There are a couple problems with that.

1. Railroads have far more severe grade and minimum turn radius limits than highways. Particularly if you're talking about high speed rail. In other words, vehicles with tires can climb steeper hills than trains, and vehicles traveling at 150 km/hr can turn sharper corners than vehicles going at 400 km/hr. Even trains traveling at much more modest speeds can run into trouble when asked to turn sharp corners (if power or braking is applied incorrectly during a turn, you can pull the cars in the middle of the train off the track. Imagine a string formed into a curve and you pull on one end of it while holding the other end down).

2. Railroad rights-of-way are wider than you think. You'd have to shove one set of lanes over to make the median large enough. When they did this for BART - which has much more modest requirements - they still had to partially reconstruct lanes on I-580 to make room.

You could probably do it like that in the middle of nowhere where it's flat, but if you're talking about the middle of nowhere, you have no incentive to do it like that - just build the tracks next door to the road if you like. No need to run it down the middle. The only place you'd need to use highway medians would be in built-up areas and through mountain passes. In the former case, you'd not save a whole lot of money doing it, and in the latter, it probably would not be a usable route.

... the marketplace will respond. At those sorts of prices, all of the alternatives, like solar, that are impractical today will be cheap by comparison. I don't think high speed rail will necessarily have anything to do with it, however.

Rail has far different security problems. If you want to take out a train, it's far, far easier to sabotage the tracks out in the middle of nowhere than it is to smuggle something dangerous onto the train itself.

The most likely prospect for a bullet train in the United States is the vaunted California high speed rail project. And even that is going to be a tough row to hoe.

Federal rail regulations being what they are, the only prospect for high speed rail is if the entire system is grade separated - that is, there are no at-grade crossings. Existing rights-of-way can be used, but every where out in the middle of Modesto or Coalinga where a gravel road crosses the tracks the road will either need to be cut or a bridge or tunnel built. Next, the route between Bakersfield and Los Angeles, as well as the route between Modesto and San Jose will need to be redone, because existing ROWs are not flat or straight enough for high speeds. Even existing ROWs elsewhere, such as the Caltrain ROW up the San Francisco Peninsula, may be inadequate. Caltrain runs enough trains up and down that the extra headway for high speed trains may make it necessary to quad-track that entire route - which may mean bulldozing houses and/or businesses along the line in some spots.

All of that is bad enough, but before you can even begin thinking about turning over dirt, you need not only to write EIRs, but then have them stand up to Luddite court challenges. And then, whatever land you wind up using for the new ROW needs to be acquired - meaning that whoever owns it now needs to be paid fair market value for it (see also, 5th amendment). The Chinese government has a big advantage here - If anyone actually asks about the environmental impact of a train route, they get reeducated.

All of this is mainly because we want high speed rail to go between places where there is demand. If you read TFA, this line is being constructed at least partially to create demand - that is, they are taking trips to nowhere in order for nowhere to wind up being a desirable destination. It's a bit like the transcontinental railroad was in the middle of the 19th century here. Nobody really wanted to go to any of the whistle stops between Sacramento and Chicago, but since the train went there, communities sprung up. But when the railroad was built, there was nothing there. Nowadays, building high speed rail from San Francisco to San Diego is a gigantic pain in the ass because the destinations are already filled in.

High speed rail should, in general, be grade separated and fenced in to avoid such hijinks.

Whoosh.

Ironically, those LN2 tanks DO present a danger that is worth warning about. But the warning isn't that "nitrogen may be present," obviously. The issue is that a leaky LN2 tank in an enclosed space may wind up making nitrogen the ONLY gas present, which is extremely hazardous. You can pass out without feeling anything abnormal in advance, and then quickly suffocate. Nitrogen asphyxiation has been advocated as an execution method for this very reason, in fact. Two people died in a nitrogen asphyxiation accident at NASA some time ago. The second tried to rescue the first without first understanding what went wrong, and then succumbed himself (if I am remembering the story properly).

Preferably, of brain cancer.

It's a lovely place to visit, but I am glad I don't have to pay taxes there.

So what do they want the warnings to say? "Warning, this cell phone may or may not cause cancer?" Didn't they already pass prop 65 to say that damn near everything may or may not cause cancer? Honesty - the last time I went the movies there was a prop 65 warning on the door.

They seriously need to stop crying wolf^wcancer.

Port 25 egress blocking is no excuse. See RFC-2476.

You should set up an authenticated-only SMTP listener on the submit port (587). See RFC-2476.

You should provide an authenticated SMTP server for your clients to use. And yes, this can be done even when their ISP blocks port 25 egress - set up an authenticated-only SMTP listener on the Submit port (587). I do this for my home domain, which means that I absolutely get to use "mx -all" for SPF.

His protest is without teeth. If he really objects to the concept of SPF, then he should publish an SPF record of "?ALL". That way, people will know he's just not being apathetic.

Irrelevant. Once someone is under arrest, a search of their person, papers and effects is "reasonable." Go RTFA.

And yet, they can stop everyone driving past a sobriety checkpoint in the hopes of finding someone whose breath smells like booze.