When was the last time you saw a new freeway in California? Yes once the land rights are secured they're secured, but getting new ones is a huge stumbling block.

Yes that's why the problem with the high speed rail plan is political, not technical.

Can you imagine the size of the shitstorm that would happen if the government nabbed all that land? It would be insane. The lawsuits alone would cost billions.

On the other hand, a bunch of pylons is fine - they don't split your land in half, and the footprint is relatively small.

Yes, the actual high speed rail technology is a concept that's been done before - however, stomping over all of that privately owned land between LA and SF is a political concept that's completely infeasible at this point in time.

Although Elon Musk is using a bunch of existing technology in new ways, his plan is politically feasible - and it's not like we would just start building the Hyperloop without doing a proof-of-concept first. If it turns out that the idea doesn't scale, we'd do something else.

Maximum capacity of something that will never get fucking built is utterly irrelevant.

The current high speed rail plan is so completely infeasible, you might as well say the system will have infinite capacity.

The border patrol considers everything within a hundred miles of any coast or national border to be under its jurisdiction.

Here's a map of what that looks like. Note that it completely covers pretty much all of the major population centers.

Those would be terrible in practice though - crud would accumulate in the ridges, and it would get in the way when you want to do something wherever it is.

Flush ones would be the way to go.

Yes, because professional snipers in the world's most-funded army are going to use an off-the-shelf commercial product, and not say some super expensive custom-made equipment that exactly fits their mission parameters.

They're totally going to use some equipment that basically amounts to an iPod wired to a laser and duct taped to their rifle.

Are there climatologists who claim global warming will destroy civilization?

Because from what I've seen, they mostly just say it'll cause drastic changes over the next hundred years, which is fairly well supported; whether or not those changes cause some sort of societal collapse depends on how we handle them.

Erm have you actually read Christy's stuff? He disagrees on the magnitude of the effect of climate change on humans, the quantity of our contribution, and which mitigation measures we should take if any - not about whether or not climate change is happening, or if we contribute anything to it.

And there are real scientists, respected climatologists, who are asking "how do we know?" about global warming. And some are coming to different conclusions.

Name one who isn't Richard Lindzen, and you might have a point. Until then you're pretty much just making stuff up.

I don't want to fund research on gun violence either.

Well congratulations then, that's actually been passed into law. It's nearly impossible for academics to get the raw data they would need to do research, entirely due to that one amendment to some random bill.

The overall impression is that life tends to "stagnate": once life evolves into an efficient survival mechanism, there's no pressure to evolve further. Evolution aims at being a better "fit" for the unchanging environment, but more complexity is simply not needed.

Yeah, one thing to keep in mind is that our world has had several such plateaus, during which (as far as we can tell) no sentient life evolved.

I wouldn't be surprised if life is exceptionally common out there in the universe, but it really seems like life that's capable of leaving its planet is nearly unheard of.

My point was that even with Google having not having said even a single peep about fiber in the Bay Area at all, I think they're still more likely to come around and wire up my parents house than Verizon is - despite Verizon having announced their fiber plan eight years ago.

My parents live in the Bay Area, and my dad's been talking about how the very moment Verizon FIOS shows up at our house he's buying it.

He's been saying that since 2005.

It's been eight goddamn years and Verizon has been dragging their asses the whole time. At this rate, Google Fiber will get to my parent's area before Verizon pulls collective their thumbs out of their asses.

Which, I think, is the point of Google Fiber.

Dude, some ISPs are already injecting ads into web content that you access through them. If it's a choice between that and Google knowing that I look at Slashdot ten times a day, I'm pretty okay with the loss of privacy.