successful train lines in Japan are all built between CBD and some spots / attractions. Odakyu: odawara / hakone, Seibu: chichibu, keiou: Takao, toukyuu: Nikko / kinugawa, nankai: Takao.
Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.
Not only encoding/decoding but searching and sorting is also different. We may also cover font rendering, unicode modifiers and emoji. They are so common and fundamental but very few understand them.
Yes. As a site owner who keep fighting with bots and malicious traffic, I wish web browsers provide me a way to identify real users from bot traffic. Otherwise I'll have to put everything behind account registration.
I think it depends on what you're compressing. I experimented with my data full of hex text xml files. xz -6 is both faster and smaller than zstd -19 by about 10%. For my data, xz -2 and zstd -17 achieve the same compressed size but xz -2 is 3 times faster than zstd -17. I still use xz for archive because I rarely needs to decompress them.
There are charging machines that accept cash cards / debit cards, but only those issued by Japanese banks. So cash is the only option for touristists. You can go completely cash-less if you can use mobile Suica / ICOCA, which let's you charge your phone with Apple Pay / Google Pay (with osaifu-keitai).
Japan has lots of IC cards in various regions, and they have spent a lot of effort integrating their system. Unfortunately some IC cards like Kumamon decided to opt-out due to high maintenance fees.
AFAIK, you can go through up to 4 different company networks once you enter paid-area. Beyond that, you'll need to do the override settlement (乗り越し精算) with the help of station staff.
Suica has a pretty large sensing distance (85mm). So it can "power up" the card at a distance before getting close to the reader.
To avoid large touch area causing accidental touches, places like vending machine requires you to keep your card within sensing area for up to 1 second before completing the transaction.
and yes they did. aside from the keihin touhoku line that's already running in parallel with yamanote line, JR East added a new track called ueno-tokyo line about 10 years ago. And the trains on the new lines are mostly 15-cars (with 2 double decker cars!). Note that for passengers travelling north-south they can also take the west route (going through shinjuku instead of tokyo), and there're also 3 parallel lines on the west. JR runs on narrow gauge which takes less space, and is cheaper to construct. Maybe this is one reason to make these expansion project fesible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueno%E2%80%93Tokyo_Line
actually 2 trains every ~2 minutes
on the east side of the yamanote loop, it runs in parallel with keihin tohoku line every station from tabata to sinagawa.
The platforms are arranged side by side, so if you miss one train, the next train is probably right behind you.
it's fun to see trains racing right next to each other.
Other than that there are also rapid lines running in parallel that takes you straight to major stations by skipping some smaller ones.
The domestic ISP I use has all its IP ranges assigned to spamhaus's Policy Block List. https://www.spamhaus.org/pbl/
However, the ISP does operate its own SMTP proxy that's free to use. So I can send and receive emails using home IP address.
Tourists spots are usually in the mountains and the CBD is near the sea. And residential area is developed between them along the lines so the trains carry bidirectional passengers to work or relax on the same line, higher utilization keeps ticket fare low.