Only if she tosses it into the trash afterwards. If it gets reused a few years down the line, it does nothing to your savings other than postpone it for that length of time. If you're including your savings on paper in your quarterly financial reporting, this might be an issue. But most likely the cost gets recovered at some point.
That said, I think there are plenty of more likely places to look for savings to be lost other than just storing the printed copies. Staples, folds, coffee rings, and "grabbed the closest thing to write on with a ballpoint pen" I think would be far more common and truly wasteful.
You can't keep paper copies that you hand out to reuse. There are roughly 180 school days per year. If you have class sizes around 20, and 5 classes you'll be looking at something on the order of 100 sheets of paper a day. That's 18,000 sheets of paper to keep around.
For a school, this might make sense. I generally found 80% or so of the pages I handed out reusable. The issues come, as others have noted, with being able to issue some sort of writing instrument which can write on this shit, while allowing it to be reused.
Frankly, I think we'll be recycling paper for a long, long time in the future...
My dad has watch built on that premise. It doesn't work well for him, because it's always running a bit fast. Why? He's a barber, so it gets 20x the motion that "your average sedentary person" would give it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they didn't build some sort of charging/current regulator into it. It is a normal-sized watch after all. Still, the fact that they either didn't care it ran fast, or didn't test it at full charge 8+ hours at a time is a bit dodgy to me.
I was thinking some superstructure to hold a skin above the mirror a few cm. I wasn't really thinking coating, although that's what I typed. Still, you make damn good points.
However, if we get good at taking out missiles and building really powerful lasers, it will really be easy to hit stationary targets. Then you don't need to worry so much about firing missiles in the first place.....
Actually, I think you might be able to put a protective coating over a mirror. As long as the coating is thin enough that when the laser burns it off, it doesn't significantly change the flight characteristics, you'd be set. A perfect mirror to bounce the laser off of, and no chance of scratches or dings to mess the mirror up.
And the logical next step is to launch an interceptor missile alongside the laser shot. The laser burns the coating off the mirror, providing a fantastic surface for the interceptor missile to bounce it's guidance system off of.
Heh, you bring back some fantastic memories. Homer, Cartman, Gumby, and Chewy playing the Headhunters mod for Quake II. "Doh", "Respect mayh Authority", and "Muaaaahhhaaa" echoing around a basement....
It's amazing that you can get an insightful mod on a comment buried in an article that's not on the front page, while not knowing what you're talking about.
Again, you're talking like a software engineer. These aren't "preconceived notions" we're talking about - they're physical processes. They're real-world observations.
If I write a program to model ocean currents, and it spits out a map of oceans very, very similar to what's been well observed in the ocean. I can assume my code is good enough. If it spits out a map of sea surface temperatures which matches 90% of what's observed, I'm not really going to worry about the code behind it.
This isn't "I have a fantasy, let me see if I can make a computer produce it." This is, "We've observed this in the real world, lets see if we can model it to try to understand it better." There is a definite check to most scientific computing - the real world. If your program doesn't match that, there's an issue.
You're once again approaching this as a software engineer - your job is to make code that does arbitrary shit, and do it correctly, efficiently, and elegantly. My job is to use some code, churn out some data, then compare that to the real world and other people's data. I have an answer key to compare my data to. You don't. Thus, you rely upon code auditing to make sure the code is good. I rely on the answer key. If my data doesn't match that, then I go digging. Is it code, statistics, initialization data? (40% stats, and 40% initialization data, usually)
And btw, what's "farhenheit"? You won't find conversions involving that in science!
A bug isn't just a bug. Either it affects the outcome of the program run or it doesn't. The issue is that if you don't know what the outcome should be, you won't be able to tell. Nobody in scientific computing just "re-run(s) the program with a specified set of inputs and check(s) the output". The input is 80% of the battle. We just ran across a paper which showed that the input can often explain 80%+ of the variance in the output of models similar to the one we use.
So there's our dilemma - what we feed the model is very, very, VERY limited. If something crashes or returns an anomalous result when fed a string instead of an integer, we'll never notice. Why? Because we'll NEVER feed it a string. If all the climatological data we get to feed the model is from NCAR reanalysis, we'll make damn sure the model can handle that data input. Might there be serious issues if another format is fed it? Sure. But that will probably never happen.
Scientific programming is garbage, by and large. Perform a code audit on it, and you'll find a lot of bugs. But largely, the parts that are in active use are relatively bug free. Why? Because we compare our output with that of other modeling groups. In my office there are two posters comparing seven models from seven different universities. I can tell you who treats oceanic uptake of carbon the same as our group does, and who treats it differently. If one model was a major outlier, we'd have identified that, and asked them what code they use to calculate oceanic carbon uptake.
This is science, not Software Engineering. We troubleshoot and find bugs by comparing OUTPUT, not CODE. It's only when we find that output is significantly different that we look to code to figure out why. It's akin to having 7 browsers all try to render a page. If 5 of them render the same thing, one is close, and one doesn't look anything like the others, your first guess is to take a look at what that one oddball is doing. The same goes for scientific code.
The people writing it aren't software engineers, by a long shot. But if they really screw up, everybody knows. It's not through a code audit - it's because their output doesn't match either what's observed in nature, or what other models output. Would rigorous code audits make our code better? Sure. Is CS volunteering to come do it for us? No. Would we have the time to deal with their nit-picking? No. We validate output, not code. And largely, it works.
Of all the stuff that's important in scientific computing, the code is probably one of the more minor parts. The science behind the code is drastically more important. If the code is solid and the science is crap, it's useless. Likewise, the source data that's used to initialize a model is far more important than the code. If that's bogus, the entire thing is bogus.
Sure, you could audit it, and find shit that's not done properly. At the same time, you wouldn't have a damn clue what it's supposed to be doing. Suppose I'm adding a floating point to an integer. Is that a problem? Does it ruin everything? Or is it just sloppy coding that doesn't make a difference in the long run? Understanding what the code is doing is required for you to do an audit which will produce any useful results.
Unless you're working under the fallacy that all code must be perfect and bug free. Nobody gives a shit if you audit software and produce a list of bugs. What's important is that you be able to quantify how important those bugs are. And you can't do that without knowing what the software is supposed to be doing. When it's something a complicated as fluid dynamics or biological systems, a code audit by a CS person is pretty much worthless.
As someone doing a PhD in a climate related area, I can see both sides of the issue. The code I work with is freely and openly available. However, 99.9% or more of the people in the world wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with it. I look at my classmates - we're all in the same degree program, yet probably only 5% of them would really be able to understand and do anything meaningful with the code I'm using.
Why? We're that specialized. Here, I'm talking 5% of people studying atmospheric and oceanic sciences being able to make use of my code without taking several years to get up to speed. What's the incentive to release it? Why bother with the effort, when the audience is soooo small?
Release the code, and if some dumbass decides to dig into it, you either are in the position of having to waste time answering ignorant questions, or you ignore them, giving them ammo for "teh code is BOGUS!!!!" Far easier to just keep the code in-house, and hand it out to the few qualified researchers who might be interested. Unsurprisingly, a lot of scientific code is handled this way.
However, I do very much believe in completely transparent discourse. My research group has two major comparison studies of different climate models. We pulled in data from seven models from seven different universities, and analyzed the differences in CO2 predictions, among other things. The data was freely and openly given to us by these other research groups, and they happily contributed information about the inner workings of their models. This, in my book, is what it's all about. The relevant information was shared with people in a position to understand it and analyze it.
It'd be a whole different story if the public wasn't filled with a bunch of ignorant whack-jobs, trying to smear scientists. When we're trying to do science, we'd rather do science than defend ourselves against hacks with a public soapbox. If you want access to the data and the code, go to a school and study the stuff. All the doors are open then. The price of admission is just having some vague idea wtf you're talking about.
Shit....I'm a poor grad student studying climate. Who do I contact to get paid off? My computer purchases are on hold, and my alcohol budget has been significantly reduced. I'll deny climate change for a couple of years! Where's my paycheck?
Just drop in an SD card and be done with it. I've got an 8gb SD card in it for just that purpose. I partitioned it to hold/tmp/opt/var/home and swap to save lots of read/write cycles on the SSD. So far, it works pretty damn well./opt and/var usually take up several hundred mb each, unless you're really good about keeping them cleaned out.
In my first generation, heavily used EEE 701 it is. The wireless card died a month ago. The left-click bar doesn't work anymore either. But the drive still works fine.
That may be in part because I put the OS on the drive, and put/tmp/opt/var and/home and swap on an SD card, to prevent drive hammering. Figured I'd be easier and cheaper to replace an SD card every year or so than replacing the internal SSD. Go figure that I haven't replaced the SD card yet, and the wireless is dead....
But if it's opt-in, and you can't find the author, the work may be gone forever.
I really don't know what the solution is. If I had the choice between losing a book forever, and google going opt-out, I'd go with google. Preserving the work of previous authors is important. We've seen it benefit society hundreds and thousands of years later.
But an opt-out monopoly is a load of bullshit. I can't support that, with any good conscience. What's the answer?
I do. But it just lists websites and what password# (1-30) it has. The actual passwords are on an index card buried somewhere on my desk. But that card doesn't include the one for this computer, nor what logins go which each.
It's the best balance of "easy" and "secure" that I could come up with. If you gain physical access to my index card of passwords, it won't help you unless you can decrypt the contents of my drive, to match password with website. If you can gain access to what # password goes with each website by cracking my system, it still doesn't tell you the password.
Not perfect, by a long shot. But fairly easy, and fairly secure. By the way, my username @ slashdot is password #7. Looking at my personal passwords.txt doesn't help you much at all.:-p
I've been lucky enough to be able to say, "Fuck IE" for the last half-dozen years or so. I did pass up some job opportunities because of it. Stupid? Perhaps. But I was in a position where I could. And it didn't burn my ass in the long run, so I guess I did ok.
I've sent out a bunch of emails ripping shoddy website design of places which required IE. If you can hit the right person with a "The fact that you're incapable of deploying W3C standardized code on your website makes your organization look incompetent and poorly run" it stings pretty damn well. I managed to get a couple of "You're right, but we can't because.....(insert some vendor or other-part-of-the-company excuse here). My reply was always, "I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in working for/doing business with a company which is that unprofessional and disorganized."
I actually managed to see a couple of changes after correspondence like that.
But like I said, I was in a damn sweet position where I could do that. I recognize that a lot of people aren't.
Awesome. Except that I can't get to it. No, I'm not going to allow a hundred scripts from a hundred different websites to view it.
I know, a typical/. bitch with noscript installed. Seriously - if you want to post a link, post a link to SOMETHING!!!! Not some shitty-ass website with a thousand tendrils mired in a thousand other websites.
Don't tell anyone, but if you fly out of very small, regional airports, it's a cakewalk. Really.
My local one here has 8 terminals, and a microbrewery/pub past security. The longest wait in line I had there was 30 minutes, just before christmas, after the Uni here had just let out. Flying out on a random Tuesday you'll be faced with an intimidating 8 screeners, with a dozen people ahead of you in line. You'll dump your stuff into bins, step through the metal detector, and if you qualify for "extra screening", they'll pat under your arms and your belly and lower back. That's it. Once my shit hits the conveyor belt, I haven't been in line more than 5 minutes, including the time it takes me to tie my shoes.
Then you'll get to sit and drink some amazing beer until your flight is boarding. And no, you don't have to wander out of the bar until 5 minutes before flight-time. That's the furthest terminal from the bar.
Once through that rigorous security, you're home free. All your flights to major hubs occur past security, so you never have to do the "real" security that happens at them.
Really, flying out of a major hub is a bit less expensive, but is a royal pain in the ass. Fuck the extra $70 - I'll pay that to avoid a rectal exam. I fly from tiny regional airports, into tiny regional airports. The people there are friendly, the security is lax, and there aren't lines to speak of.
Is this a horrible flaw in security? Yes indeed. Will I continue to take advantage of it? Hell yes!
It all depends on the company, really. If that money goes into slush funds, ridiculous executive salaries, and market speculation, it wouldn't be all that great for the economy. If it went to a company that provided fair wages and invested in its workers, it would be fantastic.
Overall, corporations abuse patents. It's in their best interest to squeeze as much money out of them as possible, despite any ill effects on other businesses, the economy, or anyone else. Educational institutions milk them for additional funding to do more research. I guess I trust research colleges to be better citizens than any corporation ever could be.
As an anecdote to this, I'm in grad school now, and I'm funded based on patents my school received in the 40s and 50s. (And a bunch since then, but there are a couple from way back when which turned into millions of dollars for the school, which was then invested into the research endowment of the school.)
Which is better? Patenting something, and then using the money from that to fund tens to hundreds of thousands of students, or releasing it to the US for free? I can see the argument both ways. But in my mind, the chance that one of those students ALSO went on to do something which also benefited society is pretty damn large. Based on the research that's been done at my school in the last 50 years, I'm willing to bet that the US was better off with the school keeping the patents, and milking them for all the research they could get out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if she tosses it into the trash afterwards. If it gets reused a few years down the line, it does nothing to your savings other than postpone it for that length of time. If you're including your savings on paper in your quarterly financial reporting, this might be an issue. But most likely the cost gets recovered at some point.
That said, I think there are plenty of more likely places to look for savings to be lost other than just storing the printed copies. Staples, folds, coffee rings, and "grabbed the closest thing to write on with a ballpoint pen" I think would be far more common and truly wasteful.
As a teacher:
You can't keep paper copies that you hand out to reuse. There are roughly 180 school days per year. If you have class sizes around 20, and 5 classes you'll be looking at something on the order of 100 sheets of paper a day. That's 18,000 sheets of paper to keep around.
For a school, this might make sense. I generally found 80% or so of the pages I handed out reusable. The issues come, as others have noted, with being able to issue some sort of writing instrument which can write on this shit, while allowing it to be reused.
Frankly, I think we'll be recycling paper for a long, long time in the future...
My dad has watch built on that premise. It doesn't work well for him, because it's always running a bit fast. Why? He's a barber, so it gets 20x the motion that "your average sedentary person" would give it.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they didn't build some sort of charging/current regulator into it. It is a normal-sized watch after all. Still, the fact that they either didn't care it ran fast, or didn't test it at full charge 8+ hours at a time is a bit dodgy to me.
I was thinking some superstructure to hold a skin above the mirror a few cm. I wasn't really thinking coating, although that's what I typed. Still, you make damn good points.
However, if we get good at taking out missiles and building really powerful lasers, it will really be easy to hit stationary targets. Then you don't need to worry so much about firing missiles in the first place.....
Actually, I think you might be able to put a protective coating over a mirror. As long as the coating is thin enough that when the laser burns it off, it doesn't significantly change the flight characteristics, you'd be set. A perfect mirror to bounce the laser off of, and no chance of scratches or dings to mess the mirror up.
And the logical next step is to launch an interceptor missile alongside the laser shot. The laser burns the coating off the mirror, providing a fantastic surface for the interceptor missile to bounce it's guidance system off of.
....I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.....
Heh, you bring back some fantastic memories. Homer, Cartman, Gumby, and Chewy playing the Headhunters mod for Quake II. "Doh", "Respect mayh Authority", and "Muaaaahhhaaa" echoing around a basement....
You make fantastic, fantastic points. Thanks.
It's amazing that you can get an insightful mod on a comment buried in an article that's not on the front page, while not knowing what you're talking about.
Hats off to you, good sir!
Again, you're talking like a software engineer. These aren't "preconceived notions" we're talking about - they're physical processes. They're real-world observations.
If I write a program to model ocean currents, and it spits out a map of oceans very, very similar to what's been well observed in the ocean. I can assume my code is good enough. If it spits out a map of sea surface temperatures which matches 90% of what's observed, I'm not really going to worry about the code behind it.
This isn't "I have a fantasy, let me see if I can make a computer produce it." This is, "We've observed this in the real world, lets see if we can model it to try to understand it better." There is a definite check to most scientific computing - the real world. If your program doesn't match that, there's an issue.
You're once again approaching this as a software engineer - your job is to make code that does arbitrary shit, and do it correctly, efficiently, and elegantly. My job is to use some code, churn out some data, then compare that to the real world and other people's data. I have an answer key to compare my data to. You don't. Thus, you rely upon code auditing to make sure the code is good. I rely on the answer key. If my data doesn't match that, then I go digging. Is it code, statistics, initialization data? (40% stats, and 40% initialization data, usually)
And btw, what's "farhenheit"? You won't find conversions involving that in science!
Spoken like a Software Engineer!
A bug isn't just a bug. Either it affects the outcome of the program run or it doesn't. The issue is that if you don't know what the outcome should be, you won't be able to tell. Nobody in scientific computing just "re-run(s) the program with a specified set of inputs and check(s) the output". The input is 80% of the battle. We just ran across a paper which showed that the input can often explain 80%+ of the variance in the output of models similar to the one we use.
So there's our dilemma - what we feed the model is very, very, VERY limited. If something crashes or returns an anomalous result when fed a string instead of an integer, we'll never notice. Why? Because we'll NEVER feed it a string. If all the climatological data we get to feed the model is from NCAR reanalysis, we'll make damn sure the model can handle that data input. Might there be serious issues if another format is fed it? Sure. But that will probably never happen.
Scientific programming is garbage, by and large. Perform a code audit on it, and you'll find a lot of bugs. But largely, the parts that are in active use are relatively bug free. Why? Because we compare our output with that of other modeling groups. In my office there are two posters comparing seven models from seven different universities. I can tell you who treats oceanic uptake of carbon the same as our group does, and who treats it differently. If one model was a major outlier, we'd have identified that, and asked them what code they use to calculate oceanic carbon uptake.
This is science, not Software Engineering. We troubleshoot and find bugs by comparing OUTPUT, not CODE. It's only when we find that output is significantly different that we look to code to figure out why. It's akin to having 7 browsers all try to render a page. If 5 of them render the same thing, one is close, and one doesn't look anything like the others, your first guess is to take a look at what that one oddball is doing. The same goes for scientific code.
The people writing it aren't software engineers, by a long shot. But if they really screw up, everybody knows. It's not through a code audit - it's because their output doesn't match either what's observed in nature, or what other models output. Would rigorous code audits make our code better? Sure. Is CS volunteering to come do it for us? No. Would we have the time to deal with their nit-picking? No. We validate output, not code. And largely, it works.
Of all the stuff that's important in scientific computing, the code is probably one of the more minor parts. The science behind the code is drastically more important. If the code is solid and the science is crap, it's useless. Likewise, the source data that's used to initialize a model is far more important than the code. If that's bogus, the entire thing is bogus.
Sure, you could audit it, and find shit that's not done properly. At the same time, you wouldn't have a damn clue what it's supposed to be doing. Suppose I'm adding a floating point to an integer. Is that a problem? Does it ruin everything? Or is it just sloppy coding that doesn't make a difference in the long run? Understanding what the code is doing is required for you to do an audit which will produce any useful results.
Unless you're working under the fallacy that all code must be perfect and bug free. Nobody gives a shit if you audit software and produce a list of bugs. What's important is that you be able to quantify how important those bugs are. And you can't do that without knowing what the software is supposed to be doing. When it's something a complicated as fluid dynamics or biological systems, a code audit by a CS person is pretty much worthless.
As someone doing a PhD in a climate related area, I can see both sides of the issue. The code I work with is freely and openly available. However, 99.9% or more of the people in the world wouldn't be able to do a damn thing with it. I look at my classmates - we're all in the same degree program, yet probably only 5% of them would really be able to understand and do anything meaningful with the code I'm using.
Why? We're that specialized. Here, I'm talking 5% of people studying atmospheric and oceanic sciences being able to make use of my code without taking several years to get up to speed. What's the incentive to release it? Why bother with the effort, when the audience is soooo small?
Release the code, and if some dumbass decides to dig into it, you either are in the position of having to waste time answering ignorant questions, or you ignore them, giving them ammo for "teh code is BOGUS!!!!" Far easier to just keep the code in-house, and hand it out to the few qualified researchers who might be interested. Unsurprisingly, a lot of scientific code is handled this way.
However, I do very much believe in completely transparent discourse. My research group has two major comparison studies of different climate models. We pulled in data from seven models from seven different universities, and analyzed the differences in CO2 predictions, among other things. The data was freely and openly given to us by these other research groups, and they happily contributed information about the inner workings of their models. This, in my book, is what it's all about. The relevant information was shared with people in a position to understand it and analyze it.
It'd be a whole different story if the public wasn't filled with a bunch of ignorant whack-jobs, trying to smear scientists. When we're trying to do science, we'd rather do science than defend ourselves against hacks with a public soapbox. If you want access to the data and the code, go to a school and study the stuff. All the doors are open then. The price of admission is just having some vague idea wtf you're talking about.
Shit....I'm a poor grad student studying climate. Who do I contact to get paid off? My computer purchases are on hold, and my alcohol budget has been significantly reduced. I'll deny climate change for a couple of years! Where's my paycheck?
Fonts and graphics. And as you mentioned, Java.
Just drop in an SD card and be done with it. I've got an 8gb SD card in it for just that purpose. I partitioned it to hold /tmp /opt /var /home and swap to save lots of read/write cycles on the SSD. So far, it works pretty damn well. /opt and /var usually take up several hundred mb each, unless you're really good about keeping them cleaned out.
In my first generation, heavily used EEE 701 it is. The wireless card died a month ago. The left-click bar doesn't work anymore either. But the drive still works fine.
/tmp /opt /var and /home and swap on an SD card, to prevent drive hammering. Figured I'd be easier and cheaper to replace an SD card every year or so than replacing the internal SSD. Go figure that I haven't replaced the SD card yet, and the wireless is dead....
That may be in part because I put the OS on the drive, and put
Once per game, it would seem.
But if it's opt-in, and you can't find the author, the work may be gone forever.
I really don't know what the solution is. If I had the choice between losing a book forever, and google going opt-out, I'd go with google. Preserving the work of previous authors is important. We've seen it benefit society hundreds and thousands of years later.
But an opt-out monopoly is a load of bullshit. I can't support that, with any good conscience. What's the answer?
I do. But it just lists websites and what password# (1-30) it has. The actual passwords are on an index card buried somewhere on my desk. But that card doesn't include the one for this computer, nor what logins go which each.
:-p
It's the best balance of "easy" and "secure" that I could come up with. If you gain physical access to my index card of passwords, it won't help you unless you can decrypt the contents of my drive, to match password with website. If you can gain access to what # password goes with each website by cracking my system, it still doesn't tell you the password.
Not perfect, by a long shot. But fairly easy, and fairly secure. By the way, my username @ slashdot is password #7. Looking at my personal passwords.txt doesn't help you much at all.
I've been lucky enough to be able to say, "Fuck IE" for the last half-dozen years or so. I did pass up some job opportunities because of it. Stupid? Perhaps. But I was in a position where I could. And it didn't burn my ass in the long run, so I guess I did ok.
I've sent out a bunch of emails ripping shoddy website design of places which required IE. If you can hit the right person with a "The fact that you're incapable of deploying W3C standardized code on your website makes your organization look incompetent and poorly run" it stings pretty damn well. I managed to get a couple of "You're right, but we can't because.....(insert some vendor or other-part-of-the-company excuse here). My reply was always, "I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, I'm not interested in working for/doing business with a company which is that unprofessional and disorganized."
I actually managed to see a couple of changes after correspondence like that.
But like I said, I was in a damn sweet position where I could do that. I recognize that a lot of people aren't.
Awesome. Except that I can't get to it. No, I'm not going to allow a hundred scripts from a hundred different websites to view it.
/. bitch with noscript installed. Seriously - if you want to post a link, post a link to SOMETHING!!!! Not some shitty-ass website with a thousand tendrils mired in a thousand other websites.
I know, a typical
Where does this bullshit stop?
I was in elementary school. The entire school gathered around to watch the launch....
Two decades later, when I became a teacher, I really appreciated how fucking awkward a moment that must have been...
Don't tell anyone, but if you fly out of very small, regional airports, it's a cakewalk. Really.
My local one here has 8 terminals, and a microbrewery/pub past security. The longest wait in line I had there was 30 minutes, just before christmas, after the Uni here had just let out. Flying out on a random Tuesday you'll be faced with an intimidating 8 screeners, with a dozen people ahead of you in line. You'll dump your stuff into bins, step through the metal detector, and if you qualify for "extra screening", they'll pat under your arms and your belly and lower back. That's it. Once my shit hits the conveyor belt, I haven't been in line more than 5 minutes, including the time it takes me to tie my shoes.
Then you'll get to sit and drink some amazing beer until your flight is boarding. And no, you don't have to wander out of the bar until 5 minutes before flight-time. That's the furthest terminal from the bar.
Once through that rigorous security, you're home free. All your flights to major hubs occur past security, so you never have to do the "real" security that happens at them.
Really, flying out of a major hub is a bit less expensive, but is a royal pain in the ass. Fuck the extra $70 - I'll pay that to avoid a rectal exam. I fly from tiny regional airports, into tiny regional airports. The people there are friendly, the security is lax, and there aren't lines to speak of.
Is this a horrible flaw in security? Yes indeed. Will I continue to take advantage of it? Hell yes!
It all depends on the company, really. If that money goes into slush funds, ridiculous executive salaries, and market speculation, it wouldn't be all that great for the economy. If it went to a company that provided fair wages and invested in its workers, it would be fantastic.
Overall, corporations abuse patents. It's in their best interest to squeeze as much money out of them as possible, despite any ill effects on other businesses, the economy, or anyone else. Educational institutions milk them for additional funding to do more research. I guess I trust research colleges to be better citizens than any corporation ever could be.
As an anecdote to this, I'm in grad school now, and I'm funded based on patents my school received in the 40s and 50s. (And a bunch since then, but there are a couple from way back when which turned into millions of dollars for the school, which was then invested into the research endowment of the school.)
Which is better? Patenting something, and then using the money from that to fund tens to hundreds of thousands of students, or releasing it to the US for free? I can see the argument both ways. But in my mind, the chance that one of those students ALSO went on to do something which also benefited society is pretty damn large. Based on the research that's been done at my school in the last 50 years, I'm willing to bet that the US was better off with the school keeping the patents, and milking them for all the research they could get out of them.