A Great Story: High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas

I had been saving the link to this story for months and finally got around to reading it today. It is a great true story of the salvage of the Cougar Ace, a cargo ship full of Mazda cars. It is the story of the salvage company who went in to save the ship. The clock was ticking for the salvage company as the ship was sinking and drifting toward the rocky shoals of the Aleutian Islands. The prospect of losing a few hundred million dollars and creating an environmental nightmare were just days away. Exciting stuff.

I remember hearing about the story on Digg or somewhere like that. Even though the ship was successfully saved, Mazda decided to destroy all the cars to avoid potential warranty and legal problems down the road. The cars had been sitting at a 60 degree angle for two weeks.

This is a story that is begging to be told in a movie. I hope it happens.

Better late than never

I came across this a few mins ago and felt compelled to share it immediately:

I had high hopes for AIM Share a while back.  It never took off the way I thought it would.  It is nice to stumble upon it on the wild wild net.

Why does BCC exist in mail clients?

To all you email developers: please either get rid of BCC or warn me when I “reply all” when I’ve been bcc’d.

I almost fell into the bcc trap today.

Blind Carbon Copy (bcc) is an arcane feature that is carried over from release to release of new mail clients. Email ettiquite says we should never bcc anyone but forward the mail to them after it is sent. Otherwise, the person you bcc may just “reply-all” and expose your secret copy to them. Most bcc’s I’ve received are when there is some argument or disagreement and I get a bcc as a form of an FYI, “those people are assholes and I want you to know about it.” Those are the exact situations where we should not reply all. But it happens. Mail systems don’t have the good courtesy to warn you that you were bcc’d. This would be a very useful feature!

Airline to charge by the pound

An article on Gadling caught my eye this morning. It gives the saying “pack light” a whole new meaning.

It’s arrived. New airline to charge by pound

I have had this same idea for a while and think it makes sense.  We pay by weight to ship packages.   Airlines weigh bags when they are checked to calculate the amount of fuel needed.  But they don’t weigh the passengers.  That doesn’t make sense.  They must use an average weight of a person in order to calculate fuel properly.  The built-in cost of transporting an average weight person is spread across all passengers whether they are heavy or light.  It’s not very fair to lightweights who subsidize the cost of flying a heavy person.

There will be some big challenges with this type of system.  Consumers want to know the price of a ticket before they buy.  The airline will need to estimate weight of passenger and baggage when when quoting a price.  This is an easy problem to solve if tickets are purchased on the airline web site.  Just enter your weight and verify at the airport.  They could estimate baggage weight by allowing the consumer to click on icons of bags like theirs and using some averages.  The airline would be shut out of big online travel systems such as Orbitz and Expedia until those systems make changes to accommodate weight based pricing.

A second problem is verifying the weight of the passenger and baggage at the airport and either charge or credit a passenger for an overage or underage.  They are able to do this now with baggage.  If a bag weighs more then 45 lbs., many airlines will add an extra charge.  I don’t see why the bags and people couldn’t use the same process.

Update:  Steve’s comment made me double check.  I looks like this is a bogus airline and must be a publicity stunt.  For what purpose, I can’t tell.  I still like the idea