> Imagine some future hotel service trend where, right after the customer checks in, the checkin agent punches the customer in the face, by policy. I shouldn't have to check beforehand whether this is a "face punch" hotel or a "non face punch" hotel.
Reminds me of that Burkiss Way sketch where somebody wants to book tickets to a West End show, but they all involve the spectators being poked in the eye with a pencil:
The problem is that this breaks down if you don't want to leak any obscure subdomains you might be using via CT-logs – shared hosting rarely supports DNS-based certificate renewals for wildcard certificates, and even less so for domains hosted by an external registrar.
(Even for a fully self-hosted system you'd still have to figure out how to interface the certificate renewal mechanism with your DNS provider, so not as easy to set up as individual certificates for each subdomain.)
> (Even for a fully self-hosted system you'd still have to figure out how to interface the certificate renewal mechanism with your DNS provider, so not as easy to set up as individual certificates for each subdomain.)
That's exactly what the new DNS-PERSIST-01 challenge is for, being able to authorize a specific system or set of systems to request certs for a given FQDN and optionally subdomains without having to give that system direct control over your DNS as the existing DNS-01 challenge requires.
> I know that read/write conflict concerns are what got USB Mass Storage mode removed from Android, but surely there's some way to resolve that.
Depending on whether the respective kernel supported it, you were still unofficially able to switch removable SD cards into mass storage mode (though only with a rooted phone), although somehow, even if I remembered to officially unmount the SD card from Android first, it somehow still often led to mild filesystem corruption (luckily never anything fatal, though) that required regular chkdsk-usage.
> Or they could have figured out a new version of MTP that supports basic features like concurrent access and normal metadata. Or they could have gone for SMB/NFS over a virtual network link.
My current phone no longer supports the above mass storage mode-hack for the removable SD card, which annoyed me enough that I actually wrote my own SMB server app (https://github.com/buttercookie42/SimbaDroid), because all other SMB servers for Android that I'm aware of were either outright broken, unsupported, buggy or fiddly to use. Sadly the only open source Java-based SMB server only supports SMBv1, so you're stuck with that, and you still need root for full comfort, but within those limitations it works quite nicely.
Competition dynamics for air traffic are different. Railway infrastructure can only support a very limited number of competing companies before you run out of capacity, and especially on classic mixed traffic routes it is very easy to run out of capacity. Once that happens, rail operators have to start competing for paths instead of directly for passenger, which can definitely lead to misalignment of incentives.
On top of that, there's the problem that it's physically impossible to run competing services at exactly the same time. This means that for customers with schedule constraints (i.e. you need to arrive somewhere specific by a certain time at latest), competition becomes much less effective, because you're no longer able to freely choose among the competing operators, but are instead forced to simply take the train that arrives at the right time.
A similar thing is for journeys that involve changes of trains – it's physically impossible to have attractive connections (i.e. without hanging around the station for ages) between more than one or at most (if that) two operators per route, because trains running along the same line always have to be separated by at least two or three minutes.
With air traffic it's different. While airport and air space capacity isn't quite unlimited, it's still not as limited in the way a mixed traffic railway is. Plus a much higher proportion of air traffic is holiday traffic and other long-distance journeys where even a few flights per day would be considered frequent service, so competition is much less limited by that fact.
> May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process
But that tendering is just internal between the state and the operator – fares and service levels on the other hand are set by TfL (and probably also the DfT to some extent, especially on the GEML and GWML sections).
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