Monterey has an Amtrak bus link to the Salinas station, and they sell it pretty well, including in a package with aquarium tickets. But it's a shame they have that bus, because Monterey had fine train service of its own. One remaining car is in the Sacramento railroad museum while the right of way has become a walking trail. Our country was collectively asleep at the switch while that stuff was shut down and removed.

Boise got its electric street railway in 1890 and it coupled with great intercity lines. All gone.

I don't stay in luxury locations (just because I'm not fancy) and in general I am with the common people. I didn't see that they weren't riding the trains in Europe. Rather, they didn't own automobiles.

Southwest finally got 110 outlets between the seats. Of course Amtrak has had this forever...

My impression was that Stansted was at least an hour's ride from anywhere that I wanted to be. Now, if you happen to live there (and lots of folks do) it might work out.

I'm a little scared about flying on Ryanair anyway. But then again, even Lufthansa screwed up with their discount airline.

I remember being in a train station in Italy and seeing a train for Egypt. NY to SFO is 2915 miles, about 60 hours driving (I did it in that long, a long time ago) and theoretically 10 hours on a Japan-class high speed rail and 6 hours for a flight plus 3 for logistics. So given that the rail is city-to-city and has an hour for departure logistics and 15 minutes for arrival logistics, it's not that far apart. Now, put a shower on the train and a full-recline bed and I'm sold.

I just drove the I-5 all of the way from LA to San Francisco yesterday as I'd brought a carful of test equipment to an engineer there. I didn't fly because of the freight I had, but in general train transport is better for carrying a lot of baggage. Less handling, less fees for freight.

Also, planes can't compete when there's a good high-speed rail, because of their logistical complications. Airports are usually far from town and require their own train to get to. Nobody takes a plane instead of Eurostar. While Southwest will survive on its many other routes, their SFO to LAX route is doomed.

Having traveled extensively in Europe, and having enjoyed never having to use a car and rarely needing a plane because their trains are so fast, cheap, and efficient, I marvel at the idiocy of our citizens, it's not the government's fault, in not having insisted on keeping and improving rail since the 40's. Americans are total retards about this, they can't ever have any excuse.

You just ruined the chance for people to say global warming is going to result in the moon crashing into the Earth, silly poster.

Nonsense. As every Solarian knows global warming is due to the sun bestowing it's benevolent, fiery appendage upon us.

Actually I find that Facebook presents a fair and reasonable range of views on all issues, now that everyone finally agrees that global warming was a myth.

What I am getting from the videos is that this test was a success but that there was indeed an engine failure and the system recovered from it successfully by throttling off the opposing engine. There was less Delta-V than expected, max altitude was lower than expected, downrange was lower than expected, and that tumble after trunk jettison and during drogue deploy looked like it would have been uncomfortable for crew.

This is the second time that SpaceX has had an engine failure and recovered from it. They get points for not killing the theoretical crew either time. There will be work to do. It's to be expected, this is rocket science.

It sounds to me like the launch engineers were rattled by the short downrange and the launch director had to rein them in.

IP address is part of the

Ahhh. This must be some strange new usage of voluntarily, of which I was previously unaware.

In an alternate timeline, Keith Moon found the 21st century to be full of challenges.

I'm not saying whether it's a good idea or a bad one, but isn't the fact that it's a defacto standard, sort of the objectors' point? Yes, you're right: it's a long-established tradition, with deep roots going back to when the computer room was a total sausagefest. I can't playfully slap the secretary's ass and then get off the hook by saying, "oh c'mon, we dudes have been doing that forever! It's always been like that. Quit trying to change our culture."

Changing the culture is an explicit part of a lot of peoples' agenda, because nobody really likes the damn computer room sausagefest (we just don't know what to do about it, which is why I really have no idea whether or not the picture is really a problem).

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.