Sure, DOS doesn't have mmap. However, you commented, "The idea of ramdriving every program by loading 100% of every program you are running and 100% of every file used by every one of those programs is silly, but it's the new norm." That simply isn't how modern operating systems work. When you execute a program on linux the OS mmaps the program and shared library images. When it opens a file often the file ends up being mmaped. The virtual memory manager then takes care of what actually resides in RAM (which may very well be everything if you have RAM to spare).
Your comment suggested that things have gotten worse, but arguably they've gotten better. DOS had no support for paging in parts of a program on-demand. Programs had to implement that themselves if they wanted to do it. On linux the OS can manage everything automatically, though programs can still do it themselves.
Solid-oxide fuel cells are a much more efficient way to burn hydrocarbons then conventional combustion engines. An electric airliner that used solid-oxide fuel cells could potentially get more range for the same weight of fuel - and unlike with batteries, you're not trading off fuel mass.
Have they managed to extend the lifetime of fuel cells that work on anything other than hydrogen? That has always been the problem with burning hydrocarbons in fuel cells.
I get your point, but even with fossil fuels it is often better to use a battery. The little engine on a plane tends to be inefficient compared to a massive power plant, and has fewer practical options for emissions controls. A power point is a concentrated emissions point and investments can be made to make it more efficient and to control emissions. Efficiency improves CO2 output, and emissions controls helps get rid of everything else.
So, even with coal power you're still better off getting things onto the grid vs burning gasoline. It also makes it easier to adopt renewable energy.
Until the energy density of batteries goes up and and we have an efficient, carbon dioxide free way to charge them, I'm not sure I see the value here.
Sort-of agree, and energy density is definitely a problem with batteries in any application. However, batteries make a LOT of sense when it comes to a carbon-neutral way to charge them. With a conventional engine you're almost always limited to fossil fuels. With a battery you could still end up burning coal to charge, but you've decoupled the ultimate power source from the plane so you don't HAVE to use fossil fuels. The battery could be charged by nuclear, even though you could never put a reactor on a plane.
I doubt we'll see an electric airliner anytime soon. Where you might see them is for recreational aircraft. Many pilots just buzz around locally for a while and land, and battery power might be ideal for this - there is no urgency to refuel quickly, maintenance could be lower, aircraft could be quieter, no leaded fuel, cheaper costs, etc.
Well, you could use a fuel cell to generate power, and that has the same energy density as whatever fuel it burns. Hydrogen energy density isn't great on a volume basis, but on a mass basis it is just fine (though the container it is stored in adds a lot of mass). For an aircraft I suspect the mass matters more than the volume, which is the opposite of how it is on a car.
Ducted fans are quieter I believe. Some speculate that moving to them for light aircraft might help eliminate complaints about small airports, thus helping to ensure that small airports will continue to exist.
Of course, that won't help when the local CEO wants to be dropped off in his Gulfstream.
Hospital management is always the IT's customer. They pay your department to perform services and protect the infrastructure. Everytime you perform work for any staff member, you are performing a service for (and on the behalf of) management.
Well, they're your customer in the same sense that your boss is your "customer." If you look at it from the standpoint that you personally are a business that sells your labor, then your boss is a customer, and so is some guy who bribes you to share your company's secrets with them. However, that really isn't a great way of defining the term in practice.
The customer-centric attitude is generally advisable when dealing with just about anybody. However, I prefer to use the term customer to refer to somebody whose business you need to earn in a competitive marketplace. Generally internal clients aren't customers by that definition - they can't elect to not work with the IT department. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be treated well, but the dynamic is a bit different. If you had one customer that generated little revenue but was the source of 30% of your costs, you'd elect to just lose their business if they were a true customer. However, looking at your internal clients your legal department might fit that bill and getting rid of them isn't really going to make your costs go away.
That was really my point - it isn't about who you need to listen to, but that the nature of the relationship between you and your boss is different than the relationship between you and your client.
Then they can let their plugin community quietly subvert the entire mechanism, just like they have everything else, and the industry will abandon it.
Yup. Just stick a comment in the source code: "Under no circumstances is anybody to comment out the following #define. It is intended for testing only, and if commented out the entire DRM system will be bypassed, and you might be able to accidentally save DRM-protected streams to disk."
It goes back way further than this. The US messed with firmware in some computer equipment back in the 80s to sabotage a major Soviet oil refinery, resulting in one of the largest industrial fires in history. That eventually became public, and by now everybody should know not to trust foreign firmware for anything important to national security.
Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes.
This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.
Perhaps more importantly even if the cop is careful his nosing around could tip off the hostage-takers, resulting in harm to the hostages. Ideally in a real hostage situation you want the first sign of a swat raid to be the big holes in all the exterior walls.
The problem is that SWAT response usually results in substantial damage to property and risk to the occupants of the house if there isn't anything going on. Pets get killed, doors and windows get smashed, and people sometimes even get shot. Then if the crank call was a drug tip or something like that then everything in the house gets torn apart in the search.
At the very least the taxpayers should be paying restitution for false alarms. By all means they can go after the crank caller to recover those costs. However, by putting the cost on the government and not on the victim of a swatting there is incentive to improve the system, and to deter this kind of prank.
If someone calls that there's a hostage situation a long way from the address of payphone (like few states away), one patrol should be enough to assess the situation on-site.
Yeah, but look at it from the standpoint of the guy who runs the police department.
If he sends one cop into a hostage situation, the cop gets shot up, and probably the hostages get shot up. The police chief gets the blame for not taking the call seriously.
If he sends a swat team into a hostage situation he made the right call, and unless he actually runs the swat team he's off the hook for anything that happens afterwards. If there isn't a hostage situation you blame the crank caller for whatever happens, and besides he just followed procedure. Too bad for the poor old guy who gets shot in bed.
Zyclon B was originally used as a pesticide as well, specifically to fumigate houses if I remember correctly. Only later did certain people discover its "other" use.
To be fair, almost all nerve gases and such have their origins in the pesticide space. Figuring out how to kill pests is a perfectly legitimate use of science, but unfortunately one that is almost impossible to divorce from chemical weapons research. The goal of scientists is obviously to find compounds that don't have a huge impact on people, but inevitably they'll find ones that do, and while they'll usually steer away from them, knowledge once gained is never lost.
None of this can be used to excuse companies that knowingly collaborated in genocide. However, the scientists who first discover most of these compounds usually have nothing to do with how they eventually end up being used.
You jest, but communicating to farmers that "over/misuse of this pesticide may cause collapse of nearby bee colonies resulting in greatly reduced yields" wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Honestly, it is the farmer's business to know this. If it isn't in their financial interest to use a particular pesticide, chances are that they'll very quickly figure this out and stop using it.
On the other hand, if you only wish that it wasn't in their interest to use it, then your statement on the packaging won't have much impact.
People do stuff like smoke/etc for personal enjoyment even though they know it will kill them. People don't use pesticides for the fun of it.
So, I get what you're saying about IT needs to look out for more than just its own needs.
However, hospital management isn't really a "customer" in most cases. If you're talking about the CEOs email account, then the CEO is a customer like anybody else. However, if you're talking about the CEO telling IT than nobody can start a project without approval, then the CEO isn't a customer - he's the manager.
Ultimately, internal divisions like "doctors," "IT," "HR," etc are all conveniences. Legally, there is a corporation, and the officers/board are responsible for everything it does. It is up to them to organize internally in whatever fashion makes sense. If they want to stay in business, they'll do a good job of it.:)
Wheeler seems too anxious to move fast."won't allow companies to segregate Web traffic into fast and slow lanes" is a matter of interpretation. If you insist the slow lane is really not a slow lane, it is a meaningless statement.
Yup. It will be the super-fast (>50 kbps) and ultra-fast (whatever you actually paid for) lanes!
BYOD was not driven by the companies, but by the employees - they wanted to use their own devices for work. You have it backwards. Now, there is no question that some companies are slow to upgrade their equipment, but that's a different issue.
They're the same issue. People wouldn't want to use their smartphones for work if the company just issued them smartphones that they actually want to use. Devices were selected almost entirely for the sake of the ease of administration, with little regard for usability.
Could they build a tunnel as a long conduit on the sea floor, perhaps giving it some flexibility to deal with the seismic activity in that area?
Another option is a free-floating tunnel anchored to the sea floor. Put it just far enough under the surface that waves/storms/etc don't bother it. That has a whole bunch of challenges as well, but probably scales better than something on the sea floor as terrain doesn't matter at all.
Los Angeles reported similar outcomes: increasing the bus frequency on a route lead to increased load factors.
Makes sense. Back when I lived in Philadelphia the local transit authority was trying to promote bringing bikes onto public transit, which makes sense. The problem is that only a few buses in the entire city were equipped with bike racks, and they were just stuck in a pool and not concentrated on any one route. So, if you tried to rid a bike to a bus stop there was a 95% chance that the bus would tell you to buzz off, so nobody used them at all (so the bike racks were just a waste of money).
Nobody wants to use a transit system where at every connection you have to stand and wait an hour outside.
Also, to be effective you need a lot more train/subway and a lot less bus. When I commuted by public transit I chose to live in a place where I could ride a bus for 5 min (with buses arriving every 5-10min), take a subway, and then walk 5 min. If I lived even a few miles further away from a major bus hub that would have turned into riding a bus for 15-20min with buses arriving every 30-60min, and I'd never have gone for it.
I'm not sure whether it is "money well spent" but projects like these are things that authoritarian governments are rather good at pulling off. That's why oppressive governments even in third world nations often have rather spectacular monuments.
In the US spending a billion dollars is a drop in the bucket, but if you want to do it you get into endless debates about whether the expenditure is worth it. That's usually a good thing, but sometimes it does get in the way of progress.
In a country that is more authoritarian, somebody just makes a decision that they want to do something and even if it takes 20% of the GDP it gets done. If people complain that the train route runs through their home, they're made into examples. The same happens to workers who go on strike, and so on.
So, getting big projects done is something dictatorships and such are actually rather good at. What they usually can't do is scale it up, because their overall economies just don't have the output to cover it. So, they can build one fancy monument, palace, train line, ship, or whatever. China isn't a banana republic so they can do a bit more along these lines, but even they can only build so much of something unless it actually has an economic return.
Some of that depends on what you're selling. If you're selling $700 smartphones that weigh 140g and depreciate $1/day then air makes a LOT more sense. If you're selling steel for $200/ton and its price doesn't fundamentally change on timescales measured in years, then sea makes sense.
Really sea makes sense for any product that you're not in a hurry to put on the market. Once the market is supplied you can always start your manufacturing runs a few months earlier and ship by sea. The problem is with stuff that depreciates fast like computers - you don't want to bring last month's computer to sell on this month's market.
For passengers though, a high-speed rail link between continents might make sense.
Planes are cheaper than trains for distances over 400 miles. This would be twenty times that far.
Trains have the potential to be cheaper, or even faster, but not the way we do them today. I don't really see building one as a technical problem so much as a political one (getting the rights of way, deciding what route is worth building, actually doing the project, etc).
A bit problem with fast/long train routes is that you can't do it if you have stops along the way, which means that you have to either build a lot of point-to-point lines, or you need to figure out a way for trains to share lines on a network at very high speeds (this involves routing problems and design challenges as the turn radii have to be VERY large).
The big advantage of planes is that you can create or change routes at any time inexpensively since once a plane is in the air it can fly anywhere unimpeded. While traffic control is a challenge, it isn't as bad as having 12 trains that all want to use exactly one pair of rails.
But, if you can get around those issues with today's technology you could build a maglev train that travels in a vacuum at speeds MUCH higher than a plane using much less energy. It might make sense to anchor the routes at airports so that aircraft could be used to extend the network.
Yes, because human beings can totally stay 100% focused and productive during the entire day. Unless you're an unethical and lazy communist ofcourse.
The funny thing is that our workforce would probably be more productive if we actually embraced what you're getting at.
Why do people browse the web at work? Is that REALLY what they most want to be doing when they don't have something to work on? Suppose instead they could collect the same pay, but have the flexibility to not have to look busy all day. Chances are that when they take a break they'll end up recovering more quickly, which means they get back to work more quickly. Or they might take a break from work by taking a class or something which just makes them more productive when they are working.
We get stuck on this 36/40/48/whatever hour work week custom that really doesn't make sense when you're not tied to an assembly line.
That's right. To lose weight, you'll need to feel hungry. That's life. I didn't make the rules, but the science is very simple, no matter how you'd like to be able to lose weight without being hungry. Just be hungry. It won't kill you.
If you read my post you'll note that I lost over 50 pounds not really feeling all that hungry at all.
Believe it or not, suffering isn't a virtue.
You can go on telling overweight people to just eat less. Just don't be surprised when they don't do it, and it ends up costing you more taxes to pay for their medical bills. They outnumber you, so you don't really get a choice in that part. You might as well try giving them advice that is actually helpful.
Sure, but that is about as helpful as telling a homeless person that if they spend a lot less than they earn, they'll be able to save up and buy a house.
Your statement carries an unstated assumption that the amount of calories consumed or expended is easily controlled, and thus they simply need to be adjusted. Any idiot knows that if they eat less they'll lose weight, and yet we have an obesity epidemic.
I've been on a low-carb diet and while I'm not as lean as I'd like to be it took fairly little effort for me to lose about 20% of my weight bringing me just under the obese threshold and keep it off for a year. When I've tried other strategies like strict calorie-counting with nutrient balancing I've never lost this much weight and I felt like I was ALWAYS hungry (despite eating 6 fairly equal portions per day - and I weighed anything that went into my mouth other than water).
In both cases I am eating less than I'm burning, but there are ways to go about it that make it MUCH easier to adhere to, and I suspect that there are far better methods that have yet to be discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, DOS doesn't have mmap. However, you commented, "The idea of ramdriving every program by loading 100% of every program you are running and 100% of every file used by every one of those programs is silly, but it's the new norm." That simply isn't how modern operating systems work. When you execute a program on linux the OS mmaps the program and shared library images. When it opens a file often the file ends up being mmaped. The virtual memory manager then takes care of what actually resides in RAM (which may very well be everything if you have RAM to spare).
Your comment suggested that things have gotten worse, but arguably they've gotten better. DOS had no support for paging in parts of a program on-demand. Programs had to implement that themselves if they wanted to do it. On linux the OS can manage everything automatically, though programs can still do it themselves.
Solid-oxide fuel cells are a much more efficient way to burn hydrocarbons then conventional combustion engines. An electric airliner that used solid-oxide fuel cells could potentially get more range for the same weight of fuel - and unlike with batteries, you're not trading off fuel mass.
Have they managed to extend the lifetime of fuel cells that work on anything other than hydrogen? That has always been the problem with burning hydrocarbons in fuel cells.
All from the coal plant? Ermmm...not so much.
I get your point, but even with fossil fuels it is often better to use a battery. The little engine on a plane tends to be inefficient compared to a massive power plant, and has fewer practical options for emissions controls. A power point is a concentrated emissions point and investments can be made to make it more efficient and to control emissions. Efficiency improves CO2 output, and emissions controls helps get rid of everything else.
So, even with coal power you're still better off getting things onto the grid vs burning gasoline. It also makes it easier to adopt renewable energy.
Until the energy density of batteries goes up and and we have an efficient, carbon dioxide free way to charge them, I'm not sure I see the value here.
Sort-of agree, and energy density is definitely a problem with batteries in any application. However, batteries make a LOT of sense when it comes to a carbon-neutral way to charge them. With a conventional engine you're almost always limited to fossil fuels. With a battery you could still end up burning coal to charge, but you've decoupled the ultimate power source from the plane so you don't HAVE to use fossil fuels. The battery could be charged by nuclear, even though you could never put a reactor on a plane.
I doubt we'll see an electric airliner anytime soon. Where you might see them is for recreational aircraft. Many pilots just buzz around locally for a while and land, and battery power might be ideal for this - there is no urgency to refuel quickly, maintenance could be lower, aircraft could be quieter, no leaded fuel, cheaper costs, etc.
Well, you could use a fuel cell to generate power, and that has the same energy density as whatever fuel it burns. Hydrogen energy density isn't great on a volume basis, but on a mass basis it is just fine (though the container it is stored in adds a lot of mass). For an aircraft I suspect the mass matters more than the volume, which is the opposite of how it is on a car.
Ducted fans are quieter I believe. Some speculate that moving to them for light aircraft might help eliminate complaints about small airports, thus helping to ensure that small airports will continue to exist.
Of course, that won't help when the local CEO wants to be dropped off in his Gulfstream.
Hospital management is always the IT's customer. They pay your department to perform services and protect the infrastructure. Everytime you perform work for any staff member, you are performing a service for (and on the behalf of) management.
Well, they're your customer in the same sense that your boss is your "customer." If you look at it from the standpoint that you personally are a business that sells your labor, then your boss is a customer, and so is some guy who bribes you to share your company's secrets with them. However, that really isn't a great way of defining the term in practice.
The customer-centric attitude is generally advisable when dealing with just about anybody. However, I prefer to use the term customer to refer to somebody whose business you need to earn in a competitive marketplace. Generally internal clients aren't customers by that definition - they can't elect to not work with the IT department. I'm not suggesting that they shouldn't be treated well, but the dynamic is a bit different. If you had one customer that generated little revenue but was the source of 30% of your costs, you'd elect to just lose their business if they were a true customer. However, looking at your internal clients your legal department might fit that bill and getting rid of them isn't really going to make your costs go away.
That was really my point - it isn't about who you need to listen to, but that the nature of the relationship between you and your boss is different than the relationship between you and your client.
Then they can let their plugin community quietly subvert the entire mechanism, just like they have everything else, and the industry will abandon it.
Yup. Just stick a comment in the source code: "Under no circumstances is anybody to comment out the following #define. It is intended for testing only, and if commented out the entire DRM system will be bypassed, and you might be able to accidentally save DRM-protected streams to disk."
It goes back way further than this. The US messed with firmware in some computer equipment back in the 80s to sabotage a major Soviet oil refinery, resulting in one of the largest industrial fires in history. That eventually became public, and by now everybody should know not to trust foreign firmware for anything important to national security.
Initial police response to confirm is only minutes away, delaying everything whilst waiting for swat is tens of minutes.
This is a nice idea, but what happens to that lone officer checking up if this is a real hostage situation with well armed felons? He is put in a life or death situation where he may end up as another hostage.
Perhaps more importantly even if the cop is careful his nosing around could tip off the hostage-takers, resulting in harm to the hostages. Ideally in a real hostage situation you want the first sign of a swat raid to be the big holes in all the exterior walls.
The problem is that SWAT response usually results in substantial damage to property and risk to the occupants of the house if there isn't anything going on. Pets get killed, doors and windows get smashed, and people sometimes even get shot. Then if the crank call was a drug tip or something like that then everything in the house gets torn apart in the search.
At the very least the taxpayers should be paying restitution for false alarms. By all means they can go after the crank caller to recover those costs. However, by putting the cost on the government and not on the victim of a swatting there is incentive to improve the system, and to deter this kind of prank.
If someone calls that there's a hostage situation a long way from the address of payphone (like few states away), one patrol should be enough to assess the situation on-site.
Yeah, but look at it from the standpoint of the guy who runs the police department.
If he sends one cop into a hostage situation, the cop gets shot up, and probably the hostages get shot up. The police chief gets the blame for not taking the call seriously.
If he sends a swat team into a hostage situation he made the right call, and unless he actually runs the swat team he's off the hook for anything that happens afterwards. If there isn't a hostage situation you blame the crank caller for whatever happens, and besides he just followed procedure. Too bad for the poor old guy who gets shot in bed.
Zyclon B was originally used as a pesticide as well, specifically to fumigate houses if I remember correctly. Only later did certain people discover its "other" use.
To be fair, almost all nerve gases and such have their origins in the pesticide space. Figuring out how to kill pests is a perfectly legitimate use of science, but unfortunately one that is almost impossible to divorce from chemical weapons research. The goal of scientists is obviously to find compounds that don't have a huge impact on people, but inevitably they'll find ones that do, and while they'll usually steer away from them, knowledge once gained is never lost.
None of this can be used to excuse companies that knowingly collaborated in genocide. However, the scientists who first discover most of these compounds usually have nothing to do with how they eventually end up being used.
You jest, but communicating to farmers that "over/misuse of this pesticide may cause collapse of nearby bee colonies resulting in greatly reduced yields" wouldn't be a terrible idea.
Honestly, it is the farmer's business to know this. If it isn't in their financial interest to use a particular pesticide, chances are that they'll very quickly figure this out and stop using it.
On the other hand, if you only wish that it wasn't in their interest to use it, then your statement on the packaging won't have much impact.
People do stuff like smoke/etc for personal enjoyment even though they know it will kill them. People don't use pesticides for the fun of it.
So, I get what you're saying about IT needs to look out for more than just its own needs.
However, hospital management isn't really a "customer" in most cases. If you're talking about the CEOs email account, then the CEO is a customer like anybody else. However, if you're talking about the CEO telling IT than nobody can start a project without approval, then the CEO isn't a customer - he's the manager.
Ultimately, internal divisions like "doctors," "IT," "HR," etc are all conveniences. Legally, there is a corporation, and the officers/board are responsible for everything it does. It is up to them to organize internally in whatever fashion makes sense. If they want to stay in business, they'll do a good job of it. :)
Wheeler seems too anxious to move fast."won't allow companies to segregate Web traffic into fast and slow lanes" is a matter of interpretation. If you insist the slow lane is really not a slow lane, it is a meaningless statement.
Yup. It will be the super-fast (>50 kbps) and ultra-fast (whatever you actually paid for) lanes!
Don't forget the "I'm too cool to vote" mentality you hear around here ("both parties are the same", blah, blah, blah.)
Most of those folks don't advocate not voting - they just advocate for voting for somebody who isn't associated with the major parties.
What other choice do they have? Do we think the FCC would be doing the right thing if only a Republican were president?
BYOD was not driven by the companies, but by the employees - they wanted to use their own devices for work. You have it backwards. Now, there is no question that some companies are slow to upgrade their equipment, but that's a different issue.
They're the same issue. People wouldn't want to use their smartphones for work if the company just issued them smartphones that they actually want to use. Devices were selected almost entirely for the sake of the ease of administration, with little regard for usability.
Could they build a tunnel as a long conduit on the sea floor, perhaps giving it some flexibility to deal with the seismic activity in that area?
Another option is a free-floating tunnel anchored to the sea floor. Put it just far enough under the surface that waves/storms/etc don't bother it. That has a whole bunch of challenges as well, but probably scales better than something on the sea floor as terrain doesn't matter at all.
Los Angeles reported similar outcomes: increasing the bus frequency on a route lead to increased load factors.
Makes sense. Back when I lived in Philadelphia the local transit authority was trying to promote bringing bikes onto public transit, which makes sense. The problem is that only a few buses in the entire city were equipped with bike racks, and they were just stuck in a pool and not concentrated on any one route. So, if you tried to rid a bike to a bus stop there was a 95% chance that the bus would tell you to buzz off, so nobody used them at all (so the bike racks were just a waste of money).
Nobody wants to use a transit system where at every connection you have to stand and wait an hour outside.
Also, to be effective you need a lot more train/subway and a lot less bus. When I commuted by public transit I chose to live in a place where I could ride a bus for 5 min (with buses arriving every 5-10min), take a subway, and then walk 5 min. If I lived even a few miles further away from a major bus hub that would have turned into riding a bus for 15-20min with buses arriving every 30-60min, and I'd never have gone for it.
I'm not sure whether it is "money well spent" but projects like these are things that authoritarian governments are rather good at pulling off. That's why oppressive governments even in third world nations often have rather spectacular monuments.
In the US spending a billion dollars is a drop in the bucket, but if you want to do it you get into endless debates about whether the expenditure is worth it. That's usually a good thing, but sometimes it does get in the way of progress.
In a country that is more authoritarian, somebody just makes a decision that they want to do something and even if it takes 20% of the GDP it gets done. If people complain that the train route runs through their home, they're made into examples. The same happens to workers who go on strike, and so on.
So, getting big projects done is something dictatorships and such are actually rather good at. What they usually can't do is scale it up, because their overall economies just don't have the output to cover it. So, they can build one fancy monument, palace, train line, ship, or whatever. China isn't a banana republic so they can do a bit more along these lines, but even they can only build so much of something unless it actually has an economic return.
Some of that depends on what you're selling. If you're selling $700 smartphones that weigh 140g and depreciate $1/day then air makes a LOT more sense. If you're selling steel for $200/ton and its price doesn't fundamentally change on timescales measured in years, then sea makes sense.
Really sea makes sense for any product that you're not in a hurry to put on the market. Once the market is supplied you can always start your manufacturing runs a few months earlier and ship by sea. The problem is with stuff that depreciates fast like computers - you don't want to bring last month's computer to sell on this month's market.
For passengers though, a high-speed rail link between continents might make sense.
Planes are cheaper than trains for distances over 400 miles. This would be twenty times that far.
Trains have the potential to be cheaper, or even faster, but not the way we do them today. I don't really see building one as a technical problem so much as a political one (getting the rights of way, deciding what route is worth building, actually doing the project, etc).
A bit problem with fast/long train routes is that you can't do it if you have stops along the way, which means that you have to either build a lot of point-to-point lines, or you need to figure out a way for trains to share lines on a network at very high speeds (this involves routing problems and design challenges as the turn radii have to be VERY large).
The big advantage of planes is that you can create or change routes at any time inexpensively since once a plane is in the air it can fly anywhere unimpeded. While traffic control is a challenge, it isn't as bad as having 12 trains that all want to use exactly one pair of rails.
But, if you can get around those issues with today's technology you could build a maglev train that travels in a vacuum at speeds MUCH higher than a plane using much less energy. It might make sense to anchor the routes at airports so that aircraft could be used to extend the network.
Yes, because human beings can totally stay 100% focused and productive during the entire day. Unless you're an unethical and lazy communist ofcourse.
The funny thing is that our workforce would probably be more productive if we actually embraced what you're getting at.
Why do people browse the web at work? Is that REALLY what they most want to be doing when they don't have something to work on? Suppose instead they could collect the same pay, but have the flexibility to not have to look busy all day. Chances are that when they take a break they'll end up recovering more quickly, which means they get back to work more quickly. Or they might take a break from work by taking a class or something which just makes them more productive when they are working.
We get stuck on this 36/40/48/whatever hour work week custom that really doesn't make sense when you're not tied to an assembly line.
That's right. To lose weight, you'll need to feel hungry. That's life. I didn't make the rules, but the science is very simple, no matter how you'd like to be able to lose weight without being hungry. Just be hungry. It won't kill you.
If you read my post you'll note that I lost over 50 pounds not really feeling all that hungry at all.
Believe it or not, suffering isn't a virtue.
You can go on telling overweight people to just eat less. Just don't be surprised when they don't do it, and it ends up costing you more taxes to pay for their medical bills. They outnumber you, so you don't really get a choice in that part. You might as well try giving them advice that is actually helpful.
If calories in > calories burned then FAT.
Sure, but that is about as helpful as telling a homeless person that if they spend a lot less than they earn, they'll be able to save up and buy a house.
Your statement carries an unstated assumption that the amount of calories consumed or expended is easily controlled, and thus they simply need to be adjusted. Any idiot knows that if they eat less they'll lose weight, and yet we have an obesity epidemic.
I've been on a low-carb diet and while I'm not as lean as I'd like to be it took fairly little effort for me to lose about 20% of my weight bringing me just under the obese threshold and keep it off for a year. When I've tried other strategies like strict calorie-counting with nutrient balancing I've never lost this much weight and I felt like I was ALWAYS hungry (despite eating 6 fairly equal portions per day - and I weighed anything that went into my mouth other than water).
In both cases I am eating less than I'm burning, but there are ways to go about it that make it MUCH easier to adhere to, and I suspect that there are far better methods that have yet to be discovered.