Their ultramobiles are small and powerful and expensive (with relatively long battery life).

Browsing the web on an ARM is a bit of slow going.

I look forward to the new ARM netbooks and their reviews. The low cost is really half the point though.

On busier lines here, there's one track I suppose. ;)

The point is I've never had to wait for another train to pass when riding a train in Europe.

Upgrade the freight trains? You miss the point. British Rail doesn't share the rails with freight, why should Amtrak? Cause actually Amtrak is just borrowing the rails from the freight companies, which is why they always have priority.

Regulation is a stupid non-solution to a real world problem, lol.

read more then the subject line...

good, at least when you compare it to the market. Like Medicare has far less overhead then private insurers. Or the obvious fact that our current interstate highway system was built the government.

Actually trains are never going to compete with NY to LA, airplanes are going to almost always make more sense for such a trip.

So the focus should be more regional in nature.

Anyways I agree that we should worry more about getting 'moderately quick' trains. The current Amtrak service is horribly slow: its just borrowing the tracks from the freight train companies so on a typical ride you have to get off the main track and wait for a 100-car coal train to mosey on by once or twice.

Its essential that passenger trains have their own tracks. I suppose if your making that sort of investment, you might as well go a little bit farther and make it high speed.

(well not literally door-to-door, but within a short walk)

Thats why it works well in Europe. They don't just have a great continental rail system, but each city has subways, buses, bike paths etc that make getting around it without a car easy.

But you have to start somewhere!

Yea it was, blame it on lack of comment editing in slashdot. :)

I'd like government to tell me when a hurricane is coming, for one.

Why even bother to predicate hurricanes if government is useless at responding to them.

"Government is ineffective, vote for us and we'll show you how!" - traditional GOP motto.

My AT&T DSL connection for all practical purposes has 6mbps available 24/7. Yes of course this isn't guaranteed, for guarantees you need to purchase the type of internet they sale for businesses and it costs much more.

That doesn't change the fact that I get consistently get 6mbps...

If my only choice in broadband was this guy's crappy ISP. Sounds about as bad as on-campus Internet. Now that I'm a grown-up, if I buy 6mbps I damn well want 6mbps.

Is anyone talking about propriety encryption though? I mean the NSA has standards for encryption that obviously the Federal government would follow, but so does most of the industry.

Being generous and deciding that by "power-up" you mean "bring the computer back from hibernation", I'd agree that yea it does take some time. But suspend brings the computer back up in seconds. Essentially your phone suspends itself when you don't use it, you can do the same with your laptop. So I don't get your point.

As far as the article, I have an instant Linux-based DVD player on my laptop and find it pretty handy. An instant Internet-oriented system is less useful since I'd have to configure wireless and similar, but I could see myself using it sometimes.

Yea I got the 8gb kit at Christmas. Its crazy how small the microsd is. Its pretty much impossible to find miniSD, but given that the n810 is only speced to take up to 8gb I guess there's no point in miniSD anyways.

And yea the n810 is precisely the answer to the question. I like to use it to listen to Internet radio stations around the house.