A four engine plane will land on no engines.

Have you achieved any sort of frequent-flyer status? My wife has had such off and on for several years, that may contribute to it.

(Are there enough people who *care* about these issues?)

Not for $700+ for an obsolete laptop, there aren't.

I've seen some niche things, but DAMN, this is takes the cake.

We have an X301 at home. It was a great computer when we bought it new, but the battery life is terrible by modern standards, the Centrino processor is slow, and the screen is dim and low-res. The weight, presence of an optical drive (though just DVD) and keyboard are the plusses. We just bought a replacement for it; I may still upgrade the RAM to 8GB from the 2GB that it has now so that it's a nice around-the-house lappy, but it's never going to be the primary computer ever again.

If they'd managed to do this treatment to a Thinkpad X1 Carbon or something else that's modern then I expect a lot more people would be interested, but somethis this old? For this kind of money?

There's a lot more space than you're thinking. First, there are a lot of unused utility easements that could be used for neighborhood last-mile distribution. Second, not all trunk lines need to run in the same alignments, so new providers can take different paths so long as they're respectful of what's there. Third, a POTS use continues to shrink, demoing-out old copper and moving the telephone company's fiber into those conduits or on those positions on the poles would free-up other positions and conduits for other services.

Again, what other provider will build-out to a rural area when it's unprofitable to do so?

Keep in mind, that simple electrification of rural America wasn't completed until the 1950s, and was only started due to Depression-era programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration basically footing the bill to attempt to employ the unemployed.

The entire point in using a massively successful commercial platform for this kind of thing is that spare parts will continue to be in production for decades to support the huge customer base. Even if the -8 has a limited run compared to other 747s, it's not like they've dropped support for the SP even though it too was only built in limited numbers.

As for why the 747 could be discontinued, at least for awhile; there's an upper limit on the number of superjumbos needed on the planet, and I expect that we're probably not far from that point. So long as the current fleet continues to operate safely then there's simply no need to produce more planes. As the current fleet wears though, eventually new replacements will be needed for those routes where moving this many passengers makes sense, especially if the manufacturers can get the efficiency up. That's part of what's eating into the superjumbos; the ability for multiple flights a day with smaller planes to get equal fuel economy per passenger and at the same time offer more flexibility (ie more than one flight per day) due to the use of smaller planes.

My wife used to fly fifteen times a year. There was one city that she flew to the most, and she chose the airline with the most daily flights because airlines will often move one up to an earlier flight or two that same day if there's empty space, because they can sell the seats on the later flights to last-minute purchasers. She could come home four or eight hours early if she was done early and didn't need to be there anymore. An airline flying two or three 777s or A320s per day offers her more flexibility than one flying one 747 or one A380, and that's worth something.

Sounds like a pornographic contest...

Yes, because the Europeans have that pesky NSA looking over their citizens' shoulders at all times...

In the early Noughties Europe got serious about building-out their telecom to replace the aging post-war system they'd been babying for many years. It also fit well with increasing European Union integration. It also seems to have coincided with the rise of the ubiquitous cell phone, since cell towers require a certain amount of backboke and resilience, and once the fiber goes in for the tower, there's no reason to not use the remaining strands for other networks. Dark fiber is unprofitable fiber.

Why would anyone build-out Internet access to rural places at a loss if they weren't either provided with incentives or required to do so? The subsidy thing (ie, incentives) isn't working as well as it should, and I don't see ANY companies interested in doing it without mandates or incentives.

It looks and smells like oligopoly-based crony-capitalism controlling the strings...

All brought on by voters that won't kick out corrupt politicians. *We built this city.* Now we have to live with it or fix it. The choice is ours.

If you want them to be forced to provide you with high-speed Internet, then you need to support government regulation. This is the result of less regulation; they attempt to pick-and-choose to whom they provide service to maximize profit.

But it still has to reside on physical disks, just like virtual servers still have to run on physical hardware. There are hundreds of cores in a high-end Cisco UCS installation, on dozens of blades. The UCS can optimize what goes where for the IT group, but in the end that's all about density and the actual relationship between physical cores and virtual cores allocated to VMs is probably not as leveraged as you seem to think it is, especially for high-load usage.

There still has to be disks, there still has to be RAM, there still has to be processors, there still has to be I/O.

Well, you and the other four of you can still buy the Lenovo Thinkpad line, like the Yoga 12.5" or Yoga 14", or the Helix...

I've had Thinkpads several times over the years and use one now. I've accidently hit the pointing stick while typing more than I've used it. They're solid machines so that's why we continue to buy them, but the pointing stick is definitely a niche feature.

I assumed they got one of those surplus Nitrogen tire filling setups from a closed-down service station.

Nitrogen is already 78% of the atmosphere. All they'd have to do is inject pure nitrogen at a rate equal to natural atmpsoheric air entering the structure and they could claim that they reduced the oxygen, as it would drop from about 20% to about 10% that way.

I'm actually curious if this would be low enough to require special breathing equipment or not. I'm no chemist or earth scientist, but I think it's worse on the top of Everest than it would be in this server room.