Personally I'm partial to the theory that it was cancelled to free up funding for the Diefenbunkers, because Canadian politicians preferred to hide underground and leave the plebians to get nuked.
It's probably not true, but it seems plausibly cynical.
For whatever it's worth, on twitter Chuck Yeager has said he wasn't a fan of the Avro Arrow. He didn't go into details though. He's well into his 90s, so maybe he doesn't remember the details anymore.
Eh, maybe. But neither could the F-104 and he liked that plane. But the F-104 was also an American plane, so maybe that has something to do with it. Then again, he almost got himself killed in a rocket boosted NF-104.
The XF-103 was an interceptor intended to do Mach 3 [1], the XF-108 likewise [2]. Both managed a single mockup each.
The XB-70 [3] and B-58 [4] was intended to be the other end of the stick, a bomber which could carry nuclear weapons and fly at high speed (mach 2-3) and altitude (>60k feet). Two XB-70s were built, and one of those was destroyed on a PR outing for General Electric. The B-58 was operational for a decade before being replaced - the change from high altitude, high speed to low altitude, low speed compromised its range and made it far too expensive to operate; the Arrow would probably have suffered the same problem.
The UK abandoned the TSR-2 [5] for similar reasons; the 1957 Defense White Paper reckoned the time of manned military aviation was over.
Fair point, but these kinds of cancellations are not unusual. For example, YF-23 and X-32 were both cancelled due to losing the competition to YF-22 (later F-22) and X-35 (later F-35), respectively. So individual designs were cancelled, but not the original mission request.
Although all those programs were cancelled, both US and Soviets built a bunch of interceptors in the 60s and 70s, notably F-106 Dart and Su-15.
The YF-23 and X-32 were losing competitors in a program that went ahead, though.
The entire concept of high altitude supersonic nuclear bombers died, and with it the idea that you’d need/be able to intercept them. The UK offered Canada the English Electric Lightning instead of the Arrow - an aircraft that would do Mach 2 in level flight but only had a combat range of 135 miles (and that’s an F.6 with ventral and over-wing fuel tanks). 15 years after the Arrow was cancelled (4 years after the B-58 was retired, 18 years before the Lightning was retired but around the same time the RAF began phasing it out of service), the AGM-86 ALCM, with a range of 1500+ miles, went into development - neither aircraft would have been able to reach, never mind attack, the launch platform for those.
The successor to bombers like the B-58 and Valkyrie are mostly ICBMs/SLBMs but also things like the B-1B (launching stand-off missiles) and B-2. As the sibling points out, the Arrow didn’t have the range, RADAR or missile technology to counter those, and couldn’t use its few advantages (speed and altitude) that it would have cost a fortune to develop.
The F-106 was actually the '54 Interceptor, and predated Arrow. It was the last "pure" interceptor that the U.S. built, as the F-108 and the A-12 (Blackbird-based) interceptors, both in the Arrow's performance class, were canceled.
The Arrow, while impressive in performance, wasn't without it's faults either. The requirements were far ahead of their time, and for some, wern't close to being met. The Nav/Radar systems, which to have "look down, shoot down" capability (i.e, Pulse Doppler). The missiles would the first fully active homing missiles in the world, having taken on the Sparrow II project that the U.S. Navy canceled.
As ballistic missiles, and not bombers, began to be seen as the danger coming over the pole, Arrow was questioned as it's entry into service was still a long way off. There was a lot more needed to be done besides flying high and fast; and something it's fans often overlooked. There were existing aircraft that could fulfill the now more limited role for far cheaper, and so it was cut.
It might have been for the best. The pulse-doppler radar it was to carry didn't come about until the later 60s with the latter F-4 Phantom versions, and the first fully active radar homing missiles not until the F-14 Tomcat/Phoenix/AWG-9 combination, which was huge. (The Active Sparrow that the U.S. Navy tried to get wasn't realized until AMRAAM of the 80s; relying on semi-active Sparrows all the way through the 90s.
One could make the argument that Canada should have dumped money into it anyway. Whether this is the "sunken cost" fallacy or promoting an industry I think is something of an opinion, but what I don't think happened is a U.S. plot to cancel Canada's project. The U.S. assisted in the development of it's engine and shared it's tech to date with the Sparrow II. But those technologies were not a good value for the U.S. defense budget at the time, and so they had lest justification as part of Canada's
It's not a conspiracy. Just business as usual where tech is concerned. The USA didn't want to see this tech fall into enemy hands; it was easier and cheaper to see it killed and hire the engineers as they came available. Acquihire, government style during the Cold War.
> The USA didn't want to see this tech fall into enemy hands
I've heard this preposterous story several times and it never makes sense. If the US doesn't trust Canada to defend North America then explain NORAD (and the 5 Eyes for that matter).
It's not prepostorous. It's what it's like to be Canada - the smart upstart, in this respect - when you challenge the incumbent. Look to tech history for many similar examples.
But there was the idea that the CIA didn't trust Canada to not sell it to an enemy of the USA. If the Arrow had existed under P. Trudeau, that was a justified fear.
..and then eventually, having no aerospace program, Canada goes on to buy F18s from America.
I think the Arrow was an economic threat couched in strategic language. The arrow was kick-ass long before 14s, 15s, 16s,18s entered the science. And yes, they have different mission scenarios, but like Avro wouldn't have owned that space.
#disgruntledCanadian
By expressing an opinion that is unpopular, my "karma" takes a hit. This is how Hacker News works, like Y Combinator: be popular, or STFU. Understandable in many respects for those who have maintained forums, but still unfortunate.
Pretty sure my life would have turned out differently if I'd seen some Lisp listings in Rainbow. I do recall William Barden Jr. making fun of parentheses once.
I've always wanted to re-sell my Steam games. I assume Valve has a real business reason why they haven't allowed this, since when sharing your games locally they are better than anyone. Clearly they don't have the big company mindset of forcing people to pay for a license on every device.
If Valve complies with this ruling I'd guess we'll find out what that reason is. I think loot crates and the item market reveals the problem. Steam licenses will turn into some kind of black market money laundering machine that will be impossible to regulate.
My best guess on why Valve doesn't like the idea of a second hand market for content sold on Steam is that it would destroy Valve's internal price structures if such a market would emerge (globally).
The prices on Steam vary quite substantial between regions / countries. Depending to which country an account is linked to the price for the same content may be only a small fraction (down to single-digit percentages) of the price called out elsewhere.
If there would be a free market for "second hand" Steam licenses, and those licenses could be freely transferred form low price regions to high price regions, Valve couldn't uphold its artificial price structure any longer. I guess they don't like this idea.
Even if Valve finds a way to avoid allowing second hand sales between arbitrary counties they might get in some trouble even with this ruling now: I guess they can be forced to allow second hand sales between EU countries with this ruling (because of properties of the trading union). But AFAIK there are also price differences between countries inside the EU. A free second hand market will likely put an end to this.
They could region lock each acquisition. It's not difficult and it probably wouln't cause issue with the law because it's already happening with video DVD.
It is still an option for purchases, the digital content rules have not been formalized yet and currently only aimed and preserving access while traveling within the EU, the current complication is licensing as well as license derived copyright (e.g. translations).
As most content is created outside of the EU and then licensed to various entities within the EU on different agreements there isn’t much that can easily be done.
Sky for example licenses HBO content for the UK you can’t become a Sky subscriber if you do not reside in the UK and pay a TV license. You can access the streaming VOD service as a subscriber from your tablet if you have traveled to Berlin, but you can’t subscribe to it as a German resident.
Because INAL I can't give a definitive answer, but here's how I understand this.
Firstly regarding the example: One can't compare selling (digital) goods and some subscription service. That are two quite different subjects.
Secondly: The EU wants to further extend this "one digital market" thing as soon as possible. The aim is to regulate exactly things like Steam. So the law will be more precise in the future.
I'm quite sure something like region codes would violate the idea of "one digital market". So if nobody manages to get some exceptions in favor of Steam-like businesses into the laws region codes (or similar) won't be a solution (at least in the long term).
>Because INAL I can't give a definitive answer, but here's how I understand this.
Firstly regarding the example: One can't compare selling (digital) goods and some subscription service. That are two quite different subjects.
You don't need to be a lawyer there is no difference in their view between sub to view and buy to view, or between movies, tv-shows, ebooks and games it's all "audiovisual content".
>Secondly: The EU wants to further extend this "one digital market" thing as soon as possible. The aim is to regulate exactly things like Steam. So the law will be more precise in the future.
Precision doesn't have anything to do with it, there is the issue of copyright law differences between various member states, EU copyright directives, conflicts with primacy issues, bilateral agreements of the EU and individual member state with other jurisdictions and the entire existing industry.
You also need to understand what unjustified geoblocking actually means, if you run an online store in a memberstate you are not obligated to ship to the entirety of the EU, to provide service or support to other member states or in languages other than your own. You however cannot arbitrarily discriminate by for example refusing as a Polish shop to ship to a shipping address in Poland if someone is paying with an Estonian debit card with an Estonian billing address it does not however mean that you have to ship to estonia, have to have to provide support in estonian or have to warranty the product in Estonia if an Estonian buys it in Poland and goes back home.
People tend to really exaggerate the implications of some of these EU directives if that was the case there would be no fucking business in the EU anymore other than Amazon... read the full instructions don't extrapolate from the widest possible interpretation of a headline.
Doesn't seem too bad. It mostly says that consumers have to be able to buy stuff, from any country in the context of websites having different portals per country.
The biggest issue is around Russia (and few others) where games are a fraction of the euro price. They're not in Europe.
Probably some loopholes around currency and/or language. A game bought in euro must be sold in euro. A game is German or French or Polish only. There are already different editions for wild reasons, for example Germany has a no-gore policy so games have a German edition with bloody content removed.
You can still lock things out depending on licensing, you can’t just do it arbitrarily and unfairly.
If you do not have the right to sell outside of a member state, or the rights to sell within a specific member state or for example have restrictions on your content imposed by member state you can still restrict access.
However most of these restrictions don’t apply to games really since the publishers tend to grant full distribution rights to online platforms.
It’s only really a problem for movies and TV shows.
I'd think movies and TV shows are the least affected. It's licensed by language and even if it wasn't, it's totally worthless to try to navigate an alien website to view a movie in a language you don't understand.
Movies and TV shows are the most affected because they are often secured for a specific distribution scale especially for the initial broadcast and VOD.
It's pretty common these days to have movies release sometimes at the same time as cinemas on certain premium VOD services and nearly always at least a few months before the wide scale home video release these deals not only cost a big premium but also negotiated exclusively for a specific country.
Movies are in english anyhow, even with dubbing the original language is always available subtitles are often available in multiple languages too not everyone in France speaks french, and many European countries are multilingual.
So I don't know what content is licenses by language but it sure as hell not TV and movies, for example HBO is broadcast exclusively in the UK through Sky whilst in France by OCS (Orange) and in Belgium by Proximus (BeTV) so the French dubbed version of Game of Thrones would be available for streaming exclusively during its broadcast period on (at least) two different services which cannot cross borders, Switzerland has probably it's own service I would guess that Luxembourg might be piggybacking on Belgium since BeTV is available there but I can't be arsed to check.
And if you care for the english language then it's available in nearly every EU country for it's initial broadcast run through different distributors which all have an exclusive right for the show in their own country.
In France, movies cannot be released concurrently, see "chronologie des medias" literally timeline per medium. It takes up to 3 years after theatrical release to be allowed to distribute to all other mediums.
Movies and tv shows are ALWAYS in the local language. The fraction of population speaking English in germany/france/spain/italy/etc is incredibly small, all content is and need to be localised.
I wouldn't worry that people will start watching (English) shows from service in other countries because it won't happen.
I wonder if something could be worked out like a rebate for giving up access to a title (e.g. 10% of current retail price or original sale price, whichever is less), or a discounted license transfer to a friend (perhaps the recipient pays 10% to the publisher to transfer the license).
That way, publishers still make money, friends can cheaply "give" games to their friends, and everyone else can still feel like they're "selling" old games, which would hopefully increase engagement in the platform. I know I have a ton of games I no longer care about, and if I could "sell" them, I would, which cleans up my library and makes me want to spend the balance.
Also, if a game is no longer supported by a publisher, transfers should be free.
I do not see a good reason why one should not be able to sell the game more expensive than the purchase price. Say when the title becomes unavailable from the original source or was obtained as part of a bundle.
This is all speculation, but I would guess that the main issue is legal agreements with the publishers. The publishers don't want any game resales, they want only new sales. Unless France can equally compel the publishers to allow this, it might end up being that Steam is forced to withdraw from France.
> I would guess that the main issue is legal agreements with the publishers. The publishers don't want any game resales, they want only new sales.
Publishers tolerated reselling for decade when game mediums where physical.
Nowadays they complain about it to increase their margin, purely because they can technically lock the medium.
This is bullshit of the same level than the DRMs and other lock-in nonsense. I am pretty happy some consumer association finally arrived to say them to fuck off.
The first thing that comes to mind is contracts. Imagine you're signing a contract to let Valve sell your games. That's fairly straightforward - you agree on the terms for any given sale, probably Valve take a fixed percentage of the sale cost, and you sign. (Any lawyers among us, I beg your forgiveness!)
Now, imagine the contract gives Valve the right to let third parties resell the games at a price of their choosing. What now? Do you, the publisher, still get a cut? How much? What if it's a used game being resold for the Nth time? There's quite a bit of complexity being introduced here.
In the old physical store days distributors and retailers held the power so they cornered the resale market by letting people trade in old games for money off new games. This let them sell the same product twice (or more!) without paying any money from the resale up the chain to the publisher or further to developers.
Valve already has a store that allows for resale of digital assets with an attached transaction fee. So naively it’d be an extension of that to games.
Whether they think they can cut out the people upstream remains to be seen.
> Valve already has a store that allows for resale of digital assets with an attached transaction fee. So naively it’d be an extension of that to games.
Does first sale doctrine apply here? I think this would violate that.
There already is sort of a black market money laundering machine around steam licenses. It basically goes like: buy steam keys (not buying the game directly on steam, but a redeemable key from some other vendor) using stolen credit cards, resell the keys on a site like G2A, then when the stolen credit cards inevitably get chargebacks you still have the money from selling the key.
This is what cryptocurrencies really opened my eyes to: Everything is fungible if it can be traded online. And if it's fungible, it's going to attract scammers and criminals.
This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.
The value of Magic cards on the secondary market does very little for the manufacturer. Why shouldn't they maximize their profit by selling as many as they can? People who want to speculate can just buy something else.
Yeah they gave up on that which is too bad. I recall being able to upload an image, refining the output with a browser applet and getting a grayscale version of the image.
All the parts were packed in neat little baggies like it was a real set.
Having watched many vids of food photographers, if I'm Pizza Hut or similar, this seems cost-effective. We already know the product doesn't match the ad.
Not mentioned: It was apparently possible to complete the game in a "pacifist run". Every fight could be avoided with exceptional attention to the fiddly details that the article rightly criticizes.
I managed to get as far as the kitchen without shooting any zombies (put the bowl of food on the table, duh), but couldn't figure out anything beyond that.
