It depends on the motive. From the text it seems as if they looked at the database to determine whether the data in it was causing the problem. I would say that it is reasonable for any sysadmin to look at data when it pertains to the smooth running of their system unless there was some explicit agreement that under no circumstances whatsoever were they to look at data.
Certainly in most places I have accounts the usual rule for sysadmins is: do not look at private data unless required for problem diagnosis and fixing. If you do need to look then treat whatever you find as confidential.
Let's also assume that they have different physics and that FTL travel is possible and routine.
First, by definition, they cannot have different physics from us without living in a different Universe. They may have a better understanding of physics though.
Secondly there are unfrotunately very good arguments to point out that intelligent life and FTL travel are, together, extremely unlikely. If you think about how long it has taken us to get from caves to spaceships (say 10k years) this is tiny compared to the length of time that life has been around on Earth (4 billion) or even multi cellular life (~500 million IIRC). Now Earth is by no means an old planet - the Universe has been around for some 13.8 billion years compared to 4.5 billion of Earth. So any other intelligent life form out there is likely to be millions of years more evolved than we are (they cannot be millions of years less evolved because otherwise we would not regard them as intelligent being so relatively young!). So if, given a million year or so head start, they have not been able to visit us so far then either interstellar travel is incredibly hard or intelligent life is fantastically rare. The two more or less balance: the easier interstellar travel is the rarer intelligent life will probably be and vice versa.
I think there's an upper boundary to technology, called the Laws of Physics, which may be refined, clarified, but won't be broken outright.
True but we don't know all the Laws of Physics yet so how can we say categorically that something is impossible? If you look at String Theory then they have models which just about break every concept we hold dear: that it is not to say that any of these bizarre models are correct but if you can come up with a theory which allows you to break things like Lorentz and unitarity in a manner not yet contradicted by experiment I don't think that you can be too certain what may eventually be possible!
As in, parents don't simply exercise good parenting and choose a console model with the ability to lock out games (or actually monitor their kids, but we don't talk about that now do we?).
As a parent (of kids too young to play console games yet) I would argue that the ability to lock out games is totally irrelevant. I'd make sure that my kids would not own any games I deem inappropriate. I'm not so stupid as to believe that this means they would never see them: they might play them at a friends house or have their friends bring them round to play at home. However if I caught them doing the latter there would be consequences.
What I'd like to know is when, as a society, did we switch from "appropriate consequences for misbehaviour" to the thought control method of "prevention of all misbehaviour"? While you have a duty to stop them making dangerous mistakes as kids at some point they will grow up and become adults and then prevention is no longer possible.
There are all kinds of doublets in the particle zoo; the fact that they are unstable makes them observable (since we usually detect not the particle but its decay).
You have this argument backwards. The reason we detect decay products from particles is BECAUSE they decay! Stable particles are often very easy to detect e.g. electron, proton, muon (ok, technically this is not stable but it is so long lived at high energy that we usually treat it as stable). In fact stable particles are generally a lot easier to detect than unstable ones because we detect the particle itself, and not its decay products.
Since all our detectors are made of matter what determines whether a particle is easy to detect is how well it interacts with matter. Electrons and protons interact strongly (after all that is what matter is made of!) whereas things like neutrinos can pass through light years of matter without interacting at all which makes then very hard to detect (you need a lot of them to see anything at all).
The Earth orbits the Sun and does not get annihilated by being sucked into the middle of the sun despite being attracted to it by gravity. For the (sort of) the same reason bound states of matter/anti-matter particles can exist without the particles combining and annihilating each other.
Why is not an unscientific question. "Why did he kill his wife?" is not some metaphysical extraction of thought it's a scientific/historical question about the emotional and rational state of his wife. "Why do we exist?"...
"Why did he kill his wife" is an unscientific question in the way that I think you mean since it is motivational and you are looking for an answer like "because he was in love with someone else" or "because he was angry and her unfaithfulness" etc. This is a subjective judgement and not a scientific one.
The same applies when asking "Why do we exist?". What you are really meaning is "How did we come to exist?" and not "What is the purpose of our existence?". The first is a scientific question and is a 'how'-type question. The second is not a scientific question and is a 'why'-type question.
Generally if you can replace the 'why' with 'how' in the question you are asking and keep the same sense it is a scientific question: "How do we exist?", "How did he kill his wife?", "How did the tree fall?".
Yes, I have, but what the hell does that have to do with software piracy?
They make money indirectly. The Chinese government makes money from the piracy it allows. Were it to forbid it then all the money would go to foreign software companies. While these guys don't have letters of marque they clearly operate with the tacit approval of the government and keep the money in the local economy where it gets spent and inevitably taxed. More subtle than the privateer method, but essentialy just another type of economic warfare.
The government(s) make money off of the rest, but they don't make any money off of piracy.... - Piracy, they haven't figured out how to profit from this yet
Sorry but governments are world-class experts at figuring out how to make money from anything. They figured out how to make money from piracy hundreds of years ago...ever heard of privateers?
A few years ago I had an idea about this and Ive been waiting to see if it ever happened. Basically I thought maybe a consortium of universities around the world could organise a kind of "offical" wiki for say scientific work(doesnt matter what subject... lets say physics)
I've had the same idea, also for physics! However I could never get my colleagues interested enough in it to form a critical mass. Unlike the other efforts on the web I want a citizendium like approach: only qualified people can contribute to the Wiki. However, inspired by an idea from citizendium I've been toying with something slightly different.
Instead of profs writing the entries I was thinking of setting an assignment for the students to write parts of the text. The requirement being that the result would be released under a suitable CC license and edited by myself or others (it would be in a wiki). This is good for several reasons:
Someone who has just learnt a concept is one of the best at explaining it since they can remember what was hard to understand.
It teaches scientific writing which is not something which is often included in physics courses.
Rather than being a 'throw-away' assignment it produces something useful which other students can benefit from.
So is this something you students would be happy doing? What do you think of it? Any suggestions for a Wiki to use? Ideally it would have PDF export and the ability to restrict access to certain pages. Is anyone already doing this? I know that Eduzendium exists but this is more about writing encyclopedia articles which is less useful/applicable to physics.
I've seen error that persist in edition after edition, or books where the problems themselves weren't even changed -- just the order and numbering of the problems.
Sad but unfortunately very true with some publishers. In one case I reported the same errors to the rep for two years in a row and then the new edition came out with the same mistakes! I got so ticked off with them that I changed the course text. Since this was for a huge 1st year course with ~1,000 students per year (plus other local education institutions typically used our book choice) I suddenly got a phone call from their New York editor plus a further call from the text book author. They fixed all the errors (some really very blatant) after which I explained we were still changing books and if they only fixed errors when threatened with loss of customers they were not the sort of company whose books I would trust. I'm not sure if it had any effect but we got a new, and far better, rep after that.
sometimes the professors are even collecting royalties from the books in question
Only if they are the author. We do not get money from the publisher for selecting a particular book: that would be extremely unethical.
As a professor I noted this and so now I write all my own assignment questions. Not only does this mean that students can use old editions but it also means that they are better prepared for the exams since I write those questions too.
How do you figure this? As a professor I choose the best textbook for the course but all the money goes to the publisher and text book author zero goes to me. All the supplementary materials I write are available free to the students: they are already paying tuition so it would be unethical for me to charge them for it. Unless your professors are using their own books using an illegal copy does not hurt them directly. Indeed it is more likely to cause the publishers to raise prices which will hurt students.
Well, you're just incorrect about science. To the extent you believe it, you're no better than the creationists. Science is not about Truth with a capital T. It's about explaining the world as best we can.
I'm guessing that you are either not a scientist or at least a very applied one. Given this definition you have entirely excluded mathematics as a science since it is solely interested in finding the truth and, unlike other sciences, can prove that it is the truth. Similarly fundamental physics aims at understanding how the universe works. The method we employ is to come up with better and better models but the ultimate goal is to come up with one that explains exactly how the universe works. I suppose you could try to make a philosophical point about whether the model is truly how the universe work or just a model of it but I'd take the pragmatic approach and say that if the model accurately predicts everything in the universe then to all practical purposes it is the truth about how the universe works.
It may suggest a theoretical explanation of everything, but I think that's where scientists get into trouble.
Not assuming this would get us into far more trouble since it would imply that there are phenomena in the universe for which there is no possible scientific explanation. (Note: this is very different from saying that we don't yet understand the scientific explanation).
When you restate the distinction as "how" vs. "why", you are making the same distinction between Truth and truth that I have made.
Really? Truth vs. truth is the same as how vs. why? Simply using a capital letter is vague at best and suggests a lack of understanding of English grammar at worst. Indeed I took it to mean that you were referring to someone's assumption of the truth i.e. as a proper noun, rather than the actual truth. This has nothing to do with how vs. why.
The moon orbiting the earth may not seem an ethical question -- and I agree that it is not -- but the Catholic church certainly considered it an ethical issue when it persecuted Galileo.
The Catholic church did not think that the Earth orbiting the sun was an ethical question: they refused to believe it was true. Hence Galileo saying that it was true must be lying and trying to lead people astray. Thus for them the ethical question was Galileo's action in telling people the Earth orbited the sun. Of course this is the most generous interpretation that can be given to the Catholic church's motivation and leaves out the politics, corruption and powermongering that were rife at the time.
The morality or ethical worth of scientific "facts" has to be dealt with in a different framework
How does a scientific fact have a morality or an ethical worth? They are facts. For something to have a morality it implies that it is an optional action. The only reason we have morals and ethics is to guide our actions. It cannot be unethical for the moon to orbit the Earth because the laws of physics require it.
Yes, I know that eventually science confronts some of the same cosmic questions, but it does so in a completely different approach, one that cannot and should not seek Truth.
As a scientist I complete disagree with this. The whole aim of science is to find the truth of how the Universe works. While your arguments about models earlier is correct the aim is to develop these models until they match what the Universe does. We are not there yet, and may never get there, but that is most certainly the goal.
The difference between science and religion is that they seek different aspects of the truth. Science asks 'how' and religion asks 'why'. The problem we are facing in recent times is that religious extremists are attempting to answer the 'how' question and they are completely unequipped to do so in a sensible fashion.
Progressive taxes (income tax which increases in percent as the principal increases) are nonsense.
No they are very sensible: they allow MORE people to survive with FEWER government handouts. Given that all civilised governments need to provide some services: health care, defence, resource allocation, social safetynet etc. they need money to do this. Lets suppose that if a flat tax rate were imposed it would require 30% of everyone's income to fund this and suppose that the minimum cost to provide food and shelter is £8,000/year.
With the flat rate this means that everyone who earns under £12,000/year would need government handouts to survive. This would increase the government's costs, raising the tax percentage and resulting in more people requring support until equilibrium.
However if you introduce a progressive tax rate you can set the lower bracket at, say, 10% and gradually increase it to a maximum of say 40% in certain steps. Doing that the minimum salary requiring government handouts to survive drops to £8,800/year which means far fewer people rely on the government for support and government costs are kept lower.
Of course this is a greatly simplified view and other means of progressive taxation can also be employed (standard allowance before tax is charged is an example). But I'd hope you agree that having more people making their own way rather than relying on government handouts is something worthwhile?
This is not a nuance of language we are talking about but completely different genres of book here. One is fiction and the other fact. Would you mention Disney's Pocahontas as a good example of an historical documentary? Science fiction is great - I'm a fan of it myself - but I have often noted a worrying trend for people to think of these books as 'sciency' (as you put it). They are not, they are 'fictiony' and not science, rigourous or otherwise.
Crichton writes science fiction NOT science. There is a huge difference! I have not read State of Fear but Timeline is clearly fictitious. Surely you don't think the 'science' behind the space-time machine was real?
If you are ever in doubt about whether us physicists have invented time travel a good check is whether we are still asking for research grants. If we ever manage to invent a time machine then, thanks to a little magic called 'compound interest', research funding worries will be a thing of the past.
Trains don't have to take time
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Take a train, take a boat, take some TIME and enjoy it - getting there is supposed to be half the fun.
Taking a train need not take time. Using the example in the article, if Chicago-New York is 635 nautical miles (=1,175km) then modern trains like the TGV can travel that distance in 4 hours (that is assuming the operating speed of 320km/h, not the max speed of 574.8 km/h). If current flights are scheduled at 3 hours then in this case a train would be far faster since there is no need to arrive 1-2 hours beforehand for your body cavity search plus you start and end at stations which, at least for Chicago, are in the city centre. Other advantages are onboard power, WiFi, cellphone coverage, something to look at out of the window etc.
It's true that the monetary cost of setting up such a network is not trivial but if you factor in the environmental cost of planes the question you might want to ask is can you afford not to?
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the motive. From the text it seems as if they looked at the database to determine whether the data in it was causing the problem. I would say that it is reasonable for any sysadmin to look at data when it pertains to the smooth running of their system unless there was some explicit agreement that under no circumstances whatsoever were they to look at data.
Certainly in most places I have accounts the usual rule for sysadmins is: do not look at private data unless required for problem diagnosis and fixing. If you do need to look then treat whatever you find as confidential.
Let's also assume that they have different physics and that FTL travel is possible and routine.
First, by definition, they cannot have different physics from us without living in a different Universe. They may have a better understanding of physics though.
Secondly there are unfrotunately very good arguments to point out that intelligent life and FTL travel are, together, extremely unlikely. If you think about how long it has taken us to get from caves to spaceships (say 10k years) this is tiny compared to the length of time that life has been around on Earth (4 billion) or even multi cellular life (~500 million IIRC). Now Earth is by no means an old planet - the Universe has been around for some 13.8 billion years compared to 4.5 billion of Earth. So any other intelligent life form out there is likely to be millions of years more evolved than we are (they cannot be millions of years less evolved because otherwise we would not regard them as intelligent being so relatively young!). So if, given a million year or so head start, they have not been able to visit us so far then either interstellar travel is incredibly hard or intelligent life is fantastically rare. The two more or less balance: the easier interstellar travel is the rarer intelligent life will probably be and vice versa.
I think there's an upper boundary to technology, called the Laws of Physics, which may be refined, clarified, but won't be broken outright.
True but we don't know all the Laws of Physics yet so how can we say categorically that something is impossible? If you look at String Theory then they have models which just about break every concept we hold dear: that it is not to say that any of these bizarre models are correct but if you can come up with a theory which allows you to break things like Lorentz and unitarity in a manner not yet contradicted by experiment I don't think that you can be too certain what may eventually be possible!
As in, parents don't simply exercise good parenting and choose a console model with the ability to lock out games (or actually monitor their kids, but we don't talk about that now do we?).
As a parent (of kids too young to play console games yet) I would argue that the ability to lock out games is totally irrelevant. I'd make sure that my kids would not own any games I deem inappropriate. I'm not so stupid as to believe that this means they would never see them: they might play them at a friends house or have their friends bring them round to play at home. However if I caught them doing the latter there would be consequences.
What I'd like to know is when, as a society, did we switch from "appropriate consequences for misbehaviour" to the thought control method of "prevention of all misbehaviour"? While you have a duty to stop them making dangerous mistakes as kids at some point they will grow up and become adults and then prevention is no longer possible.
There are all kinds of doublets in the particle zoo; the fact that they are unstable makes them observable (since we usually detect not the particle but its decay).
You have this argument backwards. The reason we detect decay products from particles is BECAUSE they decay! Stable particles are often very easy to detect e.g. electron, proton, muon (ok, technically this is not stable but it is so long lived at high energy that we usually treat it as stable). In fact stable particles are generally a lot easier to detect than unstable ones because we detect the particle itself, and not its decay products.
Since all our detectors are made of matter what determines whether a particle is easy to detect is how well it interacts with matter. Electrons and protons interact strongly (after all that is what matter is made of!) whereas things like neutrinos can pass through light years of matter without interacting at all which makes then very hard to detect (you need a lot of them to see anything at all).
The Earth orbits the Sun and does not get annihilated by being sucked into the middle of the sun despite being attracted to it by gravity. For the (sort of) the same reason bound states of matter/anti-matter particles can exist without the particles combining and annihilating each other.
...and what happens halfway across the Atlantic when you find you've forgotten the password?
Why is not an unscientific question. "Why did he kill his wife?" is not some metaphysical extraction of thought it's a scientific/historical question about the emotional and rational state of his wife. "Why do we exist?"...
"Why did he kill his wife" is an unscientific question in the way that I think you mean since it is motivational and you are looking for an answer like "because he was in love with someone else" or "because he was angry and her unfaithfulness" etc. This is a subjective judgement and not a scientific one.
The same applies when asking "Why do we exist?". What you are really meaning is "How did we come to exist?" and not "What is the purpose of our existence?". The first is a scientific question and is a 'how'-type question. The second is not a scientific question and is a 'why'-type question.
Generally if you can replace the 'why' with 'how' in the question you are asking and keep the same sense it is a scientific question: "How do we exist?", "How did he kill his wife?", "How did the tree fall?".
Yes, I have, but what the hell does that have to do with software piracy?
They make money indirectly. The Chinese government makes money from the piracy it allows. Were it to forbid it then all the money would go to foreign software companies. While these guys don't have letters of marque they clearly operate with the tacit approval of the government and keep the money in the local economy where it gets spent and inevitably taxed. More subtle than the privateer method, but essentialy just another type of economic warfare.
No the title is correct, it is just that their aim is bad. If they were aiming at international privacy it would probably be safe.
The government(s) make money off of the rest, but they don't make any money off of piracy....
- Piracy, they haven't figured out how to profit from this yet
Sorry but governments are world-class experts at figuring out how to make money from anything. They figured out how to make money from piracy hundreds of years ago...ever heard of privateers?
Sadly there are far more Data pirates than "Board ye ship" pirates.
True, but data pirates don't kill people.
If only the same principle worked for Microsoft...
Ah yes but we don't pronounce it T just t' so its easy to tell the difference.
Actually, since fusion itself is an endothermic nuclear reaction
Errr...ever heard of the sun? That is powered by fusion and looks pretty exothermic to me.
A few years ago I had an idea about this and Ive been waiting to see if it ever happened. Basically I thought maybe a consortium of universities around the world could organise a kind of "offical" wiki for say scientific work(doesnt matter what subject... lets say physics)
I've had the same idea, also for physics! However I could never get my colleagues interested enough in it to form a critical mass. Unlike the other efforts on the web I want a citizendium like approach: only qualified people can contribute to the Wiki. However, inspired by an idea from citizendium I've been toying with something slightly different.
Instead of profs writing the entries I was thinking of setting an assignment for the students to write parts of the text. The requirement being that the result would be released under a suitable CC license and edited by myself or others (it would be in a wiki). This is good for several reasons:
So is this something you students would be happy doing? What do you think of it? Any suggestions for a Wiki to use? Ideally it would have PDF export and the ability to restrict access to certain pages. Is anyone already doing this? I know that Eduzendium exists but this is more about writing encyclopedia articles which is less useful/applicable to physics.
I've seen error that persist in edition after edition, or books where the problems themselves weren't even changed -- just the order and numbering of the problems.
Sad but unfortunately very true with some publishers. In one case I reported the same errors to the rep for two years in a row and then the new edition came out with the same mistakes! I got so ticked off with them that I changed the course text. Since this was for a huge 1st year course with ~1,000 students per year (plus other local education institutions typically used our book choice) I suddenly got a phone call from their New York editor plus a further call from the text book author. They fixed all the errors (some really very blatant) after which I explained we were still changing books and if they only fixed errors when threatened with loss of customers they were not the sort of company whose books I would trust. I'm not sure if it had any effect but we got a new, and far better, rep after that.
sometimes the professors are even collecting royalties from the books in question
Only if they are the author. We do not get money from the publisher for selecting a particular book: that would be extremely unethical.
As a professor I noted this and so now I write all my own assignment questions. Not only does this mean that students can use old editions but it also means that they are better prepared for the exams since I write those questions too.
How do you figure this? As a professor I choose the best textbook for the course but all the money goes to the publisher and text book author zero goes to me. All the supplementary materials I write are available free to the students: they are already paying tuition so it would be unethical for me to charge them for it. Unless your professors are using their own books using an illegal copy does not hurt them directly. Indeed it is more likely to cause the publishers to raise prices which will hurt students.
Well, you're just incorrect about science. To the extent you believe it, you're no better than the creationists. Science is not about Truth with a capital T. It's about explaining the world as best we can.
I'm guessing that you are either not a scientist or at least a very applied one. Given this definition you have entirely excluded mathematics as a science since it is solely interested in finding the truth and, unlike other sciences, can prove that it is the truth. Similarly fundamental physics aims at understanding how the universe works. The method we employ is to come up with better and better models but the ultimate goal is to come up with one that explains exactly how the universe works. I suppose you could try to make a philosophical point about whether the model is truly how the universe work or just a model of it but I'd take the pragmatic approach and say that if the model accurately predicts everything in the universe then to all practical purposes it is the truth about how the universe works.
It may suggest a theoretical explanation of everything, but I think that's where scientists get into trouble.
Not assuming this would get us into far more trouble since it would imply that there are phenomena in the universe for which there is no possible scientific explanation. (Note: this is very different from saying that we don't yet understand the scientific explanation).
When you restate the distinction as "how" vs. "why", you are making the same distinction between Truth and truth that I have made.
Really? Truth vs. truth is the same as how vs. why? Simply using a capital letter is vague at best and suggests a lack of understanding of English grammar at worst. Indeed I took it to mean that you were referring to someone's assumption of the truth i.e. as a proper noun, rather than the actual truth. This has nothing to do with how vs. why.
The moon orbiting the earth may not seem an ethical question -- and I agree that it is not -- but the Catholic church certainly considered it an ethical issue when it persecuted Galileo.
The Catholic church did not think that the Earth orbiting the sun was an ethical question: they refused to believe it was true. Hence Galileo saying that it was true must be lying and trying to lead people astray. Thus for them the ethical question was Galileo's action in telling people the Earth orbited the sun. Of course this is the most generous interpretation that can be given to the Catholic church's motivation and leaves out the politics, corruption and powermongering that were rife at the time.
The morality or ethical worth of scientific "facts" has to be dealt with in a different framework
How does a scientific fact have a morality or an ethical worth? They are facts. For something to have a morality it implies that it is an optional action. The only reason we have morals and ethics is to guide our actions. It cannot be unethical for the moon to orbit the Earth because the laws of physics require it.
Yes, I know that eventually science confronts some of the same cosmic questions, but it does so in a completely different approach, one that cannot and should not seek Truth.
As a scientist I complete disagree with this. The whole aim of science is to find the truth of how the Universe works. While your arguments about models earlier is correct the aim is to develop these models until they match what the Universe does. We are not there yet, and may never get there, but that is most certainly the goal.
The difference between science and religion is that they seek different aspects of the truth. Science asks 'how' and religion asks 'why'. The problem we are facing in recent times is that religious extremists are attempting to answer the 'how' question and they are completely unequipped to do so in a sensible fashion.
Progressive taxes (income tax which increases in percent as the principal increases) are nonsense.
No they are very sensible: they allow MORE people to survive with FEWER government handouts. Given that all civilised governments need to provide some services: health care, defence, resource allocation, social safetynet etc. they need money to do this. Lets suppose that if a flat tax rate were imposed it would require 30% of everyone's income to fund this and suppose that the minimum cost to provide food and shelter is £8,000/year.
With the flat rate this means that everyone who earns under £12,000/year would need government handouts to survive. This would increase the government's costs, raising the tax percentage and resulting in more people requring support until equilibrium.
However if you introduce a progressive tax rate you can set the lower bracket at, say, 10% and gradually increase it to a maximum of say 40% in certain steps. Doing that the minimum salary requiring government handouts to survive drops to £8,800/year which means far fewer people rely on the government for support and government costs are kept lower.
Of course this is a greatly simplified view and other means of progressive taxation can also be employed (standard allowance before tax is charged is an example). But I'd hope you agree that having more people making their own way rather than relying on government handouts is something worthwhile?
This is not a nuance of language we are talking about but completely different genres of book here. One is fiction and the other fact. Would you mention Disney's Pocahontas as a good example of an historical documentary? Science fiction is great - I'm a fan of it myself - but I have often noted a worrying trend for people to think of these books as 'sciency' (as you put it). They are not, they are 'fictiony' and not science, rigourous or otherwise.
Crichton writes science fiction NOT science. There is a huge difference! I have not read State of Fear but Timeline is clearly fictitious. Surely you don't think the 'science' behind the space-time machine was real?
If you are ever in doubt about whether us physicists have invented time travel a good check is whether we are still asking for research grants. If we ever manage to invent a time machine then, thanks to a little magic called 'compound interest', research funding worries will be a thing of the past.
Taking a train need not take time. Using the example in the article, if Chicago-New York is 635 nautical miles (=1,175km) then modern trains like the TGV can travel that distance in 4 hours (that is assuming the operating speed of 320km/h, not the max speed of 574.8 km/h). If current flights are scheduled at 3 hours then in this case a train would be far faster since there is no need to arrive 1-2 hours beforehand for your body cavity search plus you start and end at stations which, at least for Chicago, are in the city centre. Other advantages are onboard power, WiFi, cellphone coverage, something to look at out of the window etc.
It's true that the monetary cost of setting up such a network is not trivial but if you factor in the environmental cost of planes the question you might want to ask is can you afford not to?