The one practical use I could imagine would be something like remote gate controllers and such with the mesh network coordinating activity. But that is very niche.
For passengers, yes, but primarily it’s poor for passengers because the infra is owned by freight companies that aren’t interested in passenger service. And rail freight service in the US is mostly pretty good.
And, at the time, they needed a lot of rail across huge distances. The transcontinental rail lines were hugely expensive and had immense amounts of graft involved in every step of their construction, but they got built. Also enabled the crushing of Native Americans, which was a usually-somewhat-tacit (though sometimes very explicit) goal in Washington.
Am I the only one who really doesn't care what kind of service I get on a plane? I don't drink alcohol, so I don't care about that. I bring my own water bottle, so I'm good on that. The little bags of pretzels are nice, but if they stood at the front and launched them out of a t-shirt cannon, I'd be good with that.
As long as the required crew of flight attendants doesn't assault me, I've never really got off a plane thinking anything at all about the service. Just "where do I need to go next" or "I'm glad to be home".
Dang no way? I had a terrible experience with them (tbf it was half a decade back at this point). We were in line to check in, something like 1.5hrs before a one hour flight. The line was agonizingly slow (only 2 of like 5 check-in counters were staffed), and when we got to the counter they said we were too late, missed the window for the flight. We only had carry-ons, were 3min late for their arbitrary window, and the plane still wasn't scheduled to leave for an hour or so.
We were clearly in line before their deadline, were certainly going to make it to the gate before they even opened for boarding, had no checked bags, and they made us buy new tickets. The cherry on top was that they ran flights every hour, so we bought the ticket for the next hour but the gate agent let us on the original flight we had- so they basically just forced us to pay double for our flight.
SkyTeam in general has superb service. I have in the past decade flown Delta, Air France, KLM, and Aeromexico, and all have curbstomped my American Airlines and British Airways experiences.
The service on the plane isn’t a big deal, but in my experience strongly resembles the service off it.
Not arguing against your point, but it astounds me how many airports do not have water-bottle refill stations. My home airport (SFO) does, but many in the US still do not. I feel like that sort of thing should be legally mandated, given we're not permitted to bring water through security. The paltry amount of water they give you on the flight (and at times of their choosing, not yours) is not enough to rehydrate basically anyone.
Honestly I kind of liked Spirit because the snacks aren't free. When it's snack time, I don't have to wait 45 minutes for the cart to get to me because it's not stopping at every row. And it doesn't bother me to spend $4 on a snack because I already spent so much less on the ticket.
But I guess I also don't fly much, and I never had to deal with delays or rebooking with them.
In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
Silver is the ideal color for hiding dirt. I had a silver car once. Unless you drove it down a dirt road during a rainstorm, you basically never had to wash it.
They are targeting people who want nearly-silent fans for computing devices and will pay considerably higher than average prices for them. I have several of them, and they are vastly quieter than the competition. Wouldn't be worth it in a commercial space, but I want my house to be quiet.
In my experience fans from manufacturers like Arctic can be almost as quiet similar Noctua, but cost 50% less. The difference definitely isn't vast for most models, although admittedly there's more QC issues and variation than with Noctua.
A lot of Noctua sales come from their brand value. People put Noctua fans into their gaming PC's, use headphones while gaming on them, and then turn off the PC. You don't really need the most silent fan for that, but people buy them anyway for the looks & premium quality.
I do love Noctua's coolers though, I appreciate the well thought design, manuals and free upgrade kits when you upgrade your system to a new socket type. But for case fans I'll jut buy Arctic and save money, except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority.
I want the quitest fans and whether they are 10 or 20 bucks is irrelevant. We are talking about tiny amounts of money here for something thats gonna run for 5y+
> except for things like server systems that run 24/7 in my bedroom where noise and durability are top priority
... which is why I only have a few of them, rather than replacing the fans in everything I own. But for the things that need them, there's just nothing else as good.
No kids of my own, but my niece is 16. Wife and I took her to dinner when she was ~10, and afterward she said she wanted some ice cream. Sure. We drove to the grocery store on the way home (it's an older store, not huge) and handed her a $10 bill, told her to go get whatever flavor she wanted.
She freaked out. She'd been so terrified by a litany of "stranger danger" stories that the thought of just going into a store alone - a small store with one public entrance - was alien to her. We told her she could do it herself, or not have ice cream, because we weren't doing it for her. She went.
I'm glad to hear you're pushing your kids this way.
(It's a Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed license plate.) Look carefully at the sticker at the top right. The tag is actually MONGON0, but it is far from obvious that the last character is a zero at a quick glance unless you are very familiar with the typeface used in Tennessee license plates.
The logical solution is to forbid issuing plates that could be misinterpreted. If MONGONO exists, then you can't have M0NG0N0 or other permutation of O's and 0's.
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