Why is everyone always picking on solar powered flashlights?
Clearly if you took a flashlight and added solar panels in the only even remotely logical way, they would recharge the batteries during the day so you could use it at night.
That asteroid is exactly the size of the moon in that pic
That statement is about as inaccurate as the picture is.
It's hard to judge from the picture, but comparing it to the size of the earth itself, it looks to be about 200 miles (300 km) across, +/- 100 or so.
This of course is based on the fact that the earth is about 8000 miles (13,000 km) in diameter.
The moon is a little more than 1/4th the diamater of the earth, 2,100 miles, or 3,500 km. If the moon were in that shot, it would be a _lot_ bigger.
There are about 26 really large asteroids that would be approximatly the size of that one. They're pretty sure they've found all the really large ones, although who knows when some new object might come streaking out of the Oort Cloud.
Unfortunatly not being a lawyer i don't know the name or such, but the idea is that if you allow people to use part of your property as a pathway for a certain amount of time (five years? ten?) without any attempt to stop them, you then lose the right to stop them at a later date.
You don't actually have to be successful at stoping them, you can even just put up a sign that says "no trespassing" and that will maintain your right to introduce more stringent enforcement later.
A similar law but badly implemented law (at least i presume the same law doesn't cover both cases) is what results in authors habitually telling fans "no" when they ask about doing fanfiction, even if the author doesn't mind that particular person writing that particular fanfic. Allowing some fans to write fanfiction can (stupidly) cause them to lose some legal control over their work.
The ideal behind both being that you should not be able to "fool" the public (either intentionally or unintentionally) into believing they have free right to something, and then suddenly start restricting or charging them once the object in question has been taken for granted/come into standard use/whatever is appropriate for the object in question.
I would think that this is exactly the situation such laws were trying to prevent, and i wonder if any of them apply.
The whole idea of the thing is that they'll have pretty much the same data at the end, at least an agregate form. What they won't have is the exact data on any individual person.
If their randomizer adds a value form -15 to 15 to the age, and my result comes up as 37, then i could actually be anywhere from 22 to 53 years old.
"3 No passenger will be separated from his baggage during the screening process. All screening of passenger carry-on items shall be handled in the full view of the passenger."
This is ludicrous. A carry-on item is screened with the assumption that it might contain a weapon for use in hijacking. A discreet search by a competent guard will be more effective, and less embarassing.
So much for the presumption of innocence. Given the number of false positives they get they can't reasonably claim they expect to find weapons in every bag they search.
Certainly every time I've had my bag searched at an airport it has been done in front of me, and I can't imagine that I'd rather have it any other way.
"4 All passengers traveling with family members shall have the right to have one adult family member present during all aspects of the screening process."
Also foolish. If they're criminals, leaving them together will allow them to obfuscate any crime, and possibly allow them to overpower or outwit the guards. If they're innocent, leaving them together will encourage reciporcal indignation, slowing down the process.
Again with that presumption of guilt. The possibility that they might be criminals does not justify treating them as if they _are_ criminals.
"shall have the right to have one adult family member present" Yeah, the one adult required to be present and the _children_ who are with them will _definitely_ be plotting to overpower the guards.
# All passengers who have personal items confiscated at the screening stations shall be provided with mailing envelopes for use in mailing seized items to passenger's home address. The passenger shall be permitted to place the item in the envelope, seal the envelope, and place the item in the U.S. mail at the screening station.
Gha. Talk about not understanding what "confiscated" means.
Better: No otherwise legal item shall be confiscated. The passenger may have otherwise legal items packed into USPS containers, and sent home at their own expense. Passengers shouldn't have the *right* to pack their own contraband, and neither should airlines be liable for shipping the items back to the passenger.
I think this is slightly inproper use of the word confiscated, or at least that isn't the only possibility. The few times it has happened to me i was given the choice of A: turning around and leaving the airport to deposit it elsewhere, and then coming back (assuming i still had time) to catch my flight, B: shipping it through (assuming you haven't allready given them all your ship-throughable bags) or C: letting them confiscate it.
Luckily all the times it has happened to me I've had parental units who had driven me to the airport so one of them could run back and put it in the car while the rest of us continued on to make sure I caught the flight. However if you were flying alone and had already shipped your bags trough and your flight was leaving fairly soon (or you parked your car elsewhere and took a couresy shuttle to the airport) your options would be rather limited.
It would be interesting to try and write some erotica that couches everything in metaphot and allusions so as to totally bypass their filters.
It would almost definitely end up sounding really bad, like the ones in this article on bad porn awards but it would be worth it to make something that was unblockable by any type of systematic filter.
From now on, anybody who utilizes this so-called 'whitespace' as a breaking symbol in between words, numbers, and/or other symbols, and is of the color 'white', and has not licensed such use, will be used for $1000 per cm^3 of the previously defined 'whitespace'.
Anyone who violates the copyright will be "used for $1000"? *shudder*
However you might have better success by lowering your price a little. charge 1/100 of a cent or some value such that for most works the final amount comes out to a buck or two. Then you might actually get something out of people by threatening them with legal action which would be much more costly for them than just giving you the buck:)
Someone didn't read the article. They said that usage logs showed that peak times were not actually during commuting hours, but rather late at night or "between tv shows."
More than 99.9 percent of the recipients may ignore that come-on. But if the e-mails go out by the millions, only a small fraction need respond to make the job pay off big.
This kind of reminds me of a scam to make money as a "psychic" i heard awhile ago. You send off mass mailings to lots of people "predicting" an even that has 50/50 probability of happening, saying it will happen to half the people, and it won't to the other half. Keep track of what you tell which people, and after the event happens (or doesn't) then repeat with the people that you got it right for the first time. After the third or fourth mailing, you can start charging them for your amazing psychic insights.
Presumably the psychic hotlines work the same way. The small percent that are given an accurate (though accidental) prediction rave about it more than enough to make up for the majority who grumble about lost money and walk away.
Come to think of it, this is also the exact same principle behind trolling and flamebaiting on the web. Doesn't matter how many people resist the temptation to respond as long as some small percentage give in.
The "war on drugs" may not have had much impact on illegal drug usage, but previous federal laws regulating telecommunications have been very effective.
It's pretty simple, laws designed to stop something that one (or more) of the parties involved disagrees with tend to work pretty well. (At least as long as the parties in favor aren't large enough to buy of the politicians and/or enforcers of the law)
However laws designed to stop something that all parties involved agree to tend to fail miserably. If i got sent a junk fax i would be upset and call the FCC and get the spammers ass busted. If i was into drugs and some guy offers to sell me drugs, am i going to turn him?
Laws that protect people's rights work. Laws that try to enforce some arbitrary and unwanted sense of morality don't.
At least in America we maintain the fantasy that things are supposed to be fair, so the FTC can ocasionally crack down on the record companies if they're blatant about breaking the rules.
I've been told that in Japan the record companies have some kind of agreement with the government allowing them to fix prices, which is why Japanese CDs cost $30 and the American imports were about $15 or a little over (this was a few years ago, funny how CD prices have gone _up_ as the technology has gotten cheaper, neh?)
Sounds similar to the way things work in America, in eraticness if not an exact correlation.
CDs sell at a lot of places for about $18.99, but when they first come out, or the store is having some kind of special they're often at $12.99 or $13.99.
Then other stores that focus on music (and sometimes DVDs) only will often have then in the $14.99 to $16.99 range or so.
So if you can find it on sale you want to get it at one of the big stores, but if it isn't on sale anywhere you're better off going to the smaller music stores.
Hi, i'm that guy. 30% is a fairly large percent, but a fairly large percent of what? According to the people who knew or looked up some information on actual costs, it's a 30% savings on $30-$60 of fuel for a trip across the country. That would be a savings of $10-$20. Given that i'd be lucky to find bargin cross country flight for less than $300, no, i wouldn't really consider that a large savings. You disagree?
The money that you pay for a flight doesn't nessesarly pay for that particular flight - the carrier handles it charges in a more general way (ie, per airport).. Its not important how much money they make per flight, but rather how much money they make over a given period of time. More effecient aircraft = less money / passenger = lower ticket prices.
And that is one of the reasons why i think we won't see slashed costs. They're not going to reduce the cost of flights with BWB planes to less than that of other flights. You'll pay the same amount whether you end up in a 747 or one of these things, so any savings for the new planes will have to be amortized over the entire fleet.
As for the rest of it. You seem to be assuming that you know more about the building airplanes, and the economics of the airline and aircraft industries than say, boeing, or an aviation reporter. I bet you don't.
No, i'm betting that i have less interest in being sensationalist than the reporter who wrote the article.
Yeah it will save money, but claiming a 30% savigns on fuel and an unsubstantiated (at least in the article) 19% saving on the basic construction does not necessarily mean "slashed" costs for everyone. It ignores all the added costs of researching, producing and purchasing the new planes, and focuses only on the savings.
Yeah, it will probably help the airlines, but given the problems with integration i mentioned in another reply, i suspect that the consumer won't see any huge savings until the new planes have been out for awhile.
Did you read the rest of the post? Or decide to comment as soon as you saw that?
First off, how do you know that fuel is the largest cost? Do you have exact numbers to back that up, are are you just assuming that because the amount of fuel burned is very large? I'm willing to be that maintenace costs are pretty big too, and who knows how cheap or expensive these new planes would be to maintain.
Second, if you'll look through the rest of my post you'll see that if that happened that airline X and airline Y would both go bankrupt shortly thereafter because they're paying interest on huge loans to buy these new aircraft but aren't making any more money than they were before to pay off those loans.
Airlines are _already_ going bankrupt because of pricewars. You think laying out large amounts of cash for new fleets will somehow aleviate this problem? Either the airlines are going to factor the cost of buying the planes into the operating costs over the next X years, or they're going to start running into accounting problems like so many other big companies seem to be doing these days.
And finally, how are they going to account for the price differences between flying the new planes and flying the old planes? Charging less for people to fly in the cool new planes would lead to all kinds of advertising and accounting problems. If your flight gets delayed and you get transfered to the other type of plane you may suddenly be paying much more or much less than what you should. The airlines would probably be forced to compensate you if you got transfered to the BWB, but they couldn't demand more money if you got transfered to a tube with wings.
I doubt the airlines want to deal with that headache, and i suspect that they will keep the prices the same accross all flights, and what type of plane you end up with will be luck of the draw. In that case any price savings the consumer might see would be further diluted by what percentage of an airline's fleet has been upgraded.
Preliminary analyses indicate that the BWB would outperform all conventional aircraft. It is conceived to carry 800 passengers 8,000 nautical miles at a cruise speed of approximately 560 knots. This is almost twice the passenger capacity of the Boeing 747-400 and 69% larger than he new Airbus A380! This design would reduce fuel burn and harmful emissions per passenger mile by almost a third in comparison to today's aircraft. Other potential benefits of the BWB include increased aerodynamic performance, lower operating cost and reduced community noise levels.
So how exactly does this benefit the consumer? How much do airlines currently spend on fuel? How much does one flight cost other than the fuel?
I suppose if fuel costs would be 1/3 less per person and the number of flights required per day would be cut in half, the savings per passenger would be somewhere in the 33% to 50% range, but how much of that are we likely to see?
The plane would weigh 19 percent less, suggesting that it would cost less to build. And it would need 19 percent less thrust, saving on engine manufacturing and maintenance costs.
Okay, now _that_ is cost analysis for you! By that reasoning a gun should cost less to build than a club because it weighs less. That example is a little oversimplified, but if the BWB was really similar enough to the tube and wing design to justify that kind of ballpark estimate then they wouldn't have needed to spend as much time researching as they have (and will continue to spend) to solve the engineering dificulties presented by the new design. And Boeing is going to have to factor in the costs of the long research period once they actually start producing it.
Last i checked the airlines weren't in great finacial shape, and once these things start rolling out of the factories they may have to start taking out large loans to update their fleets. And of course they're unlikely to drop the price on tickets by a huge amount for as long as they have those loans to pay off.
That means that the smaller airlines that can't aford the new jets will continue to be feasible for awhile, until five or ten years later when the big airlines finish paying off the loans, and at _that_ point we may see some big price drops. Of course by that point it may be too late for the smaller companies to switch over, and i'm not sure what they'll have to do to stay competitive.
This isn't to say that the idea isn't really cool and would make good economic sense for the long term, but the idea that a medium increase in efficiency will "slash the cost of air transport" all by itself is a naive view of economics. (I won't pretend my view is perfect, but i'm trying to be a _little_ more realistic)
As for the windows issue, it would be cool if they could replace the walls and ceiling with polarizeable high impact plastic of some kind. Make the entire thing into a skylight! It wouldn't give you much view of the ground unless you were near one of the edges, but it would still help everyone feel less cramped i think.
That is what scared me... how BSA like the RIAA is. Anonymous file sharing tip line? So some disgruntled employee anonymously says they traded MP3s and they go after the company. That's just a new low for them.
Woot! What was that number again? The last company that laid me off is going down! That'll learn them!:)
Regardless of whether or not we find that interesting, historians a few hundred or thousand of years from now might.
Historians now are certainly ripping their hair our wishing that the people of a few hundred or thousand years ago had done more to preserve _their_ historical records.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly if you took a flashlight and added solar panels in the only even remotely logical way, they would recharge the batteries during the day so you could use it at night.
That statement is about as inaccurate as the picture is.
It's hard to judge from the picture, but comparing it to the size of the earth itself, it looks to be about 200 miles (300 km) across, +/- 100 or so.
This of course is based on the fact that the earth is about 8000 miles (13,000 km) in diameter.
The moon is a little more than 1/4th the diamater of the earth, 2,100 miles, or 3,500 km. If the moon were in that shot, it would be a _lot_ bigger.
There are about 26 really large asteroids that would be approximatly the size of that one. They're pretty sure they've found all the really large ones, although who knows when some new object might come streaking out of the Oort Cloud.
No, but in that case you might have expected them to mention to NASA that they might want to keep a better eye on their moon rocks :)
You don't actually have to be successful at stoping them, you can even just put up a sign that says "no trespassing" and that will maintain your right to introduce more stringent enforcement later.
A similar law but badly implemented law (at least i presume the same law doesn't cover both cases) is what results in authors habitually telling fans "no" when they ask about doing fanfiction, even if the author doesn't mind that particular person writing that particular fanfic. Allowing some fans to write fanfiction can (stupidly) cause them to lose some legal control over their work.
The ideal behind both being that you should not be able to "fool" the public (either intentionally or unintentionally) into believing they have free right to something, and then suddenly start restricting or charging them once the object in question has been taken for granted/come into standard use/whatever is appropriate for the object in question.
I would think that this is exactly the situation such laws were trying to prevent, and i wonder if any of them apply.
The whole idea of the thing is that they'll have pretty much the same data at the end, at least an agregate form. What they won't have is the exact data on any individual person. If their randomizer adds a value form -15 to 15 to the age, and my result comes up as 37, then i could actually be anywhere from 22 to 53 years old.
"3 No passenger will be separated from his baggage during the screening process. All screening of passenger carry-on items shall be handled in the full view of the passenger."
This is ludicrous. A carry-on item is screened with the assumption that it might contain a weapon for use in hijacking. A discreet search by a competent guard will be more effective, and less embarassing.
So much for the presumption of innocence. Given the number of false positives they get they can't reasonably claim they expect to find weapons in every bag they search.
Certainly every time I've had my bag searched at an airport it has been done in front of me, and I can't imagine that I'd rather have it any other way.
"4 All passengers traveling with family members shall have the right to have one adult family member present during all aspects of the screening process."
Also foolish. If they're criminals, leaving them together will allow them to obfuscate any crime, and possibly allow them to overpower or outwit the guards. If they're innocent, leaving them together will encourage reciporcal indignation, slowing down the process.
Again with that presumption of guilt. The possibility that they might be criminals does not justify treating them as if they _are_ criminals.
"shall have the right to have one adult family member present" Yeah, the one adult required to be present and the _children_ who are with them will _definitely_ be plotting to overpower the guards.
# All passengers who have personal items confiscated at the screening stations shall be provided with mailing envelopes for use in mailing seized items to passenger's home address. The passenger shall be permitted to place the item in the envelope, seal the envelope, and place the item in the U.S. mail at the screening station.
Gha. Talk about not understanding what "confiscated" means.
Better: No otherwise legal item shall be confiscated. The passenger may have otherwise legal items packed into USPS containers, and sent home at their own expense. Passengers shouldn't have the *right* to pack their own contraband, and neither should airlines be liable for shipping the items back to the passenger.
I think this is slightly inproper use of the word confiscated, or at least that isn't the only possibility. The few times it has happened to me i was given the choice of A: turning around and leaving the airport to deposit it elsewhere, and then coming back (assuming i still had time) to catch my flight, B: shipping it through (assuming you haven't allready given them all your ship-throughable bags) or C: letting them confiscate it.
Luckily all the times it has happened to me I've had parental units who had driven me to the airport so one of them could run back and put it in the car while the rest of us continued on to make sure I caught the flight. However if you were flying alone and had already shipped your bags trough and your flight was leaving fairly soon (or you parked your car elsewhere and took a couresy shuttle to the airport) your options would be rather limited.
Wow, i'm glad i have the government around to tell me who or what i should have my first (or any) devotion to.
Unless accusing you of cheating, calling you an idiot or a lamer, or trying to make fun of your sexuality count as social skills.
It would almost definitely end up sounding really bad, like the ones in this article on bad porn awards but it would be worth it to make something that was unblockable by any type of systematic filter.
Anyone who violates the copyright will be "used for $1000"? *shudder*
However you might have better success by lowering your price a little. charge 1/100 of a cent or some value such that for most works the final amount comes out to a buck or two. Then you might actually get something out of people by threatening them with legal action which would be much more costly for them than just giving you the buck :)
Someone didn't read the article. They said that usage logs showed that peak times were not actually during commuting hours, but rather late at night or "between tv shows."
This kind of reminds me of a scam to make money as a "psychic" i heard awhile ago. You send off mass mailings to lots of people "predicting" an even that has 50/50 probability of happening, saying it will happen to half the people, and it won't to the other half. Keep track of what you tell which people, and after the event happens (or doesn't) then repeat with the people that you got it right for the first time. After the third or fourth mailing, you can start charging them for your amazing psychic insights.
Presumably the psychic hotlines work the same way. The small percent that are given an accurate (though accidental) prediction rave about it more than enough to make up for the majority who grumble about lost money and walk away.
Come to think of it, this is also the exact same principle behind trolling and flamebaiting on the web. Doesn't matter how many people resist the temptation to respond as long as some small percentage give in.
It's pretty simple, laws designed to stop something that one (or more) of the parties involved disagrees with tend to work pretty well. (At least as long as the parties in favor aren't large enough to buy of the politicians and/or enforcers of the law)
However laws designed to stop something that all parties involved agree to tend to fail miserably. If i got sent a junk fax i would be upset and call the FCC and get the spammers ass busted. If i was into drugs and some guy offers to sell me drugs, am i going to turn him?
Laws that protect people's rights work. Laws that try to enforce some arbitrary and unwanted sense of morality don't.
I just wish i could come up with something as creative to piss off the real spammers.
You forgot the make millions in extra profits from the fixed prices step!
I've been told that in Japan the record companies have some kind of agreement with the government allowing them to fix prices, which is why Japanese CDs cost $30 and the American imports were about $15 or a little over (this was a few years ago, funny how CD prices have gone _up_ as the technology has gotten cheaper, neh?)
CDs sell at a lot of places for about $18.99, but when they first come out, or the store is having some kind of special they're often at $12.99 or $13.99.
Then other stores that focus on music (and sometimes DVDs) only will often have then in the $14.99 to $16.99 range or so.
So if you can find it on sale you want to get it at one of the big stores, but if it isn't on sale anywhere you're better off going to the smaller music stores.
Hi, i'm that guy. 30% is a fairly large percent, but a fairly large percent of what? According to the people who knew or looked up some information on actual costs, it's a 30% savings on $30-$60 of fuel for a trip across the country. That would be a savings of $10-$20. Given that i'd be lucky to find bargin cross country flight for less than $300, no, i wouldn't really consider that a large savings. You disagree?
And that is one of the reasons why i think we won't see slashed costs. They're not going to reduce the cost of flights with BWB planes to less than that of other flights. You'll pay the same amount whether you end up in a 747 or one of these things, so any savings for the new planes will have to be amortized over the entire fleet.
And would probably blow the projected savings on the construction costs right out the window.
No, i'm betting that i have less interest in being sensationalist than the reporter who wrote the article.
Yeah it will save money, but claiming a 30% savigns on fuel and an unsubstantiated (at least in the article) 19% saving on the basic construction does not necessarily mean "slashed" costs for everyone. It ignores all the added costs of researching, producing and purchasing the new planes, and focuses only on the savings.
Yeah, it will probably help the airlines, but given the problems with integration i mentioned in another reply, i suspect that the consumer won't see any huge savings until the new planes have been out for awhile.
First off, how do you know that fuel is the largest cost? Do you have exact numbers to back that up, are are you just assuming that because the amount of fuel burned is very large? I'm willing to be that maintenace costs are pretty big too, and who knows how cheap or expensive these new planes would be to maintain.
Second, if you'll look through the rest of my post you'll see that if that happened that airline X and airline Y would both go bankrupt shortly thereafter because they're paying interest on huge loans to buy these new aircraft but aren't making any more money than they were before to pay off those loans.
Airlines are _already_ going bankrupt because of pricewars. You think laying out large amounts of cash for new fleets will somehow aleviate this problem? Either the airlines are going to factor the cost of buying the planes into the operating costs over the next X years, or they're going to start running into accounting problems like so many other big companies seem to be doing these days.
And finally, how are they going to account for the price differences between flying the new planes and flying the old planes? Charging less for people to fly in the cool new planes would lead to all kinds of advertising and accounting problems. If your flight gets delayed and you get transfered to the other type of plane you may suddenly be paying much more or much less than what you should. The airlines would probably be forced to compensate you if you got transfered to the BWB, but they couldn't demand more money if you got transfered to a tube with wings.
I doubt the airlines want to deal with that headache, and i suspect that they will keep the prices the same accross all flights, and what type of plane you end up with will be luck of the draw. In that case any price savings the consumer might see would be further diluted by what percentage of an airline's fleet has been upgraded.
So how exactly does this benefit the consumer? How much do airlines currently spend on fuel? How much does one flight cost other than the fuel?
I suppose if fuel costs would be 1/3 less per person and the number of flights required per day would be cut in half, the savings per passenger would be somewhere in the 33% to 50% range, but how much of that are we likely to see?
The plane would weigh 19 percent less, suggesting that it would cost less to build. And it would need 19 percent less thrust, saving on engine manufacturing and maintenance costs.
Okay, now _that_ is cost analysis for you! By that reasoning a gun should cost less to build than a club because it weighs less. That example is a little oversimplified, but if the BWB was really similar enough to the tube and wing design to justify that kind of ballpark estimate then they wouldn't have needed to spend as much time researching as they have (and will continue to spend) to solve the engineering dificulties presented by the new design. And Boeing is going to have to factor in the costs of the long research period once they actually start producing it.
Last i checked the airlines weren't in great finacial shape, and once these things start rolling out of the factories they may have to start taking out large loans to update their fleets. And of course they're unlikely to drop the price on tickets by a huge amount for as long as they have those loans to pay off.
That means that the smaller airlines that can't aford the new jets will continue to be feasible for awhile, until five or ten years later when the big airlines finish paying off the loans, and at _that_ point we may see some big price drops. Of course by that point it may be too late for the smaller companies to switch over, and i'm not sure what they'll have to do to stay competitive.
This isn't to say that the idea isn't really cool and would make good economic sense for the long term, but the idea that a medium increase in efficiency will "slash the cost of air transport" all by itself is a naive view of economics. (I won't pretend my view is perfect, but i'm trying to be a _little_ more realistic)
As for the windows issue, it would be cool if they could replace the walls and ceiling with polarizeable high impact plastic of some kind. Make the entire thing into a skylight! It wouldn't give you much view of the ground unless you were near one of the edges, but it would still help everyone feel less cramped i think.
Woot! What was that number again? The last company that laid me off is going down! That'll learn them! :)
Historians now are certainly ripping their hair our wishing that the people of a few hundred or thousand years ago had done more to preserve _their_ historical records.