Guess what: EVERYTHING you buy costs a fraction of its price to manufacture. If you don't like the price of inkjet printer cartridges, you are free to not buy inkjet printers. Printer manufacturers have found that people prefer buying cheap printers to buying expensive printers with cheap cartridges.
If you don't like the price of inkjet cartridges, you are more than welcome to buy laser printers, all of which are far cheaper to operate than inkjets. You can buy a laser printer for 50 bucks these days. Just stop whining and demanding government handouts, it's getting a little out of hand.
There are classes that involve writing an encyclopedia? At 3 cents a page, $100 is over 3300 pages. I haven't printed that many pages in 4 years of undergrad. Considering that, on average, each class requires about $200 in textbooks (many of which are not even necessary), that's a ludicrous argument.
C has this elegant simplicity going for it. There's nothing the matter with C++...except that C is (pretty much) perfect.
You really should learn C++. Yes, C is really simple, but it's not a good language. At all. Unless you are doing low-level programming, C is probably the wrong choice. I mean, how the hell can you write a program these days without OOP, exceptions, generic containers/algorithms, and user-defined data types? I mean hell, C can't even deal with strings in any reasonable way.
Using vanilla C is also a great recipe for shitty programs. It's really far too low-level of a language for day-to-day programming, and most programs written in it tend to reflect that. I can't count how many open-source programs I've seen that were obviously crippled by the choice of C as the language. C was great in 1978, but this is the 21st century, and if you are using C, it's definitely time to move on.
Figure out how to do object-oriented programming in C++, and use that. Trying to write complex programs in C always results in a horrifying, buggy mess. It's a fact of life for things like kernels, but it's simply the wrong language for normal desktop apps. I want to strangle someone when I see people still using return codes to indicate exceptions, various messes involving void pointers, and other messy, unsafe ways to do simple things.
Unless you live in a fucking ghetto, I don't think this concern is justified. It wouldn't be very smart to rob someone right outside your own house, particularly when the victim has your address. As far as burglars: unless you are selling drugs on Craigslist, I really doubt anything you put on there will interest them. Burglars are opportunistic, and will pick a house that looks like an easy target. They won't spend months researching Craigslist.
You need to be a little less paranoid. Not sure what it is with gun nuts, but you guys are very much out of touch with reality.
Watch out. Definitely talk to a lawyer. It will be very hard to prove that your knowledge of your employer's product didn't make it into the new product. It's not particularly difficult to meet copyright requirements, but there are other aspects. Main issues are going to be common law things like unfair competition, as well as trade secrets. People do this kind of thing all the time, and they also frequently get sued for it. You'll have to consider your particular circumstances, but if this seriously hurts your previous company, they will almost certainly sue you, rightfully or not. So that will have to be part of the plan from the beginning.
Which is actually a huge security hole. I can get to a lot of people's voicemail just by spoofing their number on the caller id (which can be done with nearly any VoIP termination provider). At one point, I had my caller ID number on my SIP phone set to my cellphone number; I noticed that when I called my cellphone number from the SIP phone, it dumped me straight into voicemail. No password, nothing. So if you think your voicemail is secure -- it's not.
Well, I think the main problem with the audio industry and USB is that USB is completely, absolutely horrible for audio. Really, that standard seems to have been designed by retards. It works OK for low-quality, low-bitrate things like speakers and microphones and headsets. However, the streaming model is terrible, and almost completely unsuited to professional audio. There is no way to reserve bandwidth (except in isochronous mode, which doesn't have error detection or recovery), it's very hard to use asynchronous clocks, and it's almost impossible to have low latency (due to the previous issue). Therefore, most USB soundcards run in synchronous mode, where the sample clock of the soundcard is locked to the USB clock. This, of course, is completely unsuitable for professional audio.
I think Apple has royally shot themselves in the foot with this. The people who buy Macbooks are disproportionate users of Firewire, since many of them do A/V type stuff. Considering there's no Expresscard slot, those people are basically fucked. I'm sure many of them will just switch to a Windows laptop, or get the older Macbook.
Hint: a spinning hard drive takes little energy to stay in motion. A stopped hard drive takes quite a bit of torque to spin up to running speed in a small number of seconds.
Hint: motors don't wear out because they produce torque. Magnetic fields don't wear out. So this still doesn't make much sense. And I'm not quite sure I believe the datasheet statistics -- that number was probably pulled out of someone's ass, just like the "50,000 hour MTBF" claimed by some other manufacturers.
Spinning up and down hard drives: as discussed in plenty of places, including here on/. I believe, you can dramatically reduce the life of drives when you cycle them due to mechanical wear-and-tear.
Do you have any data on this? This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it. I've seen a google whitepaper that pretty conclusively debunked commonly held assumptions that drives fail because of temperature and "wear and tear". From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense. The only wear components in a hard drive are bearings on the head and spindle. Spinning down the drive should prolong their life, rather than shortening it.
Um, Nissan Motor federally registered the "NISSAN" mark in 1959. As the court concluded, the NISSAN mark could be considered famous in 1991. Uzi Nissan registered the domain name in 1994. The only thing that saved him is Nissan Motor's delay in bringing suit, and poor lawyering on Nissan's part.
That is completely untrue. If Nissan is a well known brand (which it is, along with Nike, Coca Cola, and so on), they can stop others from using their marks for any type of product. That is called trademark dilution. That's why you can't sell Marlboro-branded computers or Microsoft-branded cigarettes. If they tried to sue the Nissan Computer guy for dilution, they would most likely win. There was basically an identical case with panavision.com (Panavision vs. Toeppen), and Panavision was the winner.
Good lord, what is it with people who just have no fucking clue about trademark laws. First, unless Uzi Nissan had a REGISTERED TRADEMARK for his name, and challenged Nissan Motors' trademark registration when they filed it, he has no right to use that trademark except in whatever local market he is doing business in. If he is not actively doing business, then he doesn't even have a trademark. It doesn't matter who was using it first, either. What matters is that Nissan Motors' trademark is famous, and at this point uncontestable.
As for the "it's his name" argument: that doesn't mean anything. Mercedes Benz is a name too. That doesn't mean I can have mercedesbenz.com.
Second, if Nissan Motors didn't try to get their domain back, they would have a hard time showing that they were diligent in protecting their mark. Actively defending your mark from misuse is a requirement imposed by the trademark laws. If they don't do this in ALL cases, they would have a hard time suing anyone over trademark misuse.
Um, video memory back in those days was incredibly slow. That's why you could have multiple connectors and things in the way and it would still work. There is no way you could socket a modern chip and expect it to not affect signal integrity. Not to mention, sockets with a thousand pins are not particularly cheap, and GPUs are not exactly interchangeable. So this idea is quite silly.
Well, I might not use natural gas for anything. That doesn't mean I have the right to stop the gas company from burying lines on my property. And wait, you are bitching about one of those cable boxes? The ones that are like the size of a small wastebasket? How much property tax do you pay on 0.5 square feet of your property? Something like 20 cents a year?
I'm not sure where people get this idea that property ownership means you get your own little kingdom where you get to make up the rules. It's not like that.
Also, cable TV is a utility just like all the other ones. Just because you don't subscribe to it doesn't mean it's not useful to others.
I think you have never dealt with NIMBY homeowners. They never try to work out a solution (other than wanting stuff to be installed elsewhere). It's not even the property values (which are not significantly affected by the presence or absence of telecom boxes), it's just the control freak mentality. Hell, many NIMBYs live in dilapidated, poorly-maintained houses, and STILL complain about things being put on their property. If telecom companies had to get the consent of thousands of homeowners to do anything, none of these services would ever get deployed.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid attitude. So you would rather not have electricity, water, sewer, or telephone service, either? I'm sure everyone appreciates these services, and nobody likes having stuff installed on their property. This is why the utility companies are allowed to do this. Otherwise, it would be impossible to build or maintain anything.
The fact is, it doesn't matter WHAT is being installed. The NIMBYs will object to anything, over any dumb reason. If the boxes are big, they will complain about size. If the boxes are small, they will complain about something else (color, location, electromagnetic fields, etc.). Giving these people veto power is absolutely insane.
It's funny how people talk about expected value on lottery tickets. Statistically, expected value makes sense only as an average. For example, if you often park illegally and only sometimes get a ticket, you could compute the expected value of a parking ticket when parking illegally. Then, that number would be useful to figure out how much you would spend ON AVERAGE.
It doesn't make sense to talk about the expected value of one transaction -- you either win a lot of money or you don't win anything. Expected value only makes sense if you buy enough lottery tickets to win regularly, and for those winnings to average out. Given the odds of powerball, even if you buy 100,000 tickets, you are still 99.99999% certain to lose. Even if the expected value of a $1 ticket was $500, it would not make sense to play at those odds unless you could buy a large enough number of tickets to make the probability of winning close to 100%. Otherwise, you'll just lose all your money.
A carburetor is pretty mind-bogglingly simple compared with computer-controlled fuel injection. It either works or it doesn't, and when it doesn't, you're not sitting there trying to figure out which damned vacuum line is clogged causing the engine to run lean.
Eh? That's exactly what you end up doing with a carburetor. Once in a while, you have to take it apart and clean it out and replace all the little mechanical bits. It has tons of adjustment screws, vacuum lines, and other shit. It takes an expert to adjust and tune it. It requires constant attention to run well, and still has horrible emissions performance (since it runs open-loop). A fuel injection system is extremely simple. In the most basic case, it involves a fuel pump, fuel injector, a MAP sensor, and an oxygen sensor (and an RPM signal from the distributor). That's it. On most cars, you will have more injectors and sensors, but that's mainly necessary for emissions purposes.
In fact, I don't think the fuel injection system itself requires a single vacuum hose. Most of the hoses and vacuum switches under the hood are needed for the EVAP system, which collects fuel vapors from the gas tank and feeds them to the engine. Some are also needed for the EGR system, which reduces NOx. These systems are required by federal regulations, not by the fuel injection system.
Ask anyone with a Ford Windstar what they think of transmission reliability. Ask anybody who has gone through three computers in their Chevy pickup what they think.
That's why I said well-engineered vehicles. American cars do not fall into that category. Compared to automatics, manual transmissions have to have the clutch replaced relatively often (every 30-60 thousand miles), which is quite an expensive job. Not to mention, high-mileage manuals often develop problems with the syncros. I'd say the overall cost-to-own and reliability is pretty similar for the two (assuming the automatic is a good one).
A motor controller does not necessarily need any electrolytic capacitors. There are designs for PWM-based controllers that do not use any capacitors. Here's one.
I can show you 20 patents for perpetual motion machines, it doesn't mean they actually exist. Show me a motor drive on an actual production car that actually meets all of the requirements and doesn't use large electrolytic capacitors. Honestly, I don't think that's possible. It's a moot point, anyway, since the lifespan of batteries is even shorter.
I think you should stick to things you actually know something about. Computers and sensors have actually simplified the engine control system considerably. In fact, well-engineered cars are insanely reliable devices. Usually, the engine and the transmission are the two most reliable components. Most of what REALLY limits the lifespan of a car is the bodywork/paint, interior, and electrical systems. There are many cars that are over 500,000 miles with the original engine/transmission. It's just that most people choose to get rid of their cars before they get that old, simply because they no longer look too good.
I doubt the motor controllers will last much longer than 10 years, on average. They all use large electrolytic capacitors, which don't last that long. In general, complex high-power electronics is not too reliable. If you do make that reliable, you still have the issue of batteries, which will certainly last less than 10 years in any EV. In all likelihood, an EV will be much more expensive to own than a gas-powered car.
FINALLY. It's amazing how the American and even European mass media manage to spin the story to make it look like Russia is the aggressor. Let's look at the facts: - Georgia attacked a capital city, in the middle of the night, during active diplomatic negotiations with Russia. They picked a time when they thought Russia would be unable to quickly respond. - Georgian troops killed and committed atrocities against thousands of Russian citizens living in South Ossetia. - Georgian troops attacked Russian peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia, killing most of the troops involved.
The US government has not hesitated to overthrow entire regimes over much less. I fail to see why Russia cannot do the same.
That's a really silly argument. If Nina is living in Russia, she would almost certainly be living with her children. If you wanted to find her, it would be easy -- just ask the neighbors. Besides, there has been no reason for her to leave like this. What's the point? She was living happily in the US, she had just found a job, she had custody of the children, and Hans was getting the short end of the stick in the divorce. It doesn't really seem like she had much of a grudge against Hans -- he was the one who had issues.
I'm pretty sure Hans won't be developing any software in prison. He'll be lucky to have books, much less a laptop.
You have GOT to be kidding me. Compared to what the airlines are getting, Amtrak in the US gets practically jack shit. It doesn't even have a rail network, it has to rent it from the freight companies. Airlines, on the other hand, get all these nice expensive-as-fuck airports built, generally at taxpayer expense. They also get nice big federal bailouts about every 5 years or so. If the government built and operated a rail network with taxpayer money (which would cost a hell of a lot less than all the interstate highways), rail travel would be much cheaper than even traveling by car.
Time-wise, air travel doesn't really save anything. With all the security bullshit and stops, flying from, say, San Diego to St. Louis takes 8-10 hours. That's about 1800 miles. A TGV-type train traveling at 200 mph would cover the same distance in about the same time. Granted, coast-to-coast travel by train wouldn't be that much fun, but it would certainly work out much better for shorter trips. Considering how much baggage you could bring on a train, it would be worth it for a lot of trips.
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Guess what: EVERYTHING you buy costs a fraction of its price to manufacture. If you don't like the price of inkjet printer cartridges, you are free to not buy inkjet printers. Printer manufacturers have found that people prefer buying cheap printers to buying expensive printers with cheap cartridges.
If you don't like the price of inkjet cartridges, you are more than welcome to buy laser printers, all of which are far cheaper to operate than inkjets. You can buy a laser printer for 50 bucks these days. Just stop whining and demanding government handouts, it's getting a little out of hand.
Have you ever even seen a live cow? It's fairly obvious you've never been on a farm.
There are classes that involve writing an encyclopedia? At 3 cents a page, $100 is over 3300 pages. I haven't printed that many pages in 4 years of undergrad. Considering that, on average, each class requires about $200 in textbooks (many of which are not even necessary), that's a ludicrous argument.
You really should learn C++. Yes, C is really simple, but it's not a good language. At all. Unless you are doing low-level programming, C is probably the wrong choice. I mean, how the hell can you write a program these days without OOP, exceptions, generic containers/algorithms, and user-defined data types? I mean hell, C can't even deal with strings in any reasonable way.
Using vanilla C is also a great recipe for shitty programs. It's really far too low-level of a language for day-to-day programming, and most programs written in it tend to reflect that. I can't count how many open-source programs I've seen that were obviously crippled by the choice of C as the language. C was great in 1978, but this is the 21st century, and if you are using C, it's definitely time to move on.
Figure out how to do object-oriented programming in C++, and use that. Trying to write complex programs in C always results in a horrifying, buggy mess. It's a fact of life for things like kernels, but it's simply the wrong language for normal desktop apps. I want to strangle someone when I see people still using return codes to indicate exceptions, various messes involving void pointers, and other messy, unsafe ways to do simple things.
Unless you live in a fucking ghetto, I don't think this concern is justified. It wouldn't be very smart to rob someone right outside your own house, particularly when the victim has your address. As far as burglars: unless you are selling drugs on Craigslist, I really doubt anything you put on there will interest them. Burglars are opportunistic, and will pick a house that looks like an easy target. They won't spend months researching Craigslist.
You need to be a little less paranoid. Not sure what it is with gun nuts, but you guys are very much out of touch with reality.
Watch out. Definitely talk to a lawyer. It will be very hard to prove that your knowledge of your employer's product didn't make it into the new product. It's not particularly difficult to meet copyright requirements, but there are other aspects. Main issues are going to be common law things like unfair competition, as well as trade secrets. People do this kind of thing all the time, and they also frequently get sued for it. You'll have to consider your particular circumstances, but if this seriously hurts your previous company, they will almost certainly sue you, rightfully or not. So that will have to be part of the plan from the beginning.
Which is actually a huge security hole. I can get to a lot of people's voicemail just by spoofing their number on the caller id (which can be done with nearly any VoIP termination provider). At one point, I had my caller ID number on my SIP phone set to my cellphone number; I noticed that when I called my cellphone number from the SIP phone, it dumped me straight into voicemail. No password, nothing. So if you think your voicemail is secure -- it's not.
Well, I think the main problem with the audio industry and USB is that USB is completely, absolutely horrible for audio. Really, that standard seems to have been designed by retards. It works OK for low-quality, low-bitrate things like speakers and microphones and headsets. However, the streaming model is terrible, and almost completely unsuited to professional audio. There is no way to reserve bandwidth (except in isochronous mode, which doesn't have error detection or recovery), it's very hard to use asynchronous clocks, and it's almost impossible to have low latency (due to the previous issue). Therefore, most USB soundcards run in synchronous mode, where the sample clock of the soundcard is locked to the USB clock. This, of course, is completely unsuitable for professional audio.
I think Apple has royally shot themselves in the foot with this. The people who buy Macbooks are disproportionate users of Firewire, since many of them do A/V type stuff. Considering there's no Expresscard slot, those people are basically fucked. I'm sure many of them will just switch to a Windows laptop, or get the older Macbook.
I take it you've never used a DV camcorder. Here's a hint: most of them don't have USB.
Hint: motors don't wear out because they produce torque. Magnetic fields don't wear out. So this still doesn't make much sense. And I'm not quite sure I believe the datasheet statistics -- that number was probably pulled out of someone's ass, just like the "50,000 hour MTBF" claimed by some other manufacturers.
Do you have any data on this? This is one of those commonly held beliefs that has absolutely no facts behind it. I've seen a google whitepaper that pretty conclusively debunked commonly held assumptions that drives fail because of temperature and "wear and tear". From a mechanical standpoint, this belief also does not make any sense. The only wear components in a hard drive are bearings on the head and spindle. Spinning down the drive should prolong their life, rather than shortening it.
Um, Nissan Motor federally registered the "NISSAN" mark in 1959. As the court concluded, the NISSAN mark could be considered famous in 1991. Uzi Nissan registered the domain name in 1994. The only thing that saved him is Nissan Motor's delay in bringing suit, and poor lawyering on Nissan's part.
That is completely untrue. If Nissan is a well known brand (which it is, along with Nike, Coca Cola, and so on), they can stop others from using their marks for any type of product. That is called trademark dilution. That's why you can't sell Marlboro-branded computers or Microsoft-branded cigarettes. If they tried to sue the Nissan Computer guy for dilution, they would most likely win. There was basically an identical case with panavision.com (Panavision vs. Toeppen), and Panavision was the winner.
Good lord, what is it with people who just have no fucking clue about trademark laws. First, unless Uzi Nissan had a REGISTERED TRADEMARK for his name, and challenged Nissan Motors' trademark registration when they filed it, he has no right to use that trademark except in whatever local market he is doing business in. If he is not actively doing business, then he doesn't even have a trademark. It doesn't matter who was using it first, either. What matters is that Nissan Motors' trademark is famous, and at this point uncontestable.
As for the "it's his name" argument: that doesn't mean anything. Mercedes Benz is a name too. That doesn't mean I can have mercedesbenz.com.
Second, if Nissan Motors didn't try to get their domain back, they would have a hard time showing that they were diligent in protecting their mark. Actively defending your mark from misuse is a requirement imposed by the trademark laws. If they don't do this in ALL cases, they would have a hard time suing anyone over trademark misuse.
Um, video memory back in those days was incredibly slow. That's why you could have multiple connectors and things in the way and it would still work. There is no way you could socket a modern chip and expect it to not affect signal integrity. Not to mention, sockets with a thousand pins are not particularly cheap, and GPUs are not exactly interchangeable. So this idea is quite silly.
Well, I might not use natural gas for anything. That doesn't mean I have the right to stop the gas company from burying lines on my property. And wait, you are bitching about one of those cable boxes? The ones that are like the size of a small wastebasket? How much property tax do you pay on 0.5 square feet of your property? Something like 20 cents a year?
I'm not sure where people get this idea that property ownership means you get your own little kingdom where you get to make up the rules. It's not like that.
Also, cable TV is a utility just like all the other ones. Just because you don't subscribe to it doesn't mean it's not useful to others.
I think you have never dealt with NIMBY homeowners. They never try to work out a solution (other than wanting stuff to be installed elsewhere). It's not even the property values (which are not significantly affected by the presence or absence of telecom boxes), it's just the control freak mentality. Hell, many NIMBYs live in dilapidated, poorly-maintained houses, and STILL complain about things being put on their property. If telecom companies had to get the consent of thousands of homeowners to do anything, none of these services would ever get deployed.
Wow, that's an incredibly stupid attitude. So you would rather not have electricity, water, sewer, or telephone service, either? I'm sure everyone appreciates these services, and nobody likes having stuff installed on their property. This is why the utility companies are allowed to do this. Otherwise, it would be impossible to build or maintain anything.
The fact is, it doesn't matter WHAT is being installed. The NIMBYs will object to anything, over any dumb reason. If the boxes are big, they will complain about size. If the boxes are small, they will complain about something else (color, location, electromagnetic fields, etc.). Giving these people veto power is absolutely insane.
It's funny how people talk about expected value on lottery tickets. Statistically, expected value makes sense only as an average. For example, if you often park illegally and only sometimes get a ticket, you could compute the expected value of a parking ticket when parking illegally. Then, that number would be useful to figure out how much you would spend ON AVERAGE.
It doesn't make sense to talk about the expected value of one transaction -- you either win a lot of money or you don't win anything. Expected value only makes sense if you buy enough lottery tickets to win regularly, and for those winnings to average out. Given the odds of powerball, even if you buy 100,000 tickets, you are still 99.99999% certain to lose. Even if the expected value of a $1 ticket was $500, it would not make sense to play at those odds unless you could buy a large enough number of tickets to make the probability of winning close to 100%. Otherwise, you'll just lose all your money.
Eh? That's exactly what you end up doing with a carburetor. Once in a while, you have to take it apart and clean it out and replace all the little mechanical bits. It has tons of adjustment screws, vacuum lines, and other shit. It takes an expert to adjust and tune it. It requires constant attention to run well, and still has horrible emissions performance (since it runs open-loop). A fuel injection system is extremely simple. In the most basic case, it involves a fuel pump, fuel injector, a MAP sensor, and an oxygen sensor (and an RPM signal from the distributor). That's it. On most cars, you will have more injectors and sensors, but that's mainly necessary for emissions purposes.
In fact, I don't think the fuel injection system itself requires a single vacuum hose. Most of the hoses and vacuum switches under the hood are needed for the EVAP system, which collects fuel vapors from the gas tank and feeds them to the engine. Some are also needed for the EGR system, which reduces NOx. These systems are required by federal regulations, not by the fuel injection system.
That's why I said well-engineered vehicles. American cars do not fall into that category. Compared to automatics, manual transmissions have to have the clutch replaced relatively often (every 30-60 thousand miles), which is quite an expensive job. Not to mention, high-mileage manuals often develop problems with the syncros. I'd say the overall cost-to-own and reliability is pretty similar for the two (assuming the automatic is a good one).
I can show you 20 patents for perpetual motion machines, it doesn't mean they actually exist. Show me a motor drive on an actual production car that actually meets all of the requirements and doesn't use large electrolytic capacitors. Honestly, I don't think that's possible. It's a moot point, anyway, since the lifespan of batteries is even shorter.
I think you should stick to things you actually know something about. Computers and sensors have actually simplified the engine control system considerably. In fact, well-engineered cars are insanely reliable devices. Usually, the engine and the transmission are the two most reliable components. Most of what REALLY limits the lifespan of a car is the bodywork/paint, interior, and electrical systems. There are many cars that are over 500,000 miles with the original engine/transmission. It's just that most people choose to get rid of their cars before they get that old, simply because they no longer look too good.
I doubt the motor controllers will last much longer than 10 years, on average. They all use large electrolytic capacitors, which don't last that long. In general, complex high-power electronics is not too reliable. If you do make that reliable, you still have the issue of batteries, which will certainly last less than 10 years in any EV. In all likelihood, an EV will be much more expensive to own than a gas-powered car.
FINALLY. It's amazing how the American and even European mass media manage to spin the story to make it look like Russia is the aggressor. Let's look at the facts:
- Georgia attacked a capital city, in the middle of the night, during active diplomatic negotiations with Russia. They picked a time when they thought Russia would be unable to quickly respond.
- Georgian troops killed and committed atrocities against thousands of Russian citizens living in South Ossetia.
- Georgian troops attacked Russian peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia, killing most of the troops involved.
The US government has not hesitated to overthrow entire regimes over much less. I fail to see why Russia cannot do the same.
That's a really silly argument. If Nina is living in Russia, she would almost certainly be living with her children. If you wanted to find her, it would be easy -- just ask the neighbors. Besides, there has been no reason for her to leave like this. What's the point? She was living happily in the US, she had just found a job, she had custody of the children, and Hans was getting the short end of the stick in the divorce. It doesn't really seem like she had much of a grudge against Hans -- he was the one who had issues.
I'm pretty sure Hans won't be developing any software in prison. He'll be lucky to have books, much less a laptop.
You have GOT to be kidding me. Compared to what the airlines are getting, Amtrak in the US gets practically jack shit. It doesn't even have a rail network, it has to rent it from the freight companies. Airlines, on the other hand, get all these nice expensive-as-fuck airports built, generally at taxpayer expense. They also get nice big federal bailouts about every 5 years or so. If the government built and operated a rail network with taxpayer money (which would cost a hell of a lot less than all the interstate highways), rail travel would be much cheaper than even traveling by car.
Time-wise, air travel doesn't really save anything. With all the security bullshit and stops, flying from, say, San Diego to St. Louis takes 8-10 hours. That's about 1800 miles. A TGV-type train traveling at 200 mph would cover the same distance in about the same time. Granted, coast-to-coast travel by train wouldn't be that much fun, but it would certainly work out much better for shorter trips. Considering how much baggage you could bring on a train, it would be worth it for a lot of trips.