Leave apart the fact that it is actually possible, but it would be a journey that takes several days and quite a few stops to change trains in european capital cities (these are distances where using air planes start to actually make sense). (Although I happen to have taken night trains across europe over long distance. But these are easier: instead of having to change trains, they switch the trains' cars around and so you stay in the same cabin until you arrive at your destination city)

Leave also apart the fact that we happen to have "geography" between these two points: mountains (Alps), sea (e.g.: the Mediterranean sea that you mention), etc. whereas your country is mostly flat (that's why the tornadoes happen much more easily, to go back to TFA's point. that also means that if anything, building a large-scale rail-road system would probably be much more easy in the US than in EU).

The main problem is: why in the first place should I travel such a long way ?

Answer A: for vacations.
Yup, why not. Go on, go visit Israel for you vacations. I've heard there are nice surfing spots there too.
And as said above, taking an airplane is the most sensible solution. (Though I've been on such long distance road trip across Europe by car, in addition to train as mentioned above). (And money-broken students take busses, that's the cheapest way around).
The thread was talking about cars, and driverless cars. Given the speed of current cars, such a long distance trip would take even longer by car than by rail. So "my country is bigger" argument won't actually work in favour of cars against trains, but in favour of planes against trains and cars.

Answer B: for work
And that's the biggest problem regarding transportation you have in the US: your society is organised in such crazy way that the biggest part of the population has to commute over such bat-shit crazy distance on a regular basis. Nobody in his/her right mind will live in Belgium and travel for work to Israel. Not even by car. Nor plane or trains. If you get a job in Israel, you move there, so you're living nearby your work place. And if you miss Belgium, you can always travel back there for vacation (refer to "A" above).

The main problem is not that train would be impossible. (They are possible), neither is the huge distance (it's flat. it would actually be easier to build train there than here).
The main problem is the distribution of the population (spread all over) and their travel needs (bat-shit fucking crazy distance, each individual travelling that distance in a completely different direction) so it's not easy to group those needs together and have the people travel together in groups (the basic requirement for any public transportation network).

Because exercising punishment is the best approach to bring back the deads ?
What about putting some technology that would have prevented the deaths in the first place... "Oh, noes! Me don't want a NANNY STATE!"

Over that century, the number of driving humans and their density on the roads has increased. The more cars in the same place, the higher the chance of two of them colliding.

When they started to be too many on the roads.
- People are stupid (even if every single person is average when singled out. But pack them together and they start doing stupid things). The more people you put on the road, the higher chance that some cretin will try something asinine and dangerous.
- Also by increasing the number of cars, you increase the level of responsibility and concentration needed for the same level of safety. A century ago, if you lifted your eyes from the road a few seconds, the most likely to happe is that you would crash on a tree on the side of the nearly empty country-side road. Now, the same behaviour in our modern over-crowded fast highways would result into a massive death toll.

And we put seat-belts into cars (requirement nearly everywhere)
And we put air-bags into cars (requirement in lots of places around).
And we put collision avoidance system into cars (standards with some manufacturer like Volvo, and soon a requirement in EU in the next few years).

all this are technologies that help diminish the death toll (proven by statistics).
autonomous cars are just the next evolution of features that can help diminish the deaths.

Just an additional tool. For when the driver is distracted, at least the AI can take care of the driving.

Yup, just tell the kids not to use the phone, your are 100% certain that every single one of them will comply.

People will always be people. Bring enough of them at the same place and they'll invent new way to behave stupid.
Hey, why don't we remove seat-belts, air-bags, etc. and just tell the people to be more careful ?
Even better idea: remove traffic lights, remove traffic signs, etc. and just tell people to drive sane and not to crash?

There's a point where you can't just trust that absolutely every single individual will behave perfectly.
The more redundant safety you put into the system, the less risk that when the driver fails something bad will happen.

Do not confuse:

- onboard I.A. that can react accordingly to surroundings.
(we're progressively heading this way as more anti-collision features are shipped on cars)
and doesn't rely at all on any remote access

- a car that communicate with the network and the mothership can issue "kill the engine" commands (which, if the cars happens to be on a fast highway, also boils down to "kill the driver" command). There's no need of camera. There's no need of any IA. A pure classic car can be made to remotely shutdown given the proper hardware.

Welcome to Europe. Let me introduce you to this wonderful technology called "TRAINS" that we have here.
We've scaled up your plan a bit (they also transport 100x the number of passengers).
We've also jumped on the "electrical vehicle" bandwagon while we're at it (very few are still diesel powered)
(also there's a human in front who can override the system just in case, though some metropolitan transport have gone 100% driverless).

Okay I was thinking that you were comparing with other RAID implementation (most fake RAID cards can't even *grow* the raid, once you've cycled the drives and that the "smallest disk in pool" is now bigger).

Yup, they would handle whatever you throw at them, as long as they can manage to fit the constrains you've asked.

Linux' software RAID support this without any problem. As you finished a cycle of yearly swap over the whole pool, you can increase the RAID to the new maximum (= shared minimum accross the drives). The resize is done on-line and is gracefully restartable (in fact, you can even migrate to bigger RAIDs with more drives gracefully).
(e.g.: After 6 years, once you've upgraded a RAID6 from 6x 1TB to 6x4TB, you can easily grow the system from 4TB to 16TB).

In addition to that, modern filesystems like BTRFS and ZFS can entirely handle the random mixture of disk. Just specify the level of redundancy (i want to be able to lose 2 drives and still suffer no data loss), plug in drives, add them to the pool, and let BTRFS or ZFS handle the actual details.
(e.g.: throw watever mix you want, total size would be always sum of drives minus what's needed for the level of redundancy you asked for).

So the solution would be to use as much Wifi as possible.
(Though the problem would be that not all wifi routers are multi-cast compatible)

Here around (european country) I see an ever lower trend:
Things move to the cloud.

"Set-top box" are nothing more than a glorified network stream viewer.
channels are simply DVB-IPTV over a multicast connection.
(You can actually watch the same channels on your laptop by pointing VLC to the correct rtp:// address)
(and in fact, you can download an iOS / Android App that does exactly that)

"DVR"... are just an extra functionality on the server.
Servers keep a backup of the last 7 days worth of data streams.
Whenever you want to rewatch a previous show (a type of premium service), pause a currently watch show, etc. there's no actual recording to a HD (the boxes don't have a disk by default).
The STB simply opens a private unicast stream from the backup.
"Recording show for a longer time than a week" is either a paid option (a premium service where the server can keep a copy of some stream longer than 7 days) or a paid option (as in, you pay for some USB attached storage and get to keep your own copy)

Beside for the storage (which is paid by the various "playback" premium options) there isn't much requirement (streams are multi-cast, so no big stress on the bandwith. The unicast playbacks are an option and are paid-for)

Doing opensoure vs closedsource comparison has also being been done on a regular basis at phoronix.

To sum things up:

Current Mesa/Gallium3D stack is opengl 3.x only, proprietary drivers are 4.x (but work is being done, including by paid developers)

AMD:
except for the latest generation (where the opensource driver team is still debugging the support - but at least AMD does publish documentation and pays a few opensource developpers on their own, so I WILL EVENTUALLY end up supported), the opensource drivers have a decent performance, which has progressively went closer to the proprietary. For slightly older cards you might as well use the opensource drivers (a bit less buggy). For really old cards, even AMD is acknowledging it: they dropped the support from catalyst and are pointing toward the opensource drivers as the preferred drivers.

In short: if it's not the latest generation of hardware, give the opensource drivers a try. Unless you want to only play OpenGL 4.x games on your machine.

Nvidia:
Here, take this pair of dice, they are better performance predictors...

More seriously: performance is rather random, mainly due to the fact that the opensource drivers are entirely developed by reverse-engineering on whatever the developers hapenned to have (if you happen to have a slighly different model, there isn't much they can do). So random bugs and problems even in the middle of an otherwise supported range.

For newer cards the situation is even worse performance-wise, because they boot underclocked by default, and the driver don't know how to ramp-up clocks as demand increases.

At least, opensource drivers follow linux standards and some features aren't utterly broken.

So for know, stick to closed-source drivers - best performance ever -, unless you happen to need a feature which works differently under windows (and thus wasn't ported to linux). In that case, you might do an attempt with opensource and se on which random result you end-up.

With time, this is bound to change: Nvidia might get interested in helping a bit (they hey released a few bits of useful information regarding the Tegra line of embed GPUs).

Intel:
Has a bit lower support than their (windows proprietary) driver (opensource Linux is GL 3.x, Windows is GL 4.x), and their opensource drivers are a bit slower.

Except that massive computing power is in the form ASICs which are extremely optimized for computing SHA256^2 and nothing else.
So the largest part of the current computing power would be pretty much useless.

You have a chicken and egg problem.
- Gamers install Windows instead of Linux because most of the games are sold for Windows.
- Most of the developer make Windows games, because that's what OS the gamers have.

Valve needs an OS do be less dependent on Microsoft. So they develop a Linux version of Steam and create a Linux-based "SteamOS" distribution on which to run it.
Over time, there are going to be games. But right now there aren't much.
Just right now, its one of the best solution that Valve could come up instead of just staying here and bitching about the chicken-egg situation. (And it's better than relying on unstable solution like Wine, or relying on virtualisation which would be taxing on the hardware of a console's small form factor).

For now as a beginning, the remote streaming is the fix they manage to quickly patch the Game library problem (and also the power limitations too. You just can't fit the equivalent of a high-end gaming PC with 2x dedicated high-end graphics cards in SLI, RAID HDDs and SSDs, etc. in a small diminutive box under the TV. Either you accept having less advanced graphics [the same compromise which pushed AMD APUs in home consoles] or you do streaming. Future iteration of steambox, following Moore's law will probably have better GFX, simply because they came later)

The premice behind Dell and Co, etc. approach is to have a little inventory are possible. That also means using generic parts that they can swap arround.

They are probably not sitting on 10'000 of unused "Steam Box" cases. Very likely, they have a contact with a chinese manufacturer who can quickly supply them small-form factor cases, that they will use for any small-form-factor machine (HTPC, Consoles, etc.) It's probably a variation of the same small-form-factor box that Dell is using as a "enterprise light desktop", with only a different front plastic piece to look a bit more console-y or more HTPC-y depending on needs.
If they have anything less re-usable than that, it is completely suicidal (specially given that it's Valve we're speaking about) and Alienware deserve any problem that they have (the main problem being that they are going to otherwise get beaten by no-name asian manufacturer who are able to use custom part at a higher turnover, simply because they are the building right next to the plastic plant)

Please research this "Just-in-Time manufacturing" that the AC mentionned.
Dell has *almost invented* the concept.

Their ARE NOT sitting on a bunch of thousands of useless premanufactured SteamBoxen that they need to get rid of. These box don't exist yet.
They don't even have a huge inventory of parts waiting to be assembled.
At most, what they have is a couple of prototype that they built in-house and that are ready to be replicated, once the orders start pouring in.

The problem isn't the stock.
The problem, as you mentionned yourself, is the money. Dell has some difficulties (current Asian no-name manufacturer are better than them at the JIT game [being closer to the manufacturing plants producing the part] and are outselling them).
They need to *SELL* something and they need to get diverse (selling as much new original and different products as possible. Selling only desktops won't cut it anymore).
They would have hoped to sell home consoles. Valve would have neen a nice way to have a piece of Sony's and Microsoft's pie. But Valve being Valve, there's no guarantee when they could sell official Steam machines.

So for now they settle in selling whatever else they can think of (a Windows-based living room machine), just to be able to sell something.

By the way:
- SteamOS *DOES* work
- XBox controller *DO* work under Linux.

What the hell where they expecting? It's freaking Valve, with a track record to have completely random concept of "schedule".

Either Alienware should have considered this as a "prototype" (and SteamOS + XBox controler or Logitech or whatever would have been perfectly acceptable. With a paying option to get a Windows License).
Or Alienware should have waited until SteamOS is actually ready.

Namecalling is the best way to explain a point.

Common, it's *Valve* we're speaking about.
They WILL deliver. Except that they will deliver on "Valve Time".
It will be as usual: wonderful, better than expectation, and *horribly* late.

What were they expecting? Given Valve's track record, they shouldn't have jumped on thing before knowing with certainty that Valve is ready.
They should either.
- start producing steam machine as soon as they can (as they did) but clearly state that these are *prototypes* and probably part of the functionality will be missing.
- or NOT jump on the bandwagon so quickly, and wait until Valve get their shit together (which could be anywhere between now and 2017) and then release a machine with all the features and the specs.

What Alienware did was as stupid as announcing a "special offer with 'Half-Life Episode 3' packaged in for free together with the machine!", and then not knowing what to do as Valve is delayed, packaging some random "Medal of Duty" instead.

Also, SteamOS actually, does work. The problem isn't Linux, the problem are:
- controller (are still tweaked)
- linux games (currently, steam OS works better as a light box to play your game on the living room's big screen/projector by *streaming them* out of a Windows war machine somewhere else in the appartment, rather than playing them directly there. Porting takes time).