Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines, considered some of the world's best in service, are both unionized (I know because I missed a connection once because of a strike). That doesn't seem to have impacted their quality of service.
Those three Japanese companies were part of the 787 project from day one. If anything, they probably share in the blame for the engineering difficulties that Boeing had; most analysts agree that the biggest flaw with the 787 product was that Boeing gave more engineering work to their suppliers than they were capable of handling.
The real problem is that for education, health care and security, the United States spends huge amounts of money in highly wasteful and inefficient ways. Yet defense and security spending are the only ones that get any real scrutiny. The other two are much better obfuscated.
I would note that professors who bring in research grants are probably some of the biggest money earners for the universities. For most schools, when a professor wins a grant, the university will first get a 30-50% cut of the funds before the remaining money goes to the professor. That's why professors are pushed so hard to generate research because grants equal more money to help feed the academic bureaucracy.
There's a reason why they're paid more: contractors serve at the whim of the government and can be fired at anytime. While they may be paid more, they lack the job security and numerous benefits that Federal employees receive. They can jettisoned at any time at the government's pleasure.
I would also add that Federal employees are near impossible to fire. The paperwork to get rid of an underperforming worker is so complex and onerous that many departments simply transfer them or "promote them out" to get rid of ineffective employees. In fact, I think it would be easier to simply dissolve an entire department than to fire an individual employee. As one friend joked, "You'd have to kill someone get fired, and even then, it would depend on the circumstances."
So yes, you're paying a premium for disposable labor.
I think this is less about appeasing Apple or respecting IP and more about "Don't you ever dare embarrass the central and provincial governments again." Rampant trademark violations are one thing as long as the right palms are greased, but rampant trademark violations that bring huge attention and international mocking and condemnation is a whole different story.
The opening post implies that this electric aircraft revolution is right around the corner, but in reality, it will be decades before any practical implementation by any major aerospace company; I would dare say the 20-30 years the article estimates may be a bit generous. Weight is one of the biggest drivers in aircraft design (and one of the biggest factors of aircraft fuel efficiency), and until they can develop batteries with sufficient power to offset their massive weight, these planes will continue to be limited to small hobby craft. Nothing in this article indicates that these technological barriers have been overcome yet.
Even if the technology were all in place today, it would take a good five to ten years to design and certify a cargo or passenger aircraft. I'm hopeful with this technology, but I temper that hope with the reality of implementation.
It would be interesting to see this project restarted with the tremendous advances in computing. The application of artificial intelligence could help alleviate many of the problems GE had with the constant manipulation of complex controls, particularly for traversing terrain.
I think the key point to keep in mind is that the attacks have to be proportional to that of a traditional conventional military attack. The Pentagon isn't going to drop a cruise missile on some kid because he launched a DDoS attack on a.mil website; that's about the equivalent to that same kid spray painting a recruitment office at night or at most getting a bunch of friends to protest in front of it. They're talking about serious and substantial attacks, the sort that brings down the power grid and blows up infrastructure for which things like Stuxnet merely represent the tip of the iceberg. These sorts of attacks aren't going to be launched by junior accidentally from the basement but are sophisticated and coordinated efforts by governments and organized movements that are deliberately out to destroy and possibly take life.
The fundamental problem is this: it costs money to generate good news coverage, particularly investigative reporting and overseas news operations. Professional journalism as a whole, but newsprint in particular, is hemorrhaging money because online advertising is simply not a sufficient replacement to traditional print and broadcast advertising. So you're left with a small set of choices. You can go the BBC route and take government money, but then that leaves you at the mercy of the government sponsor. You can go the route of people like CNN and Fox that curb real analysis and begin pandering to the lowest denominator, crowding out real news for celebrity gossip, the kidnapping of blond, white girls, and corporate statements. You can rely upon citizen journalists who do this stuff on a part time basis, but they're not going to have the resources or the weight to do the award-winning investigative journalism (Watergate, Walter Reed, etc.). There is of course raw data from sources ranging from Wikileaks to tweets by protestors, but raw data is extremely difficult and time consuming to work with and verify let alone even vet for accuracy (even the Wikileaks data was processed in the end by professional newsprint journalists). Maybe you can do the NPR non-profit model, but I don't know if that will support more than one or two news sources.
The "free" news we get right now is an unsustainable model that's only held in place because people are afraid to change by themselves, but if a new model doesn't emerge soon, then all of them will eventually collapse.
As the joke goes: people who think they should run the country read the NY Times; people who think they run the country read the Washington Post; and people who actually run the country read the Wall Street Journal.
Police departments already use helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and even blimps on a regular basis. I imagine that the regulations that already govern those will also govern unmanned airborne surveillance as well. I understand of course that these UAV have much greater airborne time than helicopters and planes which does add a new concerns about persistent surveillance, but even that is limited as most UAV aren't going to be cheap to keep in the sky and will probably not provide that much different data versus having a cop stake you out for days on end.
I believe your analogy is flawed however, and you touch on those reasons a bit in your closing argument.
When a master chef prepares a meal or a master hairdresser cuts your hair, what you are purchasing is their services. Recipes and pictures of hair styles don't matter because it takes a skill that limited individuals possess to reproduce their work. If we view recipes as the music produced, it would be more a situation where the song and chords are known to the public, and you have dozens of bands popping up to do covers of the work. For software, it would be more that the concepts and theories are known and various clones are produced by smaller software shops (in video games for example, think of all those bad RTS clones that try to mimic Starcraft or Warcraft). These individuals can use the "recipes" or "pictures" to reproduce it, but they can't create something identical to what the masters produced. However, those individuals may take those chord progressions, those game examples, and evolve it into something new to advance the field.
However, file-sharing is different because technology has created what you referred to as the "autocooks" and enabled us to create perfect or near perfect reproductions of the final product. We're not replicating the recipes here, we are replicating the actual food itself. The master chef is driven out of business because people no longer have to go into his restaurant to taste his skill, they can simply go get an exact replica. The same goes with the hair stylist. Now those individuals can theoretically survive by simply innovating and producing faster than the autocooks and autohairdressers can replicate their craft or by making their services available to the small fraction who's still willing to pay at exorbitant markups to make up for loss of quantity, but for most, it becomes near impossible to keep up with that game in a sustained manner. That's the challenge that filesharing brings, and that is what copyright is supposed to protect against.
There are plenty of reasons that the current system is flawed with various third parties that exploit the artists and craftsmen, and there's plenty of room for new paradigms to replace the existing copyright and trademark system. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a successful alternative system executed that would maintain the scale of industry that we want and that the mainstream population is ready to accept.
I think the Indians would want something larger than the Invincible. The South Koreans have the shipyards and technology to build their own (and probably would to feed their own military-industrial complex). The Thai and Brazilians have carriers, but I'm not sure if they have the money to buy and maintain a second one. Even if they did, this may not be the best choice if what they say is true about the level of cannibalization that's already taken place for this ship.
English translations provided by foreign news sources are hardly reliable not just for China but for all foreign media in general whether democratic or despotic. A lot of foreign media sources will edit, omit, or add to articles that are translated into English; they claim it's to make them friendlier for foreign audiences, but in reality it's to tightly control the image being portrayed "outside" versus what is sometimes a much more rough and tumble coverage domestically. Editorials that criticize the government, strong nationalist sentiment, and other nuances tend to be toned down or not even translated.
Keep this in mind when you read foreign news sources English sites; you'll get a very different picture reading the professional translation services that cover foreign media if it's available.
I don't want to downplay the achievement here: the building of an entire autobody using a 3D printer is an impressive feat. However, there is still the question of more sophisticated parts of the vehicle. How do you build components like the engine, transmission, and battery which are parts that require much more complex manufacturing processes and exotic materials? I understand you can fab simple circuitry with these printers, but can you but what about power supplies and microprocessors? These are all items that can require extremely high levels of quality control. While this technology can help localize some parts fabrication (say, a new panel at your local garage), you will still need the complex supply chains to manufacture these vehicles. Then the question is whether it is still more cost effective to assemble all these vehicles in a single plant that have the advantage of learning or ship parts to local assembly sites for specialized assembly.
Don't run off and warm up your torrent clients in anticipation quite yet.
I understand the arguments they make about "old" coders, but I find it weird that we don't see this as much in other related fields such as electrical engineering. You don't see nearly the same rate of "jettisoning" of the elderly that you do in computer science despite the continuing advances in EE or other engineering disciplines. Is it because the field of computer science still lacks the maturity and stability compared to traditional engineering fields?
While this is an interesting new creature, this ability is hardly something new. Sea cucumbers after all are already known for its ability to fire off select internal organs at predators as a distraction so they can flee...
There is also the question of risk mitigation. By involving a large number of major suppliers, Boeing mitigates the financial risk it takes when developing the aircraft. Thus, if the 787 had been a financial failure, the cost to Boeing wouldn't be nearly as bad versus if it had bankrolled the entire project. Of course, such a blow would be fatal to many of the smaller subcontractors...
UAV's don't necessarily mean Predator drones. There are plenty of legitimate, nonmilitary uses for unmanned aircraft ranging from geological survey work to firefighting and in the future cargo transportation.
I think this applies to any trade where a discrete task or work package cannot be completed in an hour's time whether it be drafting a document, doing analysis, generating drawings, or redoing a house's plumbing. If the task at hand doesn't have a good ending criteria that can be reached within an hour's time, any significant interruption is going to increase cost as the worker has to regather their thoughts and figure out where they were.
While I like the idea of pooling meetings into a single block, this sometimes doesn't work especially when the worker support's a cross functional team. They may have program management calling meetings from one direction, functional management from another, and then their own team's huddles, peer reviews, etc.
That's great that you can afford it. However, many of us live in cities where there is a significant financial premium that needs to be paid in order to live in a car-free environment. Those who can't afford $300k+ USD for a loft are relegated to living in the suburbs.
The real problem is that the government asks to build more and more complex systems and simultaneously makes drastic cuts to their acquisition, project management, and audit personnel back in the 1990s. Then, like any good technology development project, you have your engineers and customer folks running off and going on a scope creep frenzy in their quest to build a gold plated weapon system equipped with nuclear powered fax machines.
Richard Aboulafia, an analyst and observer of the aerospace industry for the Teal Group, wrote a good column talking about a lot of the cost overruns. The contractors deserve their share of the blame, but don't forget the other two guilty parties of the military-industrial complex: Congress and the Pentagon.
Slashdot Mirror
Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines, considered some of the world's best in service, are both unionized (I know because I missed a connection once because of a strike). That doesn't seem to have impacted their quality of service.
Those three Japanese companies were part of the 787 project from day one. If anything, they probably share in the blame for the engineering difficulties that Boeing had; most analysts agree that the biggest flaw with the 787 product was that Boeing gave more engineering work to their suppliers than they were capable of handling.
The real problem is that for education, health care and security, the United States spends huge amounts of money in highly wasteful and inefficient ways. Yet defense and security spending are the only ones that get any real scrutiny. The other two are much better obfuscated.
I would note that professors who bring in research grants are probably some of the biggest money earners for the universities. For most schools, when a professor wins a grant, the university will first get a 30-50% cut of the funds before the remaining money goes to the professor. That's why professors are pushed so hard to generate research because grants equal more money to help feed the academic bureaucracy.
There's a reason why they're paid more: contractors serve at the whim of the government and can be fired at anytime. While they may be paid more, they lack the job security and numerous benefits that Federal employees receive. They can jettisoned at any time at the government's pleasure. I would also add that Federal employees are near impossible to fire. The paperwork to get rid of an underperforming worker is so complex and onerous that many departments simply transfer them or "promote them out" to get rid of ineffective employees. In fact, I think it would be easier to simply dissolve an entire department than to fire an individual employee. As one friend joked, "You'd have to kill someone get fired, and even then, it would depend on the circumstances." So yes, you're paying a premium for disposable labor.
I think this is less about appeasing Apple or respecting IP and more about "Don't you ever dare embarrass the central and provincial governments again." Rampant trademark violations are one thing as long as the right palms are greased, but rampant trademark violations that bring huge attention and international mocking and condemnation is a whole different story.
The opening post implies that this electric aircraft revolution is right around the corner, but in reality, it will be decades before any practical implementation by any major aerospace company; I would dare say the 20-30 years the article estimates may be a bit generous. Weight is one of the biggest drivers in aircraft design (and one of the biggest factors of aircraft fuel efficiency), and until they can develop batteries with sufficient power to offset their massive weight, these planes will continue to be limited to small hobby craft. Nothing in this article indicates that these technological barriers have been overcome yet.
Even if the technology were all in place today, it would take a good five to ten years to design and certify a cargo or passenger aircraft. I'm hopeful with this technology, but I temper that hope with the reality of implementation.
It would be interesting to see this project restarted with the tremendous advances in computing. The application of artificial intelligence could help alleviate many of the problems GE had with the constant manipulation of complex controls, particularly for traversing terrain.
I think the key point to keep in mind is that the attacks have to be proportional to that of a traditional conventional military attack. The Pentagon isn't going to drop a cruise missile on some kid because he launched a DDoS attack on a .mil website; that's about the equivalent to that same kid spray painting a recruitment office at night or at most getting a bunch of friends to protest in front of it. They're talking about serious and substantial attacks, the sort that brings down the power grid and blows up infrastructure for which things like Stuxnet merely represent the tip of the iceberg. These sorts of attacks aren't going to be launched by junior accidentally from the basement but are sophisticated and coordinated efforts by governments and organized movements that are deliberately out to destroy and possibly take life.
The fundamental problem is this: it costs money to generate good news coverage, particularly investigative reporting and overseas news operations. Professional journalism as a whole, but newsprint in particular, is hemorrhaging money because online advertising is simply not a sufficient replacement to traditional print and broadcast advertising. So you're left with a small set of choices. You can go the BBC route and take government money, but then that leaves you at the mercy of the government sponsor. You can go the route of people like CNN and Fox that curb real analysis and begin pandering to the lowest denominator, crowding out real news for celebrity gossip, the kidnapping of blond, white girls, and corporate statements. You can rely upon citizen journalists who do this stuff on a part time basis, but they're not going to have the resources or the weight to do the award-winning investigative journalism (Watergate, Walter Reed, etc.). There is of course raw data from sources ranging from Wikileaks to tweets by protestors, but raw data is extremely difficult and time consuming to work with and verify let alone even vet for accuracy (even the Wikileaks data was processed in the end by professional newsprint journalists). Maybe you can do the NPR non-profit model, but I don't know if that will support more than one or two news sources.
The "free" news we get right now is an unsustainable model that's only held in place because people are afraid to change by themselves, but if a new model doesn't emerge soon, then all of them will eventually collapse.
As the joke goes: people who think they should run the country read the NY Times; people who think they run the country read the Washington Post; and people who actually run the country read the Wall Street Journal.
Police departments already use helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and even blimps on a regular basis. I imagine that the regulations that already govern those will also govern unmanned airborne surveillance as well. I understand of course that these UAV have much greater airborne time than helicopters and planes which does add a new concerns about persistent surveillance, but even that is limited as most UAV aren't going to be cheap to keep in the sky and will probably not provide that much different data versus having a cop stake you out for days on end.
I believe your analogy is flawed however, and you touch on those reasons a bit in your closing argument.
When a master chef prepares a meal or a master hairdresser cuts your hair, what you are purchasing is their services. Recipes and pictures of hair styles don't matter because it takes a skill that limited individuals possess to reproduce their work. If we view recipes as the music produced, it would be more a situation where the song and chords are known to the public, and you have dozens of bands popping up to do covers of the work. For software, it would be more that the concepts and theories are known and various clones are produced by smaller software shops (in video games for example, think of all those bad RTS clones that try to mimic Starcraft or Warcraft). These individuals can use the "recipes" or "pictures" to reproduce it, but they can't create something identical to what the masters produced. However, those individuals may take those chord progressions, those game examples, and evolve it into something new to advance the field.
However, file-sharing is different because technology has created what you referred to as the "autocooks" and enabled us to create perfect or near perfect reproductions of the final product. We're not replicating the recipes here, we are replicating the actual food itself. The master chef is driven out of business because people no longer have to go into his restaurant to taste his skill, they can simply go get an exact replica. The same goes with the hair stylist. Now those individuals can theoretically survive by simply innovating and producing faster than the autocooks and autohairdressers can replicate their craft or by making their services available to the small fraction who's still willing to pay at exorbitant markups to make up for loss of quantity, but for most, it becomes near impossible to keep up with that game in a sustained manner. That's the challenge that filesharing brings, and that is what copyright is supposed to protect against.
There are plenty of reasons that the current system is flawed with various third parties that exploit the artists and craftsmen, and there's plenty of room for new paradigms to replace the existing copyright and trademark system. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a successful alternative system executed that would maintain the scale of industry that we want and that the mainstream population is ready to accept.
I think the Indians would want something larger than the Invincible. The South Koreans have the shipyards and technology to build their own (and probably would to feed their own military-industrial complex). The Thai and Brazilians have carriers, but I'm not sure if they have the money to buy and maintain a second one. Even if they did, this may not be the best choice if what they say is true about the level of cannibalization that's already taken place for this ship.
English translations provided by foreign news sources are hardly reliable not just for China but for all foreign media in general whether democratic or despotic. A lot of foreign media sources will edit, omit, or add to articles that are translated into English; they claim it's to make them friendlier for foreign audiences, but in reality it's to tightly control the image being portrayed "outside" versus what is sometimes a much more rough and tumble coverage domestically. Editorials that criticize the government, strong nationalist sentiment, and other nuances tend to be toned down or not even translated.
Keep this in mind when you read foreign news sources English sites; you'll get a very different picture reading the professional translation services that cover foreign media if it's available.
I don't want to downplay the achievement here: the building of an entire autobody using a 3D printer is an impressive feat. However, there is still the question of more sophisticated parts of the vehicle. How do you build components like the engine, transmission, and battery which are parts that require much more complex manufacturing processes and exotic materials? I understand you can fab simple circuitry with these printers, but can you but what about power supplies and microprocessors? These are all items that can require extremely high levels of quality control. While this technology can help localize some parts fabrication (say, a new panel at your local garage), you will still need the complex supply chains to manufacture these vehicles. Then the question is whether it is still more cost effective to assemble all these vehicles in a single plant that have the advantage of learning or ship parts to local assembly sites for specialized assembly. Don't run off and warm up your torrent clients in anticipation quite yet.
I understand the arguments they make about "old" coders, but I find it weird that we don't see this as much in other related fields such as electrical engineering. You don't see nearly the same rate of "jettisoning" of the elderly that you do in computer science despite the continuing advances in EE or other engineering disciplines. Is it because the field of computer science still lacks the maturity and stability compared to traditional engineering fields?
An alternative explanation is that people are more sarcastic in the morning. Then toward the end of the day, they're too tired to keep it up.
While this is an interesting new creature, this ability is hardly something new. Sea cucumbers after all are already known for its ability to fire off select internal organs at predators as a distraction so they can flee...
There is also the question of risk mitigation. By involving a large number of major suppliers, Boeing mitigates the financial risk it takes when developing the aircraft. Thus, if the 787 had been a financial failure, the cost to Boeing wouldn't be nearly as bad versus if it had bankrolled the entire project. Of course, such a blow would be fatal to many of the smaller subcontractors...
UAV's don't necessarily mean Predator drones. There are plenty of legitimate, nonmilitary uses for unmanned aircraft ranging from geological survey work to firefighting and in the future cargo transportation.
I think this applies to any trade where a discrete task or work package cannot be completed in an hour's time whether it be drafting a document, doing analysis, generating drawings, or redoing a house's plumbing. If the task at hand doesn't have a good ending criteria that can be reached within an hour's time, any significant interruption is going to increase cost as the worker has to regather their thoughts and figure out where they were.
While I like the idea of pooling meetings into a single block, this sometimes doesn't work especially when the worker support's a cross functional team. They may have program management calling meetings from one direction, functional management from another, and then their own team's huddles, peer reviews, etc.
But what about Canadian and European Socialist Scum? Don't forget our other fine friends here in /.
That's great that you can afford it. However, many of us live in cities where there is a significant financial premium that needs to be paid in order to live in a car-free environment. Those who can't afford $300k+ USD for a loft are relegated to living in the suburbs.
The real problem is that the government asks to build more and more complex systems and simultaneously makes drastic cuts to their acquisition, project management, and audit personnel back in the 1990s. Then, like any good technology development project, you have your engineers and customer folks running off and going on a scope creep frenzy in their quest to build a gold plated weapon system equipped with nuclear powered fax machines.
Richard Aboulafia, an analyst and observer of the aerospace industry for the Teal Group, wrote a good column talking about a lot of the cost overruns. The contractors deserve their share of the blame, but don't forget the other two guilty parties of the military-industrial complex: Congress and the Pentagon.