The storm trooper helmets are based on Samurai armor, which sometimes had elaborate artificial faces, including facial hair. I've seen Roman battle masks with faces too.
The effect is creepy, because the face doesn't change. You can attack them or vice versa; the soldier can kill or be at your mercy, but the face doesn't show anything.
The storm troopers, I'd argue, aren't what we'd think of as a military force. They're more like an internal security force. The uniform is highly effective if you want to turn somebody into a killer, because it makes every trooper anonymous. I visited Chile shortly after Pinochet was out, and the carbineros (federal police) still liked to wear their mirror sunglasses. Getting pulled over by these guys who'd been disappearing people a couple years ago was intimidating.
I think you're on the right track about the appeal, but I'd be a lot more convinced it was *intentional* if you could point to examples of top notch dialog written by Lucas.
The parallels with the cheesy old serials of yore are more than skin deep. If you look at the original Star Wars movie, its charm comes from its break neck pacing. There was so much wonderful throwaway stuff, like the cantina musicians playing Benny Goodman, but if you'd taken a good look at them they'd have looked cheesy: their faces and mouths didn't move. Instead we get a glimpse of them, and by the time we've recognized what's going on the film moves on. The cantina musician costumes were very good *for the amount of screen time they got*. They'd have been terrible for a longer scene, but as we learned from later Lucas works longer scenes have their own drawbacks.
So it's the same thing driving both the old serials and the original Star Wars movie: the director had to cram a lot of things into the movie cheaply enough, and that means not giving you too good a look at them.
That said, I don't see how better dialog could have harmed the movie. "Good" doesn't mean declaiming like in Shakespeare, it means appropriate to the story and how the story is told. Like the cantina musician masks, the dialog in the movie serves well enough. Later, when Lucas had the resources to make a movie as big as he wanted, we really see his artistic limitations. Things might have been different if Star Wars had only been a moderate success; he might have grown more as an artist.
Oh, that one's easy. The bridge officers don't want them because if there is ever a bad accident they think their chances are better if they're thrown clear of the ship.
Well, the storm troopers' battle ineffectiveness is actually one of the few things that ring true about the Star Wars universe.
Once you've got control of the galaxy, you don't want an effective fighting force. Who are you going to use them against? What you want is an effective *intimidation* force that is unable to fight effectively against your smaller but more capable praetorian guard. You keep your praetorian guard divided and intimidated by the higher ups too. Everybody in the galaxy is afraid of the guys just above him, except of course *you*.
Look at military dictatorships. Once they settle in, they're guaranteed to have a totally pathetic fighting capability, despite despoiling the land to support their military. Hitler inherited a capable military culture, so why did he build the smaller parallel Waffen-SS? Because if he had won WW2, he'd have let the regular military stagnate, keeping them under the thumb of a smaller force that he'd keep under his personal thumb. The result would look a lot like the Star Wars Imperial forces. At every level people would be intimidated by those just above them. At the bottom would be the people of course, but the "fighting" forces just above them wouldn't be much more capable than them.
The Death Star confirms this political strategy. Aside from its well known engineering fault, it would be extremely inefficient from a strategic standpoint when compared to a fleet of Star Destroyers of a equivalent displacement. It isn't a weapon designed to achieve strategic superiority, it's designed to keep a relatively small number of individuals in line. In fact, that's exactly how it was used in its one successful engagement. Won't tell us the location of the secret base, princess? Take THAT.
I agree. Every time I've ever profiled code, I've been amazed at how much time is spent in such tiny portions of the code.
It's an interesting exercise though. I've only done a little assembler, but my thoughts were that if I did more of this I could get pretty good at it. The trick in any kind of programming is to learn to express *ideas*. I learned several different programming paradigms over the course of my career, and while I'm doing OO like everyone else these days, having tried functional programming makes me a better programmer.
I could imagine doing non-trivial systems in assembler, but mainly if the problem domain and its solutions are very well understood. When you see that 1% of your code is taking 99% of your execution time, you *could* tighten that code and get an immediate payback, or you could try understand the problem better in order to find a more efficient algorithm. If you can improve your algorithms, that's almost always going to be a bigger win.
We've been making essentially modern operating systems (virtual memory, process scheduling etc.) for a long time. If you just wanted to implement the textbook approaches for everything, and didn't care about architecture portability, it seems pretty feasible for a couple of guys to make a reasonably credible OS in assembler, provided they knew their OS stuff and were very good assembly programmers. Obviously the C with assembly for tight loops approach is a quicker path to a usable system, but the fact that they're assembly enthusiasts probably means they'll get more benefit out assembler where it is most useful and less benefit out of C where assembler is least useful than a sane programmer would. And it's always worthwhile to demonstrate the limits of conventional wisdom.
SInce you work in embedded systems, I don't have to tell you that upgrading your processor in six months isn't always an option.
As we get older, we're supposed to get wiser, but in fact as I get older I don't see most of my peers changing much at all. They were closed minded, ignorant,and obstreperously intolerant youths, and they're aging into closed minded, ignorant and obstreperously intolerant elders. The world moves past them; it changes and they don't change with it. They're too picky about who they learn from to learn much at all. As youths, they see the experiences of their elders as belonging to an irrelevant, bygone age. As elders, they've become certain that every thought worth having must have already passed through their heads.
Here's a test: if as a young person you can and do have friends older than yourself, chances are you'll have young friends when you are older. That's a nice thing when your old friends start to die, but just as importantly it means you'll probably keep learning things as you get older. Young people who think they can't learn anything from their elders are right, but they don't realize that's because they're already rotting from the head down. Sooner or later they'll become exactly the kind of old fogey they despise, because they've already got the attitude. All they need is a few decades.
For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
WRONG. Dr. Seuss will live forever.
It's like when Jim Henson died, and the media wrung their hands over how to explain to children that Kermit the Frog died. What kind of parent would tell a child such an abominable lie? It's a shame that an artistic genius like Jim Henson died so young, but his creations live on.
You can date when I learned electronics by the following facts: (1) I was shown how to build circuits on a bakelite terminal strip, although I never did it for real; (2) I was also shown how to wire wrap.
I don't know where you get the idea that Honda isn't trying to make money on them.
The press. It's not that they intend to lose money, especially in the long term, but the program was never meant to be a cash cow. If it breaks even at the very low sales volumes they have, it'll be a success for them. The takeaway is not being left in the dust by Toyota's hybrid technology experience and capabilities.
The Insight may look like a Fit, but they aren't the same car. For one thing the Insight has an aluminum body and weighs 200 kg less. If they were the same car, then introducing a "Hybrid Fit" next year would be silly.
I can't vouch for what you heard or read somewhere, but Car and Driver's mileage on the 2010 Insight was 46. Other articles I've read where the test was repeated found considerable variation. One I read had 38 MPG on the first run through, and 10MPG higher on subsequent runs, due to differences in driving style. The first time true was putting the car through its paces. Sites where consumers report their mileage are probably skewed by hypermilers, but in general show that getting mileage close to 50MPG is not unrealistic for many drivers.
By the way I'm not disagreeing with your point, only your evidence. The Insight/Fit comparison is not completely unreasonable in that they are both small cars that aren't too far apart in price. But extrapolating anything about the economics of the underlying technology from this is not valid. A comparison between a Hybrid Civic and conventional Civic would be better. Going by EPA combined that's 42 vs. 29 MPG, a 13MPG gain at a cost of about $8000. Eyeballing that, it would seem to come out to something like a 12 year payback.
In any case, we don't want to conclude too much about the fundamental economic viability of the technology. Hybrid technology is not nearly as mature as conventional ICE technology. Honda is not being stupid here, it's looking at the long term.
Comparing the Fit to the Insight doesn't make sense. The Insight is practically a concept car, designed as a real-world test bed for hybrid drivetrain and fuel saving technology. If the Insight had the same markup as the Fit, it would be waay more expensive. It's not built to generate cash, but rather know-how. That's that long-term planning thing we keep hearing about in action.
The EPA testing methodology for MPG is pretty out of whack here in any case. The auto press has been reporting mileage in the 50-60 MPG range with the 2010 Insight, the EPA 43/40 highway/city estimate notwithstanding. Actual user reports (discounting the hypermilng outliers who report high 50s to low 60s) seem to be in the high 40s to low 50s, although again this may be due to hypermiling behavior. The same can be said for the Fit, although the mean seems to be around 33. So the spread between the Fit and Insight seems more like 15MPG rather than 10. That's still a long payback, but a lot better than 9 years.
In any case, we'll be able to look at this argument a lot more closely next year, when the hybrid version of the Fit becomes available.
The behavior is highly breed specific. Some breeds are so defensive of their owners they'll automatically stand between them and any strangers. Small terriers whose ancestors were bred for courage can do amazing things. There was a case a couple years ago in Australia where an elderly Jack Russel terrier drove off a pair of pit bulls who attacked some children it had been playing with (the little terrier died as a result).
Well, sure. And *White Heat* is just another gangster movie. *Casablanca* is another movie with Nazi villains.
You can't do a lot of exposition in a commercial length film, so films deal in archetypes. It's how those archetypes are used that matters.
An amoral corporation isn't any more implausible or fictional than an arrogant SS officer. In some ways it's more interesting, especially in a movie with aliens and robots. Like robots corporations are artificial persons which operate according to rules *we* ordain for them. If we don't like the consequences, it's our own fault. On the other hand it's interesting to speculate that under our laws aliens might *not* be recognized as legal persons, even though corporations are and enjoy many of the rights of natural persons.
There's a lot of interesting material to mine there.
Alternatively, if you don't live near any red states, drive into Massachusetts with the hard drive hidden behind one of those "My gun has killed less people than Ted Kennedy's car" bumper stickers;)
Sure, because we've never seen one of *those* before. Good gracious you are a saucy fellow! The only conceivable way you could wound us more would be to write it in French, so we'll know the message is meant for us.
It seems to me that airlines react to economic stress by concentrating passengers.
I was scheduled to fly out of Boston to LA on 9/11/2001, but had the office manager cancel the trip a few days in advance. I don't know if I was scheduled to go on one of the planes that flew into the WTC, and I never looked at my old itinerary because I didn't *want* to know. But I did take that trip in October, the first week after Logan reopened, and I remember being amazed at how mobbed Phoenix Sky Harbor was as I changed planes there, despite air travel supposedly being way down. The airlines were funneling more passengers through their hubs.
I'm guessing these monster planes, aside from carrying passengers on long haul international flights, will help the major airlines move more passengers on fewer flights through their major hubs. The whole point of a major airline is that you can get any place from any place. I can drive up to Manchester NH and fly a major carrier to Sacramento CA. Airlines like JetBlue cherry pick direct flights, so I can drive down to Boston, fly to San Francisco on JetBlue, and drive to Sacramento. They routes they fly are simpler and more lucrative, but if you can't get from point A to B direct, it's murder to travel on their network.
I am not an economist or an industry analyst, just somebody who's taken enough commercial airline flights to last him a lifetime. I'm guessing that an airliner like the A380 or 787 might increase the economies of scale the major airlines have, resulting in cheaper airfares provided you don't mind taking two or even three planes to get where you are going.
On the other hand, it keeps the best composite material manufacturing expertise in Japan. Should a Japanese company ever be interested in producing a 787 competitor, they could locate across the street (figuratively speaking) from the producers of the components most tied to design in a fiddly and complex way. That could help the competitor develop a more iterative, agile approach to design.
It seems to me that a lot depends on how well the information technology works. Back in the 80s when there was a mania for Japanese manufacturing methods, a lot of people here were surprised that the Japanese production systems weren't heavily computerized. In fact the communication systems were often amazingly low tech for such coordination dependent methods, people relayed signals to each other like athletes on a sports team. When you go global like this, your IT has got to pick up the slack because you can't wave to some guy down the production line. Your virtual reality design software has got to fit each piece together, and the measurement and testing procedures have got to confirm that each piece conforms to what the model assumes it to be.
And your people have to be really good too. Cultural nuances about what constitutes a yes, no, and non-committal answers to a question can be costly. I learned that when my employer hired a team of Indian H1B software engineers for me to lead. It was the usual mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly, generally weighted towards the good. These guys spoke perfect colloquial English, so it was easy to overlook subtle differences in the way incipient problems were communicated. They didn't give news that reflected badly on my judgment (guesses) in writing, or if anybody else were present. They didn't want to be the one who pointed out the boss's fallibility in public. Anybody would be, but the difference in what constitutes "insubordination" was a matter of degree I hadn't grasped before. Yet as a manager, information about how I was wrong was what I needed most. Eventually I learned that if I had a face to face, heart to heart talk with each of my engineers, I could learn what I needed to know. I don't know how I would have done it by email and teleconferencing.
What this means by 'surprises' is people hacking the network and getting free phone calls.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Seriously though, being attractive to hackers, black and white hat, really is a good thing, because it means a system is open and flexible. Naturally, you want the black hats' efforts to be thwarted, but a system that isn't attractive to a hacker probably isn't going to be attractive to a user.
I remember being excited when GSM was first put forward, but the US government decided that competition between *standards* would result in a better network. That's going to be an economic case study for future generations, because while each system in use in the US has its advantages, the bottom line is that carriers used that freedom to *evade* competition, to tie users to their networks and make switching as inconvenient as possible. You can't get the phone you want on the network you want, and if they had their way they'd tie *content* to their network too. The exciting thing about GSM is that it is built on the assumption that wireless networking is a commodity and that networks would have to compete with each other with *no* barrier to users switching.
Why in the world would I want to buy music from the company that provides me with *network access*? It's a profoundly stupid idea, one that only exists because consumers don't have the freedom to choose the devices and networking services they want a la carte.
Not to mention CLA (a kind of trans-fat) - probably good.
The best advice I'd guess is to eat like a primitive modern human. That means eating plant matter pretty much all the time (like you were foraging) and enjoying meat but maybe not every day and always in conjunction with an active lifestyle.
I'd also limit foods whose nutritional profile have been heavily manipulated, other than by normal cooking (modern humans evolved to eat cooked food, the raw food movement notwithstanding). Those manipulated foods include hydrogenated oils and animals who have been fed artificial diets to increase their market weight. The "you are what you eat" advice applies to animal feed. Fish do not create Omega 3 fatty acids; they bio-accumulate those up the food chain from algae. Feed lot diets aren't aimed at creating healthy animals, they're aimed at creating heavy animals ripe for the slaughter, and you are what you eat.
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By all means then mod me offtopic. However I thought most people would realize that 100-16 is 84, not 79.
C'mon moderators, are you totally incapable of recognizing irony, even when *labeled* as such?
I've got to metamoderate more.
The storm trooper helmets are based on Samurai armor, which sometimes had elaborate artificial faces, including facial hair. I've seen Roman battle masks with faces too.
The effect is creepy, because the face doesn't change. You can attack them or vice versa; the soldier can kill or be at your mercy, but the face doesn't show anything.
The storm troopers, I'd argue, aren't what we'd think of as a military force. They're more like an internal security force. The uniform is highly effective if you want to turn somebody into a killer, because it makes every trooper anonymous. I visited Chile shortly after Pinochet was out, and the carbineros (federal police) still liked to wear their mirror sunglasses. Getting pulled over by these guys who'd been disappearing people a couple years ago was intimidating.
I think you're on the right track about the appeal, but I'd be a lot more convinced it was *intentional* if you could point to examples of top notch dialog written by Lucas.
The parallels with the cheesy old serials of yore are more than skin deep. If you look at the original Star Wars movie, its charm comes from its break neck pacing. There was so much wonderful throwaway stuff, like the cantina musicians playing Benny Goodman, but if you'd taken a good look at them they'd have looked cheesy: their faces and mouths didn't move. Instead we get a glimpse of them, and by the time we've recognized what's going on the film moves on. The cantina musician costumes were very good *for the amount of screen time they got*. They'd have been terrible for a longer scene, but as we learned from later Lucas works longer scenes have their own drawbacks.
So it's the same thing driving both the old serials and the original Star Wars movie: the director had to cram a lot of things into the movie cheaply enough, and that means not giving you too good a look at them.
That said, I don't see how better dialog could have harmed the movie. "Good" doesn't mean declaiming like in Shakespeare, it means appropriate to the story and how the story is told. Like the cantina musician masks, the dialog in the movie serves well enough. Later, when Lucas had the resources to make a movie as big as he wanted, we really see his artistic limitations. Things might have been different if Star Wars had only been a moderate success; he might have grown more as an artist.
5 points deducted for failing to use the word "semiotics".
10 points deducted for failing to cite Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" essay.
1 point deducted for comprehensible syntax.
Final grade after deducting 16 points from a maximum total of 100: 79.
Oh, that one's easy. The bridge officers don't want them because if there is ever a bad accident they think their chances are better if they're thrown clear of the ship.
Well, the storm troopers' battle ineffectiveness is actually one of the few things that ring true about the Star Wars universe.
Once you've got control of the galaxy, you don't want an effective fighting force. Who are you going to use them against? What you want is an effective *intimidation* force that is unable to fight effectively against your smaller but more capable praetorian guard. You keep your praetorian guard divided and intimidated by the higher ups too. Everybody in the galaxy is afraid of the guys just above him, except of course *you*.
Look at military dictatorships. Once they settle in, they're guaranteed to have a totally pathetic fighting capability, despite despoiling the land to support their military. Hitler inherited a capable military culture, so why did he build the smaller parallel Waffen-SS? Because if he had won WW2, he'd have let the regular military stagnate, keeping them under the thumb of a smaller force that he'd keep under his personal thumb. The result would look a lot like the Star Wars Imperial forces. At every level people would be intimidated by those just above them. At the bottom would be the people of course, but the "fighting" forces just above them wouldn't be much more capable than them.
The Death Star confirms this political strategy. Aside from its well known engineering fault, it would be extremely inefficient from a strategic standpoint when compared to a fleet of Star Destroyers of a equivalent displacement. It isn't a weapon designed to achieve strategic superiority, it's designed to keep a relatively small number of individuals in line. In fact, that's exactly how it was used in its one successful engagement. Won't tell us the location of the secret base, princess? Take THAT.
I agree. Every time I've ever profiled code, I've been amazed at how much time is spent in such tiny portions of the code.
It's an interesting exercise though. I've only done a little assembler, but my thoughts were that if I did more of this I could get pretty good at it. The trick in any kind of programming is to learn to express *ideas*. I learned several different programming paradigms over the course of my career, and while I'm doing OO like everyone else these days, having tried functional programming makes me a better programmer.
I could imagine doing non-trivial systems in assembler, but mainly if the problem domain and its solutions are very well understood. When you see that 1% of your code is taking 99% of your execution time, you *could* tighten that code and get an immediate payback, or you could try understand the problem better in order to find a more efficient algorithm. If you can improve your algorithms, that's almost always going to be a bigger win.
We've been making essentially modern operating systems (virtual memory, process scheduling etc.) for a long time. If you just wanted to implement the textbook approaches for everything, and didn't care about architecture portability, it seems pretty feasible for a couple of guys to make a reasonably credible OS in assembler, provided they knew their OS stuff and were very good assembly programmers. Obviously the C with assembly for tight loops approach is a quicker path to a usable system, but the fact that they're assembly enthusiasts probably means they'll get more benefit out assembler where it is most useful and less benefit out of C where assembler is least useful than a sane programmer would. And it's always worthwhile to demonstrate the limits of conventional wisdom.
SInce you work in embedded systems, I don't have to tell you that upgrading your processor in six months isn't always an option.
Born in the 80s?
No, you are still young in body. But that's OK.
As we get older, we're supposed to get wiser, but in fact as I get older I don't see most of my peers changing much at all. They were closed minded, ignorant,and obstreperously intolerant youths, and they're aging into closed minded, ignorant and obstreperously intolerant elders. The world moves past them; it changes and they don't change with it. They're too picky about who they learn from to learn much at all. As youths, they see the experiences of their elders as belonging to an irrelevant, bygone age. As elders, they've become certain that every thought worth having must have already passed through their heads.
Here's a test: if as a young person you can and do have friends older than yourself, chances are you'll have young friends when you are older. That's a nice thing when your old friends start to die, but just as importantly it means you'll probably keep learning things as you get older. Young people who think they can't learn anything from their elders are right, but they don't realize that's because they're already rotting from the head down. Sooner or later they'll become exactly the kind of old fogey they despise, because they've already got the attitude. All they need is a few decades.
For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.
WRONG. Dr. Seuss will live forever.
It's like when Jim Henson died, and the media wrung their hands over how to explain to children that Kermit the Frog died. What kind of parent would tell a child such an abominable lie? It's a shame that an artistic genius like Jim Henson died so young, but his creations live on.
You can date when I learned electronics by the following facts: (1) I was shown how to build circuits on a bakelite terminal strip, although I never did it for real; (2) I was also shown how to wire wrap.
What gives you the right to say that?
Age.
Now be a good boy and go freshen up Grandpa's whiskey.
I don't know where you get the idea that Honda isn't trying to make money on them.
The press. It's not that they intend to lose money, especially in the long term, but the program was never meant to be a cash cow. If it breaks even at the very low sales volumes they have, it'll be a success for them. The takeaway is not being left in the dust by Toyota's hybrid technology experience and capabilities.
The Insight may look like a Fit, but they aren't the same car. For one thing the Insight has an aluminum body and weighs 200 kg less. If they were the same car, then introducing a "Hybrid Fit" next year would be silly.
I can't vouch for what you heard or read somewhere, but Car and Driver's mileage on the 2010 Insight was 46. Other articles I've read where the test was repeated found considerable variation. One I read had 38 MPG on the first run through, and 10MPG higher on subsequent runs, due to differences in driving style. The first time true was putting the car through its paces. Sites where consumers report their mileage are probably skewed by hypermilers, but in general show that getting mileage close to 50MPG is not unrealistic for many drivers.
By the way I'm not disagreeing with your point, only your evidence. The Insight/Fit comparison is not completely unreasonable in that they are both small cars that aren't too far apart in price. But extrapolating anything about the economics of the underlying technology from this is not valid. A comparison between a Hybrid Civic and conventional Civic would be better. Going by EPA combined that's 42 vs. 29 MPG, a 13MPG gain at a cost of about $8000. Eyeballing that, it would seem to come out to something like a 12 year payback.
In any case, we don't want to conclude too much about the fundamental economic viability of the technology. Hybrid technology is not nearly as mature as conventional ICE technology. Honda is not being stupid here, it's looking at the long term.
Comparing the Fit to the Insight doesn't make sense. The Insight is practically a concept car, designed as a real-world test bed for hybrid drivetrain and fuel saving technology. If the Insight had the same markup as the Fit, it would be waay more expensive. It's not built to generate cash, but rather know-how. That's that long-term planning thing we keep hearing about in action.
The EPA testing methodology for MPG is pretty out of whack here in any case. The auto press has been reporting mileage in the 50-60 MPG range with the 2010 Insight, the EPA 43/40 highway/city estimate notwithstanding. Actual user reports (discounting the hypermilng outliers who report high 50s to low 60s) seem to be in the high 40s to low 50s, although again this may be due to hypermiling behavior. The same can be said for the Fit, although the mean seems to be around 33. So the spread between the Fit and Insight seems more like 15MPG rather than 10. That's still a long payback, but a lot better than 9 years.
In any case, we'll be able to look at this argument a lot more closely next year, when the hybrid version of the Fit becomes available.
Ahhh, the human imagination and psyche.
Isn't it nice to be above all that?
The behavior is highly breed specific. Some breeds are so defensive of their owners they'll automatically stand between them and any strangers. Small terriers whose ancestors were bred for courage can do amazing things. There was a case a couple years ago in Australia where an elderly Jack Russel terrier drove off a pair of pit bulls who attacked some children it had been playing with (the little terrier died as a result).
And I want to be able to parasitically power other devices from it. Then I'd have a lychee wii qi.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch Game Six again. I wonder if Bill Buckner will catch the ball this time? ;)
Shows what *you* know. If sports were sex, Red Sox fandom back in the day would be BDSM.
Well, sure. And *White Heat* is just another gangster movie. *Casablanca* is another movie with Nazi villains.
You can't do a lot of exposition in a commercial length film, so films deal in archetypes. It's how those archetypes are used that matters.
An amoral corporation isn't any more implausible or fictional than an arrogant SS officer. In some ways it's more interesting, especially in a movie with aliens and robots. Like robots corporations are artificial persons which operate according to rules *we* ordain for them. If we don't like the consequences, it's our own fault. On the other hand it's interesting to speculate that under our laws aliens might *not* be recognized as legal persons, even though corporations are and enjoy many of the rights of natural persons.
There's a lot of interesting material to mine there.
Alternatively, if you don't live near any red states, drive into Massachusetts with the hard drive hidden behind one of those "My gun has killed less people than Ted Kennedy's car" bumper stickers ;)
Sure, because we've never seen one of *those* before. Good gracious you are a saucy fellow! The only conceivable way you could wound us more would be to write it in French, so we'll know the message is meant for us.
That may be true in a world where people struggle to survive.
In *our* world of high tech comfort, the danger, misery and uncertainty of the trip would have wealthy volunteers lining up to pay.
It seems to me that airlines react to economic stress by concentrating passengers.
I was scheduled to fly out of Boston to LA on 9/11/2001, but had the office manager cancel the trip a few days in advance. I don't know if I was scheduled to go on one of the planes that flew into the WTC, and I never looked at my old itinerary because I didn't *want* to know. But I did take that trip in October, the first week after Logan reopened, and I remember being amazed at how mobbed Phoenix Sky Harbor was as I changed planes there, despite air travel supposedly being way down. The airlines were funneling more passengers through their hubs.
I'm guessing these monster planes, aside from carrying passengers on long haul international flights, will help the major airlines move more passengers on fewer flights through their major hubs. The whole point of a major airline is that you can get any place from any place. I can drive up to Manchester NH and fly a major carrier to Sacramento CA. Airlines like JetBlue cherry pick direct flights, so I can drive down to Boston, fly to San Francisco on JetBlue, and drive to Sacramento. They routes they fly are simpler and more lucrative, but if you can't get from point A to B direct, it's murder to travel on their network.
I am not an economist or an industry analyst, just somebody who's taken enough commercial airline flights to last him a lifetime. I'm guessing that an airliner like the A380 or 787 might increase the economies of scale the major airlines have, resulting in cheaper airfares provided you don't mind taking two or even three planes to get where you are going.
On the other hand, it keeps the best composite material manufacturing expertise in Japan. Should a Japanese company ever be interested in producing a 787 competitor, they could locate across the street (figuratively speaking) from the producers of the components most tied to design in a fiddly and complex way. That could help the competitor develop a more iterative, agile approach to design.
It seems to me that a lot depends on how well the information technology works. Back in the 80s when there was a mania for Japanese manufacturing methods, a lot of people here were surprised that the Japanese production systems weren't heavily computerized. In fact the communication systems were often amazingly low tech for such coordination dependent methods, people relayed signals to each other like athletes on a sports team. When you go global like this, your IT has got to pick up the slack because you can't wave to some guy down the production line. Your virtual reality design software has got to fit each piece together, and the measurement and testing procedures have got to confirm that each piece conforms to what the model assumes it to be.
And your people have to be really good too. Cultural nuances about what constitutes a yes, no, and non-committal answers to a question can be costly. I learned that when my employer hired a team of Indian H1B software engineers for me to lead. It was the usual mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly, generally weighted towards the good. These guys spoke perfect colloquial English, so it was easy to overlook subtle differences in the way incipient problems were communicated. They didn't give news that reflected badly on my judgment (guesses) in writing, or if anybody else were present. They didn't want to be the one who pointed out the boss's fallibility in public. Anybody would be, but the difference in what constitutes "insubordination" was a matter of degree I hadn't grasped before. Yet as a manager, information about how I was wrong was what I needed most. Eventually I learned that if I had a face to face, heart to heart talk with each of my engineers, I could learn what I needed to know. I don't know how I would have done it by email and teleconferencing.
What this means by 'surprises' is people hacking the network and getting free phone calls.
You say that like it's a bad thing ...
Seriously though, being attractive to hackers, black and white hat, really is a good thing, because it means a system is open and flexible. Naturally, you want the black hats' efforts to be thwarted, but a system that isn't attractive to a hacker probably isn't going to be attractive to a user.
I remember being excited when GSM was first put forward, but the US government decided that competition between *standards* would result in a better network. That's going to be an economic case study for future generations, because while each system in use in the US has its advantages, the bottom line is that carriers used that freedom to *evade* competition, to tie users to their networks and make switching as inconvenient as possible. You can't get the phone you want on the network you want, and if they had their way they'd tie *content* to their network too. The exciting thing about GSM is that it is built on the assumption that wireless networking is a commodity and that networks would have to compete with each other with *no* barrier to users switching.
Why in the world would I want to buy music from the company that provides me with *network access*? It's a profoundly stupid idea, one that only exists because consumers don't have the freedom to choose the devices and networking services they want a la carte.
Not to mention CLA (a kind of trans-fat) - probably good.
The best advice I'd guess is to eat like a primitive modern human. That means eating plant matter pretty much all the time (like you were foraging) and enjoying meat but maybe not every day and always in conjunction with an active lifestyle.
I'd also limit foods whose nutritional profile have been heavily manipulated, other than by normal cooking (modern humans evolved to eat cooked food, the raw food movement notwithstanding). Those manipulated foods include hydrogenated oils and animals who have been fed artificial diets to increase their market weight. The "you are what you eat" advice applies to animal feed. Fish do not create Omega 3 fatty acids; they bio-accumulate those up the food chain from algae. Feed lot diets aren't aimed at creating healthy animals, they're aimed at creating heavy animals ripe for the slaughter, and you are what you eat.