There's an often-missed angle on public transit: total transit time. has to go up with public transit, including trains, That means you're asking everybody taking them to spend possibly alot more time to go anywhere. My wife doesn't mind, but I do.

Money quote: "In NYC, it seems to take roughly 50 minutes to get anywhere by public transit, more like an hour by car, and the car costs more. Thus, in NYC, it makes sense to take transit. In the medium-size city where I live, it takes 20-30 minutes to drive places. Even if we had NYC-level transit, it'd take a lot longer to go that way."

I'm all in favor of public transit - I figured this stuff out by, well, taking alot of every kind of public transit, and it served me well within its limits. I just want to get one of those limits out in public a bit.

Like Paladin, that's made me also feel like transit rail has some realistic low-end density requirements to be of much help.

While I'm at it, notice that having 15-minute busses is alot cheaper than rail, because you already have lanes in place. And it'd prolly be easier to adapt Detroit to changing to. But you still need reasonable density or you just get lots of empty busses.

...you have failed to notice that no-one would be producing top class games in that environment. The GPL and commercial reality are fundamentally incompatible without some sort of mitigating factor, and high qua6lity games are probably the single best example of this.

Yep, there's no money in Open Source. Red Hat and Canonical are figments of the imagination, as are the over $100 I've sent each way to support my Linux usage. So maybe it's a question of bizplan rather than impracticality.

The reason you should pay attention is because it'll let your industry have fun again.

We operating system geeks used to live in the shadow of operating system vendor concentration as well, especially with respect to Microsoft. and had to sign away our souls and belong to a big institution to play with operating systems. It was getting harder and harder to innovate or have fun. Then one day a man named Linux Torvalds came along with a release of some interest. And FreeBSD was released. And we were all free to have fun and innovate. Yeah, Open Source work's less profitable because it's more efficient and more competitive, but much more fun because billg can't call the tune on it and we can start any new startup any time we choose.

You're where we were. Spore, a great innovation, will be terrible when released because it's under the EA cloud. All the surviving companies are getting bigger and more bureaucratic.

And it's not just OSs with serious free alternatives, but also databases, web caches, languages, office software, and other serious work apps. You have nothing to lose but your chains! ;-)