Why can't we afford it? The market is willing to buy our debt at attractive interest rates and if the return from this project is greater than the interest rate, then we should do it. A successful high speed rail network would lower road maintenance costs and reduce the need for emergency services. It would lower traffic congestion, which would result in a faster commute for car drivers. Other benefits include lower gas prices which translates into a stronger US economy and less money for petro dictators. IMHO fixing the transportation system is our only chance to pull ourselves out of this mess and that's why we can't afford NOT to build this. Our ability to repay our debt depends on making society more efficient.

In addition to all the benefits you describe, it also decreases society's dependence on automobiles. Assuming that these high-speed trains will be joined by regular express trains stopping in mid-sized cities, it will once again be possible for visually-impaired people and everyone else who can't drive an automobile to actually participate fully in society. As it is today, such people are virtually shut out of the job market everywhere except in the inner cities, and there's no affirmative action or any other social programs to help them out. They have to pay taxes to subsidize an infrastructure that they can never use themselves.

When we talk about which members of society are "privileged", things like race and gender are usually mentioned first. But I can think of few privileges more underappreciated than the privilege to operate an automobile.

Bring on the train infrastructure!

I'd love to see them reuse the assets -- it would be great to actually get to wander freely in all those amazing places in Cocoon that you were froced to sprint through without ever smelling the roses.

It shouldn't be hard to create something interesting between groups of people: Cocoonians (Cocooners?) who go down to Pulse to explore what they once thought of as hell, Cocoonians who resolve to stay behind and make their home a paradise by human hands, and of course (this should have been in the original) humans already living on Pulse, whom we never met in the original game.

(Some of the "side" material from the producers indicates that in the game's ending, one-third of Cocoon is destroyed, so presumably they can make sure that the more interesting areas are part of the two-thirds that remained intact, or just retcon it and let it all stay intact. While the linearity was no fun, very little of what we saw of Cocoon is worth throwing away.)

There's so much good background material in this game thtat it's a shame how the actual experience didn'T live up to it for the player. Let's see them try to make something a little better now that the pressure is off.

I agree; society is designed around the car, which causes businesses and residences to become more spread out, which makes even more people switch to driving; the vicious circle continues until just about everyone had a car and a car-dependent lifestyle to match.

I'm looking forward to self-driving cars because they'll be able to finally eliminate one of the most unnoticed discriminations in society today: the plight of the visually impaired, who are fully capable of working the vast majority of jobs, but are denied the right to work there because so many employers are accessible only by automobile. (Places of employment are required to make their facilites accessible to people with almost any handicap, but there's no penalty for setting up shop in an area that can only be reached by car.)

In "The High Cost of Free Parking", an excellent book on parking and its contributions to automobile-centric society, author Donald Shoup estimates that over 88% of all commutes in the USA are done by car. That doesn't mean that all 88% are accessible *only* by car, but that number has to be close.

Is there any other minority whose work opportunities are so restricted? We would be appalled if some race or ethnic group were barred from working at seven-eights of the jobs in the country, yet few drivers ever consider the plight of the non-driver (who is stuck paying for all thise automobile infrastructure that he's legally forbidden to use).

I can't wait to see these self-driving cars become a reality. Thousands if not millions of people who are partially blind or have other conditions that prevent them from driving will finally be able to live full, unimpeded, unrestricted lives.

Has it come time to ban some of the classics before someone else goes out and breaks a few bricks with their heads after eating a large mushroom?"

Minor point, but Mario isn't actually using his head. Look carefully; it's his fist that's breaknig the bricks!

So if someone shows up at the hospital with a head injury in this situation, it means he wasn't paying enough attention not just in life, but in the game as well.

I must confess that I'm pretty disappointed with how FFXIV is looking, particularly after FFXIII was so totally underwhelming.

FFXII really impressed me. Beautiful, intricate, lovingly-crafted world; innovative gameplay that took some of the drudgery out of it; even a translation that made the English version even better than the original.

FFXII contained a lot of MMO elements, and with some of the obscure items and monster spawn conditions and the like, even managed to be a kind of meta-MMO in that players had to interact with other players on the internet in order to figure everything out.

I'm increasingly beginning to think that they should just bring back the FFXII team and have them turn that game's world, Ivalice, into some kind of MMO. Keep all the assets -- they look great in HD, as people emulating the game on high-spec PCs have shown -- and make another game out of that. Many of the elements are in place already. Do it, Square.

I do something similar: I have two computers at my desk at work, and I set up the one on the left side left-handed, and the right one right-handed. It keeps both hands in good mousing shape, allows me to have the two keyboards butting up against each other in the middle, and makes it very easy to operate both machines at the same time.

Curiously, not only does no one else at my office do this, but they all use both computers right-handed. I'm looking out at a field of dozens and dozens of desks, and every single one has two keyboards with the mice on the right-hand side of both. If only right-hander supremacism would go away; they could gain a lot of productivity by using both mice at once!

As someone with only one functional eye, I sure hope that 3D doesn't become the standard and screw me over.

Couldn't agree more. There have been several "advancements" in television that have benefited most people, but they didn't actually leave those unable to take advantage totally unable to use them -- the switch from B&W to color didn't prevent color-blind people from looking at a color screen, and people with blurred vision who can't distinguish HD content certainly don't lose anything by looking at it.

3-D, on the other hand, is less than worthless to those without binocular vision. It actually exacerbates their (our) handicap. In an age when we like to consider ourselves sensitive to handicaps of all kinds, I sincerely hope that all TVs can convert 3-D images into 2-D ones so that more of the population can see them.

Whether it takes three button presses or a hundred, the person paying for the service is getting what he wants: an updated PS3 plus the peace of mind of not having to do anything himself plus the freedom of not even having to find out that the update is a simple process.

Most Slashdotters are aware that there isn't much work involved in a PS3 system update. But a newbie, even one that doesn't mind doing the simple update manually, still has to discover how simple the update is, perhsps by searching online or asking friends who already have the device. I don't have a problem with the person who's willing to pay $30 ni part to never have to even think about that.

Have reports of the program's demise been exaggerated?

For a project named Orion, you should quote not from Sam Clemens, but rather find something from his older brother!

There's something even more slimy abour region codes, and when arguments about piracy and parallel imports start up, the issue often goes unremarked-upon.

Region codes are a violation of people's linguistic rights.

They require you to consume media in one of your nation or region's majority languages. In the US, you get English, and maybe Spanish or French, but not generally Japanese, Korean, Russian, or German. In the EU you'll get a few more choices, but not generally any languages from Asia. In Japan you typically get Japanese only.

So an immigrant family living in a certain region, wanting to raise bilingual children who know the language of their new home and of the "old country," can't do this legally, thanks to region locking.

Want to play a Japanese game on your North American PS1 or 2 (or vice versa)? Too bad. Need German subtitles to understand that Hollywood movie, because you're an expat Deutscher? Tough; wrong region. It doesn't matter that you're willing to pay the retail price. It doesn't matter that local media might be worthless to you (because you can't understand it) but that the equivalent from another region is something you want to buy. It doesn't matter that the material in another region might cost more than it does where you reside.

A series of international resolutions over the past 60 years have affirmed the rights of people -- particularly linguistic minorities -- to use whatever language they desire in private, and not be forced to abandon one language in favor of another, more politically powerful one.

Not even the most virulent nativist would attempt to prevent people from reading books or watching films in the language of their choice in the privacy of their own homes, but region-locking corporations are doing this very thing.

It's one thing for a company not to produce versions of a product in multiple languages because they don't have the budget. It's quite another to actually produce them, and then say "We refuse to allow you to use it, because you live in the wrong place."

Things are getting better -- the PS3 is region free and you can set the OS to whatever language you like. Computers will let you change the region 5 times, and these days a lot of people have more than one PC, so they can set one for each of the regions they're interested in. And older game systems are cheap enough that you can just buy two of them. But this is a far cry from a real, genuine right to multilingualism. If a government tried what these media corporations get away with, there would be hell to pay.

Their jobs are in no danger; there are plenty of people in this world who need to be horsewhipped. Wasn't there a story earlier today about the RIAA?

do you think that when somone is accused of a crime the government should first spend several days or weeks looking into wether the accuser is credible or not?

Yes, this is exactly what I think.

I don't know if they're going to force people to carry these ID cards around with them, but if they do, that's *worse* than a tattoo in my book. Get tattooed once, and you never have to think about it again. With mandatory ID cards, you have to consciously remember to carry your government-issued card on your person everywhere you go. From a psychological-oppression standpoint, I'd rather just be tattooed and be done thinking about it.