How much should Microsoft fear Google Chrome?
Who knows? We’ll see.
Category Archives: Business
Land For Sale
John Tierney on lunar and martian property rights.
Congratulations To Armadillo
But it sounds like a business setback for XCOR:
If the demonstrations in Oshkosh and Burns Flat were meant as a fly-off, the Armadillo team – led by millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack – came away as the winner.
“The Armadillo engine is going to be the primary engine for the Rocket Racing League,” Whitelaw told me. He said five more planes will be built using Armadillo’s propulsion system, which is a spin-off from Carmack’s years-long quest to win the $2 million, NASA-backed Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
It sounds like the Armadillo engine has more thrust, though it’s not clear how the T/W compares.
I wonder to what degree XCOR was constrained by a potential desire to maintain some legacy toward the Lynx engine? If they were building an engine purely for the RRL, would it have been a different design and fuel type?
Presumably, the business plan with which they raised their recent institutional investment considered this as a contingency. I’m sure they would have liked continuing business from RRL, though Whitelaw doesn’t seem to rule it out for the future.
Batten Down The Hatches In Creole Country
Gustav is looking like it’s going to be bad news for the upper Gulf Coast:
As long as Gustav is over water, it will intensify. Gustav is currently under moderate wind shear (15 knots) . This shear is expected to remain in the low to moderate range (0-15 knots) for the remainder of the week. Gustav is over the highest heat content waters in the Atlantic. Given these two factors, intensification is likely whenever the storm is over water, at least 50 miles from land. Expect the high mountains of Hispaniola to take a toll on Gustav. Recall in 2006 that Hurricane Ernesto hit the southwest tip of Haiti as a Category 1 hurricane with 75 mph winds. Haiti’s mountains knocked Ernesto down to a tropical storm with 50 mph winds, which decreased further to 40 mph when the storm crossed over into Cuba. Expect at least a 25 mph decrease in Gustav’s winds by Wednesday, after it encounters Haiti. Further weakening is likely if the storm passes close to or over Cuba. By Wednesday, Gustav will be underneath an upper-level anticyclone. These upper atmosphere high pressure systems can greatly intensify a tropical storm, since the clockwise flow of air at the top of the storm acts to efficiently vent away air pulled aloft by the storm’s heavy thunderstorms. With high oceanic heat content also present in the waters off western Cuba, the potential for rapid intensification exists should the center stay more than 50 miles from the Cuban coast. Once in the Gulf of Mexico, Gustav is likely to intensify into a major Category 3 or higher storm. I give a 60% chance that Gustav will cause significant disruption to the oil and gas industry in the Gulf.
This will roil the energy markets (it may be doing so already). It may also be a test, and an opportunity, for Governor Jindal to show that the people of Louisiana were wise to replace his predecessor with him after her Katrina fiasco, which was largely overlooked by the media in their lust to bash George Bush.
Sandwich Artists
Lileks explains why I rarely go to Subway.
I’d won a free 6″ sub. This was timely, since I was planning to buy one for my wife. We finished our meal; I went back to the place where the Sandwich Artists labor in various degrees of surly disinterest, and presented the coupon. The Artist began to craft the meal out the chopped and processed carbclay arrayed before him – and that’s when the manager walked over.
“For future reference,” she said, “those are for the next visit.”
I pointed to the small print on the back of the ticket. “Actually, it says for your next order.”
“Well, it means visit. It’s how we keep track of them in the back.” She jerked a thumb towards the back of the store, where the Something wet and spiny sat in a crate, swallowing souls and dreams and crapping out rules and procedure.
If there are two things I don’t like, it’s someone who tells me that fine print doesn’t mean what it says, and alludes to some company process that makes things simpler not for me, or for the employees, but some theoretical person on whose behalf the system was set in place years ago by a team of consultants who have already moved on to rejiggering something else that worked perfectly fine. On the other hand, after years of dealing with restaurant employees who couldn’t give a fig about the job, it’s difficult to carp when you find someone who does – unless, of course, that person has decided to make a point about a free sandwich for future reference.
Also, a trip to the museum.
Good Advice For McCain
From George Will. I’m kind of intrigued by the idea of capping the pay of fascist CEOs (Lee Iacocca comes to mind as a poster boy).
A Milestone For New Space
XCOR has attracted the funding of an institutional investor. It’s not just angels any more.
Politics, Not Geology
Why the oil “shortage” is made in Washington.
Arrived Safely
Sort of.
When I had the privilege of paying American an extra fifteen bucks to check my bag today, I had no idea how much extra service they’d be rendering. Apparently, with this new program, they’ve come up with an innovative new luggage-handling process that enables them to expeditiously lose your suitcase on a non-stop. And it only took me an hour and a half after the wheels touched down to discover this new capability.
When I got to the carousel that was supposed to be for my flight, it was full of luggage from not one, not two, not three, but four different Dallas flights, as evidenced by inspection of the tags. Apparently, another innovation that the airline has come up with is to get the luggage to the airport before the passengers arrive, and then helpfully leave it all on the carousel, so that the few bags from your own flight from Fort Lauderdale won’t feel lonely and ostracized, and can fit in better with the crowd. Or perhaps the aircraft simply arrived in LAX sans occupants, the latter having somehow been spirited away en route by Bushco to be shipped off to Gitmo for the ritual waterboarding and holy book defilation, with the airline complicit in both the act and the cover up.
I reported the miscreant item to the baggage service.
“Did you look at the bags we have outside the door here”?
No, that hadn’t occurred to me, because I lacked the imagination to conceive that a bag would be removed from the carousel by the authorities with hundreds still milling around seeking their luggage.
“Let’s go over and look.”
We go back over to the carousel.
“Sometimes it might have a Dallas tag on it, because it might have gotten rerouted.”
This, as there remained hundreds of Dallas arrivals on the swirling machine, whose contents I had now seen several dozen times.
I marveled at an airline that could get a bag rerouted through Dallas and somehow end up there at the same time as I, who took a non-stop from Florida. Does the luggage get to skip the layover?
Bottom line: I am now the proud owner of a receipt that informs me that in the event they locate the missing suitcase, it will be delivered to my room. So I am here for a business meeting in the morning with no clothing except that on my back. Well, OK, and my keister. And, yeah, my feet. But still.
I have to say that I agree with the sentiment.
[Update on early Monday morning]
Well, when I check the web site to track it, it seems to have shown up overnight. It’s supposed to be delivered sometime this morning to my hotel. No word on where it had been sequestered. I was kind of wondering if someone else took it off the carousel. They’re not bothering to verify tags any more at LAX, as they did in the olden days.
How High Taxes Kill Jobs
Jim Manzi explains it to Barack Obama. Unfortunately, both presidential candidates are economic ignorami.