micks56

In Boeing's recent statement they said they need a few weeks to determine the length of the delay. It is not a good sign when it takes weeks to find out how far behind you are.

Prediction Number 2: For every week it takes Boeing to release an updated schedule, the delay will be 1-2 months. I think it will take Boeing 2-3 weeks to release a statement, so that means somewhere between 2-6 months delay. I'll take 6 months.

Boeing lost about $3B in value yesterday and today. Boeing margin on planes is a maximum of about 6%. To me, this means Wall Street thinks about 250 planes (or more) are now delayed. I figured that out by solving $3B / 6%, which is total revenue expected by Boeing when profits are $3B. I took that number and divided by $200MM, which is the approximate sales price per plane. That comes out to be 250 planes (which would result in $3B profit).

Boeing says they would be able to produce about 10 planes per month, eventually ramping up to 16. That means it takes about 2 years for Boeing to make 250 planes.

Checking my numbers, I said a 6 month delay, then there will be 1 year of testing, and then Boeing can start manufacturing. So I predicted somewhere over 18 months, assuming no further problems (yeah right), while Wall Street predicts around 2 years, pending further statements.

Prediction #3: First non-test version 787 delivered to a customer Fall 2011.

I may regret that prediction later in life. :)

Two of the main design constraints for planes are weight, and its close close relative, fuel efficiency. Consider those as important as actually being able to fly.

The whole reason my project existed was to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency. What made the critical component I talked about difficult to make was that it needed to be much more efficient than any of its type ever made before. Its efficiency would allow for less operating current, which would reduce the wire gauge needed throughout the plane, reduce weight by 1000s of pounds, and therefore save many gallons of fuel.

It also allowed for another fuel efficiency gain; It reduced the number of systems operating via air or hydraulics. The air comes from the engine after the compressor stage but before fuel is added. These systems are inefficient because the air from the compressors is very hot and it must be cooled before use. That cooling operation takes electricity, and therefore wastes energy when compared to a system that just used electricity from the start.

I should add that the critical component is not a discrete one like a transistor or resistor. Rather it is a system of its own, like a power supply is a system of its own, but we can buy one and as an engineer consider it a single component.

I don't know Boeing's rationale for TV commercials either. It could be anything from putting the Boeing name in front of Americans for American pride when competing against European Airbus. Or maybe they know that the decision maker at a key potential customer loves NFL football, and Boeing blanketed his hometown team with ads during the games. Maybe the marketing department wanted to use up their yearly budget.

Whatever the reason is, when hundreds of billions of dollars in orders are at stake like this, the ads aren't directed at people who purchase plane tickets. I am guessing the ads are out there to make sure that every plane purchasing decision maker absolutely knows that the 787 exists and that they should buy it, and making sure that every member of Congress (and their constituents) absolutely knows that the 787 exists and Americans should support it, as opposed to Airbus.

We knew in May 07 that there was a 0% chance that the 787 would actually fly on 7/8/07; a critical component was still in development. For that certain critical component, Company A dictated to Company B which one to use and who to buy it from (Company D). The problem is that the part was still in development by Company D. The electrical component specifications significantly stretched what actually existed on the market at that time. I didn't think Company D would be successful in designing the critical component. It was certainly a big leap forward. We knew that Company D would not have the part done by July 07. The hope was August of that year.

In June 07 my company successfully designed and built a few prototypes of the system we were tasked to build. They passed all specifications dictated by Boeing, Company A, and Company B. We dutifully delivered the prototypes to Company B in June 07. The only problem was critical component from Company D wasn't there, and therefore the 787 could not fly.

I don't know whether Company D ever delivered. But I do know that Company B (the company that outsourced to us) ordered a few more of the product I designed at the end of last year, and the critical component from Company D was not supplied to my company. I don't know whether the part existed. But it doesn't seem likely since Company B would have had us put it in. My guess is that Company D, or a replacement outsourcer, was able to deliver some time at the beginning of this year, maybe Spring. Hence the two year delay.

I no longer work at the company where I designed this system, so I no longer have any first hand knowledge of the goings on. But from what I read in the article, the root cause of the delays has not been fixed. I would put my money on further delays.

Read the first page: "Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam [sic] autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy."

Holden is in a mental hospital. This is confirmed on the last page [approx.] of the book.

"I could probably tell you what I did after I went home, and how I got sick and all, and what school I'm supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here."

From that, Holden is in the hospital. The last line of the book says, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

From what I remember, this means that Holden made up all of those stories. His family realized he was crazy because they know none of those things actually happened, put him in the hospital, and now he doesn't get to see his family or friends very often.

So the issue is whether an algorithm implementation is transformative when compared to the pseudocode.

The answer to your main question is fact specific. Each case is different and a court of law will look at the specific facts and make a ruling.

Talk to a lawyer for counsel that relates to your specific facts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436214

[Edited: Best Course of Action? Talk to a Lawyer.]

The so-called purchaser files a motion with the registrar, registrar reviews, and takes your domain. This is all before the courts get involved. No attorney fees or court costs required.

Negotiating shows bad faith and the would-be purchaser gets the domain for free, almost instantly.

Negotiation is the absolute worst possible thing to do in a situation like this.

Can you prove the preferential TOS terms in place when you gave the data? If you don't have something in writing you will have a tough time in court of law. And when I say writing I mean you being able to go on the stand to say, "Yes we did have an agreement. Look at the TOS I printed off their site right here." A person doesn't need a signed piece of paper, although that does help. A person couldn't go on the stand to say, "So and so told me the terms of the site."

Can you prove you didn't agree to the modified terms? Using a site after terms modification can be construed as agreeing to the modified terms.

Another example is if you are a web service that doesn't comply with DMCA provisions, you may be liable for your users actions.

What I am trying to say is that a TOS does not indemnify as a matter of law. The question of fact for each specific issue will be sent to the jury who will decide your fate.

Whether a TOS creates a contract could also be decided by the jury. They aren't contracts 100% of the time.

And the mathematical version of the law brings up many issues. The law is actually pretty mathematical. Non-lawyers may not know this, but legal standards follow strict standards whenever possible.

Here is an example: Plaintiff brings discrimination suit based on US Constitutional equal protection claims. Is the Defendant the Federal Government? If yes, you sue under the 5th Amendment. Is the Defendant a State? If yes, you sue under the 14th Amendment. Is the Defendant neither, and this case doesn't fit into a limited exception that I haven't listed here for clarity? If yes to both, then you can't sue based on the US Constitution. It is that simple.

Continuing the example (assuming you are suing the Feds or a State. Also, I am leaving out corner cases): Is the suit based on Race, Alienage, or National Orgin? If so, strict scrutiny applies. Is the suit based on gender? If so, then intermediate scrutiny applies. All other claims are analyzed based on rational basis. Now there are some terms of art that need to be defined there. But they are pretty easy to understand.

Perhaps the main reason the mathematical legal system won't happen is that courts only decide the issue at hand. The math system will require a programmer to enter an outcome based on the applicable laws and facts ahead of time. But every case is an example where the court hasn't yet ruled on these unique facts applied to the laws. That is why the case is heard and not dismissed, tossed via summary judgment or a directed verdict. If the exact same facts and exact same law is applied, the verdict is mechanical. Trial lawyers make their money when that isn't the case.

That leads all of our law professors to drill into our heads brevity, clarity, and conciseness in everything we write. But as you mentioned, patents have a completely different audience and goal.

I am amazed at what is patentable too. I wrote a research paper arguing against software patents. The professor that graded my paper disagreed with the position very much. I wrote mine a few days before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard the Bilski case. When the decision was rendered this past fall they made some law that is similar to what I argued. I should go show the professor the paper he marked down and the Bilski decision. But I digress...

Patents are a land grab. The goal is to get the vaguest, broadest patent possible and protect the most space. And the legal-speak is there because those words have been litigated time and time again and they have a known meaning to the courts. As soon as you write a new phrase you open yourself to debate in front of the court. A macro to convert legal-speak to human-readable prose should be used at the researcher's own peril.

We are told time and time again: read the case for yourself. Do not read anyone else's summary. And don't paraphrase words unless you know to stay away from the special ones.

Example: There was a contracts case where the contract says "only use pipe made by Company A to build my house." The builder uses pipe from Company B. The court ruled against home buyer because "only use pipe by Company A" doesn't actually mean that! It means use pipe similar to the quality of Company A! So translating the legal speak required to really get a builder to use pipe from Company A into "only use pipe from Company A" will result in failure.

The information is hyper-linked very well. I wish I could show you, but I can't. My student access to the site is restricted to school use only. I am pretty sure I will be violating the TOS by posting any of the information.

But every case cited is linked. Those are the most important. Judges are linked to other decisions. Same with arguing lawyers. Statutes are linked. Footnotes are linked. Obscure terms are linked. For example, a medication will have a link but a legal term of art will not.

I just wish the search and the site overall were faster. Sometimes the navigation is quirky, too.

There certainly is a lot of legal text. Lawyers certainly are good at creating volumes of paper. For example, the Supreme Court just decided a case, Wyeth v. Levine. It will be recorded in volume 555. So to date the Supreme Court decisions have filled 554 volumes of 1000 pages each. And that is just one court. Every state court, state appeals court, and state supreme court, federal court, land court, etc has similar volumes and page counts.

And all of this is just the primary sources. Once you add secondary sources, aka books and papers written by learned scholars on individual topics or cases, the number of books and pages increase by orders of magnitude. And we still haven't archived any statutes (those go on forever, for each state) or any administrative law. And each one of those has comment sections that go on for pages whereas the actual rule is only a paragraph.

I wonder what percentage this is, too. I bet it is still extremely small compared to what the rest of the world has produced. There are so few law writers when compared to all other writers.

I haven't thought of a fair test to run yet. The two engines do different things. My West can search case decisions, statutes, administrative codes, briefs filed to the court, secondary sources (sort of the research paper of the legal field) and the news.

So I tried doing a search on the news only. I searched "ycombinator" and the results returned are news articles only, whereas on Google someone probably wants and gets the YC home page, this site, or the actual function. None of those show up on the West site.

Then I ran a search of these terms on each (I didn't enter quotes on the actual searches): "massachusetts custody modification"

On Westlaw, I get cases, and statutes on point. With extra terms I will easily get to cases that deal with my specific issue. On Google, the first link is a divorce resource site and the rest are for lawyers.

Searching statutes might work. But the main reason statutes search well on Google is the Cornell Law site. The quality of results for statutes is probably a bigger testament to them and their cataloging efforts.

I would say both search engines hit their target markets well. Most people searching "massachusetts custody modification" don't want 20 decisions of the Mass SJC. And people searching the same on Westlaw don't want attorneys. Google is much much faster though. It returns in a fraction of a second. Westlaw took about 12 seconds to return 10,000 hits. First three hits were decided yesterday, which is pretty cool.

There is a group of people creating an open legal database. I can't remember its name. I think they are based in the San Fran area. I think it was started by some hacker that worked on opening up some other government data and is now on the court system. I have the bookmark buried somewhere and of course can't find it. Does anyone know which one I am talking about? We could maybe test that database versus the commercial West one.

They have many different types of searches, but the two applicable to this discussion are (as they are written on the site) both "terms & connectors" and "natural language." T&C works well using your standard OR/AND/etc. However, natural language works so much better even though you type in the exact same words.

The natural language search returns cases more on point and has one awesome feature: the most relevant text is in red type, set apart from the rest of the case. From the natural language search West is better able to determine what the legal researcher wants and shows it to him.

I spent almost 2 years of law school searching using terms and connectors because I thought the same thing as you do. But I recently converted when I realized West returns better results from their natural language search.

2. What if these people are trying to defer income to a later date when the income tax isn't as high?

3. Or the people can invest capital in their businesses now, get below the income tax increase by taking deductions, wait for the rate to decrease and then cash in on higher profits due to lower taxes and gains from investment in the business.

The dentist doesn't seem like an idiot to me. Maybe she never took much of a vacation before. Now she will. Then when tax rates decrease the incentive to work increases and she will increase her hours.

The big one I did know about is Grand Central, software that takes advantage of multi-cores. It is supposed to spread the load across the cores in your processor. That is the feature I am waiting for.

Building that now makes sense to me. I have a dual core processor that barely uses the second core. Plus my dual core will soon be on the low end of cores per processor.

While it may be unlikely that ING will fail as a bank, there is no reason to take that risk. Divide your money among banks to stay below the maximum Federally insured limits.

Once you 1) learn what you want to do with the money, 2) get some advice that you can check and challenge, and 3) feel the time is right, move the money to wherever your analysis takes you.

Dividing the money into the savings accounts just buys you time.

ps. Congrats!

If a startup is able to reach profitability within three months, this startup surely wouldn't need Mark Cuban's money to move forward and create jobs at some point in the future."

Not everyone has a bankroll sitting in a savings account ready to start a business. Mark's idea solves that.

And even if a person does have that bankroll, he may not want to invest it in the new business. Recessions don't end overnight because people hoard instead of spend money. The worse things get, the more people want to save for the long term, which prolongs the recession. Mark's idea solves that case, too.

Mark will fund promising ideas which need the cash now and can put it to good use. The cash he gives will be mostly gone by 90 days. That cash is a direct injection into the local and national economy.

So what gets accomplished is:

1. a possible wealth generating/job creating business is started

2. spending occurs when the natural inclination is to save

Both will have stimulative effects on the economy.

You are still subject to Federal prosecution, though. There is no way around that unless the Federal Government decriminalizes marijuana.

My point is that requiring a .edu address is artificially restricting your potential, and most certainly legitimate, users.

I read RateMyProfessors and the information given is less detailed than the information I get talking to people in the halls of my school. The site definitely has a use, but a professor rating himself artificially high will probably contradict the actual widely held student view that the reader already knows.

For example, some sales people at tech companies make much more money than mid-level managers taking home a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. Some of those sales people will make more than the senior level executives. Which one is more important and is higher rank is up for debate.

In my comment above I tried to explain a way to fix the loophole that byrneseyeview listed. Saying nobody makes more than $500k is a way to fix that.

Every engineering company I have worked at had these legacy databases. They all allow you to enter information (not very well), see the information on your screen, or send a report to the printer.

Piping data to a spreadsheet is something almost everyone in the companies I work with (I am a consultant) could do. These aren't sophisticated users. Even the ones with recent EE degrees aren't programming in their spreadsheets. The Mechanical Engineers don't even know that you can.

What they do need is tools to analyze the data existing in these large databases. Switching to another database/interface is not an option.

To extend my original idea: Excel has a way to import data from a text file. It works ok. Select your field delimiter, etc. What would be awesome is if I could draw my own macro on the screen. Make it more powerful. Excel shows me how my input data will work in the spreadsheet. Do that, but give me more editing tools.

Here is why: the data coming out of these databases to the printer is structured. Every record looks the same. If I can draw what one case looks like all of my data will be entered to the spreadsheet correctly.

I know I am not explaining this well, but if anyone (including the YC group) wants me to elaborate further I will.

I would pay for a spreadsheet that has these 2 features. A large part of my job is analyzing data in my customer's database. I can provide my customer with more value if the data input to spreadsheet is trivial as opposed to me billing for several hours performing the task by hand.

I read BusinessWeek every week. I pay for that subscription. They would not lose me as a customer if they went on iNews.