Well, you have 34 million users, so theoretically they must be worth something if you can leverage that for advertising or something.
Not 10 billion though. If you started charging your users for special features you could start pushing toward that, but as long as you're relying on ad revenue you're screwed.
It's like cable, or newspapers...The ad revenue is what people talk about, but the bulk of the money comes from subscription fees! Advertising is just the icing on top. The reason you pay 100 bucks a month for your extended basic cable is because ESPN doesn't break even with advertising...That's just reality.
As long as people buy into this fantasy that users of a free service are equal to money, you're going to see this sort of behaviour.
Uh huh. I assume you're trotting out the old saw about everything being subjective so there is no point in valuing one subjective thing over another? Thus science is worthless, etc. I find that premise to be absurd. Feel free to wallow around in the solipsisms for a while though, if it makes you happy.
As for the supposed strawman, I am curious as to which part of contintental philosophy relies on anything but the most subjective opinions?
Meh. I'd just use a bullet myself. I think lethal injection is basically designed to make it look clean, rather than the old electric chair which looks anything but.
Killing is significant. I don't think the person being killed minds much one way or the other...Not like they're going, "Whew! Thank god for lethal injection!" But the people doing the killing should have to accept that that's what they're doing.
Yup, me wanting a multiple murderer, rapist, child molester, litterbug to die makes me as bad, if not worse, than him. Shame on me. Also, you're quite correct, the death penalty, imprisonment, torture, etc are all used to perpetuate oppressive governments.
Of course, so are taxes. Schools. Television. Art. Religion. Philosophy. Science.
Funny how that works. It's almost like those are all tools, and people can use them to do good things, and people can use them to do bad things. And a good society would use them well, and a bad society...not as well.
Funny how a man who kills a murderer painlessly with a drug is a terrible person, just as bad as the murderer, but the same man violently and painfully killing that same murderer to prevent him killing a child is a hero.
My whole point, which you chose to ignore, is that this isn't about morality. It's about society. Societies act to protect themselves, be it through war, censorship, or the death penalty. Lot of people have the illusion that societies consistently act against the will of the majority...It's just not true. The majority may be a bunch of ignorant frightened sheep, but when they move, society moves with them. If they want dangerous criminals to die, then die they will.
So save your self-righteousness. I've heard it all before, and better stated.
My pro-Death Penalty argument is basically the same as your rabid dog argument. Sidestep the moral issue entirely. It's not about whether or not this person deserves to die or be killed, or whether or not we have the moral right to kill him or her, or eye for an aye, or any of that crap. It's simply that they have proven that they are unable to function in society, and so we preserve society by removing them from society.
Permanently.
The problem comes in when you understand that the legal system makes mistakes, and you take into account the fact that the person you are so blithely condemning to death may not have done the thing that they were convicted of. That's a pretty big deal. Lot of societies view it as a deal breaker.
So, instead, they put them in prison forever on the off chance that they might be wrong.
Meh. They say plugins, but I haven't noticed notably more problems on my work machine (a zillion plugins), my home machine (two or three plugins), and my wife's machine (honey, what's a plugin?). That's Windows XP, Linux Fedora 5, and Mac OS X Panther, for those who care.
They all have memory creep. They all slow down. And they all need to be killed on occasion when they lock up. I'd say it's a technical achievement to have the same bug set on all platforms.
I really like Firefox. I'd really like to keep using Firefox. But I'm getting to the end of my patience. Enough with the goddamn widgets. I want it clean and fast; I can add plugins and bloat it up myself.
Yes, yes, the continentals always explode out of the woodwork when anyone dares to challenge their notion that the best way to discuss and describe mental states is through the lens of their own subjective experience, rather than through rigorous scientific analysis.
Regardless, continental philosophy has no practical use in anything I've ever done. I would go so far as to say that it has no practical use; maybe you could argue for psychology or spiritualism. I've seen it crop up in literary criticism. Sartre and Kierkegaard may be interesting to read, but there is no science there.
Depends on what you pair it with...
on
MIT's SAT Math Error
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...And where you go to school. I got a philosophy degree at Rutgers, one of the best analytic philosophy schools in the world. Whenever someone asks me, with a superscillious smirk, "How is philosophy useful in computer science?" I give them a deadpan look and say, "I did my senior thesis on finite automata and fuzzy logic trees, I took 4 more hard logic classes than are required for a CS degree, and my advisor was one of the greatest living cognitive scientists in the world. You tell me." Of course it helps that I took a frickton of CompSci as well.
Unless you went to some school whose idea of philosophy is ancient philosophy and subjective continental philosophy, you can pitch it successfully to anyone, as long as you can also show skills in whatever you're actually applying for.
Re:motion controller
on
Lair Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
IANAPS3D, but I'd venture to guess that the input itself is on the mushy side...The Wii design team obviously mistrusted pure controller sensors; it's why you have to strap that crap on your TV. In my experience (not vast, but existent) with the sort of gyros and acceleration sensors small enough to jam into a hand-held controller, I'd be surprised if they got really accurate fine-grained responses in a chaotic dogfighting session.
Without that, it doesn't matter how good the developers are.
Another thing (pet peeve) that pisses me off is gratuitous "special moves". I have to master a special move to do a loop? Wtf is wrong with just pulling up? By itself, it suggests that you're going to have issues with the flight controls. I remember this crap being executed fine on F-16 back in the '80s, but not now? Work on your damn interface.
But even so, it's hard to see how anyone could possibly find it justified at this point in time. If it weren't for the DMCA, we could get it by show off of YouTube...Clearly there is no technical limitation.
It comes down to the fact that their business model is more and more dated by technology. No one is obligated to provide them a free ride.
Lots and lots of people have said, "I know a guy whose bike..."
Carbon fiber laminates like they use on planes and race cars are vastly different from what they use on bikes, tennis rackets, golf clubs, etc. They're meant to take different stresses, they're meant (in many cases) to save a lot less weight, and they're meant to last a lot longer, and fail differently. They use different polymer laminates, they use different amounts of carbon fiber, and they use different methods for forming the structure.
All animals, man included, spend their whole existence building up "logic trees" which give us our reactions in certain situations. Someone throws something at you, you block it, dodge it, catch it, or let it bounce off your head. We categorize, extrapolate, and induce...It's all logic trees.
Cats are cursory hunters; they lack stamina, and they hunt by stealth and lightning attacks. This being the case, knowledge of their range is critical to their success as hunters, therefore they spend most of their non-sleeping time engaged in exploration. That's why cats are always into stuff. Startle a cat, and he's gone, under something, up something, behind something. Do you ever see them stop and think about where they're going? They already know.
And the processing power isn't dim. Jesus, just because it's not sitting there doing philosophy its not a highly specialized and successful hunter? You're talking about an animal with enough instinct and reflex control (and that is brain power, just as much as problem solving) to do acrobatic things that people strive in vain to accomplish, calculate a thousand variables while flying through the air to snatch something, or land on its feet after a drop of meters, and we can't even get robots to accurately match the range of mere human dexterity. It's like the DARPA robot challenge; it took years to get a robot through that course, and it's not because the vehicles couldn't make it, its because the processing power wasn't up to making the decisions needed to get across the terrain.
You can't look at intelligence in pure terms of math. When you take them out in the world, and tell them to apply that computational power to walking, talking, and chewing gum at the same time, you see how far we still have to go.
AI is easier...All a bot has to do to seem real is surprise you every now and then. But the eye has been trained from birth to expect certain things from water, and when those things don't turn up, then there are problems.
I imagine they'll start doing something like with facial recognition software...Matching 100% of the face is a nightmare because even small deviations can stymie a computer, but matching the important 3 or 4% is easy. All we need to do is figure out what amount of simulation we need to do to trick the eye into believing it's real, and we're good to go.
I've seen it. It's not "shattering" the way a CF wing would shatter. It's a compression fracture, it tears and deforms. It fails along a single line. Carbon fiber wings wouldn't fail like that; once they let go the, the "fracture" would be more like a piece of laminated glass being hit with a hammer...it wouldn't crack in one place, the cracks would run the length and width of the wing and the energy released would throw shards everywhere.
One of the key reasons they don't want to test a CF wing to the shattering point (there is no requirement that this be done, it is simply something that boeing has chosen to do in the past) is the worry that they'll cover their entire testing area with electrically conductive carbon dust. It would be a nightmare to clean up.
Yes, AI is difficult. The best way to do it is to model it on the way actual players play, which would mean collecting a large database of player actions in specific situations, something that is finally becoming achievable due to the popularity of online play.
Programming a logic tree is old school. It doesn't work very well because it's easy for a player to "learn" the logic tree of a bot...It's something you don't even do consciously, but after you find yourself tossing a grenade in a certain direction, because you just sort of know the bot is going to be there...It's game over. You know the tree.
Picking up the data from the game though, you can get a lot of information. Using weapon X, 70% of players started shooting from 100 meters, hitting the target 30% of the time. Why? Who cares? A bot that engages from that distance with that weapon at that accuracy will seem normal to a person. Weapon nerf comes along, and all of a sudden people only engage with that weapon at 20 meters or less (desperation). The tree updates itself.
Learning systems are the next step. Build the tree from harvested data, don't sit and try to figure it out yourself. You don't even have to make it that complicated a tree...Take the 10 most popular situational actions (Bot on Defense with Weapon X) add some random rock-and-roll to keep the choices from getting repetitive, and you can work out positioning and situational reactions based on statistical comparisons with the actions of previous players.
Compile stats on a daily/weekly basis, resample the tree, and push it out to the clients as a patch...Or hell, if the bot logic is online, just update their datasets.
There is some good stuff, but it's NEVER TV...Those jokers know they only need two minutes of content, and the splashier the better.
I'd like to see Rather deal with what the reporter in Airframe went through at the end of the book...Send him up in the plane, and show him how strong those wings REALLY are.
I was thinking about Airframe as well...Here we haven't even had a proof in the field that anything is wrong with the design, and yet we have an ill-informed pundit putting out a series of damning statements against it...Some of which are inaccurate, some of which aren't proven.
And yea, the damn public will eat it up, because carbon fiber isn't well understood and people's knee jerk is that metal must be stronger because it's metal and that's what you make planes out of, right?
In the end it hurts Boeing, it hurts carbon fiber's public perception...This is one of those things I hate about TV news; one guy does bad research, and they all pick it up and run with it because they want to "have the story." Then, when the rebuttal comes, they bury it or ignore it.
I'd love to see them do a commercial with an aluminum wing and a CF wing, and just pile crap on them both until the aluminum one collapses, then end with the caption: "Which would you rather have on your plane?"
It's already a problem. There is so much toxic crap in planes (jet fuel, anyone?) that the fact that the material that makes up the plane adds to that isn't a critical point against it.
Not at all. Aluminum won't shatter without being super-cooled or absorbing some kind of catastrophic strike...It'll bend, warp, tear, deform. Carbon fiber will bend, hell, there is theory (not yet tested to my knowledge) that carbon fiber wings could bend to the point of touching above or below the plane.
The difference is, if aluminum bent like that it wouldn't return to it's original shape, whereas carbon fiber might. Carbon fiber is very flexible, but when it bends too far it effectively explodes...Shatters into a zillion pieces. So it's brittle.
Put the two materials side by side, and carbon fiber can absorb a hell of a lot more energy without failing than aluminum, but aluminum isn't brittle, so it might be better at dealing with certain types of impacts.
Carbon fiber more brittle than Aluminum? So's diamond...What's your point? Carbon fiber is also a lot more flexible than aluminum and it's lighter. There are pros and cons of every material. It produces chemicals when it burns? Like inhaling toxic smoke is going to be your big worry if the PLANE is ON FIRE.
This kind of crap is infuriating for airline companies...It doesn't take much at all to kill a whole line of planes, just the vague reputation for being unsafe. A report like this, based on a flawed understanding of Carbon vs Aluminum where the "reporter" doesn't even grasp the real issue, could do real harm.
I bought a 80.00 paperback of the Physics 1 textbook, and when I went in for Physics II I found a 120.00 hardcover that included both 80.00 paperbacks.
I bought it, and I made it my mission to give it to a new person every semester. They used that book the entire time I was at college. I still have it; it's almost a paperback itself after being used by 4 people over 7 semesters. Also gave the original paperback to someone else.
Don't go through the bookstores. Hell, where I was they offered a guaranteed buyback on certain textbooks for a whopping 30% of the cover price. Screw that. Sell them yourself! Put up a few fliers or put 'em on Craigslist. Don't go through the bookstores, especially not if there isn't any competition at your school! Why support the monopoly?
Even selling them back to the bookstore is a rip off because you could buy it for 120 and sell it to a student for 40 who'd have to pay 80 for the same book if he bought it from a bookstore, and that bookstore would have given YOU 25!
I wouldn't consider myself to be a "windows power user"...I mean, I can fix it if it's broken, and I know how to pummel the registry into submission, and how to prune the goddamn services to something sane and secure. I'm certainly very familiar with windows. But there is that little spark of, I don't know, "Taking it seriously" that I lack.
All that being said, Windows is my gaming platform of choice. I always have a good gaming rig running the latest stable version of Windows. I run games on Linux occasionally. I run games on Macs occasionally. But in both of those cases it's more to prove that I can, not because I want to actually play games in those environments.
Windows is a toy, even when I'm running it at work (like right now). Looking at the programs I have running currently, I have two programs connecting to MySQL databases running on linux machines, I have Eclipse running, and 4 terminal emulators hitting 2 linux servers, 1 solaris server, and 1 MPE/iX mainframe. Oh, and Outlook, which is the only thing that actually requires Windows.
So, what I'm saying is, I think it's cool that companies support Linux. Always gives me a fuzzy feeling to buy a game from Blizzard or Id that runs on Linux, but in the long run, I'd never actually PLAY it there unless my solitary Windows machine was dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you have 34 million users, so theoretically they must be worth something if you can leverage that for advertising or something.
Not 10 billion though. If you started charging your users for special features you could start pushing toward that, but as long as you're relying on ad revenue you're screwed.
It's like cable, or newspapers...The ad revenue is what people talk about, but the bulk of the money comes from subscription fees! Advertising is just the icing on top. The reason you pay 100 bucks a month for your extended basic cable is because ESPN doesn't break even with advertising...That's just reality.
As long as people buy into this fantasy that users of a free service are equal to money, you're going to see this sort of behaviour.
Uh huh. I assume you're trotting out the old saw about everything being subjective so there is no point in valuing one subjective thing over another? Thus science is worthless, etc. I find that premise to be absurd. Feel free to wallow around in the solipsisms for a while though, if it makes you happy.
As for the supposed strawman, I am curious as to which part of contintental philosophy relies on anything but the most subjective opinions?
I don't think the person being killed minds much one way or the other as long as it's quick. Should have been more specific.
Meh. I'd just use a bullet myself. I think lethal injection is basically designed to make it look clean, rather than the old electric chair which looks anything but.
Killing is significant. I don't think the person being killed minds much one way or the other...Not like they're going, "Whew! Thank god for lethal injection!" But the people doing the killing should have to accept that that's what they're doing.
Yup, me wanting a multiple murderer, rapist, child molester, litterbug to die makes me as bad, if not worse, than him. Shame on me. Also, you're quite correct, the death penalty, imprisonment, torture, etc are all used to perpetuate oppressive governments.
Of course, so are taxes. Schools. Television. Art. Religion. Philosophy. Science.
Funny how that works. It's almost like those are all tools, and people can use them to do good things, and people can use them to do bad things. And a good society would use them well, and a bad society...not as well.
Funny how a man who kills a murderer painlessly with a drug is a terrible person, just as bad as the murderer, but the same man violently and painfully killing that same murderer to prevent him killing a child is a hero.
My whole point, which you chose to ignore, is that this isn't about morality. It's about society. Societies act to protect themselves, be it through war, censorship, or the death penalty. Lot of people have the illusion that societies consistently act against the will of the majority...It's just not true. The majority may be a bunch of ignorant frightened sheep, but when they move, society moves with them. If they want dangerous criminals to die, then die they will.
So save your self-righteousness. I've heard it all before, and better stated.
My pro-Death Penalty argument is basically the same as your rabid dog argument. Sidestep the moral issue entirely. It's not about whether or not this person deserves to die or be killed, or whether or not we have the moral right to kill him or her, or eye for an aye, or any of that crap. It's simply that they have proven that they are unable to function in society, and so we preserve society by removing them from society.
Permanently.
The problem comes in when you understand that the legal system makes mistakes, and you take into account the fact that the person you are so blithely condemning to death may not have done the thing that they were convicted of. That's a pretty big deal. Lot of societies view it as a deal breaker.
So, instead, they put them in prison forever on the off chance that they might be wrong.
Meh. They say plugins, but I haven't noticed notably more problems on my work machine (a zillion plugins), my home machine (two or three plugins), and my wife's machine (honey, what's a plugin?). That's Windows XP, Linux Fedora 5, and Mac OS X Panther, for those who care.
They all have memory creep. They all slow down. And they all need to be killed on occasion when they lock up. I'd say it's a technical achievement to have the same bug set on all platforms.
I really like Firefox. I'd really like to keep using Firefox. But I'm getting to the end of my patience. Enough with the goddamn widgets. I want it clean and fast; I can add plugins and bloat it up myself.
Yes, yes, the continentals always explode out of the woodwork when anyone dares to challenge their notion that the best way to discuss and describe mental states is through the lens of their own subjective experience, rather than through rigorous scientific analysis.
Regardless, continental philosophy has no practical use in anything I've ever done. I would go so far as to say that it has no practical use; maybe you could argue for psychology or spiritualism. I've seen it crop up in literary criticism. Sartre and Kierkegaard may be interesting to read, but there is no science there.
...And where you go to school. I got a philosophy degree at Rutgers, one of the best analytic philosophy schools in the world. Whenever someone asks me, with a superscillious smirk, "How is philosophy useful in computer science?" I give them a deadpan look and say, "I did my senior thesis on finite automata and fuzzy logic trees, I took 4 more hard logic classes than are required for a CS degree, and my advisor was one of the greatest living cognitive scientists in the world. You tell me." Of course it helps that I took a frickton of CompSci as well.
Unless you went to some school whose idea of philosophy is ancient philosophy and subjective continental philosophy, you can pitch it successfully to anyone, as long as you can also show skills in whatever you're actually applying for.
IANAPS3D, but I'd venture to guess that the input itself is on the mushy side...The Wii design team obviously mistrusted pure controller sensors; it's why you have to strap that crap on your TV. In my experience (not vast, but existent) with the sort of gyros and acceleration sensors small enough to jam into a hand-held controller, I'd be surprised if they got really accurate fine-grained responses in a chaotic dogfighting session.
Without that, it doesn't matter how good the developers are.
Another thing (pet peeve) that pisses me off is gratuitous "special moves". I have to master a special move to do a loop? Wtf is wrong with just pulling up? By itself, it suggests that you're going to have issues with the flight controls. I remember this crap being executed fine on F-16 back in the '80s, but not now? Work on your damn interface.
But even so, it's hard to see how anyone could possibly find it justified at this point in time. If it weren't for the DMCA, we could get it by show off of YouTube...Clearly there is no technical limitation.
It comes down to the fact that their business model is more and more dated by technology. No one is obligated to provide them a free ride.
Lots and lots of people have said, "I know a guy whose bike..."
Carbon fiber laminates like they use on planes and race cars are vastly different from what they use on bikes, tennis rackets, golf clubs, etc. They're meant to take different stresses, they're meant (in many cases) to save a lot less weight, and they're meant to last a lot longer, and fail differently. They use different polymer laminates, they use different amounts of carbon fiber, and they use different methods for forming the structure.
It's not an apples to apples comparison.
All animals, man included, spend their whole existence building up "logic trees" which give us our reactions in certain situations. Someone throws something at you, you block it, dodge it, catch it, or let it bounce off your head. We categorize, extrapolate, and induce...It's all logic trees.
Cats are cursory hunters; they lack stamina, and they hunt by stealth and lightning attacks. This being the case, knowledge of their range is critical to their success as hunters, therefore they spend most of their non-sleeping time engaged in exploration. That's why cats are always into stuff. Startle a cat, and he's gone, under something, up something, behind something. Do you ever see them stop and think about where they're going? They already know.
And the processing power isn't dim. Jesus, just because it's not sitting there doing philosophy its not a highly specialized and successful hunter? You're talking about an animal with enough instinct and reflex control (and that is brain power, just as much as problem solving) to do acrobatic things that people strive in vain to accomplish, calculate a thousand variables while flying through the air to snatch something, or land on its feet after a drop of meters, and we can't even get robots to accurately match the range of mere human dexterity. It's like the DARPA robot challenge; it took years to get a robot through that course, and it's not because the vehicles couldn't make it, its because the processing power wasn't up to making the decisions needed to get across the terrain.
You can't look at intelligence in pure terms of math. When you take them out in the world, and tell them to apply that computational power to walking, talking, and chewing gum at the same time, you see how far we still have to go.
AI is easier...All a bot has to do to seem real is surprise you every now and then. But the eye has been trained from birth to expect certain things from water, and when those things don't turn up, then there are problems.
I imagine they'll start doing something like with facial recognition software...Matching 100% of the face is a nightmare because even small deviations can stymie a computer, but matching the important 3 or 4% is easy. All we need to do is figure out what amount of simulation we need to do to trick the eye into believing it's real, and we're good to go.
I've seen it. It's not "shattering" the way a CF wing would shatter. It's a compression fracture, it tears and deforms. It fails along a single line. Carbon fiber wings wouldn't fail like that; once they let go the, the "fracture" would be more like a piece of laminated glass being hit with a hammer...it wouldn't crack in one place, the cracks would run the length and width of the wing and the energy released would throw shards everywhere.
One of the key reasons they don't want to test a CF wing to the shattering point (there is no requirement that this be done, it is simply something that boeing has chosen to do in the past) is the worry that they'll cover their entire testing area with electrically conductive carbon dust. It would be a nightmare to clean up.
Yes, AI is difficult. The best way to do it is to model it on the way actual players play, which would mean collecting a large database of player actions in specific situations, something that is finally becoming achievable due to the popularity of online play.
Programming a logic tree is old school. It doesn't work very well because it's easy for a player to "learn" the logic tree of a bot...It's something you don't even do consciously, but after you find yourself tossing a grenade in a certain direction, because you just sort of know the bot is going to be there...It's game over. You know the tree.
Picking up the data from the game though, you can get a lot of information. Using weapon X, 70% of players started shooting from 100 meters, hitting the target 30% of the time. Why? Who cares? A bot that engages from that distance with that weapon at that accuracy will seem normal to a person. Weapon nerf comes along, and all of a sudden people only engage with that weapon at 20 meters or less (desperation). The tree updates itself.
Learning systems are the next step. Build the tree from harvested data, don't sit and try to figure it out yourself. You don't even have to make it that complicated a tree...Take the 10 most popular situational actions (Bot on Defense with Weapon X) add some random rock-and-roll to keep the choices from getting repetitive, and you can work out positioning and situational reactions based on statistical comparisons with the actions of previous players.
Compile stats on a daily/weekly basis, resample the tree, and push it out to the clients as a patch...Or hell, if the bot logic is online, just update their datasets.
Yea, last time I heard about it they were still debating whether or not it was worth it to try it anyway.
Thanks for the links.
It's more about how it fails. Aluminum bends, carbon fiber shatters. But carbon fiber will bend farther before it fails.
There is some good stuff, but it's NEVER TV...Those jokers know they only need two minutes of content, and the splashier the better.
I'd like to see Rather deal with what the reporter in Airframe went through at the end of the book...Send him up in the plane, and show him how strong those wings REALLY are.
I was thinking about Airframe as well...Here we haven't even had a proof in the field that anything is wrong with the design, and yet we have an ill-informed pundit putting out a series of damning statements against it...Some of which are inaccurate, some of which aren't proven.
And yea, the damn public will eat it up, because carbon fiber isn't well understood and people's knee jerk is that metal must be stronger because it's metal and that's what you make planes out of, right?
In the end it hurts Boeing, it hurts carbon fiber's public perception...This is one of those things I hate about TV news; one guy does bad research, and they all pick it up and run with it because they want to "have the story." Then, when the rebuttal comes, they bury it or ignore it.
I'd love to see them do a commercial with an aluminum wing and a CF wing, and just pile crap on them both until the aluminum one collapses, then end with the caption: "Which would you rather have on your plane?"
It's already a problem. There is so much toxic crap in planes (jet fuel, anyone?) that the fact that the material that makes up the plane adds to that isn't a critical point against it.
Not at all. Aluminum won't shatter without being super-cooled or absorbing some kind of catastrophic strike...It'll bend, warp, tear, deform. Carbon fiber will bend, hell, there is theory (not yet tested to my knowledge) that carbon fiber wings could bend to the point of touching above or below the plane.
The difference is, if aluminum bent like that it wouldn't return to it's original shape, whereas carbon fiber might. Carbon fiber is very flexible, but when it bends too far it effectively explodes...Shatters into a zillion pieces. So it's brittle.
Put the two materials side by side, and carbon fiber can absorb a hell of a lot more energy without failing than aluminum, but aluminum isn't brittle, so it might be better at dealing with certain types of impacts.
Carbon fiber more brittle than Aluminum? So's diamond...What's your point? Carbon fiber is also a lot more flexible than aluminum and it's lighter. There are pros and cons of every material. It produces chemicals when it burns? Like inhaling toxic smoke is going to be your big worry if the PLANE is ON FIRE.
This kind of crap is infuriating for airline companies...It doesn't take much at all to kill a whole line of planes, just the vague reputation for being unsafe. A report like this, based on a flawed understanding of Carbon vs Aluminum where the "reporter" doesn't even grasp the real issue, could do real harm.
I bought a 80.00 paperback of the Physics 1 textbook, and when I went in for Physics II I found a 120.00 hardcover that included both 80.00 paperbacks.
I bought it, and I made it my mission to give it to a new person every semester. They used that book the entire time I was at college. I still have it; it's almost a paperback itself after being used by 4 people over 7 semesters. Also gave the original paperback to someone else.
Don't go through the bookstores. Hell, where I was they offered a guaranteed buyback on certain textbooks for a whopping 30% of the cover price. Screw that. Sell them yourself! Put up a few fliers or put 'em on Craigslist. Don't go through the bookstores, especially not if there isn't any competition at your school! Why support the monopoly?
Even selling them back to the bookstore is a rip off because you could buy it for 120 and sell it to a student for 40 who'd have to pay 80 for the same book if he bought it from a bookstore, and that bookstore would have given YOU 25!
I wouldn't consider myself to be a "windows power user"...I mean, I can fix it if it's broken, and I know how to pummel the registry into submission, and how to prune the goddamn services to something sane and secure. I'm certainly very familiar with windows. But there is that little spark of, I don't know, "Taking it seriously" that I lack.
All that being said, Windows is my gaming platform of choice. I always have a good gaming rig running the latest stable version of Windows. I run games on Linux occasionally. I run games on Macs occasionally. But in both of those cases it's more to prove that I can, not because I want to actually play games in those environments.
Windows is a toy, even when I'm running it at work (like right now). Looking at the programs I have running currently, I have two programs connecting to MySQL databases running on linux machines, I have Eclipse running, and 4 terminal emulators hitting 2 linux servers, 1 solaris server, and 1 MPE/iX mainframe. Oh, and Outlook, which is the only thing that actually requires Windows.
So, what I'm saying is, I think it's cool that companies support Linux. Always gives me a fuzzy feeling to buy a game from Blizzard or Id that runs on Linux, but in the long run, I'd never actually PLAY it there unless my solitary Windows machine was dead.