> I'm all for high speed rail, but why is it so expensive and why does it take so long to build?
Both have the same answer: because there's a whole lot of lobbyists that don't want it built. And it's not a secret - even the first segment they're building is just a screaming indicator of how little they want this thing to come to life.
Neither the airlines nor the car manufacturers nor the petrochemical companies nor billionaires like the Kochs want the thing to happen, so they're happy to shut it down at every possible turn - just look at every propaganda piece the "Reason Foundation" keeps pumping out against the project.
France and Italy are covered in high speed rail projects that make this one seem almost trivial by comparison, but we can't do it because politicians are too happy to take a few campaign dollars and enjoy some free filet mignon medallions and expensive red wine than represent the people who elected them.
As someone who loathes flying with the heat of a thousand suns and who has taken that route on Amtrak, I'll be happy to try this service at my next convenience.
I don't hate the ride on Amtrak, but it's a hard route to sleep, since it's just a little too short to be worth booking the sleeper (which ends up being about double the rate compared to the bus ride), and sleeping in the open cabin can be a bit of a challenge. That, and the roads are at least capable of allowing for some routing around, unlike Amtrak which frequently hits freight traffic and has a pretty abysmal on-time reputation for the Coast Starlight.
Not all of us are in a rush, and most of us could use a good night of unplugged sleep. Plus it shaves off a night in a hotel, so there's actual savings there too.
Used in combination with compressed swap (ZRAM), it greatly alleviates this problem on the (at least GNOME-based) Linux Desktop.
Still, browser really need to do something about the memory problems they're causing. They're Windows 95-level bad at managing their high memory/leak cases - just leave a browser with more than a few dozen tabs open over night. Especially with a tab that does background fetches (e.g. Facebook or Twitter or something with a lot of timer-driven Ajax queries).
I assert that if it weren't for browsers, there'd be no memory problems on modern desktops.
Nothing in that comment said you can't do whatever you want - it said, quite specifically, it's bad form to do it, and then explained exactly why that was the case.
Plenty of libraries break API/ABI all of the time. Notoriously FFMPEG was/is terrible about it. But depending on libraries that are hugely unstable in this way is terrible, so in most cases, people go out of their ways to avoid doing so (most frequently using another library, or in harder-to-avoid cases creating an interposer library to smooth out the instabilities of the underlying library).
OSS developers probably know more than anyone in the world that the most expensive thing to do in software engineering is maintaining a piece of software as time moves forward. Anything that makes that job more difficult needs to have an enormous upside to make it worth while, and in almost every case, using an unstable library is just not worth the extra maintenance costs attached.
Both have the same answer: because there's a whole lot of lobbyists that don't want it built. And it's not a secret - even the first segment they're building is just a screaming indicator of how little they want this thing to come to life.
Neither the airlines nor the car manufacturers nor the petrochemical companies nor billionaires like the Kochs want the thing to happen, so they're happy to shut it down at every possible turn - just look at every propaganda piece the "Reason Foundation" keeps pumping out against the project.
France and Italy are covered in high speed rail projects that make this one seem almost trivial by comparison, but we can't do it because politicians are too happy to take a few campaign dollars and enjoy some free filet mignon medallions and expensive red wine than represent the people who elected them.