That's really awful if the best they can achieve on a new track is 110 MPH. High speed rail *starts* at 125, so even that doesn't qualify as HSR. Many passenger rail projects built recently achieve roughly twice that speed. 110 MPH wasn't even state of the art in the 1960s. These days, that's a joke. Is there inadequate grade separation, or did they just cheap out on the trains?

Is it? It takes 3 hours and 23 minutes to do that trip by car. You're saying it makes that trip in 21 minutes? I don't think so.

Doing some quick math, the trains leave once an hour, so your average wait time should be roughly 30 minutes (assuming randomly distributed arrival times). Add that to the 2 hours and 45 minutes for the trip, and you save... Wow! You save EIGHT WHOLE MINUTES! That is TOTALLY worth $12 Billion! Oh, wait. Some of them take two hours and 50 minutes. So only three minutes saved. Maybe not such a good deal. [rolls eyes]

And to think some people don't think the California HSR makes sense. This gives new meaning to the phrase "corporate welfare".

The solution isn't to cut the long-distance routes. The solution is to fix them. Right now, those routes are pretty problematic, frequently running many hours behind because of freight trains delaying the Amtrak trains unreasonably. And the Zephyr ends up averaging just 55 MPH, which isn't really a great speed for traveling across the country, but that's not including the time spent at stops. With stops, it averages just 39 MPH, assuming it arrives on time. There are electric bicycles that can almost reach that speed (ignoring charging).

By the straightest route, I can get to my parents' house in 3 days of hard driving. By train, which doesn't go all that far out of the way, I can get there in... well, roughly three days. The difference is that by car, I would leave at 9 or 10 in the morning from my house, and on day 3, I'd arrive in the evening, whereas with Amtrak, I'd leave my house at more like 7 in the morning and arrive at... I think 3 in the morning on day 4.

In other words, the problem isn't that long-distance rail lines can't be viable in the U.S., but rather that running trains at two-thirds of 1950s train speeds can't be viable anywhere.

Compel the rail companies to comply with the law and give priority to passenger trains, run the trains closer to their maximum speed more often (which will probably require spending a lot of money on rail repairs), and reduce time spent at each station, and things will get a lot better. And of course, high-speed rail lines running at 150 MPH or faster would reduce travel time to a third what it takes on Amtrak, making it fairly competitive with air travel for most people, which would be a game-changer.

Yeah, because of the limited speeds involved, the only way high-speed rail travel makes sense is if it is Amtrak-style, where there's approximately zero security other than having police at major stations, with the occasional bomb-sniffing dog.

And that's a perfectly reasonable level of security, too. Trains aren't like airplanes, where if something goes wrong, police can't respond. Trains are on the ground, and if somebody starts something, someone will call 911, and police will meet the train within single-digit minutes at the nearest road crossing.

And trains also aren't like an airplane, where terrorists plausibly might try to smuggle a bomb onto an airplane to bring it down. There are far too many easier ways to attack a train, like sabotaging the rails or putting a bomb on a railroad bridge, and none of those require the attacker to blow him/herself up in the process or put him/herself at risk of getting caught carrying a bomb. So exactly nobody even remotely in his or her right mind would attack a train in that way (though I don't mind seeing the dogs just as a hedge against people who aren't even remotely in their right minds).

And trains also aren't like airplanes, where terrorists could take them over and crash them into a building. Trains pretty much only go where the rails go, and attempting to make them go somewhere else will not be particularly successful.

So there just isn't any rational reason for having any sort of security before boarding a train. All it does is cost travelers a whole lot of time, money, and convenience, all for approximately zero actual increase in public safety.

Weird. I've ridden Amtrak many times and have never experienced that. I do vaguely recall a point in the distant past where the TSA tried to muscle their way into doing random checks, and it caused so many problems that the Amtrak Police escorted them off of the premises. Maybe you were unlucky enough to have traveled on one of those days. :-)

Of course, it is connecting to an existing train station and, presumably, to the existing rail system. So assuming that there are some parallel tracks through certain stations or other sidings that they can use to pass the trains that already run on that track, nothing necessarily prevents them from running trains from Las Vegas all the way to LA Union Station at that point.

That's because almost nobody has released games for this thing yet. I mean, apart from subscription-only Apple Arcade games, I really didn't find very many out there that are worth playing.

For me, the killer app would be a virtualization environment running macOS Sonoma, combined with high-quality vision analysis that can let you type on a virtual keyboard floating in front of you.

Not to mention that screens tend not to move with you on the Vision Pro, and neither do physical keyboards and trackpads. Their text input story, other than with a keyboard (where you might as well use a real computer) is basically nonexistent, and a "spatial computer" that can only be used for media consumption device and gaming doesn't make much sense (because you might as well buy a Quest for a fraction of the price).

AVP has serious problems when lying down, though. Yes, if you can get a virtual screen positioned correctly before you lie down, it works, but try repositioning it while lying flat, and it jumps in random directions and is completely as unusable as the Quest 2.

AVP also lacks any obvious way for the user to mark a screen as "floating". One way I'd like to use it is as a media consumption device while out for a walk. Have a picture-in-picture with the screen floating in front of me. But I haven't been able to figure out a good way to do that. I'm pretty sure the Quest actually does have a way to do that, at least in some apps, though I don't remember how off the top of my head. So for at least one consumption mode, Apple's offering is actually inferior in some ways (though I'll grant you that its image quality is much better).

Passive LEDs have blocked light for decades. That's solvable. So in theory, if you combined a projection-style setup like Google Glass used with a 1-bit LCD panel, you might be able to do a passable job. But I've obviously never tried it, so I could be wrong.

It doesn't mirror the MacBook screen. It blacks it out and replaces it entirely, making it the ultimate privacy screen.

But you have to either use the computer's keyboard/trackpad or an external Bluetooth keyboard and mouse/trackpad/trackball, so you can't usefully use it as the only display unless you're sitting right at the computer, so it is basically useless unless you are working on an airplane, on a bus, in a coffee shop, or in an open office and you don't want other people seeing what you're doing.

Stupid admins can easily mis-manage cloud resources just as easily as they can mis-manage on-prem. It's just that when someone manages to mine bitcoin on your cloud services, you get a big bill at the end of the month as well as having performance problems.

The key to saving a ton of money with on-prem equipment is getting techs that know better than to let MS manage it.

Except it doesn't actually save a buck. It's actually like those outfits that rent you furniture and appliances. It looks cheap to start but in the end it costs you several times as much as ownership.

Cloud computing only makes sense for overflow capacity and perhaps disaster recovery.

Being in tech after 35 means knowing that the latest silver bullet is just warmed over slop from 10 years ago and will work no better now than it did the last time it was abandoned but will probably cost twice as much. It also means remembering and being able to adapt a technique from 10 or 15 years ago that worked really well and didn't cost much.

Many younger programmers find embedded work on micro-controllers to be hard because there's no room for "application frameworks" or kitchen sink libraries. It's actually reminiscent of programming in C for small 8-bit home computers like the C64. But only older programmers ever had that experience.

Actually, I find it to work pretty well for that — better than a laptop screen, anyway.

What doesn't work well are:

• Low rate of iOS app compatibility — most iOS apps don't run on it, despite it theoretically being able to run them, because most developers don't check the checkbox
• No Mac app compatibility
• Zero keyboard or mouse control when controlling your Mac (i.e. you're still 100% tethered to the Mac when using it as a display)
• Almost zero games that are not part of Apple Arcade (subscription-only)
• Frequent inability to connect to nearby computers, and no way to figure out what's wrong, with the only reliable fix being a complete reboot of the Vision Pro

Basically, you can't do anything with it except in a few limited situations, and when you can, it's still a pain in the a**. It can give you a private screen for working in a cube farm or on an airplane, and that's about it. Mind you, its Wi-Fi support is miles ahead of what you can do with non-Apple hardware, which at least makes those things practical, but it is nowhere near good enough yet, IMO.

At some point, when the apps are there, this could be pretty cool, but right now, it really just isn't there.