Phil Plait is an astronomer/teacher who likes to debunk or comments on movies/media/etc. at BadAstronomy.com. I've seen this guy at a conference and he's very amusing.
The core problem with science/math in movies and TV shows is that reality is often too boring to make it on film. Writers/directors/studios feel the need to violate the laws of physics rather than violate the laws of entertainment. I can only hope that shows such as Numb3rs can reverse (or at least) minimize this tendency.
IBM is playing it smart, however. It's investing in consumer electronics with the Cell. That is growing faster than the desktop or server market.
The mainframe makers had their lunch eaten by the minicomputer makers. The minicomputer makers had their lunch eaten by the PC makers. Now the PC makers are going to see their lunch eaten by the consumer electronic makers. Everytime someone comes up with a way to find more customers (on the low-end), they create tech that eventually supplants the tech of the prior, more limited, customer base.
From this standpoint, IBM is in a good position with processors (the Power/PPC family) that work in consumer electronics, desktop, and mainframe applications. Intel is also doing well with low-cost processors that can run Media PCs. On the otherhand, I fear that AMD's niche in the high-end PC and server market will disappear once consumer electronic processors become fast enough to handle desktop and work-group server applications (just like PC-grade processors supplanted SGI's specialty graphics machines). Sure, there will always be room for specialty processors (e.g., for super-duper clustered DB servers) but it won't be a big market.
Getting proper parallax from 620 km is a bit tricky. The cameras would need to be many km apart to get good stereo (31 km camera baseline is equivalent to the parallax that human eyes have at 1 meter).
Instead, I suspect that the parallax is achieved by having two cameras that point slightly different angles. One points down and forward along the track of the satellite, the other points down and backward. Thus, as the satellite passes overhead, the same spot on the ground is seen by the two cameras in succession from different parts of the orbit.
For purposes of get topo data on fixed objects, its more than adequate. Given that the satellite is moving about 8 km/sec, it traverses the needed baseline for stereo in only a few seconds. This is not enough time for the scene to have changed that much.
As software makers add eye-candy, the graphics board becomes more important than the CPU. The advent of graphics card such as this suggests that perhaps the CPU and main RAM is becoming less important to system performance.
I wonder when the GPU will supplant the CPU? I'm sure it would be much easier for ATI to add a few million transistors for some general CPU performance than for Intel/AMD/IBM to replicate a high-power GPU. The CPU-needs of the core logic of basic applications are pretty minimal and could run on a modest CPU nubbin inside a GPU that does the heavy lifting of the GUI. Perhaps the hoped-for $100 PC will really be a nice GPU with a bit of CPU and a minimal set of bridge/IO chips for the system.
New encryption tools are cool, but they only secure the network. The end-terminals (and end-users) are still insecure. Holes in the OS, clicking on the wrong email, etc. can compromise one of the machines. And if either party likes chocolate, then we know that we can get the keys to crypto just by offering a tasty morsel.
Security is only as strong as its weakest link. This invention ensures that the network is not the weakest link. Its a step in the right direction, but other components are still pretty vulnerable.
The rise of Sarbanes-Oxley highlights a key insecurity in the accountability of enterprise systems. Although the high-level applications can do a good job of tracking who did what to the financial data, the core DB may be open to tampering. If a DB admin with the right password can manually diddle a field in a database, they can change the financials of the company.
In contrast, a secure bitemporal DB would record not only the date of the what the data refers to (e.g., the purchase order was entered on March 3rd, 2004) but also the date(s) of any modifications of the data (the quantity and total was changed on December 31, 2004, Uh-Oh!).
This is more than just securing the DB with a hierarchy of privileges, it means that no one can overwrite the old data or change any data without creating an audit trail. This, of course, also means changes in the DB, OS or file system to make critical data only accessible through a secure DB layer that tracks changes (e.g., no accessible plain-text DB data structures). These same concepts could be used (probably are, for all I know) for OSS version control to track who did what and when to the code.
Lowering the power consumption per core is a first step to upping the number of cores. I imagine that CPU power consumption for desktops will level out in the 100 W range and makers will add cores, cache, and clock speed to maximize performance within a given power budget. I could also see some innovators creating new cooling technologies to boost the power budget and thus boost the permissible CPU performance within that expanded budget.
And what happens when the person takes the subway or is in a building? People act like GPS is the all-knowing eye in the sky. In reality, it fails in urban landscapes.
Re:Resampling: Imagine a 1-pixel-wide line
on
When is 720p Not 720p?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
There's got to be a fairly straightforward formula relating inherent resolution loss when performing any noninteger upsampling, or any downsampling.
Its a bit messy. Imagine 1080i image with a 1-pixel wide sloping black line that is nearly horizontal on a white background. If you throw out half the data, you create an image with a dashed-line. Gaps in the line occur where the slanting line cut across the rows that were discarded. If you upsample from 540 to 720, you will find that the remaining dashes become fattened non-uniformly. In places where the row in the 720-row image falls directly on top of the 540 row image, the line will be thin and dark. In places where the 720-row image falls midway between rows in the 540 row image, the line will be wide and less dark. The end result is the thin black uniform line is converted to a dashed line of varying thickness and darkness -- not pretty.
Even if you resample directly from 1080 to 720, you still run into problems where the 720-row image pixels fall between the 1080-row pixels. At best, you can use higher-order interpolation (e.g. cubic) to try and fit a curve through the original data and try to estimate what was in the middle of the pixels so they can be shifted half way over. But the result wil never look like an image that was taken with a 720-row camera in the first place.
or maybe 9 years if we take into account that we need to rest (even though part of resting this time is important with regard to the learning activity)
You may be right. The question is: is sleep/relaxation, etc. a critical part of intellectual development? For humans it definitely is -- sleep deprivation really messes up the brain. But even for non-biological intelligences I'd bet that some "downtime" is an important part of assimilating all the data of the day. Interacting with the world is a full-time job for the CPU that forces the deferral of many analysis and restructuring tasks that can only occur when the brain is offline.
Perhaps androids would dream because dreaming is a critical maintenance/analysis cron job.
I'd bet that the first human-equivalent machine intelligence takes 18 years to develop after the first human-brainpower-equivalent CPU is created. It will take that long for the machine to "learn" the world if it only has a CPU equivalent to one human brain (1 HBE).
Of course, if Moore's Law is still kicking, then 2 years into the learning phase, they can swap the 1-HBE processor for a 2-HBE processor. This will shorten the remaining learning period, but I doubt it will cut it in half. Learning to physically and mentally interact with the world will still take time. What might accelerate the learning time is if multiple copies of the intelligence can share experiences and learn directly from each other's mistakes/successes.
The point is that the first intelligent robots will need to go to preschool to learn how to interact with the world.
I'd bet that the economics of P2P depend on the "popularity" of the artist. P2P file copying probably helps obscure artists because it helps listeners overcome the cost and risk barier of buying an unknown artist. But file copying probably hurts more popular artists when people download must-have (but don't neccessarily want ot pay-for) manufactured hits by a known artist. P2P fragments the listening population by connecting them with more artists. In theory, the total outcome can be better as P2P file copying expands people's interests and helps them find music they consider worth paying for.
On the other hand, RIAA, I'll wager, is more concerned with preserving blockbuster artists than in promoting obscure ones. It's easier (and more ego-boosting) to ride the back of a Britney Spears than it is to promote a thousand no-name bands. Moreover, its more cost-efficient for music distributors to sell 10 million copies of one album than hassle with selling 15,000 copies of a 1000 artists. Even in a digital age, creating a distribution relationship with 1000 artists is harder (and less sexy) than having a single relationship with a megastar .
Fragmentation of people's musical interests is not in RIAA's best interests even if it expands the total music industry by more effectgively matching content creators to content consumers.
(*sigh* Most of the times when I see people bashing Fortran, they mean F77 and older versions, while F90 and later are nice and powerful to work with.)
Thanks for the info. Yes, I learned F77 in 1982 and hated it because I'd already been using APL for a few years. It sounds like I need to check out F90.
APL was far more powerful for array handling than FORTRAN. APL is like Matlab, only with a much more powerful syntax for handling n-dimensional arrays of numbers. Want to add 5 to every element of array, X? Then just say 5+X. No DO loops, no indexing through all the elements, just one simple statement. It doesn't even matter is X is a vector, 2-D array, 3-D array, or whatever. Need an 3-D finite difference gas diffusion simulation for N different gases? Just create a 4-D array and a program of under half-dozen lines handles the core diffusion estimation process (with no awful nested loops). Because APL is inherently array-oriented, most statements can be vectorized automatically very easily.
I'm not saying that APL does not have its faults (the original version was weak on control structures and data structures other than arrays), but it's core syntax and native handling of multi-dimensional arrays make it idea for scientific computing.
Given that ALL news sources or sites have some bias, isn't trust in the eye of the beholder in many cases? Although the objective facts of some situation may be undisputed (usually these are disputed, too), the interpretation of those facts is subjective and highly dependent on the viewpoint, world model, etc.
Perhaps Google will need to introduce right-wing and left-wing versions of TrustRank. If it does not, then it will be an example of tyranny of the majority when Google asserts than the majority's bias is trustworthy.
If one tries to clone an FS that is active, can this cloning tool handle open/changin files (often the most important/recent-in-use files on the system)? I remember an odd bug in an Mac OS X cloning tool that would create massive/expanding copies of large files that were mid-download during a cloning.
Every game presents a new world to explore and to learn and to challenge. Yes, the basic motifs may be the same -- puzzles, mazes, monsters, and weapons -- but the combinations are always unique and that provides the challenge.
A "new" game provides a "new" challenge even if it uses the same building blocks as the old game.
The more you can bridge two disciplines, the more valuable you become. Lots of people know software and lots of people know hardware, comparatively fewer know how to make the two work together.
From my experience, software-only people don't understand the nonlinearities and non-idealized behavior of hardware and thus create software that breaks in the real world. Hardware-only people lack an understanding of the powerful functionality of software and don't create designs that take full advantage of what software can do.
You can still choose one or the other as your declared major or concentration, but if you understand both you will be in a better position to more than just another programmer or hardware engineer. Rising to a level where you know how all the pieces fit together gives you a career that is much harder to outsource.
Using the law in unintended ways is nothing new. Although nothing has been done about this yet, I suspect that anti-phishing legislation could also be used by a corporation to shut down parody sites. Depending on how the law is worded (misworded), it could become a crime to make a site the "looks like another site."
Although the courts may, eventually, rule in favor of the parody site, the legal costs to defend the site mean victory for those who would resort to barritry.
Currently its aimed at the longhaul routes, which do not work well in the P2P model at the moment due to the smaller number of customers.
I agree that hub's have a role, the question is what is the solution to air travel growth when when some fraction of the traffic on a route is due to hubbing (e.g., you have some fraction of passengers who did not want to travel to the hub and add at least 2 hours to their travel time). If more people want to get from England to India, at what point to you stop forcing them to fly to-from London/Mumbai and start offering more point-to-point between Birmingham and Bangalore? Is it cheaper to add a customs & immigration checkpoint to another airport to add A380 handling abilities?
If you need 20%-35% more capacity than a 747, then an A380 is the way to go. But the other alterantive is to put create a schedule that varies over the year or week with either one or two 777s (for ETOPS-compatible routes) or A340s. One 777/A340 is more economical when demand is low and two provide more capacity than an A380. A global carrier can usually keep total asset utilization high by balancing winter destinations and summer destinations (or day-of-week patterns) and moving/rescheduling the fleet to go where demand is.
I'm not saying the A380 has no place in the world, only that the current portfolio of airframes provides more flexibility for high and low volume routes than it might seem. I'm also saying that hubs suck for passengers and that people, given a choice, prefer direct flights.
It will be interesting to see if Airbus' bet on the hub-and-spoke model works. The A380 makes sense for high-volume hub-to-hub long-distance flights. On the other hand, I prefer point-to-point, myself. I always try to avoid connecting flights if possible, prefer smaller planes (faster load/unload times), and prefer smaller airports (shorter concourses, faster in-and-out, fewer runway delays).
I'm sure there is room for both models, but once a hub saturates it becomes necessary to increase point-to-point operations from smaller airports (e.g., the Southwest Airlines model).
What was stolen? Ignorance & naivete
on
Phishing for Credit
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Your analogy to robbing a bank is a false one; nothing was actuallly stolen in this project.
Something was stolen from the unwitting student/participants. They lost their ignorance of the sad state of the internet's infrastructure. This "experiment" created a harsh wake-up call that e-mail is not a trustworthy medium.
SMTP was never designed for an open environment with untrustworthy users. It was designed for collegial academic networks with funding from people that run closed military networks.
Why is the solution to everyone's problem with academia "fire the professor"
I agree 100%, but shooting the messenger is an age-old solution. People prefer a comforting falsehood (email is trustworthy) to a harsh reality.
You guys here on/. make it sound like we have nothing else to do of our time than to think about the mighty US of America, how to annoy it, how to counter it. Believe it or not, it happens sometimes that we have ideas, rules, laws of our own, that are not just there to be "against" the US.
If I offended you, then I apologize.
What I said was not meant to imply that the French spend all their time cooking up schemes to annoy the U.S. As you say, the French have their own laws for their own reasons. I saw the court ruling as a legitimate way to change the economics of imported American movies with an eye toward preserving French culture.
And by the way, even though you almost never see them in the US, there is actually a lot of movies produced in France.
If this ruling stands, it might be a very interesting test of the validity of arguments about DRM. If DRM really is essential to the economics of the motion picture industry, then the ruling will hurt French film industry especially. If DRM is a barrier to film consumption, then the absence of DRM on French DVD should mean prosperity for French film makers.
Slashdot Mirror
Phil Plait is an astronomer/teacher who likes to debunk or comments on movies/media/etc. at BadAstronomy.com. I've seen this guy at a conference and he's very amusing.
The core problem with science/math in movies and TV shows is that reality is often too boring to make it on film. Writers/directors/studios feel the need to violate the laws of physics rather than violate the laws of entertainment. I can only hope that shows such as Numb3rs can reverse (or at least) minimize this tendency.
IBM is playing it smart, however. It's investing in consumer electronics with the Cell. That is growing faster than the desktop or server market.
The mainframe makers had their lunch eaten by the minicomputer makers. The minicomputer makers had their lunch eaten by the PC makers. Now the PC makers are going to see their lunch eaten by the consumer electronic makers. Everytime someone comes up with a way to find more customers (on the low-end), they create tech that eventually supplants the tech of the prior, more limited, customer base.
From this standpoint, IBM is in a good position with processors (the Power/PPC family) that work in consumer electronics, desktop, and mainframe applications. Intel is also doing well with low-cost processors that can run Media PCs. On the otherhand, I fear that AMD's niche in the high-end PC and server market will disappear once consumer electronic processors become fast enough to handle desktop and work-group server applications (just like PC-grade processors supplanted SGI's specialty graphics machines). Sure, there will always be room for specialty processors (e.g., for super-duper clustered DB servers) but it won't be a big market.
Getting proper parallax from 620 km is a bit tricky. The cameras would need to be many km apart to get good stereo (31 km camera baseline is equivalent to the parallax that human eyes have at 1 meter).
Instead, I suspect that the parallax is achieved by having two cameras that point slightly different angles. One points down and forward along the track of the satellite, the other points down and backward. Thus, as the satellite passes overhead, the same spot on the ground is seen by the two cameras in succession from different parts of the orbit.
For purposes of get topo data on fixed objects, its more than adequate. Given that the satellite is moving about 8 km/sec, it traverses the needed baseline for stereo in only a few seconds. This is not enough time for the scene to have changed that much.
As software makers add eye-candy, the graphics board becomes more important than the CPU. The advent of graphics card such as this suggests that perhaps the CPU and main RAM is becoming less important to system performance.
I wonder when the GPU will supplant the CPU? I'm sure it would be much easier for ATI to add a few million transistors for some general CPU performance than for Intel/AMD/IBM to replicate a high-power GPU. The CPU-needs of the core logic of basic applications are pretty minimal and could run on a modest CPU nubbin inside a GPU that does the heavy lifting of the GUI. Perhaps the hoped-for $100 PC will really be a nice GPU with a bit of CPU and a minimal set of bridge/IO chips for the system.
New encryption tools are cool, but they only secure the network. The end-terminals (and end-users) are still insecure. Holes in the OS, clicking on the wrong email, etc. can compromise one of the machines. And if either party likes chocolate, then we know that we can get the keys to crypto just by offering a tasty morsel.
Security is only as strong as its weakest link. This invention ensures that the network is not the weakest link. Its a step in the right direction, but other components are still pretty vulnerable.
The rise of Sarbanes-Oxley highlights a key insecurity in the accountability of enterprise systems. Although the high-level applications can do a good job of tracking who did what to the financial data, the core DB may be open to tampering. If a DB admin with the right password can manually diddle a field in a database, they can change the financials of the company.
In contrast, a secure bitemporal DB would record not only the date of the what the data refers to (e.g., the purchase order was entered on March 3rd, 2004) but also the date(s) of any modifications of the data (the quantity and total was changed on December 31, 2004, Uh-Oh!).
This is more than just securing the DB with a hierarchy of privileges, it means that no one can overwrite the old data or change any data without creating an audit trail. This, of course, also means changes in the DB, OS or file system to make critical data only accessible through a secure DB layer that tracks changes (e.g., no accessible plain-text DB data structures). These same concepts could be used (probably are, for all I know) for OSS version control to track who did what and when to the code.
Lowering the power consumption per core is a first step to upping the number of cores. I imagine that CPU power consumption for desktops will level out in the 100 W range and makers will add cores, cache, and clock speed to maximize performance within a given power budget. I could also see some innovators creating new cooling technologies to boost the power budget and thus boost the permissible CPU performance within that expanded budget.
And what happens when the person takes the subway or is in a building? People act like GPS is the all-knowing eye in the sky. In reality, it fails in urban landscapes.
There's got to be a fairly straightforward formula relating inherent resolution loss when performing any noninteger upsampling, or any downsampling.
Its a bit messy. Imagine 1080i image with a 1-pixel wide sloping black line that is nearly horizontal on a white background. If you throw out half the data, you create an image with a dashed-line. Gaps in the line occur where the slanting line cut across the rows that were discarded. If you upsample from 540 to 720, you will find that the remaining dashes become fattened non-uniformly. In places where the row in the 720-row image falls directly on top of the 540 row image, the line will be thin and dark. In places where the 720-row image falls midway between rows in the 540 row image, the line will be wide and less dark. The end result is the thin black uniform line is converted to a dashed line of varying thickness and darkness -- not pretty.
Even if you resample directly from 1080 to 720, you still run into problems where the 720-row image pixels fall between the 1080-row pixels. At best, you can use higher-order interpolation (e.g. cubic) to try and fit a curve through the original data and try to estimate what was in the middle of the pixels so they can be shifted half way over. But the result wil never look like an image that was taken with a 720-row camera in the first place.
or maybe 9 years if we take into account that we need to rest (even though part of resting this time is important with regard to the learning activity)
You may be right. The question is: is sleep/relaxation, etc. a critical part of intellectual development? For humans it definitely is -- sleep deprivation really messes up the brain. But even for non-biological intelligences I'd bet that some "downtime" is an important part of assimilating all the data of the day. Interacting with the world is a full-time job for the CPU that forces the deferral of many analysis and restructuring tasks that can only occur when the brain is offline.
Perhaps androids would dream because dreaming is a critical maintenance/analysis cron job.
I'd bet that the first human-equivalent machine intelligence takes 18 years to develop after the first human-brainpower-equivalent CPU is created. It will take that long for the machine to "learn" the world if it only has a CPU equivalent to one human brain (1 HBE).
Of course, if Moore's Law is still kicking, then 2 years into the learning phase, they can swap the 1-HBE processor for a 2-HBE processor. This will shorten the remaining learning period, but I doubt it will cut it in half. Learning to physically and mentally interact with the world will still take time. What might accelerate the learning time is if multiple copies of the intelligence can share experiences and learn directly from each other's mistakes/successes.
The point is that the first intelligent robots will need to go to preschool to learn how to interact with the world.
Given that its possible to compute any digit of pi without computing the preceding digits its not surprising that the digits have structure. The bizarre part of this algorithm is that computes digits in hexadecimal.
I'd bet that the economics of P2P depend on the "popularity" of the artist. P2P file copying probably helps obscure artists because it helps listeners overcome the cost and risk barier of buying an unknown artist. But file copying probably hurts more popular artists when people download must-have (but don't neccessarily want ot pay-for) manufactured hits by a known artist. P2P fragments the listening population by connecting them with more artists. In theory, the total outcome can be better as P2P file copying expands people's interests and helps them find music they consider worth paying for.
On the other hand, RIAA, I'll wager, is more concerned with preserving blockbuster artists than in promoting obscure ones. It's easier (and more ego-boosting) to ride the back of a Britney Spears than it is to promote a thousand no-name bands. Moreover, its more cost-efficient for music distributors to sell 10 million copies of one album than hassle with selling 15,000 copies of a 1000 artists. Even in a digital age, creating a distribution relationship with 1000 artists is harder (and less sexy) than having a single relationship with a megastar .
Fragmentation of people's musical interests is not in RIAA's best interests even if it expands the total music industry by more effectgively matching content creators to content consumers.
(*sigh* Most of the times when I see people bashing Fortran, they mean F77 and older versions, while F90 and later are nice and powerful to work with.)
Thanks for the info. Yes, I learned F77 in 1982 and hated it because I'd already been using APL for a few years. It sounds like I need to check out F90.
APL was far more powerful for array handling than FORTRAN. APL is like Matlab, only with a much more powerful syntax for handling n-dimensional arrays of numbers. Want to add 5 to every element of array, X? Then just say 5+X. No DO loops, no indexing through all the elements, just one simple statement. It doesn't even matter is X is a vector, 2-D array, 3-D array, or whatever. Need an 3-D finite difference gas diffusion simulation for N different gases? Just create a 4-D array and a program of under half-dozen lines handles the core diffusion estimation process (with no awful nested loops). Because APL is inherently array-oriented, most statements can be vectorized automatically very easily.
I'm not saying that APL does not have its faults (the original version was weak on control structures and data structures other than arrays), but it's core syntax and native handling of multi-dimensional arrays make it idea for scientific computing.
Given that ALL news sources or sites have some bias, isn't trust in the eye of the beholder in many cases? Although the objective facts of some situation may be undisputed (usually these are disputed, too), the interpretation of those facts is subjective and highly dependent on the viewpoint, world model, etc.
Perhaps Google will need to introduce right-wing and left-wing versions of TrustRank. If it does not, then it will be an example of tyranny of the majority when Google asserts than the majority's bias is trustworthy.
If one tries to clone an FS that is active, can this cloning tool handle open/changin files (often the most important/recent-in-use files on the system)? I remember an odd bug in an Mac OS X cloning tool that would create massive/expanding copies of large files that were mid-download during a cloning.
Tiger only runs on machines that have built-in firewire. That means the oldest laptop supported is the Pismo.
I'm sure the Xpostfacto folks are looking into how to get Tiger to run on older machines.
Every game presents a new world to explore and to learn and to challenge. Yes, the basic motifs may be the same -- puzzles, mazes, monsters, and weapons -- but the combinations are always unique and that provides the challenge.
A "new" game provides a "new" challenge even if it uses the same building blocks as the old game.
The more you can bridge two disciplines, the more valuable you become. Lots of people know software and lots of people know hardware, comparatively fewer know how to make the two work together.
From my experience, software-only people don't understand the nonlinearities and non-idealized behavior of hardware and thus create software that breaks in the real world. Hardware-only people lack an understanding of the powerful functionality of software and don't create designs that take full advantage of what software can do.
You can still choose one or the other as your declared major or concentration, but if you understand both you will be in a better position to more than just another programmer or hardware engineer. Rising to a level where you know how all the pieces fit together gives you a career that is much harder to outsource.
Using the law in unintended ways is nothing new. Although nothing has been done about this yet, I suspect that anti-phishing legislation could also be used by a corporation to shut down parody sites. Depending on how the law is worded (misworded), it could become a crime to make a site the "looks like another site."
Although the courts may, eventually, rule in favor of the parody site, the legal costs to defend the site mean victory for those who would resort to barritry.
Currently its aimed at the longhaul routes, which do not work well in the P2P model at the moment due to the smaller number of customers.
I agree that hub's have a role, the question is what is the solution to air travel growth when when some fraction of the traffic on a route is due to hubbing (e.g., you have some fraction of passengers who did not want to travel to the hub and add at least 2 hours to their travel time). If more people want to get from England to India, at what point to you stop forcing them to fly to-from London/Mumbai and start offering more point-to-point between Birmingham and Bangalore? Is it cheaper to add a customs & immigration checkpoint to another airport to add A380 handling abilities?
If you need 20%-35% more capacity than a 747, then an A380 is the way to go. But the other alterantive is to put create a schedule that varies over the year or week with either one or two 777s (for ETOPS-compatible routes) or A340s. One 777/A340 is more economical when demand is low and two provide more capacity than an A380. A global carrier can usually keep total asset utilization high by balancing winter destinations and summer destinations (or day-of-week patterns) and moving/rescheduling the fleet to go where demand is.
I'm not saying the A380 has no place in the world, only that the current portfolio of airframes provides more flexibility for high and low volume routes than it might seem. I'm also saying that hubs suck for passengers and that people, given a choice, prefer direct flights.
P.S. I like you sig.
It will be interesting to see if Airbus' bet on the hub-and-spoke model works. The A380 makes sense for high-volume hub-to-hub long-distance flights. On the other hand, I prefer point-to-point, myself. I always try to avoid connecting flights if possible, prefer smaller planes (faster load/unload times), and prefer smaller airports (shorter concourses, faster in-and-out, fewer runway delays).
I'm sure there is room for both models, but once a hub saturates it becomes necessary to increase point-to-point operations from smaller airports (e.g., the Southwest Airlines model).
Your analogy to robbing a bank is a false one; nothing was actuallly stolen in this project.
Something was stolen from the unwitting student/participants. They lost their ignorance of the sad state of the internet's infrastructure. This "experiment" created a harsh wake-up call that e-mail is not a trustworthy medium.
SMTP was never designed for an open environment with untrustworthy users. It was designed for collegial academic networks with funding from people that run closed military networks.
Why is the solution to everyone's problem with academia "fire the professor"
I agree 100%, but shooting the messenger is an age-old solution. People prefer a comforting falsehood (email is trustworthy) to a harsh reality.
You guys here on /. make it sound like we have nothing else to do of our time than to think about the mighty US of America, how to annoy it, how to counter it. Believe it or not, it happens sometimes that we have ideas, rules, laws of our own, that are not just there to be "against" the US.
If I offended you, then I apologize.
What I said was not meant to imply that the French spend all their time cooking up schemes to annoy the U.S. As you say, the French have their own laws for their own reasons. I saw the court ruling as a legitimate way to change the economics of imported American movies with an eye toward preserving French culture.
And by the way, even though you almost never see them in the US, there is actually a lot of movies produced in France.
Absolutely! The local university has an excellent International Film Series where I have seen some very enjoyable French movies.
If this ruling stands, it might be a very interesting test of the validity of arguments about DRM. If DRM really is essential to the economics of the motion picture industry, then the ruling will hurt French film industry especially. If DRM is a barrier to film consumption, then the absence of DRM on French DVD should mean prosperity for French film makers.