This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.

Oh well.

-Isaac

Actually, it isn't completely clear what the arrangement is with RIM and the various intelligence services. RIM allegedly have some kind of data-sharing/intercept agreement with U.S. agencies

RIM's customers are overwhelmingly not located in Canada. Yet RIM's servers are in Canada, rather than somewhere with cheaper power, more bandwidth, and lower network latency, like, say, Virginia. Why is that?

NSA is (OK, was) forbidden from intercepting domestic communications between US entities. But every packet a Blackberry sends is addressed to Canada! Problem solved.

Of course, if an intelligence agency is interested in you, nothing you do with a phone - no matter the make - is going to be private. OTOH, if your objective is to prevent Google or Apple or your mobile carrier from monetizing your identity, a Blackberry connected to your own BES server is a relatively easy and secure option.

I can't really be bothered at this point, though. I'm pro privacy but have realized that I am, in fact, mortal and have other things I'd rather spend time doing than operating my own VPN head-end for the purpose of backhauling my mobile IP traffic.

My single biggest beef with Android (at least the Sense-flavored version that I have to use due to ActiveSync policies) is that there's no reliable way to disable HTML email and remote element loading. As a result, I'm continually guessing from subjects and senders whether or not a given message is safe to open.

Google and/or HTC developers really should know better. At least I have a decent browser-only solution now, but I'd prefer something integrated with the base system's webkit (assuming that's what's being used to render HTML in the mail client as well as in the lousy default browser.)

-Isaac

The scary thing is... Leonard Nimoy was in the original Transformers movie. No, not that one, I mean the one from the 1980s. Leonard Nimoy voiced Galvatron in it.

Another fun, if irrelevant fact about the animated Transformers movie from 1986 - it was Orson Welles' last performance. He was the voice of Unicron, the giant planet-eating robot. Presumably this wasn't much of a stretch for the good Mr. Welles.

-Isaac

Today's Republicans think they are on the debate team and will take the opposite side of any Democrat position. I bet if the Democrats said "we are against the raping of babies", the Republicans would instinctively pick the opposite side (regardless of their personal opinion; no I am not saying or implying the Republicans are for that).

No, naive.

The R's would run campaign ads with a scary white-on-black text: "Democrat John Jackson: 'we are... raping babies" and a voiceover reminding the viewer that only Jack Johnson can be trusted to stand up to the baby-raping Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco (and we all know what that means, wink wink.) Elect Jack Johnson!

At least hiring the kid on a bike gives the kid on a bike a job.

Hypothetically, say a UAV can do the kid's job for 20% less per delivery. What are the kid's prospects now that the delivery business has been taken over by a robots? What about the kid's family who depended on that income?

I'm no luddite - it's not as though e.g. manufacture of antiretroviral medications can or should be done by people stirring pots by hand - but this doesn't sound like a good use of automation.

A much more interesting innovation in distribution is filling the extra space in Coca-Cola crates with pods for delivering medicines, leveraging the awesome distribution network of Coca-Cola (which is available in some of the most remote inhabited places on Earth.) See http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/633148/-/r17ejdz/-/index.html

-Isaac

What Chris said. Thanks for the fun ride & for providing a space for nerds and trolls of all stripes.

Also, I'll always remember that bitchin' party at the China Club.

Have fun with the next thing.

-Isaac

I can't speak for all phones but I can disable the GPS functionality on mine if I want to.

Sure, but you can still be tracked by the network and anyone who cares.

E911 Phase 2 requires the ability to localize your phone to 300 meters, within 6 minutes regardless of whether you've "disabled GPS" or not.

I challenge you to see the affects of anti-aliasing on a screen with a DPI equivalent to the iphone 4.

The eye is pretty good at picking out jaggies, especially in tough cases (high contrast, thin line, shallow slope against the pixel grid,) and where the screen is viewed from close range (my eye is closer to my phone's screen than my desktop monitor.)

Now, I don't think antialiasing makes a huge deal to game mechanics - but it is nice to have in high-contrast information situations (e.g. google maps) regardless of the pixel pitch of the underlying display.

>Schools are more concerned with getting everone to pass regardless of quality,
Exactly. Egalitarianism is destructive.

I would argue strongly that the issue is not egalitarianism, but a business/customer mindset at the collegiate level.

The students (or the students' parents) are the customers. Denying the customers what they "paid for" is problematic - hurt feelings, loss of goodwill, no alumni support, etc. This is true of elite and quotidian institutions alike; elite institutions just have tougher entry requirements designed to build a class of admitted students who can hack it.

At the elementary and secondary levels, the pressures are more PR - test scores and graduation rates are the concern. Still, most teachers practicing today beyond the kindergarten level have stories of butthurt parents protesting bad grades or lawyering up when a kid is faced with suspension.

Anyhow, I think the reasons behind the drive to get as many people as possible to pass are complicated - and not entirely reducible to egalitarianism.

-Isaac

Hey, I'm not old! Now get off my lawn.

Chu-Chu Rocket makes it in but not a single entry in the Civilization series?

I don't understand.

-Isaac

Yeah, same guy. Made his nut as CTO of Microsoft in the 90's, but has had a pretty solid career in numerous fields over the years.

-Isaac

Herve This is indeed the pioneer of this style - he actually coined the term Molecular Gastronomy.

He's an engaging speaker, even in English, and clearly talented.

Unfortunately, his books (or at least the English translations of them) are pretty poor. Clunky translation, marginal editing, downright lousy typesetting. Mostly anecdotes about food science, precious little of use in the kitchen.

Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is a far better book than any of This' three volumes that have made it into English translation.

-Isaac

This is terrible. 3 tabs are enough to spin the fans up on my MacBook Pro. Where's light mode gone?!

-Isaac