Well. It's pretty much unworkable. Train is not a single rigid body, it's composed from bogies and car bodies, and they are only quite loosely attached. They absolutely have to be. So you can't expect it to just sit as a rock on the tracks, even in pretty low speeds. And with speed low enough, you are maybe better to simply stop. Modern electric bullet train unit with high powered axles ratio can accelerate really, really fast.
Anyway, you could spend money much better on allowing higher speeds on the whole track, or improving adjacent tracks so to allow higher speeds even for feeders and conventional trains, which could allow you to make fewer stops.
Travel itself should be quite ok even regularly, it certainly wouldn't be just siting in your seat for 2 days and looking out of the window, more like a hotel on rails. But I'd very afraid of bureaucracy: entry visa, transit visa, various railway companies and their mess of various offers and discounts… Land trip across Asia means passing through countries like Iran, China or Russia. And given how unkind seems rail travel even within EU's borders (where only the last problems applies, and you can get all schedule informations you need by just typing your destination at http://oebb.at or similar site) for many people, and not because the length of the trip.
On the other hand, it would be wonderful business opportunity for travel agencies. And much more interesting than just booking the right plane. I almost want it to happen :-)
I have no problem in believing that things like this can help with the pain (a lot). But still, author says that now he is able to type in any uncomfortable position for as long as he wants, and it sounds little scary. "See? I don't feel any pain, it's great." Well, wasn't there some reason for that pain in the first place? Maybe you feel great, but still, are you sure that you aren't permanently hurting your own body? RSI isn't just a state of mind…
(You don't want to let anybody else use your browser profile. Especially with all those "smart" address bars. Rather set up a guest account and switch to it. It's also very useful for presentations. Recent Linux distros makes user switching very easy and reliable, so it's worth doing even for a very short sessions.)
I wasn't trying to be so general, and wanted to talk mostly about Apple and Appstore :-) But thank you, it's a good answer. Anyway, I think that while market will usually find a workable solution, we cannot expect it to ever find the best one (well, and especially socially responsible one, whatever it means :-)). Of course, regulation, even in the best interests, can fail badly and make things much much worse. Still, I think it would be better for us all if Apple was forced to make iPhone development more open, and the risks of doing so are not so great. But I agree that those risks could be seen as a good reason to avoid it. After all, we can live quite happily even with closed iPhone (or no iPhone at all :-)).
Why? If I don't think that "government interfering in the internal operations of some company" is generally bad and morally wrong (and I don't [1]), is there any other reason to think this? Is there any objective reason why should the European governments let Apple do anything it likes at the expense of the European companies and customers? (This is not necessarily the case, but it's close.) I'm not saying that you are wrong and I don't think that some government should "interfere" in this case, but I'd like to know your reasons why it should not. Just curious.
[1] I don't even think that we're speaking about "internal operations", there are numerous external companies and customers involved, how is that an "internal operation"?
Doesn't it mean that you have to pay for imgur premium account so they wouldn't (possibly) delete your image after some period of time when they are not viewed? (Of course, maybe they are viewed all the time, and after all, it's not that much money and quite useful anyway.)
If it wasn't ragged, it would most likely look even worse than that Pooh example in the article. It depends on the size of font, which you can't (on the web) control. And he is right, justified paragraphs without hyphenation are ugly, unless you have a lot of characters on a line. Which he has not (around the images especially), and the example is even worse. I wouldn't even think of displaying justified paragraphs for lines shorter than, say… 80 characters or with hyphenations [1]. But even printed newspapers give up justification in narrow columns and has ragged right.
[1] I think that you could make it in javascript. With too few characters on a line, display paragraphs ragged, with more, justified. Maybe someone already did it.
Such a lack of any failsafe behavior in a script that can potentially erase whole disk should have been against all reasonable policies that distribution's init scripts should have. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, and I have very, very low opinion about it, but still, there must be such guidelines and policies. If there aren't, it's the primary bug.
Well, it's still quite obvious that something is missing there, as the central area of the picture is visibly less blurred than its surrounding. I guess you could fix that easily by just blurring it with ordinary gimp blur. (But great start indeed, comrade. :o))
Worst idea? Uh. I also thought that browser should look like everything else and so on, but then I simply tried some of these Chrome themes and some Firefox Personas, and hey, I liked it. Why not. Not all of them are ugly and makes everything in your browser illegible. It's just something nice to look at, something that looks a bit "artsy". I'm living in a rented shared flat with just gray wallpapers, some furniture, and the only decoration is an xkcd poster. I'm so glad that I can get at least this, no matter how desperate it may sound.
And, well, I have quite a lot in common with a teenage girl, but don't know why I should be ashamed for that…
And why not? IE6 was released in August 2001! Its competition was something like Netscape 4.8. Mozilla was barely alpha, and not really usable yet. In this light, IE6 was a good browser, better than any competition back then. Of course. IE6 was mostly irrelevant few years later, but that wasn't because it was crappy browser, but because it was simply obsolete (but without a replacement from Microsoft).
I'd rewrite the title as "Time since Opera officially submitted to Apple". Well. OK. Not really. But still, it's quite strange to see such an announcement not sayng "hey, we have a new product, try it!", but "we sent a plea, now waiting for the answer" (when it will come? will it come at all?). Quite ugly.
Might be just a theater by both Opera and Apple. Of course.
What you mean? The website seems to suggest that the only browser available now is… lynx. (And with 32 MiB RAM, well, what would you expect? Could be possible with some adapted and modified browser, but off-shell Firefox and Gmail with this? Uhm.)
Hm, this doesn't really seems to be an attempt to divert passenger traffic from using the planes to some cross-continental HSR. On the other hand, it'd allow China to export much much more goods and much much faster than nowadays with ships [1]. And of course, it would also very much strengthen China's influence in the Middle east and around, as in this area, HSR travel times would be very interesting and provide (in comparison) wonderful connection with China.
You wouldn't travel from China to Europe by train even with this, of course. I wonder what would the Russian response be, as they are quite expected to maintain their strong influence in this region, and this isn't exactly going to support that.
[1] This is already being done, in a rather small scale.
Hm, well, it is not really about [Xe][La]TeX, but various features of opentype fonts. But that is OK, and those links in the section 8 to some free (for commercial use, that is important) fonts are perhaps the best part of the article, I didn't know them yet. :-)
And I guess that by saying this, you are also undermining their effort. Well, maybe even more, those who downloaded the album at least showed some interest in this way of, hm, "helping", and even might buy it later. It's just an compilation, it isn't really worth of downloading just for the music.
Mine is that with ordinary text emails, it will make very ugly HTML code, like putting hard breaks instead of proper HTML paragraphs (even though it shouldn't be that hard to do, with properly formatted emails). I wouldn't care about that much, but when somebody looks at the site with unexpectedly large fonts (and not even very large, with common 67 columns paragraphs and default posterous themes, it happens quite too often), the browser will break lines sooner than the hard break, and then again at the next line, after few characters. That sort of sucks.
After looking at the grammar and dictionary, I find it much more similar to Czech than I thought after looking at just samples. Dictionary has quite a lot of Czech words, you'd only have to apply some rules to make it look more "modern" :-) (ija -> [i]e, throw out most of trailing i's, ični -> cký, g -> h…)
My native language is Czech, and all sample texts looks very similar to Croatian or Serbian :-) Not much Polish. And yes, even for me it's very hard to read :-)
(Though, that might be because it has quite different spelling from polish. Spoken, it could be similar. It feels very ancient. :-))
One would also like to ask if it's even true that everyone says this. Are there data to support that claim? :) (Yes, it's just a joke, yet... it would make nice irony.)
I'd call this a fruit of this kind of DNS abuse. Yeah, OK, it looks nice, x.usesthis.com or whatever it is, but it forces you to make a new DNS lookup for each page, instead of using cached www.usesthis.com/something. And, as we can see, you can even make the address invalid. It's quite sad. :-/
There is no general solution, of course. Every city is different, and cities in the USA are very different from the cities in Europe, and so on.
I'd like for the public transit to be seen more as a public service than just another private business. After all, transportation is a vital part of the city, and something that the local authorities simply have to manage somehow. It also affects every other aspect of the city life.
I believe that the actual question should be much more like "how would you like to your city look like?"
To offer some "solution". I'd try to abolish the fares. I'd try to reduce maximum velocities for the cars, make more one-way lanes, narrow some other lanes, and so on. I'd try to bring new development into the brownfields inside the city (every city has them). But, there is no general Solution for everything. After all, it's not a fight between public transit and individual cars, but aim should be to provide the best service for the lowest price (to bring that viewpoint here too).
And after all, things will simply change with the time :-) I expect, one day, that all those disgusting highways around and inside the cities will turn into parks or something similar, as the old city walls from the middle-ages did. :-)
Of course it is, it's quite common for many companies to compete with offers, and the local authorities choose the best one. But that kind of competition is not aimed at the end user, passenger.
In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro.
Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and incomplete.
And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite portable (and comparable to the ports).
Well, I'd rather hear the lecture, these slides looks more like just something to put on the screen to show some examples while talking. I am very interested in some modern TeX variants (mostly I use Xe[La]TeX), but this presentation fails in giving me an impression of what LuaTeX really is and "can do for me" (I realize that wasn't its meaning).