Boeing is now working on contingency plans because of delays in the 787.
I know that I’ve been harping on this a bit, but it’s because of the “sky is falling press” about the A-380. Both are in their own ways revolutionary aircraft, and schedule slippage is to be expected.
The difference is that Airbus has been far more upfront on the matter.
There has just been a study on the effect of Low Cost Carriers entering a market, in this case, Pittsburgh, and it shows that:
Fares in Pittsburgh dropped 27%, while the airport reported 360,000 additional passengers per year for a total economic impact of $1.8 billion, according to the study, written by Wilbur Smith Associates (WSA). Pittsburgh’s LCCs include AirTran, JetBlue, Southwest and USA3000.
In 2000, the average one-way fare to all destinations was nearly $192, one of the highest in the nation, said the report. “The expansion of low-fare service at Pittsburgh lowered this figure dramatically,” it said. “The average one-way fare decreased by 27% to $140 from 2000 to 2006, and fares to Pittsburgh’s top 15 destinations dropped 32% to $120.”
The people managing airports in Atlanta, Denver, and ESPECIALLY Dallas-Fort Worth, please take note. Being the bitch of the dominant airport in a region hurts air travel and the local economy.
This should surpirse no one, that the big CDO (Collateral Debt Obligation) resellers knew that they were passing bad paper.
Why, you ask, would professional traders do this?
The answer is quite simple: DEAL FEES. I gotta keep buying collateral, in order to keep issuing these transactions as a CDO manager. Its my job: I gotta keep accumulating collateral, and I gotta issue the liability against that collateral.
Welcome to 3rd world Klepto-Capitalism, Wall Street style.
Well, it looks like everyone’s favorite patent troll, Rambus is about to get spanked by the EU.
The European Commission has confirmed formal “patent ambush” charges against US memory chip designer Rambus.
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It said that “Rambus engaged in intentional deceptive conduct in the context of the standard-setting process, for example by not disclosing the existence of the patents which it later claimed were relevant to the adopted standard.”
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The FTC found that Rambus had through subterfuge, illegally gained a monopoly in four key memory technologies.
The gist of all this is that Rambus had an idea, a patentable idea, about how to improve memory performance.
It wasn’t a bad idea, but it wasn’t better than any of the other ideas out there either.
However, when the JEDEC was drawing up standards for the next generation of memory, Rambus, which participated in this board, deliberately, and deceptively kept the information that they had this IP, and that people who signed off on this standard would have to pay them royalties in order to use it.
Had Rambus revealed the status of their IP during the development of this standard, as required by law, the standard would have been drawn up in a way so as not to require their technology.
Personally, I think that people should go RICO on their butts, definately to the extent of putting them out of business, and hopefully to the extent of bankrupting principals in this scheme and sending them to jail.
Remember when I said in jest that Bush wants American children to die? It may have been reality.
Remember when all the wingers were claiming that Clinton was selling the US out to China because of some chump change at a campaign event at a Buddhist temple? Well, now we have the Bush administration poisoning children at China’s behest.
The Bush administration has hindered regulation on two fronts, consumer advocates say. It stalled efforts to press for greater inspections of imported children’s products, and it altered the focus of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), moving it from aggressive protection of consumers to a more manufacturer-friendly approach.
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In March 2006, a 4-year-old Minnesota boy died of lead poisoning after swallowing a metal charm that came with Reebok shoes. The charm was found to contain more than 90 percent lead.
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China remains very much under the microscope. It’s fighting a CPSC proposal to bring the lead restrictions in children’s jewelry to the same levels as those imposed on toys and furniture — six hundred parts per million, which effectively amounts to a ban.
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But in a March 12 filing, China was the only one of 48 interested parties to tell the panel that it opposed new restrictions on lead paint in children’s jewelry. Guo LiSheng, the deputy director of a Chinese global trade agency, warned against “unnecessary obstacles to trade” and advocated international rules that allow some lead content. He added that good product labeling was sufficient.
That boy is dead because of someone that George W. Bush employs.
It appears that Paramount and Dreamworks are going HD DVD.
This is a switch for Paramount, which had supported both.
There are really two reasons for this, HD-DVD is a lot cheaper, $299 vs $499, and there are more HD-DVD players in the US (not counting the Blu-Ray drives on the Sony PS3, but who wants to play a DVD on a game system that doesn’t even have a remote>).
Ya mother’s calling from Yenta Tones.
Good stuff.
When one goes to trade shows, one tends to come back with “schwag”…The free stuff that they hand out at the tables….Typically, this is things like pencils, erasers, calendars, water bottles, etc. all with a logo on them.
Some times, the vendors can get creative, as one did at the recent Force Protection Equipment Demonstration:
Words fail me.
It appears that the Bobsey Twins of the security worldhave decided to put features into chipset that will prevent users from running the software they choose.
They are not admitting this, but the statement that, “Intel plans to incorporate Trusted Platform Module capabilities, which already ships as separate modules in some of its laptops, into its chipsets next year.” Means that you will not be able to run the programs that you buy on your PC.
Hello AMD.
This story has a picture mercenaries in Iraq, and it is not pretty.
They operate with little or no supervision, accountable only to the firms employing them. And as the country has plummeted toward anarchy and civil war, this private army has been accused of indiscriminately firing at American and Iraqi troops, and of shooting to death an unknown number of Iraqi citizens who got too close to their heavily armed convoys.
Not one has faced charges or prosecution.
There is great confusion among legal experts and military officials about what laws — if any — apply to Americans in this force of at least 48,000.
They operate in a decidedly gray legal area. Unlike soldiers, they are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under a special provision secured by American-occupying forces, they are exempt from prosecution by Iraqis for crimes committed there.
What follows is a litany of misdeeds that would get a soldier locked away in Leavenworth for decades, and in Bush’s Texas, get them executed.
Their behavior alienates the local population, endangering our troops, and they are a massive brain drain on the military.
Violence in the context of a military operation must be the monopoly of the military, not mercs.
J.K. Rowling is worried about networks for fans translating the final Harry Potter book.
Oh please….She’s worth more than the British Royal Family…And she and her publisher got a 16 year old fan boy thrown in the slam.
Cry me a river.
It appears that thethe US Government is forbidding the use of an advanced radar on the Korean FA-50 trainer derivative (subscription required).
Let’s make this clear, this is not a technology transfer issue. The radar, the Vixen 500E (PDF)
But in declining to permit advanced FA-50 capability, the U.S. side is only exercising rights that were set out when the then-General Dynamics combat aircraft division agreed in the early 1990s to support South Korean development of a fast jet. Under the agreement, the aircraft’s combat capability had to remain below that of the F-16, to avoid competition.
Korea Aerospace will struggle to sell the fighter overseas without the preferred radar, the Vixen 500E active electronically scanned sensor built by Finmeccanica’s Selex unit. But Korean industry officials assume that that was the intention of the U.S. authorities: To ensure the FA-50 would be unattractive on export markets and offer no competition to the Lockheed Martin F-16.
I’m really not sure why anyone with equibalent choices uses US systems, such as choosing the F-15K over the Rafale, which performed better in tests.
Lovely…Some people bought videos through Google, and nowthey’ve been told that that their videos will be taken away.
This is what the RIAA and MPAA want. They want you to buy stuff, and then they want to keep making you buy it again, and again, and a again, and again.
Patents are already hamstringing innovation in the US, and now it seems that actually buying a video is a thing of the past too.
Hopefully, some lawyer will go medieval on Google’s tuchas.
The Pirate Party is the group that sponsors Pirate Bay bit torrent site. They also stand for office in Sweden.
An American branch has now opened up.
I approve of their goals, but they are not going anywhere here.
It does look like there is an increasingly mainstream chorus against what has become a drumbeat against boneheaded copyright and patent laws though/
I said that this would happen, and I was right. Boeing has delayed the first flight of the 787.
While I don’t think that it is going to slip as much as the Airbus A380, it won’t come in on time.
The company won’t have its existance threatened, but we will see Wall St. analysts wring their hands on cable TV and a dip in stock price.
It will mean nothing in the long term, but stock brokers don’t make money on buy and hold, they make it on churn and burn.
So now the blithering idiots who think that copyright is property want to apply copyright to designer fashion.
Let’s get this straight: It’s for the useful arts and sciences. Says so in the constitution.
What’s more, there is plenty of fashion (most of it sucky) being made out there. There is no need to encourage production of more tacky handbags.
IP is about encouraging production of beneficial things, inventions, arts, etc. It’s not about allowing people to print their own money so that they can make bigger campaign donations to you, senator butthead Schumer.
AT&T censored anti-Bush lyrics on a webcast by Pearl Jam. This is why we want to put net neutrality into law.
Note: I am quoting the press release in its entirety, because permission is implied by posting a press release.
LOLLAPALOOZA WEBCAST: SPONSORED/CENSORED BY AT&T?
08.08.07After concluding our Sunday night show at Lollapalooza, fans informed us that portions of that performance were missing and may have been censored by AT&T during the “Blue Room” Live Lollapalooza Webcast.When asked about the missing performance, AT&T informed Lollapalooza that portions of the show were in fact missing from the webcast, and that their content monitor had made a mistake in cutting them.
During the performance of “Daughter” the following lyrics were sung to the tune of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” but were cut from the webcast:
– “George Bush, leave this world alone.” (the second time it was sung); and
– “George Bush find yourself another home.”
This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media.
AT&T’s actions strike at the heart of the public’s concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media.
Aspects of censorship, consolidation, and preferential treatment of the internet are now being debated under the umbrella of “NetNeutrality.” Check out The Future of Music or Save the Internet for more information on this issue.
Most telecommunications companies oppose “net neutrality” and argue that the public can trust them not to censor..
Even the ex-head of AT&T, CEO Edward Whitacre, whose company sponsored our troubled webcast, stated just last March that fears his company and other big network providers would block traffic on their networks are overblown..
“Any provider that blocks access to content is inviting customers to find another provider.” (Marguerite Reardon, Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: March 21, 2006, 2:23 PM PST).
But what if there is only one provider from which to choose?
If a company that is controlling a webcast is cutting out bits of our performance -not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations – fans have little choice but to watch the censored version.
What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.
The complete version of “Daughter” from the Lollapalooza performance will be posted here soon for any of you who missed it. We apologize to our fans who were watching the webcast and got shortchanged. In the future, we will work even harder to ensure that our live broadcasts or webcasts are free from arbitrary edits.
If you have examples of AT&T censoring artist performances around political content, it’s a good thing for everyone to know about. Feel free to post examples on the official Pearl Jam Message Pit.
It appears that Google has gotten religion on patent abuse.
This is something that has been true for over 20 years.
When the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was established, software, business plans, and species were specifically not patentable, and the law is fairly clear that they should not be.
The wiggle room was that while free standing software is “tangible” because it required a computer to run on…Where they got business plans…I’m not sure.
Unfortunately, this court resembles a man with just a nail, and so has increasingly seen everything as a nail, which is why this court was recently slapped down by the Supreme Court.
It appears that there has been a spate of fraudulently labeled whiskey in Korea. The solution is to place RFID on premium bottles of booze that can be quizzed by mobile phone handsets.
Neat trick, but considering the fact that RFID chips cost about $0.15, with prices dropping, it should not be too tough for the bootleggers to copy them too.
History has shown that the adult entertainment industry leads the consumer electronics field in adopting new technologies.
It led the adoption of VCRs, it was probably the deciding factor in the VHS/Betamax format war, and popularized DVDs.
Well, it appears that, Blu-Ray is the format of choice for Japanese porn (HD-DVD is the format of choice in the US).
This is significant change of direction for Sony, who created Blu-Ray, as they have typically been very aggressively using licenses to keep erotica out of their formats.
They still don’t “get” it. The disks have to be produced in Taiwan, and reimported, but they appear to be having at least a bit of a clue now.
Still, despite the head start, HD DVD isn’t exactly taking the porn industry by storm. Several U.S. companies interviewed earlier this year have not made good on their plans to release titles in HD DVD, while Blu-ray Disc appears to be gaining ground with its new initiative to work with Japanese adult film makers. The result could be a shift in Blu-ray’s favor. U.S. adult film makers said they would use whatever makes sense, and only favored HD DVD early on because the format is less expensive to make movies with and they received extensive help from HD DVD backers.
A friendlier face from the Blu-ray Disc camp appears to be working with Japan’s porn industry. Perhaps it could work in the U.S. as well.