costs of distributing content, making directly offering your movies and shows online a viable solution for small production companies, or in fact anyone. The middlemen - networks, cable providers, DVD distributors, theater chains - could be cut out entirely. With an integrated payment system and appropriate DRM, shows could cost less to the consumer, make more profit for the producers, and have convenient simultaneous worldwide releases. As the mechanisms mature, fan websites would assume the role of the networks to help popularize, filter, and organize different shows into playlists and collections. Good shows can find their fanbase without being squashed by idiot executives, and bad ones can die quickly. The concepts of "rerun", "timeslot", "syndicated", and "out-of-print" would become irrelevant. A well designed system would allow devoted fans to allow wider spread of content, by fansubbing (independently subtitling) untranslated shows from overseas, or even more complex modifications.
The best part is, it costs very little to jump on the bandwagon once the set-top box is set up to take advantage of this style of delivery. All you need is to encode and package your existing show for online distribution. You'd be foolish to ignore this easy source of existing revenue - unless of course the exising middlemen decide to play hardball while they still hold the cards. But their strong-arm tactics won't work on the tiny producers who can grow the medium.
Tivo may not succeed in their endevour, but I think this is where the nature of mass media is heading.
You are correct - pangenesis was proposed by Darwin as a possible means of heredity, and is semi-Lamarkian. Mendel filled in that crucial piece of the puzzle. I had forgotten that aspect, it's been a while since I learned it.
However, pangenesis is NOT part of the venerable biology of Darwin, it's a theory of his that was proven wrong, is of interest only to historians of science and would rarely get more than a sentence or two in your average biology textbook. One he himself regarded as provisional. Choosing that long-discredited provisional theory as representative sample of his work is disingeneous. You think Einstein and Heisenberg never vetted a wrong idea? The present incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity means at least one of them is oversimplified, incomplete, or flawed. Those two men didn't even agree with each other - Einstein flat-out rejected Heisenberg's interpretations of the quantum. Future generations of scientists may yet look back on Einstein and his cosmological constant in the exact fashion you are regarding Darwin now.
Einstein and Heisenberg, I might add, were developing theories that were neither accessible nor threatening to the sensibilities of the layman in the 20th century. Darwin, on the other hand, and all the later students of evolution have had to constantly defend against entrenched religious and political authorities that regard evolution as a mortal threat to their existence since the 19th century. And while you'll find plenty of inspirational posters of Einstein, ask a thousand random people and you'll find hardly anyone who has ANY idea what he actually worked on (good luck finding people who have even heard of Heisenberg). The basic theory of evolution is taught at the high school level everywhere, and and even the people that have forgotten/ignored the basic mechanisms know quite well what the implication is - diverse and complex creatures and systems can arise without any direct intervention. Darwin also did quite a bit of fieldwork to develop and back up his theory - and sailing around the Earth in those times definitely took some balls. Einstein mostly worked on paper. Heisenberg probably got his hands dirty - leading the German atomic bomb project during WWII.
So, who again is supposed to be the inspiration?
And as you have indirectly pointed out, the theory of evolution goes well beyond Charles Darwin even if the core insights and original evidence did originate with him and the voyage of the Beagle. I don't know what PhDs you hang out with but I've while I hear plenty of debate over the minutia of the process I've yet to meet a single biologist who had any objections to the central tenets. I've met quite a few - I am a biologist. Hell, I work upstairs from a guy that evolves novel enzymes from only random sequence and selective pressure on a regular basis. Pray tell, if the PhDs you know think evolution as a theory has a long way to go, just how much further do they think it needs to go and what alternative hypotheses are they proposing?
I see two distinct possibilities here: A) you're Yet Another Intelligent Design Guy parroting faulty arguments you pulled off of sites like this or B) you're a pure physics/math/engineering snob who regards the relatively messy field of biology with unwarranted disdain. Please enlighten me in this regard.
Not really, just if you know she's honest then you can go by the less subtle and easier to read signs, such as when she goes "YES, YES, OH GOD DON'T STOP, DON'T STOP, aah, Aah, AH-AAAAaaaAAAAAaaAAAAHH, AAH, Aah, aahhhhhh..." and collapses. That's detectable even when it's dark.
Regardless, I know no lack of people with gay biological parents who reproduced because they felt social pressure to enter into heterosexual relationships.
Wouldn't that be a good argument for a steady increase in human homosexuality? After all, if we just followed our animal instincts any (male) gay allele would weed itself out of the gene pool. But if society/rational thought/etc. overrides that tendency, the function of that gene becomes less relevant or irrelevant, and there is less to no selective pressure for or against the various alleles, including the gay one. The distribution of alleles would then tend towards a new equilibrium.
So in this fashion, society's censure of overt homosexuality could be a key enabler of the spread of a biological cause.
I have no reason to believe so and a fair amount of evidence to the contrary. I certainly wish it were true, though. Until we have a grand unified theory that says otherwise I'm going to hope anyway.
First, because strictly according to Darwin's biology if I go out and run several miles every day and then have a child, my child will be born with the uncanny ability to run well
That's a Lamarkian theory of evolution, not Darwinian.
Why am I even responding to this idiotic drivel?
Where's your sense of rhythm?
Good lovemaking requires no accessories. Except maybe a towel. (Hitchhiker's Guide was right!)
I do feel sorry for her dog, which inevitably took the blame on that one!
One more reason why dogs are the best family pet.
I believe the word you're looking for is cuckholding.
>>>The vaginal contractions at 0.8s intervals would be very difficult to fake also.
>>
>>And if they're only at 0.9 s intervals, what then?
>
>She's overclocked?
LOL! Good one... but wouldn't that be underclocked? Either way, the real issue is whether you like your women fast or slow.
They have ping-pong tables in there. I can't prove it, but I jusk know it must be true.
Granted they're defintely lights-on-and-facing kinds of signs. But you don't have to look for them every time (although I like seeing them), just enough to know she's not a faker.
No offense, but I feel sorry for any woman you date.
Why, because I can tell if they're enjoying themselves and work for it? I don't think it would be fair to them if I were the one having all the fun. They certainly weren't complaining about it.