Funny how there is no shortage of land available for building automobile roads. They go through all of those expensive neighborhoods, without exception. There's room to piggyback urban rail on them. Regarding LA to SF, there is nothing but farmland for most of the way. That's the first thing you learn about I-5, and even 101 is the same for much of its length. Getting the train down the SF Penninsula and into urban LA is a small part of the overall route.

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.

The cost of my labor per hour is a lot higher than $70. Any trip where I can do even an hour of writing instead of driving is more than paid for.

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.

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.

First of all, this is the link that the story should have included. It includes updates of the scoreboard, etc. On it you will see that even though the brains are collectively beating Claudico, the computer is actually over $100,000 ahead against Jason Les, a feat that almost no human could match. Yes, Claudico is down against the other three, but these are the top players in the world, and most human pros would get clobbered much worse by these guys. Are we really so hard to impress? This is the first time that something like this has been tried, and already, the computer is performing on a level that most poker pros would love to reach.

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.

"Geoengineering is a bad idea." "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
"So let's do some testing and improve our models of how it works."
"No way, we can't be doing research on geoengineering!" "Why not?"
"Because geoengineering is such a bad idea!" "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
...

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.