In the '80s I did a back of the envelope calculation on living in Merced and commuting to Silicon Valley.
It looked like that for less than the cost of owning a small house or condo in SV, one could get a big house near Merced, on several acres of land, buy a private plane such as a Mooney M20 (about 50% or more faster than a common Cessna), buy a car to keep in SV at an airport, and pay the operating costs and parking costs and such for the plane and the second car.
That would have given something like a 40-60 minute commute between Merced and an SV office (depending on just where the office was relative to a general aviation airport in SV).
If a train will let one get a similar commute without the need to buy an airplane the numbers will be even more favorable. Madera is not as cheap as Merced, but a quick check on Redfin turns up a lot of houses that are large and almost trivially affordable by even entry level bay area tech workers.
There can be roaming charges and roaming data caps inside the US although they're not very common with the major carriers. The only time I've specifically encountered a cap with AT&T (I have a grandfathered "unlimited" plan) was when I was in Furnace Creek in Death Valley. (For those not familiar, Furnace Creek is quite isolated but it did get cell phone service a few years back.)
As others have said, international roaming is very expensive without a specific plan. I left early on a trip to Europe last winter because of a snowstorm and before I knew it I had a big bill because I had used my phone in Toronto airport and my roaming service wasn't scheduled to begin for a couple of days. Fortunately, AT&T moved the start time for the international service earlier for me.
AT&T's system for international add-ons on their site is a lot better than it used to be when you had to explicitly cancel the plan over the phone when you got back home.
I'm happy enough with their offerings. I suppose there are circumstances where I'd just buy a SIM card for my old phone when I arrived at the airport, but for most purposes I'm fine with paying $30 for 120MB or whatever it is. It's no hassle and serves my purposes for a week of travel or so.
Sprint is the slowest us mobile carrier but they've had free 2g roaming in Mexico and Canada and recently upgraded that to 3G I haven't tried to use them outside of those areas (and tbh I wouldn't expect it to work since it's not gsm) but for traveling in some subset of the Western Hemisphere, sprints not too bad.
I used the T-Mobile roaming data for a two month trip this year and was really happy with it. It may not be fast but it's pretty useful to have messaging, VOIP, and maps ready to go as soon as the plane lands.
T-Mobile's free international roaming has been great. I used to always pick up a sim from a vending machine at Heathrow, but now I don't bother. 2G is fine for email, light web browsing and navigation.
In France, TMO free international was phenomenally useful even at 128Kb/s. You can't stream video, but I was able to get some data in the most remote places.
There are no rules against roaming charges, so it depends on the plan.
I believe that most plans don't have roaming charges within the United States. Mine certainly doesn't. It's hard to have a competitive plan that has roaming charges.
Roaming charges outside the United States can be quite high. I have to watch carefully who I'm connected to when I'm near the Canadian border.
To name a few, we highlight correctly async/await, function annotations, very complex regexps, all kinds of unicode|byte|raw string literals (and new/old style formatting), docstrings, reserved words in improper contexts etc. Most importantly, MagicPython doesn't break where builtin sublime syntax fails, try this snippet for instance:
>radio interface (RF) chips that traditionally were off limits to all but the most advanced chip makers like Qualcomm. These chips rival CPUs in complexity.
This is interesting, I want to know more about why are they so complex?
Analog circuitry is the most complex in chip design. It's part art part science. At the end of the day radio waves are traveling through the air and a lot of things can go wrong.
iOS apps are shipped as fat binaries, so for one, part of that 100mb app is duplicated slices of binaries for armv7, arm64 and possibly, but not likely, armv7s.
Android apps enjoy bytecode that is getting JIT-ed on install.
For what, fat binaries? That's pretty much what Mach-O format had from inception under NeXTSTEP, and survived until now. As it was said in the sibling comment, iOS 9 is introducing a way to cut exactly the slice you need for a particular device.
True, but what is now a mutable choice becomes less so when the technology involved doesn't support any other option. Their approach also precludes a second signature embedded and checked within the app itself, independent of the app-store signature.
Well then, how about charging more for faster flights, to account for fuel? I mean, domestic business class isn't that great, but people who pay others people money for it would presumably go for a faster flight.
The majority of people who fly do so in cattle class, where basically the headline ticket price is the biggest factor in choosing prices (which is why low-cost airlines offer cheap tickets but charge steep prices for doing things like bringing luggage or getting a drink on board the plane).
You can't fit enough people in first or business class to fill a plane on most routes, and you simply can't go fast enough to make speed premiums really worth it. Note that going to an airport usually requires on the order of 2 hours of hassle before accounting for flight time, which means that you've already lost a day of work in practice. No, unless it's a long-haul flight, there's little benefit to faster speeds, and the Concorde was never really profitable.
