That's not true at all. If you are considering *passenger* rail, then yes, it's terrible. But we don't really use much passenger rail. That chicken and egg problem aside, US freight rail is pretty good.

For instance: http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576136-quiet-success-americas-freight-railways-back-track

"Even the American Society of Civil Engineers, which howls incessantly (and predictably) about the awful state of the nation’s infrastructure, shows grudging respect for goods railways in a recent report."

Given your experience, I actually had a question about the pipelines. It would seem most of the failures are caused by a combination of pressure and time. Assuming that you have to operate on a sliding scale of perfect safety for infinite cost and reasonable safety for much lower cost*, is there a way to build pipelines with specific failure points such that you avoid failures at costly points? Something like a fuse in an electrical circuit; you certainly don't want it to blow, but it's there to blow so that worse places don't burn. I've always been a little surprised that discussion of running pipeline through sensitive areas didn't involve a compromise where you just build in a costly but agreed upon sigma of reliability into the region at issue by shunting the risk to an area you're prepared to clean up.

*A possibly erroneous assumption.

I'd imagine the lack of social networking elements is the draw. People assume that today's kids don't care about privacy, but I get the sense that most of them want their social connections to be more ephemeral than Facebook encourages. With Facebook, defriending someone could be slightly embarrassing, so I just accumulate a pile of people I used to know and may not identify with anymore, with potentially added stress if I delete them. With a messaging app, I message you, or I don't. You can add all the privacy features you want to Facebook, but the possibly preferable alternative is not putting all the effort into maintaining a profile.

Whoa, footnote [1] is a little too egregious for me to let it pass unremarked. Why in the world could the insurance company see the picture? How long was it from posting to reaction? Which company was this? (I'm not inclined to reward this kind of behavior)

For one, the logical leap they made is huge, and for another, that's some serious monitoring of online traffic for this to be true. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical, not that I'm sure they wouldn't love to do this.

I think the inefficiency is part of the point, honestly. I personally dislike Facebook exactly because it has tried to be where you contact everyone you know, regardless of the context, and I simply don't want to spend the time to curate a stark divide between sharing with coworkers and friends when I don't share that much on Facebook in the first place. At this point in my life, it's like my contact list, except that it posts cat videos.

The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact. If I take the time to learn your details in a completely new or inefficient contact system, it means that messages from me are more likely to be significant because there's a greater barrier to me contacting you and I clearly put more effort into it that pulling up your profile on Facebook.

The summary makes the same ridiculous assumption I see repeatedly, which is that a desire for higher resolutions means that I want the text to remain tied to a number of pixels. Of course I don't want the text to get arbitrarily smaller; I just want it to get sharper. And I definitely notice. Every time I take a look at my boss's MacBook Pro I feel my eyes relax a bit compared to the jagged fonts on my Air.

The real problem is that the OSes are terrible at rescaling to take advantage of the increased ppi. OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.

Ridiculous. Imagine you were subject to a national government that did those things. At least this way, if a state does something really shitty, you can freely MOVE TO ANOTHER STATE! As states face that kind of backlash they change their laws, and a federal law usually only arises after testing and consensus at the state level.

It's not perfect, but it's not a bad system, because it allows experimentation and slow but definite change. Unless you figure that pooling together the governments will lead to representatives that are somehow more deliberative and considerate, I don't understand the desire to eliminate it.

Because they are organizationally distinct, with separate laws, populations, and modes of living. If you can't make a law at the federal level that most states are happy with, you shouldn't make it! Imagine a law that restricted certain things you could do on your property, such as hunting. That is perfectly reasonable and probably desired in Delaware and Rhode Island. It's incredibly unreasonable in Montana.

If it passed because of coastal states, it is the tyranny of the majority over Montana, and is a reflection that those laws should just be made at the state level in the first place, not the federal level.

Okay, honestly, I not interested in arguing that point.

I am legitimately curious about Gates foundation stipulations. Can you provide a link? I know nothing about these contracts, so I would be interested in seeing what you're talking about.

His wealth has continued to grow irrespective of any of that, I'm sure, due to a massive spread of investments.

However, I can't find any reference to these contracts stipulating restrictions on food growth or the alleged unsafe vaccines. Do you have a source for either of those? I'd like to follow that up.

In any place receiving these vaccines, wouldn't it be a headache to enforce that kind of contract anyway given the state of the local judicial system?

That's not what he said. He said people with something to hide will be in that category, not that everyone in that category has something to hide. And he's right; this can't be considered an unbiased sample set.

The Coinbase service based in the US works well for just buying and selling (not trading). I didn't buy way back in the day, I bought a dozen or so over the course of the summer, and sold about half at various points (usually not at the peak, sadly).

Of the exchanges I've tried, BTC-e is frankly the most stable. It's got a mild air of sketchiness from being Russian and spartan, but I've seen some of the other exchanges (Cryptsy, etc.) crap out or become unusable under load. Mt. Gox is a bit pointless given the difficulty of getting dollars out, and usually trades higher since speculators want a higher dollar return in exchange for the risk.

Sad to see BTC dropping right now, but I've already cashed out the initial speculation and a profit, so anything else is just gravy. I'll probably take out a bit more and just hold the rest indefinitely.

All good observations, because I'm not so concerned about it avoiding one-off obstacles encountered serially as I am about the choices it makes between two bad options, like the braking path that goes through a small dog vs. a crawling toddler.

That's not how it works. First to file means that, given that two claimants of a patent, the first to file will get it. It does away with a messy process that incentivized holding on to trade secrets and delaying filing a patent as long as possible. First to invent can get incredibly messy and expensive to prove. Before some reform years ago, there was a practice known as submarine patents where applications would be submitted and withdrawn indefinitely, effectively allowing extended patent protection without disclosure.

If prior art is out there, the patent is invalid anyway in both cases. Quoth Wikipedia:

"Prior art (also known as state of the art, which also has other meanings, or background art[1]), in most systems of patent law,[2] constitutes all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent's claims of originality. If an invention has been described in the prior art, a patent on that invention is not valid."

Sure, maybe they'll get the patent. If it's the same as Bitcoin, it would be invalidated. First to invent vs. first to file doesn't really come into play here because no one else is trying to patent it.

Where did you get that information from? I haven't seen an estimate like that anywhere else, and that would be all over the place if it were true, even if just by speculators trying to short the market.