The flip side is that when halfway through the development cycle, the dev decides to go a completely different direction and starts over with a radically different concept, now the people who bought in at the beginning don't have any ability to vote with their dollars and ask for a refund, which is problematic. So there are abusers on both sides.

More importantly, this change makes early access a whole lot less attractive and a whole lot riskier from the perspective of a potential buyer. As a result, I'd expect people to be a lot less likely to bite the bullet and give people money before something is complete or nearly complete. And I suspect that the people who do buy early access games won't be willing to spend as much money for that privilege because of the increased risk caused by this rule change. So creators are likely to get significantly less money by making something available in early access than they would have before this change to the rules — likely to the point where it doesn't even make sense to release something as early access until it is mostly finished, which completely defeats the purpose.

There's probably a middle ground somewhere, but my suspicion is that this will turn out to be a significant net negative for content creators, in spite of preventing a small number of freeloaders from taking advantage of it.

Also, if it becomes obvious that making things available for early access won't bring in a significant percentage of the final purchase price, I would expect most content creators to start making early access versions available through other vendors, either with a Patreon-like model or by making early versions free with the understanding that at some point, they'll charge for it, and only people who buy it will be able to upgrade past version 0.5 or whatever. And approximately none of those people will end up converting to paid ownership through Steam, so Steam will also end up making less money as a result.

So I'm having a hard time seeing how this is supposed to actually be a revenue-positive decision for anyone involved.

The funny thing is where they call this America's first true high-speed rail system, when it averages just 100 MPH, meanwhile parts of Acela express have been running 90 MPH for more than two decades, with peak speeds over 150 MPH. And over the course of this year, the equipment on that route is being replaced with new Avelia Liberty equipment that may actually make it average faster speeds than what Brightline is proposing.

To be pedantic, by 1985, Metroliner *barely* qualified as high-speed, because it could hit a maximum of 125 MPH, which is the absolute minimum for qualifying as high-speed rail. But in 1969, it was just 120 MPH, which isn't considered HSR.

The difference between Brightline and the California HSR is that the Brightline "high-speed" rail project involves only about 40 miles of new track, largely along an existing limited-access toll highway, with the remaining 195 miles using existing tracks, and as I understand it, exactly none of it is running at speeds that actually qualify for a high-speed rail designation (125 MPH for upgraded tracks, or 155 MPH for new tracks). In fact, it averages just 69 MPH, according to Wikipedia.

So sure, Brightline is a shining example of how to achieve "results", if by results, you mean spending as much money as California's high-speed rail system has spent so far, while only building 40 miles of track and setting up a new passenger train line that on average is within the margin of error of being the same speed as driving. If they get the speeds up, it might eventually be interesting, but right now, it just seems like a huge money pit to me.

At least California's HSR is designed for actual high speeds (max 220 MPH), rather than for half that speed, and when it eventually gets finished, will provide a very real benefit. And if Brightline had to deal with a decade of environmental reviews like the California HSR project did, they probably wouldn't have even bothered starting to build it. The delays in California have very little to do with government running the project and everything to do with other parts of the government getting in the way of the project.

That's really awful if the best they can achieve on a new track is 110 MPH. High speed rail *starts* at 125, so even that doesn't qualify as HSR. Many passenger rail projects built recently achieve roughly twice that speed. 110 MPH wasn't even state of the art in the 1960s. These days, that's a joke. Is there inadequate grade separation, or did they just cheap out on the trains?

Is it? It takes 3 hours and 23 minutes to do that trip by car. You're saying it makes that trip in 21 minutes? I don't think so.

Doing some quick math, the trains leave once an hour, so your average wait time should be roughly 30 minutes (assuming randomly distributed arrival times). Add that to the 2 hours and 45 minutes for the trip, and you save... Wow! You save EIGHT WHOLE MINUTES! That is TOTALLY worth $12 Billion! Oh, wait. Some of them take two hours and 50 minutes. So only three minutes saved. Maybe not such a good deal. [rolls eyes]

And to think some people don't think the California HSR makes sense. This gives new meaning to the phrase "corporate welfare".

The solution isn't to cut the long-distance routes. The solution is to fix them. Right now, those routes are pretty problematic, frequently running many hours behind because of freight trains delaying the Amtrak trains unreasonably. And the Zephyr ends up averaging just 55 MPH, which isn't really a great speed for traveling across the country, but that's not including the time spent at stops. With stops, it averages just 39 MPH, assuming it arrives on time. There are electric bicycles that can almost reach that speed (ignoring charging).

By the straightest route, I can get to my parents' house in 3 days of hard driving. By train, which doesn't go all that far out of the way, I can get there in... well, roughly three days. The difference is that by car, I would leave at 9 or 10 in the morning from my house, and on day 3, I'd arrive in the evening, whereas with Amtrak, I'd leave my house at more like 7 in the morning and arrive at... I think 3 in the morning on day 4.

In other words, the problem isn't that long-distance rail lines can't be viable in the U.S., but rather that running trains at two-thirds of 1950s train speeds can't be viable anywhere.

Compel the rail companies to comply with the law and give priority to passenger trains, run the trains closer to their maximum speed more often (which will probably require spending a lot of money on rail repairs), and reduce time spent at each station, and things will get a lot better. And of course, high-speed rail lines running at 150 MPH or faster would reduce travel time to a third what it takes on Amtrak, making it fairly competitive with air travel for most people, which would be a game-changer.

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.

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).