No One Uses Smart TV Internet Because It Sucks

People aren’t using their internet-connected smart TVs for anything beyond, well, watching TV. It turns out, nobody wants to tweet from their TV. Or read books. Or do whatever it is people do on LinkedIn. Worse, more than 40 percent of the people who buy a connected TV aren’t even using it for its ostensible primary purpose: getting online video onto the biggest screen in your home. What gives?

We didn’t need a report to tell us this, but NPD provided one just the same. The report finds fewer than 15 percent of smart-TV owners are listening to music, surfing the internet or shopping on their TVs.

I think I can explain all of this with a single thesis: Smart TVs are the literal, biblical devil. (That may be overly broad. Perhaps they are merely demonic.) But the bottom line is that smart TVs typically have baffling interfaces that make the act of simply finding and watching your favorite stuff more difficult, not less.

There are two things to mull over here. The first is why apps haven’t taken off. The other is why more people who buy a TV capable of showing online video aren’t watching online video. Although related, they have different explanations.

If you’ve ever used an Internet-connected TV, it’s pretty obvious why apps for Twitter and Facebook and reading books or shopping haven’t taken off: It’s a lousy user experience. Sitting 10 or 15 feet from your screen and trying to interact with it is a tricky thing to do. Even if your TV has a keyboard (doubtful) and you’ve got perfect vision (most people do not) and you’re a great typist (ha!) working with text from that distance isn’t easy. The mere act of firing up those apps can be a chore compared to the ease of doing so on a mobile device. It’s a far better, more intuitive experience to use the second screen — like your tablet or phone — while you’re in front of the TV. Which is exactly what people are doing.

But why aren’t more people using their smart TVs to watch online video? NPD attributes this in part to all the other connected devices we have — Rokus and Apple TVs and Xboxes and TiVos — that offer the same services. That’s certainly part of it. But the real answer lies in its conclusion: Smart TVs are just too complicated. They have terrible user interfaces that differ wildly from device to device. It’s not always clear what content is even available — for example, after more than two years on the market, you still can’t watch Hulu Plus on your Google TV. At least, not without resorting to trickery.

The bottom line is smart TVs are dumb. They give us too many options for apps most people will never use, and they do so at the expense of making it simple to find the shows and movies we want to watch, no matter where they are, be it online or on the air. As NPD puts it in the conclusion to its report, “OEMs and retailers need to focus less on new innovation in this space and more on simplification of the user experience and messaging if they want to drive additional, and new, behaviors on the TV.” Which is a more polite way of saying, clean up your horrible interface, Samsung. (And Sony and LG and, well, everyone.)

We turn to TV to relax and unwind and enjoy ourselves at the end of the day. Our TVs should be easy and pleasant to use. But instead, all too often, it’s the most complicated device in the home.

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Soprano Bartoli: My voice has more colors, shadow

LONDON (Reuters) – Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli has released a year-end blockbuster that is part mystery story, part research project and shows off a voice which only seems to improve with age.

Bartoli’s latest deluxe-packaged album “Mission” (Decca) is devoted to the music of the late 17th-century Italian composer, diplomat and perhaps spy, Agostino Steffani.

Steffani may have been a bit overlooked as a result of his appearance at the end of the Renaissance and at the beginning of the Baroque periods – until Bartoli’s interest alighted on him.

“The variety is amazing in the music of Steffani, the slow arias have very beautiful melodic lines, they are unbelievable, it’s quite hypnotic music,” Bartoli said in a telephone interview from Paris.

Since she burst upon the world in the 1990s, specializing mostly in Mozart and Rossini, Bartoli has gone from strength to strength, not only in digging up unusual repertoires, including another deluxe compilation in 2009 devoted to music sung by castrati, but also vocally.

Here’s what else Bartoli had to say about Steffani and his possible career as a spy, why she goes for the anti-diva look on her recent album covers, and what she calls a Fellini-esque experience at La Scala with conductor Daniel Barenboim:

Q: Is it true, then, that the voice improves with time?

A: “I think this is a very good time because of the maturity of the technique. When you are young, of course, you have to have a beautiful voice. This is a gift you receive, but you don’t have enough technique or experience. So this is a very good time because I can really paint with my voice with so many colors, like a painter. I love painting with the voice and I’m of an age when I do this definitely better than 20 years ago.”

Q: So this bit about Steffani being a spy, surely that was dreamt up by the Decca marketing department?

A: “He had an incredible life as a priest, a missionary and a diplomatic mission to arranging weddings between the royal princes of that period. And also he was a kind of spy, in fact he was a Catholic priest in the north of Germany, in the Protestant area, and he spent lots of years in that area – it was very unusual, very strange. Maybe he also had the mission to convert (people) to Catholicism, who knows? We have lots of speculation about him, all the mysterious things about this man. There’s still mystery.”

Q: There’s no mystery though that the cover for this album, showing you bald-headed and wielding a crucifix, is “non-diva” – like the cover on the “Sacrificium” album of castrati music, with your head superimposed on the torso of a male statue.

A: “The idea was to have a cover related to the project and it was a bit against the cliche of a diva who has to look beautiful all the time. In a project like ‘Sacrificium’, when at the beginning of the 18th century 3,000-4,000 boys were castrated every year in Italy…how can I make a CD project about this and make a cover with a beautiful, glamorous Vanity Fair picture? This would be more embarrassing…People realize there is a real story here to tell, it’s not a compilation of arias which you do for Christmas. And ‘Sacrificium’ was a huge success.”

Q: Your concert recital earlier this month singing Handel, Rossini and Mozart with Daniel Barenboim conducting at La Scala in Milan, with a chorus of boos and whistles in the second half, was perhaps less of a success?

A: “This story is repeating what happened to Carlos Kleiber, one of the greatest conductors of our lives, also to (Maria) Callas, (Luciano) Pavarotti. The concert was magnificent – Handel, Mozart, Rossini – and then I believe at the very end there was a very Fellinian situation. You think these things don’t happen anymore, that they only happen in the movies of (Federico) Fellini but actually, no, this is happening. And it seemed like a parody but the next morning I opened the newspaper and (Silvio) Berlusconi is back (in Italian politics). And so I said, ‘Yes, of course.’

I think living in Italy is difficult but living without Italy is impossible.”

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

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Measles: Measles Epidemic Is Spreading in Central Africa

Jehad Nga for The New York Times

An internally displaced persons camp in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In addition to recent violence in the country, a spreading measles epidemic is further endangering the lives of thousands of children there.

A large measles epidemic is spreading in Central Africa, endangering the lives of thousands of children, the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned last week.

Since October, the charity has vaccinated more than 226,000 children in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization has also treated nearly 13,000 Congolese for the effects of the disease.

Measles is very contagious. In places where many children are malnourished and vitamin-deficient, it kills 1 percent to15 percent of those who don’t receive medical care, Doctors Without Borders estimated. (Even in the United States in the 1990s, although cases were rare, the fatality rate was 0.3 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In AIDS patients, the rate is 30 percent.)

The eastern Congo basin has serious shortages of medical workers and of drugs. While there is no treatment for measles itself, antibiotics can save those who develop pneumonia, meningitis or other secondary infections. Measles can also cause blindness by scarring the eyeball.

The outbreak is taking place despite enormous success against the disease worldwide. According to a study released earlier this year, deaths from measles have dropped by almost 75 percent since 2000.

Most of the lives saved were in Africa and India. Measles shots are often cited as one of the chief reasons that deaths of children under age 5 around the world have fallen steadily.

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Senate Leader Says Deal Is Unlikely Before Fiscal Deadline

WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warned Thursday that there was scant time to put together a Congressional deal to avert the impending fiscal crisis and that no resolution was in sight.

T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Senator Harry Reid arrived at the Capitol on Thursday in Washington.

“I have to be very honest,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened in an unusual session between Christmas and New Year’s Day. “I don’t know time-wise how it can happen now.”

Mr. Reid offered his pessimistic assessment shortly before President Obama, cutting his vacation short, arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. White House officials said that before leaving Hawaii, Mr. Obama had spoken separately by phone with each of the four Congressional leaders about the status of negotiations, but they gave no details of the discussion.

Mr. Obama is expected to invite all four lawmakers to meet on Friday. In a related development, House Republicans were told to return to Washington on Sunday. Republican senators were planning to convene at the Capitol — normally somnolent during Christmas week — to strategize.

On the Senate floor Thursday, Mr. Reid excoriated House Republicans for failing to consider a Senate-passed measure that would extend lower tax rates on household income up to $250,000. He urged House members to return to the Capitol to put together at least a modest deal to avoid the more than half-a-trillion dollars in automatic tax increases and spending cuts set to begin in January.

“The American people are waiting for the ball to drop,” Mr. Reid said, “but it’s not going to be a good drop.”

A spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, confirmed that he had spoken with the president, and said that Mr. McConnell was “happy to review what the president has in mind.” But the spokesman, Don Stewart, said Senate Democrats had not come ahead with a plan.

“When they do, members on both sides of the aisle will review the legislation and make decisions on how best to proceed,” Mr. Stewart said.

Mr. Reid said that absent a move from Republicans, the Senate would move forward this week on a national security measure concerning espionage, as well as a bill to help states that have suffered hurricane damage, with multiple votes possible.

“We are here in Washington working,” Mr. Reid said, “while the members of the House of Representatives are out watching movies and watching their kids play soccer and basketball and doing all kinds of things. They should be here.”

Senators, frustrated, pessimistic and in some cases downright miserable, returned to Washington with no clear fiscal agenda. Senator Ben Nelson, a retiring Democrat of Nebraska, arrived shortly after midnight on Thursday on a flight that was delayed more than four hours. As he walked through the airport, he lamented the deteriorating political comity that he has observed during two terms in the Senate and two terms as a Democratic governor of a conservative state.

“There are folks who are elected who have come here with an agenda to do nothing and want to stop everything,” Mr. Nelson said in an interview. “It may be the new norm – blocking everything.”

For Mr. Nelson, who decided against seeking a third term, the looming fiscal crisis would be the final legislative act of a political career built around a bipartisan voting record. He said he was not confident that a real deal could be reached that would be acceptable to both sides, considering that Congress is filled with many people “who didn’t accept the 2008 presidential election and haven’t accepted the 2012 election either.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

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Obama, Democrats, winning over public on 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON -- Americans are increasingly doubtful that Congress and the White House will reach a budget deal as the deadline to the "fiscal cliff" approaches, according a new poll, though more said they still think a compromise will eventually be formed out of the fight.
 
According to Gallup, just 50% of those polled said they think President Obama and Congress are at least somewhat likely to reach a budget compromise, down from a high of 59% on Dec. 9. An increasing number, 48%, said they see no resolution before a deadline of Jan. 1.
 
The cliff, that self-imposed deadline set in place last year to force a deal on government expenditures and revenues, would institute broad spending cuts across government programs and allow President George W. Bush's tax cuts to expire. Both Republicans and Democrats have offered evolving proposals on how to avoid both actions.

PHOTOS: Notable moments of the 2012 presidential election 

But as they have sparred back and forth, with House Speaker John Boehner's "Plan B" proposal notably failing prior to the shutdown in Washington for the Christmas holiday, Obama and his allies appear to be coming out on top, at least in the court of public opinion as measured by Gallup.
 
A majority of survey respondents, 54%, said they approve of the way that Obama has handled the negotiations, and 45% said they approve of Democratic leaders in Congress. Just 26% said they approve of Boehner and the Republican congressional leadership.
 
That's a sharp increase for Obama and the Democrats, 6% and 11%, respectively, since Gallup's last round of polling Dec. 15-16. Approval ratings for Boehner and the Republicans remained low, increasing by 1 point for the House speaker and decreasing by 3 points for his colleagues.
 
A majority of respondents, 68% to 22%, also said they favor compromise over strict adherence to principles in the budget negotiations.

QUIZ: How much do you know about the fiscal cliff? 

Obama is scheduled to return to Washington by midday Thursday to restart negotiations, cutting short his holiday vacation to Hawaii. He will be met by the House and Senate, which are reconvening after the holiday, though neither chamber has any specific legislation laid out on their schedules.

The poll was conducted between Dec. 21 and 22 via telephone interviews with 1,076 people, with a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.

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Virginia Town Releases Crime-Fighting App

Crime-fighting is tough. Look at Batman. That guy’s a mess. Still, for most people, if you witness a crime you want to do something about it. And while screaming “citizen’s arrest” seems about as effective as a substitute teacher in a junior high class, using that smartphone with all its media-capturing features actually makes sense.

The town of Marion, Virginia has released a free app that citizens can use to report crimes. The iWatch Marion app is available for iOS and Android (sorry Windows Phone vigilantes) and will let crime-fighting citizens call, text or send photos and videos of a crime in progress to the local Marion police department.

Lt. Andrew Moss of the Marion police department told the Bristol Herald Courier that the app could be used to report incidents that citizens might not feel worthy of a 911 call or calling dispatchers. In other words, if you see a kidnapping, call 911. If you see a guy vandalizing the local library use the iWatch Marion app.

So be careful out there, folks. Reporting crime is a great way to help the local police keep your city safe. But, if we’ve learned anything from Bruce Wayne, sometimes you can let it get too personal.

Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering augmented reality, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.

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Ticket rush: Film fans hand Hollywood record cash

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The big deal for Hollywood is not the record $ 10.8 billion that studios took in domestically in 2012. It’s the fact that the number of tickets sold went up for the first time in three years.

Thanks to inflation, revenue generally rises in Hollywood as admission prices climb each year. The real story is told in tickets, whose sales have been on a general decline for a decade, bottoming out in 2011 at 1.29 billion, their lowest level since 1995.

The industry rebounded this year, with ticket sales projected to rise 5.6 percent to 1.36 billion by Dec. 31, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. That’s still well below the modern peak of 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, but in an age of cozy home theater setups and endless entertainment gadgets, studio executives consider it a triumph that they were able to put more butts in cinema seats this year than last.

“It is a victory, ultimately,” said Don Harris, head of distribution at Paramount Pictures. “If we deliver the product as an industry that people want, they will want to get out there. Even though you can sit at home and watch something on your large screen in high-def, people want to get out.”

Domestic revenue should finish up nearly 6 percent from 2011′s $ 10.2 billion and top Hollywood‘s previous high of $ 10.6 billion set in 2009.

The year was led by a pair of superhero sagas, Disney’s “The Avengers” with $ 623 million domestically and $ 1.5 billion worldwide and the Warner Bros. Batman finale “The Dark Knight Rises” with $ 448 million domestically and $ 1.1 billion worldwide. Sony’s James Bond adventure “Skyfall” is closing in on the $ 1 billion mark globally, and the list of action and family-film blockbusters includes “The Hunger Games,” ”The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part Two,” ”Ice Age: Continental Drift,” ”Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” ”The Amazing Spider-Man” and “Brave.”

Before television, movies were the biggest thing going, with ticket sales estimated as high as 4 billion a year domestically in the 1930s and ’40s.

Movie-going eroded steadily through the 1970s as people stayed home with their small screens. The rise of videotape in the 1980s further cut into business, followed by DVDs in the ’90s and big, cheap flat-screen TVs in recent years. Today’s video games, mobile phones and other portable devices also offer easy options to tramping out to a movie theater.

It’s all been a continual drain on cinema business, and cynics repeatedly predict the eventual demise of movie theaters. Yet Hollywood fights back with new technology of its own, from digital 3-D to booming surround-sound to the clarity of images projected at high-frame rates, which is being tested now with “The Lord of the Rings” prelude “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” shown in select theaters at 48 frames a second, double the standard speed.

For all of the annoyances of theaters — parking, pricy concessions, sitting next to strangers texting on their iPhones — cinemas still offer the biggest and best way to see a movie.

“Every home has a kitchen, but you can’t get into a good restaurant on Saturday night,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner Bros. “People want to escape. That’s the nature of society. The adult population just is not going to sit home seven days a week, even though they have technology in their home that’s certainly an improvement over what it was 10 years ago. People want to get out of the house, and no matter what they throw in the face of theatrical exhibition, it continues to perform at a strong level.”

Even real-life violence at the movie theater didn’t turn audiences away. Some moviegoers thought twice about heading to the cinema after a gunman killed 12 people and injured 58 at a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Colorado last summer, but if there was any lull in attendance, it was slight and temporary. Ticket sales went on a tear for most of the fall.

While domestic revenues inch upward most years largely because of inflation, the real growth areas have been overseas, where more and more fans are eager for the next Hollywood blockbuster.

Rentrak, which compiles international box office data, expects 2012′s foreign gross to be about $ 23 billion, 3 percent higher than in 2011. No data was yet available on the number of tickets sold overseas this past year.

International business generally used to account for less than half of a studio film’s overall receipts. Films now often do two or even three times as much business overseas as they do domestically. Some movies that were duds with U.S. audiences, such as “Battleship” and “John Carter,” can wind up being $ 200 million hits with overseas crowds.

Whether finishing a good year or a bad one, Hollywood executives always look ahead to better days, insisting that the next crop of blockbusters will be bigger than ever. The same goes this time as studio bosses hype their 2013 lineup, which includes the latest “Iron Man,” ”Star Trek,” ”Hunger Games” and “Thor” installments, the Superman tale “Man of Steel” and the second chapter in “The Hobbit” trilogy.

Twelve months from now, they hope to be talking about another revenue record topping this year’s $ 10.8 billion.

“I’ve been saying we’re going to hit that $ 11 billion level for about three years now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “Next year I think is the year we actually do it.”

___

Online:

http://www.hollywood.com

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Well: Exercise and the Ever-Smarter Human Brain

Anyone whose resolve to exercise in 2013 is a bit shaky might want to consider an emerging scientific view of human evolution. It suggests that we are clever today in part because a million years ago, we could outrun and outwalk most other mammals over long distances. Our brains were shaped and sharpened by movement, the idea goes, and we continue to require regular physical activity in order for our brains to function optimally.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

The role of physical endurance in shaping humankind has intrigued anthropologists and gripped the popular imagination for some time. In 2004, the evolutionary biologists Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard and Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah published a seminal article in the journal Nature titled “Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo,” in which they posited that our bipedal ancestors survived by becoming endurance athletes, able to bring down swifter prey through sheer doggedness, jogging and plodding along behind them until the animals dropped.

Endurance produced meals, which provided energy for mating, which meant that adept early joggers passed along their genes. In this way, natural selection drove early humans to become even more athletic, Dr. Lieberman and other scientists have written, their bodies developing longer legs, shorter toes, less hair and complicated inner-ear mechanisms to maintain balance and stability during upright ambulation. Movement shaped the human body.

But simultaneously, in a development that until recently many scientists viewed as unrelated, humans were becoming smarter. Their brains were increasing rapidly in size.

Today, humans have a brain that is about three times larger than would be expected, anthropologists say, given our species’ body size in comparison with that of other mammals.

To explain those outsized brains, evolutionary scientists have pointed to such occurrences as meat eating and, perhaps most determinatively, our early ancestors’ need for social interaction. Early humans had to plan and execute hunts as a group, which required complicated thinking patterns and, it’s been thought, rewarded the social and brainy with evolutionary success. According to that hypothesis, the evolution of the brain was driven by the need to think.

But now some scientists are suggesting that physical activity also played a critical role in making our brains larger.

To reach that conclusion, anthropologists began by looking at existing data about brain size and endurance capacity in a variety of mammals, including dogs, guinea pigs, foxes, mice, wolves, rats, civet cats, antelope, mongeese, goats, sheep and elands. They found a notable pattern. Species like dogs and rats that had a high innate endurance capacity, which presumably had evolved over millenniums, also had large brain volumes relative to their body size.

The researchers also looked at recent experiments in which mice and rats were systematically bred to be marathon runners. Lab animals that willingly put in the most miles on running wheels were interbred, resulting in the creation of a line of lab animals that excelled at running.

Interestingly, after multiple generations, these animals began to develop innately high levels of substances that promote tissue growth and health, including a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. These substances are important for endurance performance. They also are known to drive brain growth.

What all of this means, says David A. Raichlen, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona and an author of a new article about the evolution of human brains appearing in the January issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology, is that physical activity may have helped to make early humans smarter.

“We think that what happened” in our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, he says, is that the more athletic and active survived and, as with the lab mice, passed along physiological characteristics that improved their endurance, including elevated levels of BDNF. Eventually, these early athletes had enough BDNF coursing through their bodies that some could migrate from the muscles to the brain, where it nudged the growth of brain tissue.

Those particular early humans then applied their growing ability to think and reason toward better tracking prey, becoming the best-fed and most successful from an evolutionary standpoint. Being in motion made them smarter, and being smarter now allowed them to move more efficiently.

And out of all of this came, eventually, an ability to understand higher math and invent iPads. But that was some time later.

The broad point of this new notion is that if physical activity helped to mold the structure of our brains, then it most likely remains essential to brain health today, says John D. Polk, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-author, with Dr. Raichlen, of the new article.

And there is scientific support for that idea. Recent studies have shown, he says, that “regular exercise, even walking,” leads to more robust mental abilities, “beginning in childhood and continuing into old age.”

Of course, the hypothesis that jogging after prey helped to drive human brain evolution is just a hypothesis, Dr. Raichlen says, and almost unprovable.

But it is compelling, says Harvard’s Dr. Lieberman, who has worked with the authors of the new article. “I fundamentally agree that there is a deep evolutionary basis for the relationship between a healthy body and a healthy mind,” he says, a relationship that makes the term “jogging your memory” more literal than most of us might have expected and provides a powerful incentive to be active in 2013.

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Problems with new 787 Dreamliner continue to plague Boeing

Aerospace giant Boeing Co. just can't seem to escape trouble with its new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet.

More than three years late because of design problems and supplier issues, the much-anticipated plane has run into another bout of turbulence with fresh concerns about its safety.

The Federal Aviation Administration this month ordered inspections of fuel line connectors on Dreamliners because of risks of leaks and possible fires.

PHOTOS: Inside the Dreamliner

On the same day, a United Airlines Dreamliner flight from Houston to Newark, N.J., was diverted to New Orleans after an electrical problem popped up mid-flight. After accepting delivery of the aircraft just a month earlier, Qatar Air later said it had grounded a Dreamliner for the same problem that United experienced.

Despite criticism of the problem-plagued program, Boeing is confident that the plane will be a success once it gets more miles under its wings.

"We're having what we would consider the normal number of squawks on a new airplane, consistent with other new airplanes we've introduced," Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney said in an interview on cable network CNBC.

"We regret the impact on our customers, obviously," he said. "But … we're working through it."

The Dreamliner, a twin-aisle aircraft that seats 210 to 290 passengers, is the first large passenger jet with more than half its structure made of composite materials (carbon fibers meshed together with epoxy) instead of aluminum sheets. Major parts for the plane are assembled elsewhere and then shipped to Everett, Wash., where they are "snapped together" in three days, compared with a month the traditional way.

Chicago-based Boeing says the new plane burns 20% less fuel than other jetliners of a similar size. Because of this, the plane has been hotly sought-after. Through November, Boeing had delivered 38 Dreamliners.

The company has taken 844 orders for the plane from airlines and aircraft leasing firms around the world. Depending on the version ordered, the price ranges from $206.8 million to $243.6 million per jet.

Early customers get massive rebates on the first planes delivered because of bugs that may pop up in production. The plane maker sells these early aircraft at a loss.

David E. Strauss, an aerospace analyst at UBS Financial Services, said in a note to investors this month that his analysis indicates Dreamliner production "costs are not declining rapidly enough for [Boeing] to come close to its target for break-even 787 cash flow by early 2015."

Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said he would not comment on Strauss' analysis, but he did say that the company had already cut its production cost per plane by half. He did not specify how much that was.

"We're very pleased on the progress and confident on our processes," he said. "Once we get to 10 Dreamliners a month and stay there, that's when we expect a healthy production system."

Boeing is currently making five Dreamliners a month. The company doesn't plan on reaching 10 a month until late next year.

Many of the planes so far have gone to Japanese carrier All Nippon Airways, which has 16 of them. The airline said the Dreamliner has exceeded its expectations.

Since All Nippon began flying the planes in November 2011, it has flown nearly 7 million miles and saved 21% more fuel per flight than a different aircraft of similar size. The company also took a customer survey that found 98% of passengers said they would like to fly again on the Dreamliner.

"This is better than what we initially expected," said Kohei Tsuji, an All Nippon spokesman. "And the financial impact will only grow bigger for ANA as we continue to operate more Dreamliners."

Scott Hamilton, an aviation industry consultant and managing director of Leeham Co. in Issaquah, Wash., said that the latest Dreamliner problems are "irritants more than substance."

"The 787 problems are annoying for the airlines and embarrassing for Boeing," he said. "But I don't see these as major issues to worry about."

william.hennigan@latimes.com

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A Look Inside Tarantino's <em>Django Unchained</em> Comic Book

Django Unchained opens in theaters today, but the big screen isn’t the only way to see the newest work by Quentin Tarantino. The issue of the Django Unchained comic book mini-series from DC/Vertigo Comics is available now in comic book stores (and online), and in advance of tomorrow’s film debut, Wired has a look at the Tarantino’s introduction to the comic, along with the original character sketches by artist R.M. Guéra and a six-page preview of the first issue.

The comic is an incredibly faithful adaptation of Tarantino’s movie script – the first issue is the first few scenes of the film, almost line for line. Drawing on the director’s story, the book’s interior art comes from Guéra, who made characters that hew closely to their actor counterparts but are their own characters entirely. The artist’s Django, the slave that becomes a bounty hunter, has a more steely cowboy vibe than smooth, cool Jamie Foxx; ruthless plantation owner Calvin Candie looks even more maniacal than Leonardo DiCaprio; and Candie’s house slave Stephen looks far more jowly and grizzled on the page than Samuel L. Jackson does on screen.

“Growing up I read the adventures of Kid Colt Outlaw, TOMAHAWK, The Rawhide Kid, BAT LASH, and especially, Yang (which was basically the Kung Fu TV show done as a comic), and Gunhawks featuring Reno Jones (a Jim Brown stand-in) and Kid Cassidy (a David Cassidy stand-in), which for my money was the greatest Blaxploitation Western ever made,” Tarantino says in the first issue’s intro. “And it’s in that spirit of cinematic comics literature that I present to you Django Unchained.”

Tarantino’s version of the story hits theaters Dec. 25.

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