That's only one factor. Another factor to consider is that more passengers riding a train (or bus, or whatever) means fewer drivers, which means less road maintenance, relatively lower congestion, and fewer parking spaces that need to be provided. Dealing with those items also costs the government money, which is part of the reason transit options are generally subsidized by cities, counties, and states.

How do you know this won't end up being an equivalent pain in the ass?

For me, the answer to the posited question is "it depends". If I can just walk on, the way I currently just walk onto my commuter train, then I'd easily pay at least as much as air fare. If I'm going to have to take off my shoes, get groped, and walk through a backscatter scanner... I won't pay anything - I'll drive instead.

I used to think flying was a bit of a treat, but now I only choose it if it's the only possible way of getting to my destination. Nowadays I just choose to drive most of the time, even though it takes longer - I don't waste any time even considering the flight option.

... was a twinkle in Jeff Bezos' eye.

I lived on Queen Anne (south of Ballard) back in the late 80s - early 90s. Old Ballard was already being dismantled by developers, with old houses getting torn down and large apartment buildings going up in their place.

True, but if anyone freaked it might have ended badly.

She kept her head under extremely stressful and frightening circumstances, and thought of a clever way to notify the authorities. Good for her!

Someone isn't very good at statistical analysis...

This message has been brought to you by your friends at the NSA!

Also the whole h.264 non-support debacle. Of course, to be fair, Google waffled on that too... but was on the flip-side, and never actually followed through and removed it from their mainstream browser.

At some point Mozilla decided its philosophical (and sometimes political) agenda was going to be the driving force behind its decisions, rather than the users' wants/needs. That's fine; they're certainly free to do that - but if their users don't see value in them doing so, they're going to fade into obscurity... and, from what I can determine, most users don't care about the things Mozilla cares about.

Simple enough - just require that all phones in the US use a fingerprint scanner for unlocking. The courts seem to be ruling that police can require you provide your fingerprint for phone access.

Which, by the way, is a good reason to restart your iPhone the moment you think you just might get some unwanted attention from the constabulary.

My first summer job was at a music store, doing some simple coding and data management on a TRS-80 (with 16K, BASIC, and even a floppy drive!). At least that was my job when they didn't need me to man the till or help fill out rental contracts for students who were going to be taking band.

There were some simple software packages available commercially for stuff like payroll, but my boss wanted custom stuff so I wrote it all myself.

I remember staying late a lot, after the store closed, and playing games that I first had to manually copy the code for out of computer magazines. Ah, memories...

It was very tragic for the Nepalese people as well.

I feel sorry for the people grieving today for lost loved ones. But I'm getting a bit tired of the tiny number of climbers and tourists that died completely dominating the news. Thousands of Nepalese died. Their loved ones may have trouble even surviving, going forward. Let's not forget about them.

After all, there haven't been any complaints!

Yeah. There's no net gain in knowledge - no real science going on, to speak of. Really he could accomplish the same thing setting up this capsule in someone's back yard.

No, but he has his Oracle database.

Ah, here's an opinion piece - also from Bloomberg:

Is Yahoo’s Business Worth Less Than Nothing?

However I shouldn't have been so cavalier about all this, since Yahoo's potential failure affects a lot of real people with real families and obligations. If you're one of them, I apologize.