Wait, what? This is pure crazy.

Having tech-related knowledge doesn't make you immune to dropping things.

While some of what you say is absolutely true, keep in mind NIMBYism has been a major point of resistance for Metro.

The Purple Line was being built-out to Westwood about 25 years ago but NIMBYs killed it before the TBMs ever made it to the West Side. An unrelated methane explosion was used as ammunition against the plan.

Then we had County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky essentially ban subway construction.

The Valley? More NIMBYs. The Orange Line became a bus after people claimed their families could cross a wide boulevard, but not two light rail tracks.

Metro has been forced to avoid doing anything of note in huge sections of the city. There's a reason some of the more obvious routes have nothing, but we're extending a line to Azusa.

Anyway, here is a nice look at the evolution of the plans.

No problem. ;)

Might I suggest putting a trash can fire next to the chillax office worker next time?

"My office is on fire, but it an't no thang."

Yes it was!

Most major cities had extensive streetcar and interurban lines. It might surprise you that Los Angeles was once a model city for mass transit in the U.S. A massive network of electric trams began running in 1887 and continued on through 1961. The late 50s / early 60s marked the auto boom and death of comprehensive public transit in LA (and many other cities, as well) leaving only some bus routes behind. That began a period of planning designed to focus exclusively on the automobile.

The funny thing is that the whole "People will never stop using X! This city was built for it!" argument against mass transit that you hear today was used against cars 40 years ago - after nearly 80 years of mass transit shaping the city and lifestyle.

Now, LA has become the site of a transit renaissance. The period of time between the end of the Red Car's 74 year run and the completion of the last segment of the Red Line subway was 39 years.

Car-centric planning was a blip. Don't believe the hype that claims otherwise.

Modern clean agent systems are kind of amazing. By amazing, I mean they don't kill you anymore. (Sorry Halon / CO2!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuEylKMvbjw

You're talking about a show that was supplied with high-res space imagery by fans at NASA... and then included that in exterior FX shots.

Not everyone takes the "it looks cool, good enough!" approach to making TV.

I feel like the decidedly suburban, car-centric approach to Maps in iOS 6 is something that can't be improved without a rethink. "Hard work" isn't enough if it's going in the wrong direction.

Google Maps offered an elegant and seamless approach to providing transit directions in iOS 1 to 5.

Apple Maps offers a clunky "solution" that kicks you out of the app, forces you to use whatever UI the 3rd party app maker uses for your local transit system and doesn't guarantee a minimum level of quality (a lot of the transit apps are pretty terrible). Traveling? Hope there's an app for that city and you feel like getting used to a new UI.

Apple claims 3rd party transit apps do a better job, but honestly, they often don't.

I've tried a large number for a few major U.S. cities. If you want to find out every single bus or train that passes nearby, they're just great, but I find them clunky as hell when it comes to route planning, and that's how I believe most people use them most of the time.

"Will I drive or take a train / bus?" is a question without a definite answer in most American cities due to the limited or growing transit systems. For example, L.A. is getting back to its mass transit roots, but there are a lot of trips that really demand a car.

With Google Maps, I can effortlessly switch between auto, transit, biking and walking for a proposed trip. One finger-press and it's done. Then I can see multiple routes on the map, or a plain, readable list. Total time, connections (if any), the next best time to go... It's really ideal and has been indispensable. It's honestly the thing that pushed me over the edge to buy the iPhone in the first place.

That was their policy on phone calls, if I remember correctly.

Anything nonsensical, unsourced, reaching reference under:

In Anime

In Western Animation

In Manga

In Comics

Then there's the classic spam for shitty bands that have never performed outside of their local pizza place but feel the need to spam an article with some ridiculous mention:

In Music

GarageBandThatFormedLastTuesday recorded a song called "Roth's Child" that was written about a month after their lead singer saw the trailer for "The Human Stain".

I really can't believe that the reacting, tweeting, flagging, aggregating and alerting could happen in 20 seconds or less. Not a chance.

I find it extremely unlikely that tweets you're referring to were posted within 1/3 of a minute of the first shaking taking place.

Not to mention, that all of that aside, you still need a representative sample of people from a geographic area with public Twitter accounts. Unless you're OK with 8 people from the Salton Sea triggering an automated alert chain all the way to Santa Barbara. And you have to make sure no IP spoofing is going on to trigger a fake alert.

And then you have to make sure they're not dummy accounts. I don't have to tell you Twitter is absolutely filled with them.

"Sorry 3.8 million residents of L.A. who are without hot water / ability to cook until SoCal gas can come out and reopen all of your valves - a few people nonexistent people tweeted about an earthquake."

And then you still have no way to quantify the intensity of the shaking. A 5.5 is the same as a 7.2 in the minds of a Twitter user watching things fall from their shelves during the first 20 seconds of a quake.

If you don't have a rough approximation of how intense the quake is, you have no way to select the appropriate response.

This whole concept screams of another "WOW WEB 2.0 CROWDSOURCED USER CREATED CONTENT NONTRADITIONAL MEDIA" thing that moves forward based on the inertia of its own perceived specialness.

It will only report quakes that are already over. News reports, online reporting "Did You Feel It?" pages, etc already do a pretty good job of telling seismologists that something just happened.

Valuable earthquake detection would be detecting the P-Wave from a quake in progress, and automatically broadcasting a SAME Code, combined with some kind of equivilent forcibly pushed to every cell phone connected to a tower. Japan has something like this already. California is kinda, sorta working on it, but I'm pretty sure it's grossly underfunded and not really a priority.

Earthquake models suggest a quake on the northern or southern reaches of the San Andreas fault would reach Los Angeles in about 40 seconds. That's actually a huge chunk of time.

Let's assume:

- 20 seconds to detect a quake / automatically crosscheck with multiple sensors and transmit a warning to a predefined area.

- 5 to 10 seconds for devices to receive, decode and go into alert mode. Weather radios are always listening for SAME transmissions and can decode more or less instantly (assuming the user has programmed in their location). Cell networks could probably get the data there in the time it takes for a regular text message to arrive.

- That gives you 10 to 15 seconds to pull your car over, stop doing delicate surgery, stop fixing your roof, etc and find something to crawl under. It also gives you time to trigger automated fail safes. Gas valves can be set to close, emergency generators can be spun-up, fire pumps can activate, elevators can go to their recall floors and hold their doors open, while fire station doors can roll-up on their own and lock in place.

Yeah, about that...

Gonna chime in and agree with both of you here. eInk is superior to any other screen, as far as books are concerned.

I have an iPhone 4S and first generation Kindle. Maybe someday I'll go ahead and buy an iPad. But it will never take the place of a device with an eInk display. I have precisely zero desire to read a book on anything else (other than paper).

I hate managers / CEOs who try to change as much as possible as soon as possible, but I'd be happy to have a new CEO experiment with improving employee amenities in their first few weeks.