That's because of the spin of the summary. In fact, the way it should have been said was: you can pay for priority baggage claim. The spin of the summary makes it sounds like United employees will put your bag at the end unless you pay them $$$$$... and they may also hurt your family.
> They keep maintenance costs low by only flying one type > of airplane (granted the 737 has a large number of subtypes)
Every airline minimizes the types of aircraft it flies. It is not just maintenance, either. Crew must be rated for particular aircraft, so the more diverse your fleet, the harder it is to manage crew during irregular ops.
The difference, though, is that WN is severely limited in where it can fly, because it is not cost effective to fly a large airplane like that unless the distance and passenger counts are right.
> They don't punish emergency flyers by jacking up the prices > in the last two weeks
That's because they aren't targeting business travelers. They live and die by the casual traveler market. If they were to have higher price late-reservation fares, it would not be effective in subsidizing the casual traveler fares with the business traveler fares. Of course, this means that the flip side is that casual travelers must bare the full brunt of the cost and profit margin.
I am a business traveler, but on rare occasions I have a life as well, and I will schedule a vacation. I can very often find a fare on CO or US that is cheaper (and out of a closer airport) than on WN, as long as I book the flight far enough in advance.
> If you arrive to the airport early or arrive for a connection > early, they will try to get you on the earliest flight for > free. Southwest understand that delays are cumulative, so > getting you out of the airport and to the next stop is a > priority over keeping everyone in their appointed seat on > their appointed flight
You say this as if it is something special that WN does but other airlines refuse. This is definitely not the case. Every airline I've ever flown will put you on an earlier flight if room is available in the same fare class (ie they won't put you in first if you have a coach ticket, obviously). Worst case you can go on standby (although technically I think many airlines say you have to pay $25 or so to do this, I have never had this enforced). If I miss my flight, except under certain conditions (like the next flight isn't until the next day), they will put me on the next flight with no problem.
One thing you did NOT mention is that WN does not communicate with other airlines. If your flight is delayed 7 hrs, you do not have the option to fly the United flight that leaves in 1 hr and has open seats... unless you want to pay for a second ticket on United, that is!
Talking about Southwest as an alternative to United is kind of pointless; it is an apples and oranges comparison.
However, that does bring up an interesting point. Why is United considering this? 99% of people checking bags will be vacationers or otherwise infrequent flyers. This is not exactly United's target market.
Story summary misses the point. Then commentary by submitter mentions the point but still manages to miss it!
Listen, you can have your bags come out first one of two ways:
1) pay a crapload more money for first class 2) travel a crapload of miles per year to earn status which will get you upgrades to first and/or priority baggage claim even when stuck in coach
This is the case not only on United, but also many other airlines. I am platinum on Continental and if I were dumb enough to check my bags, they would come out first on the claim belt.
United's great offense is suggesting a third option, which is paying a few bucks to get this privilege on a particular flight, when you normally would not have it. United already does similar things with "premium" coach seats (e.g. exit row) and their "economy plus" product.
Typical slashdot spin to prompt a lot of bitching in ensuing discussion. Nothing to see here.
Clicking on a header of a table and having it sort with JavaScript is not what you are asking for. That would only work if there is 1 page of data. Do you have 1 page of emails in your gmail account? If so, you are probably the only one.
Sorting on gmail would require server-side sort. If you don't think that this is a big deal and they can just sort by arbitrary columns without concern for how the data is structured on the disk, then clearly you have never worked on an enterprise level application before.
Is it impossible? No. Can Google do it? Of course they can. But the point is that it would be a very expensive feature to implement, as it would require an increase in infrasturcture and processing power, and perhaps even a significant change to the google server operating system.
I am impressed that you understand GMail's infrastructure enough to know that there is no reason not to allow sorting by arbitrary columns. Optimizing data for search and having a static sort by date received is a very different thing than optimizing it for sort on arbitrary columns.
At first I just chuckled at this, but then I thought about 5-6 years ago when I was applying to undergrad. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1380, I would have applied because that is right around where I scored. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1430, I wouldn't have applied (and I didn't).
you can search by any of those items (and more) and you would rather sort??? What the hell good does sorting do? Surely you are looking for emails from 1 person, not a group of people with names starting with 'A', right???
What a dumb question. If your answer is anything but "no, it is not theft", then you are implying that we are obligated to look at stuff we don't want to look at. Absolutely ridiculous. Are you stealing if you are in IE and you don't glance at every ad? What if you just glance but don't click or at least consider clicking?
Seriously, this story is almost as dumb as the facebook "hate group" story. What bothers me is that the OP surely thought he was stimulating intelligent dialog (but then one wonders why (s)he came here).
Seriously, who cares? Does dude X have the right to create the group? Should facebook shut down dude X's group? These questions are not meaningful. Perhaps you should calculate how much impact this group on facebook has on the world, relative to other much more atrocious things going on.
Point taken (although since there have been many that mention Hiible and Terry and others). That case is not relevant to the scariest part of this situation, which is whether or not stores can detain customers for refusing "voluntary" searches!
I like how you say that and assume everyone can fill in the gap for why that is bad. If you were to list how this is bad, I'd bet Libertarians here could point out balances for most if not all of them.
Why does everyone seem to be answering as if the question were: First Thing a Systems Admin Does in the Morning?
So far I haven't seen anything that resembles the level at which a Manager of IT operates. What Manager of IT gets paged to come into work to fix a systems problem?!?! Insanity.
No offense, but if you were interviewing for me and gave an answer like that, you wouldn't get a callback. The key is to make your answer not sound like BS.
There are actual reasons to do this, sans some silly bargaining chip for negotiations with MS
Let me guess, you're not in business. Of course there are actual reasons to do this; that's why it makes it a good bargaining chip. What kind of leverage would it create if no one would ever buy a machine with Ubuntu on it?
It is certainly not some conspiracy theory, as you seem to imply. It's an extremely plausible reality, and parent deserves the insightful mod.
I know exactly where this guy is coming from. Limp Bizkit start out hardcore and didn't give two shits about mainstream music. They did what they wanted and I loved them for it. Then they accidentally released Faith as a single, not realizing that it was just mainstream enough to make the mainstream kids feel like they're embracing the underground. And Limp Bizkit has been pandering to the mainstream every since. And, therefore, it totally lost its cool.
Sounds like this band, Open Source, is doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because of the spin of the summary. In fact, the way it should have been said was: you can pay for priority baggage claim. The spin of the summary makes it sounds like United employees will put your bag at the end unless you pay them $$$$$... and they may also hurt your family.
/. spin.
Don't buy into the
> They keep maintenance costs low by only flying one type
> of airplane (granted the 737 has a large number of subtypes)
Every airline minimizes the types of aircraft it flies. It is not just maintenance, either. Crew must be rated for particular aircraft, so the more diverse your fleet, the harder it is to manage crew during irregular ops.
The difference, though, is that WN is severely limited in where it can fly, because it is not cost effective to fly a large airplane like that unless the distance and passenger counts are right.
> They don't punish emergency flyers by jacking up the prices
> in the last two weeks
That's because they aren't targeting business travelers. They live and die by the casual traveler market. If they were to have higher price late-reservation fares, it would not be effective in subsidizing the casual traveler fares with the business traveler fares. Of course, this means that the flip side is that casual travelers must bare the full brunt of the cost and profit margin.
I am a business traveler, but on rare occasions I have a life as well, and I will schedule a vacation. I can very often find a fare on CO or US that is cheaper (and out of a closer airport) than on WN, as long as I book the flight far enough in advance.
> If you arrive to the airport early or arrive for a connection
> early, they will try to get you on the earliest flight for
> free. Southwest understand that delays are cumulative, so
> getting you out of the airport and to the next stop is a
> priority over keeping everyone in their appointed seat on
> their appointed flight
You say this as if it is something special that WN does but other airlines refuse. This is definitely not the case. Every airline I've ever flown will put you on an earlier flight if room is available in the same fare class (ie they won't put you in first if you have a coach ticket, obviously). Worst case you can go on standby (although technically I think many airlines say you have to pay $25 or so to do this, I have never had this enforced). If I miss my flight, except under certain conditions (like the next flight isn't until the next day), they will put me on the next flight with no problem.
One thing you did NOT mention is that WN does not communicate with other airlines. If your flight is delayed 7 hrs, you do not have the option to fly the United flight that leaves in 1 hr and has open seats... unless you want to pay for a second ticket on United, that is!
Talking about Southwest as an alternative to United is kind of pointless; it is an apples and oranges comparison.
However, that does bring up an interesting point. Why is United considering this? 99% of people checking bags will be vacationers or otherwise infrequent flyers. This is not exactly United's target market.
Story summary misses the point. Then commentary by submitter mentions the point but still manages to miss it!
Listen, you can have your bags come out first one of two ways:
1) pay a crapload more money for first class
2) travel a crapload of miles per year to earn status which will get you upgrades to first and/or priority baggage claim even when stuck in coach
This is the case not only on United, but also many other airlines. I am platinum on Continental and if I were dumb enough to check my bags, they would come out first on the claim belt.
United's great offense is suggesting a third option, which is paying a few bucks to get this privilege on a particular flight, when you normally would not have it. United already does similar things with "premium" coach seats (e.g. exit row) and their "economy plus" product.
Typical slashdot spin to prompt a lot of bitching in ensuing discussion. Nothing to see here.
So, what you are saying is that the iPhone is the Mustang of PDAs
Clicking on a header of a table and having it sort with JavaScript is not what you are asking for. That would only work if there is 1 page of data. Do you have 1 page of emails in your gmail account? If so, you are probably the only one.
Sorting on gmail would require server-side sort. If you don't think that this is a big deal and they can just sort by arbitrary columns without concern for how the data is structured on the disk, then clearly you have never worked on an enterprise level application before.
Is it impossible? No. Can Google do it? Of course they can. But the point is that it would be a very expensive feature to implement, as it would require an increase in infrasturcture and processing power, and perhaps even a significant change to the google server operating system.
Dig?
I am impressed that you understand GMail's infrastructure enough to know that there is no reason not to allow sorting by arbitrary columns. Optimizing data for search and having a static sort by date received is a very different thing than optimizing it for sort on arbitrary columns.
If you can't comprehend my comment, I wonder how smart you are.
At first I just chuckled at this, but then I thought about 5-6 years ago when I was applying to undergrad. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1380, I would have applied because that is right around where I scored. If I saw that MIT's average SAT score was 1430, I wouldn't have applied (and I didn't).
There were hotter girls at my college anyway.
you can search by any of those items (and more) and you would rather sort??? What the hell good does sorting do? Surely you are looking for emails from 1 person, not a group of people with names starting with 'A', right???
Oh, that's right. The left wing is the side that cares about personal liberties this decade. I keep getting confused...
What a dumb question. If your answer is anything but "no, it is not theft", then you are implying that we are obligated to look at stuff we don't want to look at. Absolutely ridiculous. Are you stealing if you are in IE and you don't glance at every ad? What if you just glance but don't click or at least consider clicking?
Seriously, this story is almost as dumb as the facebook "hate group" story. What bothers me is that the OP surely thought he was stimulating intelligent dialog (but then one wonders why (s)he came here).
50 states - your current state - Ohio = 49, eh?
How's Kentucky treating you?
Unfortunately, most people do not understand how lie detectors are flawed and believe that they are inadmissible in court because of a technicality.
Seriously, who cares? Does dude X have the right to create the group? Should facebook shut down dude X's group? These questions are not meaningful. Perhaps you should calculate how much impact this group on facebook has on the world, relative to other much more atrocious things going on.
I'm sorry, but this story is laughable.
Point taken (although since there have been many that mention Hiible and Terry and others). That case is not relevant to the scariest part of this situation, which is whether or not stores can detain customers for refusing "voluntary" searches!
Your post was so coherent that for a moment I thought I was on a /. spoof site.
I like how you say that and assume everyone can fill in the gap for why that is bad. If you were to list how this is bad, I'd bet Libertarians here could point out balances for most if not all of them.
Yeah, those US idiots can't do anything right.
You crackpots. The world has only been around for 6,000 years.
Why does everyone seem to be answering as if the question were: First Thing a Systems Admin Does in the Morning?
So far I haven't seen anything that resembles the level at which a Manager of IT operates. What Manager of IT gets paged to come into work to fix a systems problem?!?! Insanity.
No offense, but if you were interviewing for me and gave an answer like that, you wouldn't get a callback. The key is to make your answer not sound like BS.
Bzzt. 10.
There are actual reasons to do this, sans some silly bargaining chip for negotiations with MS
Let me guess, you're not in business. Of course there are actual reasons to do this; that's why it makes it a good bargaining chip. What kind of leverage would it create if no one would ever buy a machine with Ubuntu on it?
It is certainly not some conspiracy theory, as you seem to imply. It's an extremely plausible reality, and parent deserves the insightful mod.
I know exactly where this guy is coming from. Limp Bizkit start out hardcore and didn't give two shits about mainstream music. They did what they wanted and I loved them for it. Then they accidentally released Faith as a single, not realizing that it was just mainstream enough to make the mainstream kids feel like they're embracing the underground. And Limp Bizkit has been pandering to the mainstream every since. And, therefore, it totally lost its cool.
Sounds like this band, Open Source, is doing the same thing.