| why airport tax is not reinbursed when canceling a flight ticket. |
[Oct. 21st, 2008|11:49 pm] |
the question came to my mind when booking a flight ticket 4 months in advance and reading the fine print.. The fine print says the ticket fare is non refundable and nothing about airport tax. I wonder why the tax is also non-refundable. The total fare is about Euro 799 and of which 350 or so is Tax etc. The question is if I cancel the flight why can't I get airport tax back? in NL air lines tell you breakup of tax and fare.
I imagine in a better world when I cancel my trip, they should try to resell that ticket and reinburse if they managed to sell. Well the cooperation may not budge in that direction. However, if I cancel I should get the airport tax part back, that is only fair. In this case if I cancel I would get 40% money back.
fact of life: non-refundable tickets are annoying but attractive:! |
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| One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Beta2 |
[Aug. 25th, 2007|11:54 pm] |
at the CCC summer camp (Aug 2007)I got to play with an OLPC, XO laptops B2 release. OLPC made several leaps in technology; leaving aside any social impacts. It was amazing to see a revolutionary product. Especially coming out of a small group. The first thing that caught my attention was the screen. The XO laptops cracked the problem of using a LCD screen under sunlight. In a practical way. How long commercial companies have been trying to make sunlight readable LCDs? Mary Lou Jespen took radical approach under the pressure to cut manufacturing costs. The screen get brighter under bright ambient light, aka outdoors; at least in monochrome mode. Color mode is only usable indoors. I am glad to see a 200dpi screen for USD 35. Second one was the WiFi mesh. They seems to have advanced quite a bit there too. Meshing will work even when the laptop is not running. Marvel chipset can offload mesh packet forwarding. There are many more to enumerate:) The idea of sharing content and work is cool. Though not every thing is working yet the brilliance standout. Not just another thing "made" to get money from those poor people . The security design Bitfrost has posed some interesting problems. Bitfrost seems to making a good attempt to move beyond login password based authentication/authorization method. A five year old will be challenged to use login password in many ways.
I was quite happy to see some brilliant yet simple ideas being developed. tempted to volunteer for OLPC:)
Just hope Microsoft types don't kill the project; Intel pretend to take a turn and join them instead of competing.
Note about LCD screen: "Jepsen has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB subpixels a the critical design innovation in the new LCD. Instead of using subtractive color filters, the display uses a plastic diffraction grating and lenses on the rear of the LCD to illuminate the colored subpixels. This grating pattern is stamped using the same technology used to make DVDs. The grating splits the light from the white backlight into a spectrum. The red, green and blue components are diffracted into the correct positions to illuminate the corresponding R, G or B subpixels. This innovation results in a much brighter display for a given amount of backlight illumination: While the color filters in a regular display typically absorb 85% of the light that hits them, this display absorbs little of that light.[28]
The remainder of the LCD uses existing display technology and can be made using existing manufacturing equipment. Even the masks can be made using combinations
of existing materials and processes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Machine#Display
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost |
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| economist's reason to end drug war. |
[Feb. 11th, 2007|01:50 am] |
Finally I am getting around watching/reading Milton Friedman works. It has been on my list for a long long time. This one is about Drug war in America. youtube video or the transcript. His arguments to stop drug war are interesting; numbers are based in 1993. Some of my favorites are below.
Though he call the drug problem as a social problem, govt making criminals out of citizens most of the his arguments come from economic ist's view; supply, demand, and free choice, and government controlled products.
- being able to get drugs for which they're sure of the quality
- Should a Government be in the business of controlling it?
- "And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws?"
- "It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else. Most of the arrests for drugs are for possession by casual users."
- "The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating."
Milton Friedman is a great advocate for individual fredom and a minimal government. If you like this try to see the 1990 edition of PBS series (15 episode "Free to Choose"). |
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| number game: chineese outbound tourists. |
[Jan. 31st, 2007|01:58 pm] |
This is still a work in progress entry.
Chineese outbound tourists are on the rise. Since Beijing's entry to WTO, in 2001, number available tourist destination to chineese increased from 18 to 130(in 2006). Estimated number of outbount Chineese tourist in 2006 is about 30 million and it is rising steeply. World Tourism Organization estimates 100M by 2020. Many countries are making deals with china. Briton, Syria are the few I have noticed.
Any way this set of numbers are very interesting logistics wise.
I wonder what better things would comeout beside local economies improving.
- I bet on longdistance fligts. This would create a persistant demand for long distance flying, One day many chineese would be able fly faster than sound, supersonic.
- Chinesse credit cards. Looks like JCB is already there?
- Biometric passport for Chineese ( not for a Billion but for a 100M who travel). Host govt want want make sure these people leave once they spend their money. US take finger print of all 10fingers in China. So cutting of finger is not an option:)
- Visa is given to a group of people(5). So every one is in part responsible to bring their fellow tourists back.
- More translation devices.
- I guess at some point they china will try to make it crime if you don't return from the vacation. Or in extreme cases like Vietnam, (Boat people) confiscate your assets in china if you don't return.
You can see weierd numbers: Average chineese tourist spend euro 500 in a trip. Apparntly the other possible large community, outbound tourists from India, are rated as a rather stingy spenders. Average indian tourist spend Euros 150 - 250 a day. The numbers I have seen are 5.5 million Indian tourists.
To give a perspective the number of oversease US travellers (excluding Mexico and Canada) is 25 Million[3]
[1] http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005853503
[2] http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/oct/23spec2.htm
[3] http://tinet.ita.doc.gov/view/m-2006-O-001/index.html
[4] http://www.buyusa.gov/china/en/tourism.html
http://www.wttc.org/NU_compmon/Human%20Tourism.htm {some numbers don't add up to [4]) |
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