Brad Ideas - Blog entry - Comments

Cheap Monster Beats For Sale

Monster Beats — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:51:34 -0800

Monster Beats as you'd expect from an Artist endorsed product, Sound quality is top-class, playing every sound in fine detail. Bass sounds deep, drums hard-hitting, and lyrics crystal-clear. Despite the Solo's heavyweight music playing abilities, they are lightweight to wear, with a funky overhead design. The over-ear ear-pads are designed to reduce the amount of outside noise that leaks into your ears and disturbs your music, while the soft cushioning makes them comfortable to wear for long periods of time.The Power Beats Dre can be used to listen to music in the house or when you're on the move. They have a fold away design, which means you can easily pop them into the supplied carry case when you're not using them.

Not any truck

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:51:59 -0800

It’s not any truck. But it would be an ordinary truck (already on the roads) with the appropriate radio unit to communicate with the cars in the convoy and give them instructions. It would not have to be a truck, I presume they just think trucks are a good target for their wind shadow, professional drivers and frequency. No reason they could not do it in cabs, buses etc. One important thing is that it be vehicles going a long way on the highway. You don’t want to follow a car that might not be going that far, though you could make a system so any convoy you joined told you first how far it was going.

Re: Road Trains

Randy — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:13:32 -0800

Brad,

Ahhhhh....It's not a *special* truck. It's *any* truck. Now it makes perfect sense.

And I agree that truck drivers are safer than car drivers, which is hard to convince just about anyone else.

Thanks,
Randy

I understand the revenue management

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:57:59 -0800

But that is not the case here. Here it’s just bureaucracy. If I had booked the flight as two one-way flights, at no extra cost, I would have been able to change one leg. If I had booked a slightly different flight to Europe with a similar plane change and also a flight number change, I would have gotten the upgrade offer.

I agree that revenue management causes all sorts of strange things, but these are not among them.

My general view is that when you have a business like this, you should have a desk that is able to authorize changes when the airline is clearly doing something silly and bureaucratic. Escalate to that desk if it seems that has happened, and if that happens a lot, fix the software.

Road trains

brad — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:55:17 -0800

I have seen various figures for the increase in fuel efficiency from drafting, but would say 30% can be done, possibly more. I have seen others claim less.

I think they are using a truck because it does provide quite a wind shadow, and because trucks are common and driven by professional drivers. Professional drivers do have higher class licences and good safety records, and those records are monitored. They don’t change lanes much either and are satisfied with that. I believe the plan is to get trucks equipped to do this work, so that all a person has to do is get on the highway and look for a suitable truck to follow. They are easy to spot, unlike cars or vans.

The truck is presumably already taking the trip its taking so its mpg are not important.

Hi Brad Yeh the Wired series

Matthew Newton — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:00:42 -0800

Hi Brad

Yeh the Wired series has been awesome.

In terms of the Road Train project.. we blogged about it, I'm personally not enthused. The cost of creating the wind break (including human driver) surely negates most of the benefit

Revenue management

John Moore — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:59:56 -0800

You are being treated to the tender mercies of revenue management systems. These automated beasts were first developed in the '80s to allow American Airlines to defeat a discount carrier. RM's optimize the revenue on a flight by selling low when they have to, and selling high when they can. Because these decisions are not made real time, they create a thicket of ever changing weirdness in pricing. However, they work really well, which is why aircraft are usually full these days.

They use AI and linear programming and various models as part of their work. I have run across these in my work in the hotel reservation business, which also uses them. When they set the fares, they are looking at history and then modeling current demand against that (and other factors) to calculate the price. Airlines used to use humans to do this, but the modern systems are much more effective (and weird).

In the airline world, customer satisfaction has taken a back seat (okay, way back in the tail cone) to price competition. That's how they can get away with treating us this way. It may piss you off royally, but they make more money doing it - even as everyone is growing to loathe the airlines.

The Madness of a Beep Beep Beep

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:04:52 -0800

Just moved into an Urban area, really very nice spot.. Day after the move, the beeping at 7:01 am three days a week started with the Garbage trucks and it's so loud, ear plugs would not suffice! I read all your comments from others and was wondering, nothing new in your blog recently... I find it amusing that people would scream at you about your thoughts. How ignorant, as ignorant as the Dude that created this Beep Beeping...
IN Madness, I try not to get Mad and go to the GYM but it's in that room too! HELP! :(

Re: Road Trains

Randy — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:15:08 -0800

They mentioned that it was more environmental for the cars to be in a train, but they didn't say how much better. Do you have a feel for that?

I'm also wondering why the truck would be necessary. Or is this a prototype of the system the are envisioning?

If the truck is required, how does the it's MPG factor in to the efficiency?

Randy

Who is at fault

brad — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:36:23 -0800

Unlike most systems, software systems are deeply instrumented and logged. While there are a number of privacy concerns about this, I actually expect there will be very little to debate about the cause of most robocar accidents. That won’t stop people trying to debate, I agreee. But after a time, with a complete 3-D video of the accident and detailed logs of the computer’s internals, the defendants will know when to fight and not to, and the courts will tire of crazy tangents. But at the start, it’s harder to predict, and punative damages are the issue. But we won’t be debating if it was a bad chip at fault; I suspect we’ll know quite clearly.

Driverless cars

Guycf4 — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:23:36 -0800

Brad
As insightful as ever. I'd like to weigh in here on a couple of specific points:
Cost of liability- we tend to look at the cost of insurance in terms of injuries and repairs. Another significant layer is the cost to defend. This will be particularly messy during the early adoption phase. Today, a claim is against a driver who made a mistake. With these vehicles the range will run from the driver, to the manufacturer, the software engineer, the chip maker, the manufacture of each component, the wireless carrier, and so on. The litigious nature of America may well prevent lives from being saved.
Next, to complicate matters more, the bulk of our liability system is regulated differently across all 50 states.
Finally- let's remember that we that the stats can be put into a story to highlight why working through these issues will happen: imagine consumers spending 4 billion hours a year, waiting to board 747's, knowing in the US, 1 will crash every 4 days. Who would do it? On a global basis, it's a 747 every 24 hours. These debates remind of others like why entertainment material can never be streamed due to piracy- whoops. Or- why genetic scanning won't lead to preventative health care because of cost and privacy...please...really?
In the end, it is us-consumers that will set the pace. If we want to stay connected and entertained, we'll have to let the car drive. Take control and all that fun, extra productivity, social interaction will just shut off. What do you think we will choose? PLEASE send me my robo taxi!

Phillip, The idea that

kbender — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:09:56 -0800

Phillip,

The idea that income should be directly tied to "how hard you work" Sounds nice, but in reality it doesn't really work.

The basis of capitalism is that it rewards those who are innovators. Bill Gates is rich because microsoft and his accomplishments were huge innovations and improvements on our society that almost everyone benefited from. Did he work millions of times harder to create these innovations? of course, not. But are they millions of times more valuable then say someone who has flipped a bunch of burgers for a living, Apparently yes, because we (society) have all paid him that much money for the technology that he has given us.

I would prefer the system stay this way because it will continue to reward innovators for what they produce, not just how hard they work...

Thing abou LENR/coldFusion

Alain — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:26:10 -0800

@Sean
Just to say you that your dream to put nuclear energy
in a car is now possible with working Cold Fusion, as
implemented by Defkalion Green Tech, and Andrea Rosssi Ecat...

http://www.defkalion-energy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=926

... thanks for the comments on Stirling... instructives.
bytheway cold fusion is not pathologic science, it could even probably respect standard quantum mechanic (if Widom-Larsen theory is right)
keep tuned.

I'm torn. Obviously this

Matthew Newton — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:40:59 -0800

I'm torn. Obviously this would mean more working opportunities for those who need it, but then again the weekend is being eroded bit by bit and it irks me.

It seems that the companies don't believe they would generate enough business to compensate for running up their costs so much.

Frequent Flyer Porgram

Michael — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:43:28 -0800

I have similar experiences with several airlines. I changed from LH to UA 3 years back and still have LH miles which I tried
to use now. A miles & more ticket Duesseldorf to Montreal is at 60000 miles plus 618.36 CAD fees.

For the same dates you get a similar flight on expedia (Going leg identical, return leg different routing but also 1 stop) for
696 CAD. Identical flights (but not a LH ticket) go for 765 CAD. If you insist on LH paper it's 1166 CAD.

The Fee structure tends to be a bit better at