I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.

Depends, what are you using the NUC for?

Games? For 200 bucks you can buy a PS3 that plays mostly the same games, has a BluRay player and plays digital media. For 400 bucks you can get a PS4 which has a better GPU.

For anything else, depending on how much horsepower you need. If you're rendering video or editing RAW photos or audio, sure, it's probably unbeatable for size/power consumption.

Anything else though, we're at a stage where things are pretty much Good Enough.

Very frequently, doing the wrong thing is much worse than doing nothing.
They might be doing something, but doing something is not in itself a praise-worthy goal.

$51.1 billion? (I'll switch to 55 billion for 2015 numbers since they're close enough and 2015 numbers are what everyone uses now) You'd have to be crazy if you think it's going to be that low. The current estimate (Feb 2015) is for $68 billion for Phase 1, the Central Valley segment.

While there could be a few bad actors, Most of the DLC I've seen is an extra for an already-complete game, a game with plenty of content.

Also keep this in mind. In the mid-1980s, most games cost around $40. That's nearly $90 in 2015 dollars.
Game prices have FALLEN drastically in the last 30 years.

Europe is Europe. In America, tempting targets get subjected to security theater to deter terrorism. Currently, passenger rail is not a tempting target... but if it was..

If you want a good high-speed rail from SF south LA, then a northeast trip up to Sacramento is a pretty big detour.

The estimated cost more than doubled within a few years of the bond and our rates of inflation have been extremely low.
It's not inflation. The costs were intentionally underreported (or at best, naively reported) so that the bond measure would pass and that California would get locked into the plan.

This isn't Ecotopia, no matter if some in California desire that nightmare scenario.

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.

No. If anything, I assert that good trains are a hallmark of the set of good economic policies that lead to the general well-being of the citizenship.

Poor people are poor because they can't get jobs. One of the reasons is that they can't get to jobs. Can't afford a reliable car and insurance and gas in the US? Can't work! Too often, that's the equation.

The other reasons they are poor are that we were equally bad in investing in other things we should have spent more upon publicly, like good primary education. This is caused by more wealthy folks not wanting to pay the necessary taxes.