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.

What exactly is the appeal to X11, in 2024?

I've not been a serious Linux desktop user for a number of years now, but when I was, Wayland was far more appealing than X11 on every basis: performance, remote desktop capability, overhead, security.

No. You also need to mod the body to a reptilian pattern. Some of the dinosaurs would make a good model. How about a flame wielding pterosaur?

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.

Actually, I think violet, or a least indigo, eyes are more plausible. All that requires is an additional pigment.

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.

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

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.