Except that the congestion caused by individual drivers on roads (even with each car fully loaded) is far greater than that caused by mass transit vehicles such as buses, trams or trains. And as congestion increases, the cars spend a lot more time waiting in gridlock, and a lot more fuel is burnt than in the theoretical optimum.

Also, I doubt that the Cato Institute would be particularly impartial here.

Actually, GM have a division which builds diesel locomotives.

France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h.

Not quite; 574km/h was the maximum speed obtained on a special test run, using a train consisting solely of power cars (i.e., no passenger cars), with modified electrical systems and a special raised voltage, just to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities. The maximum speed day to day is 320km/h.

Not that that invalidates the rest of the article; passenger rail in the US is lagging behind the state of the art and, in many cases, behind the state of the practice (witness the state of Amtrak, which makes Britain's post-privatisation railways look like a model of efficiency).

Wonder how many of these will end up on eBay.

Actually, producing or distributing "circumvention devices" is a criminal offence in all countries that have implemented WIPO legislation (such as the US DMCA or the EU Copyright Directive).

Telstra used to be the national government-run telephone monopoly. It's now semi-privatised, though maintains a lot of its monopoly over the network (in particular, the last mile). As a profit-making entity answerable to its shareholders, it has, of course, been squeezing that for all it's worth, at the Australian consumer's expense. It's about time Telstra got smacked down.

Knowing the New Labour government, chances are a bill requiring data-loggers in all PCs will be drafted before the end of the year. And the data loggers will not only be accessible to the police, but to the Inland Revenue, the TV Licensing department, the British Phonographic Industry and local council officials.

This looks like a modern version of the Commocoffee 64.

that the US has a bill of rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and association. Australia, a former penal colony and military outpost of the British Empire, has no constitutional guarantees of any rights other than there not being a religious test for public office. That, and the apathy of the citizens of the "Lucky Country", allows the government of the day to get away with things such as passing draconian sedition laws, banning online advocacy of suicide or euthanasia, banning video games unsuitable for children and controversial art-house films (never mass-market entertainment; if the films banned are French and highbrow, it wins them anti-elitist culture-war points), and now the national firewall.

There is no way that the US government could push something like this through.

There is an online petition which will mail the government. So far, it has received around 80,000 signatures within a few days.

If you're Australian, you probably should sign it and tell your friends about it. Unless this meets with overwhelming opposition, the government will force it through.

Sites such as Piratpartiet (or their local equivalents) would probably be mandatorily blocked in Australia. The mandatory part of the blacklist will include anything illegal, which under Australian law includes copyright violation, advocacy of suicide/euthanasia, hardcore porn and various extremist points of view (which, given Australia's sedition laws, covers a lot).

What constitutes being "black" or "white" beyond skin colour? Does a black character have to dress in a certain way, walk in a certain way, or speak in a certain way to be truly "black"? Also, how do you make a protagonist in an action game "feminine"? Do women jump over ravines in a different way from men?

If President-elect Obama was a fictional character, would people be accusing him of being essentially a white character hastily written into being tokenistically black because he doesn't dress funky or say "fo'sheezy"?

Aren't they just asset-stripping Yahoo!'s search business and throwing the rest back to die like a finless shark?

(Though does anyone use Yahoo! Search? Come to think of it, does anyone use any Yahoo! properties other than Flickr and del.icio.us these days?)

Still, at least then, Flickr won't be "upgraded" to an all-Silverlight/Windows Media service that integrates tightly with the Windows 7 desktop or something.

Over and above this, it'll need a new name. I know it doesn't make one iota technical difference, but people are fussy about such things; change the name, and people don't care if it was developed by fiends. Keep it and people will find excuses to edge away and it'll wither on the vine.

The Volkswagen was a runaway success despite its Nazi origins, but had it been named the "Hitlerwagen", things would have probably turned out a lot differently.

If you have to choose either Windows or MacOS X for a platform (let's say, you need to run things not available on Linux; it happens), OSX is the lesser evil. It doesn't have the BluRay-mandated DRM infrastructure in the kernel making the system slow and fragile, and it is based on UNIX with some very elegant technologies on top. Apple's APIs are also considerably less horrendous than Microsoft's, at least since the move to Cocoa.

As far as audio players go, Apple are evil, though they seem to be the only people making decent-sized hard-disk-based players with a passable interface for going through large music collections (i.e., the iPod scroll wheel is a lot better than stabbing at the down button with your finger for 30 seconds as you make your way down the alphabet). Having said that, if someone made a player that did something similar but was mountable from Linux/UNIX, I'd be interested.