The first is obvious-Your website makes a profit, and you want your family members to continue to profit in your absence.

If the profit comes from the content you created, it's going to fall off almost exponentially with each week that passes with you no longer at the controls. The problem with websites that make a profit isn't keeping the lights on, that's trivial. The problem is keeping the cash flowing, and that's much much harder than just making sure there's a trusted person who pays the domain registrar and occasionally updates the software.

Third type of website is a public service. Maybe you're not making money off it, but people like it. An example of this would be: Capgeek. Its owner got sick and passed away. No one runs it anymore because he put a lot of work into it, and no one could maintain it.

Then what's the point of keeping the lights on? Within a few weeks, a few months at best... the content is stale. Within a year, it's of historical value at best. Within two, it gets maybe ten hits a day.

Best to let the wayback machine handle it, and have the site itself go dark.

Huh? How is a quarter century of direct operating costs on hand (at current costs) not awash in money? Costs aren't raising that fast.

You can hardly claim they are being secret about it.

No, it's not being kept secret per se - but it is kept in a dusty filing cabinet in a basement. They don't exactly publicize it, and what publicity they do undertake (the fund raising banners) gives a very different impression.
 

However, when you look at the presence of WikiPedia on the internet, it's basically first hit on google in every search on every possible subject.

If anyone but Wikipedia was as efficient at spamming Google - they'd change their ranking algorithm. That Wikipedia does it "subconsciously" as it were doesn't change the fact that many of the results are near the top because Wikipedia is keyword dense, has plenty of keyword internal links, and the pages are routinely changed - not because of any particular value of a given page.
 

They have a HUGE presence. If someone had to put a value on that, it would be worth billions.

Which is completely irrelevant as to whether or not Wikimedia, the non profit foundation should, retain so much cash on hand, have employee and salary costs so out of proportion to operating costs, and continue as somewhat misleading advertising campaign.

That's over 50,000 people per hour so why does 50,000 per day seem unlikely?

Because neither LA nor SF are anywhere near as big and economically important as Tokyo and Osaka? (Among other things, Tokyo is the Japan's capital.)

That's being said, between the parent and grandparent I'm not sure who is right and who is wrong, there's a lot of flights and cars between SF and LA on a daily basis. Whether rail can take grow to absorb many of those depends on a ton of factors - such as travel time and convenience. SF and LA are big places, and a rail connection between them is only one link in the chain. You also need useful local transport to destinations within the metro area. (And even so, I suspect it'll take years to decades for people to get in the habit of using trains rather than defaulting to the airlines or the highways.)

But the main point here is one of the reasons why US rail (particularly passenger rail) developed differently from other countries - not just the sheer physical size of the country, but that we don't have One Big City to (all but) Rule Them All. Japan has Tokyo, England has London, Germany had Berlin, then Bonn, and now Berlin again, and the pattern repeats across the globe... one Big City that is the heart of the nation's government, business, and financial structures. One Big City that serves as a nexus for the transportation system. New York City once came very, very close... but even then it shared primacy with Chicago and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Even now it's probably the closest we (the US) have, but it still shares primacy with half a dozen cities scattered across the continent.

Thus the US is far better served by a series of regional HSR networks than by One Big Network, with the airlines serving to cross the gaps and the continent.

Setting aside the fact that most US rail advocates seem unaware of the various levels in a rail network - the locals, the limited, the express. They mostly seem to want to have their cake and to eat it too - high average speed, _and_ no city left behind. You can't do this with a single level network, and nobody even tries.

You can't have HSR and freight on the same tracks, so the US railways chose freight.

Because that's where the money is. Passenger rail (in the US) was at best a barely break even proposition.

I can't think of any rental system off the top that consistently presents clean and well-maintained equipment without enormous amounts of time and effort.

Pretty much any rental system that rents to professionals and/or vetted individuals rather than to the unwashed masses.
 

Construction equipment costs upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't see someone renting out a bulldozer and taking a chance that the renter didn't run it without oil for a weekend.

Which is why they don't rent equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to just anyone who walks in off the street.

To take a field I'm familiar with, (camera) lens rental agencies typically require some form of proof that you're an actual photographer. (Such as a copy of your business license and a website).* I know of one local rental company that serves contractors that won't rent to you without proof that you're a business, a credit and background check, and personal references from existing customers. Quite different than a consumer car rental where all you need to do is walk up to the counter with an ID and a credit card that doesn't bounce. It's hard to get 'in the loop' and easy to be put beyond the pale.

Such systems can obviously be gamed, but basic due diligence works like the lock on your front door - it keeps out 99.9% of the threats. On top of that, they simply don't care if you get offended and go away. Amateurs get offended, professionals treat it as the price of doing business. And while all the amateur wants is a "bulldozer for the weekend", the professional is typically in for the long haul, so losing an amateur doesn't cost them much.

Seriously, professional rental agencies serve a different market than consumer agencies and work under a different set of assumptions. If all you've ever dealt with is consumer rentals, all you've ever done is eaten at McDonalds - there's a whole world you've never seen.

*The one I use, quite unusually, serves amateurs. Even so, before I rented the first time they asked for links to any photo sharing sites I used, a faxed copy of my ID, and gave me a brief phone interview. (And the questions they asked indicated that they had actually checked out my Flickr stream.)

People are leaving jobs and town because they can't get high speed internet? Color me skeptical. Plus, though I live across the water on the peninsula, I have many friends who live in Seattle and I've heard not once complaint about lack of broadband access - ever.

On top of which, we just had a report here on Slashdot of broadband access being lost (temporarily) because a fiber was cut. Searching around a bit shows pretty much no significant complaints about lack of faster-than-dialup internet connections. (Many complaints that broadband isn't as fast as it should be... though it's hard to sort out the actual complaints from the unrealistic assumptions about what the service should be.)

So, I'm moving beyond skeptical right to not buying it.

My kingdom for mod points!

What folks not from Seattle and it's environs don't realize is that while Microsoft is often referred to as a "Seattle company", it's not actually in Seattle. It's in Redmond, ten miles to the east. (Though there are satellite campuses all over the place nowadays.) Most of the growth that lead to Seattle's infamous traffic was/is equally to the east of Seattle proper.

Like most metro areas, Seattle metro covers a huge area... but it's eponymous city is only a small part of that area.

Downtown Seattle has prospered over the last couple of decades, and that's partly a side effect of Microsoft and the growth of the dot com era, not a direct result.

*Certainly* the autodriver will not be able to "handle" a rig in the context of a terminal; there are just too bloody many variables to see that happening soon. But for the bulk of long-haul miles? I can certainly see a sort of 'local pilotage' system developing where trucks are driven by a human to a terminal on the outskirts of a metro area. From that point the human gets out and the autodriver takes it to a similar terminal at the destination city, where a local 'pilot' gets in and handles the truck from there.

In other words - reinventing a less efficient version of the railroad.

I suppose its not a bad thing to have just in case but I don't see the reasoning behind the fixation on it as a design requirement and their ranting about its "importance" in press releases. In almost 300 manned space launches a Launch Escape system has only been of verifiable use in a single incident(Soyuz T-10-1).

My wife and I have owned vehicles with airbags for nearly twenty years. By your logic, we could have gotten rid of them since we never needed them.

Until a week ago.

Also, SpaceX has done something rather clever. The abort propellent and engines will eventually be used for propulsive landings instead of coming down under canopy. So their abort system isn't a total waste.

Clever in some respects - but not without risks and drawbacks. (As compared to the toss-it-unused style generally in use otherwise.) Since the spacecraft is (intended to be) re-useable up to ten time "without significant refurbishment", all limited life components (notably the seals) have to last that long. Since it's carried the whole flight, the system has to survive all flight phases. And most notably, it increases the orbited, suspended, and landed weights.

Another consideration is that "traditional" (solid fueled tractor escape motors) were passively stable, while Super Draco very likely is not. "Traditional" systems could also be easily designed to passively steer the vehicle clear of the boosters trajectory, while Super Draco will require active throttling.

I'm not saying anything against the system, only that the cleverness comes with costs that aren't going to be obvious to the untrained eye.

Why is this any different than the population of other skilled professionals?

That's the thing - the (claimed) distribution is different from what we see in other professionals.

It's cash-price is currently at the top-end of the luxury-sedan class

In among all your handwaving about TCO - the above quote is the single relevant fact.
 

Your example fails.

On the contrary - the grandparent is correct, electric cars are the plaything of the rich because you pay the cash price upfront. TCO is irrelevant to what the bank loans you.
 

Trust me, ten years from now the only ICEs that may still be on the roads will be classic cars and long-haul heavy-load delivery trucks.

Only if somebody comes out with a wide range of cost comparable electric vehicles fifteen or twenty years or so ago. (The average age of cars on the road in America generally hovers between 9 and 12 years - generally lower in good times, higher in bad times. Currently it's about 11 years and still trending up somewhat.) ICE automobiles are going to be on the road in significant numbers for a long time indeed - and that won't change until the lower income folks can pick up a "junker" electric vehicle for a couple of grand the same way they currently can an ICE vehicle.

Even the "leasing" option appears to be a contract to purchase power at a set rate. Going by the blurbs *every* option they offer, other than direct purchase of the panels, is a contract to purchase power. (I suspect that's because that allows SolarCity to keep the tax credits for themselves.)

Did you actually read the page? Or just jump on the word "lease"?