The same argument can be used in Europe and Asia. You never refuted the grandparent's claim which is that the interstate highway was funded by government money, not by user money which you used against HSR.

Europe and most of Asia would disagree.

Yet in your entire analysis, you only account for the cost of gasoline. You didn't account for the cost of the roads you would use (they are not free and cost money to maintain or in your words LOSE money). You didn't account for the cost of the vehicle depreciation, license, registration, and maintenance. You also can't sleep and drive at the same time. You're not supposed to eat and drive at the same time. And you're definitely not supposed to drink and drive at the same time.

Meanwhile an elementary school child in Japan can travel at will as long as he has enough money to pay for the fare. The traveling business man can still drag himself onto the train despite having a bit too much to drink. Most of all, each household is perfectly happy with one car, while here in California each adult or older teenager needs their own vehicle.

HSR itself isn't enough, I'll give you that. Intra-city rail and adequate public transit would be necessary. We would also need to improve public transit in major metro areas. LA is already on its way with Measure R.

So you admit that cars aren't a solution, yet planes aren't a solution either. By that I would argue that the more modes of passenger transportation we have, the better off we are. In Japan the airlines compete with HSR. This directly benefits the traveler--because of the additional competition, fares become cheaper.

In Japan, the rail companies are private entities just like airplanes and car manufacturers. They turn a profit. Why? I'll give you a few reasons:

• Japan expressways are all tolled: users must pay a fee to use the system. In America, the interstate is subsidized or socialized--whichever term you prefer.
• Rail companies are able to acquire land and re-purpose it for transportation. In California, the Interstate system was approved prior to the NEPA and CEQA regulations. These environmental regulations delay the building process for any project (including freeways) and make it more expensive. The primary target at the time was freeways due to NIMBYism. Keep in mind that the government at this time was pretty much rolling through people's backyards with freeways and using eminent domain to make it happen.
• In Japan parking is not "free" or socialized. You must pay for your own parking.
• Rail companies in Japan don't just operate trains, they also acquire and redevelop areas near train stations turning them into giant shopping malls or upscale living areas. This means users of the system have access to most retail they'll ever need. Some stations even have integrated retail and dining just like airports--but it works better than airports because of more repeat commuters.

Now in Japan people want to live near a train station because it means convenience. Property prices generally increase the closer they are to a train station--and decrease as you get further from a train station. And people are free to own cars, and drive as much as they would like, yet people choose the trains? Keep in mind that Japan especially during their boom years was not automobile averse. In fact during their boom years, it was common for individuals to purchase a car even though they wouldn't use it. Yet the public transit system and rail network still flourishes.

That's not to say that all cities in Japan are car-free. Many cities in fact require a car or an alternate mode of transit (bicycle). Yet it all works together, trains and HSR included.

Now I'll go ahead and agree with you that perhaps the government shouldn't be managing HSR. The root of the problem, I believe, is the fact that we do not treat modes of transit equally. Automobiles are heavily subsidized through road and interstate construction. So it is like we are encouraging people to drive because we're giving them access to something that would normally be very expensive. The solution is actually to stop subsidizing the interstate, roads, and parking so that other modes of transit can become competitive. But roads (namely city roads) are certainly a public good; a city road can be multipurpose and support not just cars but bicycles and pedestrians. So I'm all for subsidizing city roads. Interstate/freeways and parking however shouldn't. I would cut interstate funding through taxes and switch to a toll based system: all users pay a toll and tolls must support the maintenance of the road. For parking I would do the same: users pay for parking and all municipal minimum parking regulations are revoked. This means it would be possible to build stores with no parking in high density areas rather than paying for an expensive underground garage that would sit unused anyway.

Finally I would change property/land taxes to be separated. Currently you are taxed on the value of the property as a whole. So if you make an improvement to the property like build a skyscraper, you actually end up paying more property taxes because the total value has gone up. What this encourages is for people to purchase land, build a parking lot, and wait for nearby property to increase the value of the area. Then when the increase comes along, they then sell the land back at an increased price. If instead they were taxed relative to the value of the land, they would be encouraged to actually build something of value instead of a vacant parking lot.

This is kind of how the Japanese yen works except they haven't phased out there version of a "nickle" and "penny". In Yen, they have 1 yen, 5 yen, 10 yen, 50 yen, 100 yen, and 500 yen coins. The smallest bill is 1000 yen. About 100 yen feels like $1 in their economy.

Japanese people hate the 1yen coins just as much as we hate pennies and there is usually a donation box at the register of big chain stores for you to donate your 1 yen coins. Or you can go to a shrine or temple and get rid of them there. The 5 yen coin, however, seems to symbolize some kind of luck in their culture so they probably will never phase out the 5 yen coin.

I'm all for USA switching to dimes and dollar coins as well as reintroducing the half dollar coin while phasing out $1 bills and all of the existing coins.

But but, what about vending machines! Just give up. One thing I hate about today's American culture is how everyone expects their opinion to be preserved for their own benefit when it is clearly dragging down everyone else.

Autonomous cars aren't going to magically solve the traffic congestion problem. You can look at it in two ways. If human driven cars are following each other too closely, that means that the road is congested even though speed may be at the specified speed limit. Another way to look at it is that road is already "full". A road that isn't "full" means that each car has sufficient space to account for changes in speed. There's a video of a quick experiment some kids did where they took all four lanes of a high way and drove right next to each other at exactly the speed limit. What followed was traffic. So in a sense, when drivers exceed the speed limit, they are naturally "increasing" the capacity of the road.

Now let's say you do have every car on the road be an autonomous car and the average length of each car is 15ft. That means in 150ft of a single lane of road, that road can fit a maximum of 10 cars side by side. But let's add in a merge in the middle of this 150ft of road. If the cars are riding exactly right next to each other, merging cars will not be able to merge in. The only way a car would be able to merge in would be if cars slowed down and let the car in. If the flow of cars merging in is constant, then that means cars will continuously slow down to let more cars in. Thus you will get traffic.

Even if you stop and say "hey, let's put 15 feet or so of space between each car" well now you've cut the capacity of the road in half, and even if a car merges in during a "full" condition, it will still create traffic because the cars will try to slowly create their 15 feet of buffer space. If the flow of cars coming in on the merge is constant, then all cars in back of the merge will continuously slow down again to maintain their 15ft of buffer space.

Now you say "1 car length is all an autonomous car needs while human drivers need more." I would say that human drivers can get by with close to 1 car length at the risk of increasing accidents. Which is exactly what happens. Go to LA during rush hour and drive along the 405. There won't be much more than 1 car length between cars. The only way you can merge in is to "force" your way in by putting the front of your car in the slight gap so the driver behind you has to slow down and let you in otherwise he will hit you.

It is simple really. If a road can only handle 10 cars per a second, the second you get more than 10 cars per a second, traffic will occur. It doesn't matter if the driver is a computer. We see the same conditions for bandwidth on the internet where everything is controlled by a computer.

For specs it looks like a decent device. For price and features, it is certainly a hard sell with the only compatible devices/media being Google content and specifically movies and music.

It seems like a premature launch. As a developer I don't care much for hackability. Random Joes aren't going to randomly go out and buy this thing for its hackability.

What they should have done is at least provide a developer API. If pandora, netflix, and the rest had access to this thing, I'm sure it would be much more palatable as a viable product.

Also if it had a real "on screen" UI, that would be great too...but I guess they really want you to buy a Nexus 7 first.

We're currently in a "gap" in technology where most of the functions are starting to move to phones yet phones aren't quite powerful enough or usable enough yet.

Right now your best option is the Macbook Air. I own the 11" i5. Buy it and don't look back. It has plenty of power that most netbooks lack and the smallest form factor. Also at ~2lbs, it is as light as you're going to get. The trackpad is also very usable so you don't have to drag the mouse if you don't need it. The keyboard is full size so unlike most netbooks, your hands won't cramp up.

Since I bought it I've sold/gave away pretty much all of my other PCs. It is my primary computer for development now. At home I connect it to a 32" lcd hdtv which is mounted on the wall above my desk.

It also fits into much smaller bags. So you don't need a giant bag.

I bought a Macbook Air because I liked the hardware. The OS was secondary. By now I've gotten used to OSX, it does the job. I'm not sure it makes me more efficient or anything. As a software person, I do find the unix base quite useful.

With the Air and now this new Macbook Pro, Apple is hitting target markets that no one else has. My requirements were simple:

• Must be extremely light (~2lbs or 1kg).
• Must be thin enough (for me that is less than 1")
• Must be powerful enough (i3 or i5 minimum, Intel Atom does not cut it)
• Must be capable of SSD storage
• Must be 11" screen size, no bigger, no smaller.
• Must have a method of port expansion (usb2 hubs are not good enough).

Given that, I did not buy the first or second iteration of Macbook Airs. I waited until last year's iteration which came with Thunderbolt and i5 CPUs. Prior to that, I can tried a few different PC alternatives. The first 10" Asus netbook, and later Acer 11" notebook with a slightly faster AMD processor. They were both extremely lacking though they were close in the form-factor department. The first computer to pretty much meet my requirements was the Macbook Air 11" with Thunderbolt.

My use case is fairly simple. I needed a computer that is portable yet powerful enough to take with me. This makes it possible for me to bring my work with me and rid myself of all the extra computers that are totally unnecessary in my opinion. I shouldn't need a powerful desktop just to do software development. I don't play games anymore so I don't care about graphical performance. I do care about video acceleration so many netbooks fell flat in this area. The SSD is necessary for fast application startup and file access. You simply do not go back after using an SSD. Finally the 11" screen is both the minimum and maximum size I'm willing to deal with when traveling. It is both small enough to fit in a small backpack yet large enough to do work.

The only things I desire for my Air right now are:

• HiDPI screen
• Thunderbolt dock

If they could also manage to make the charger a little thinner, that would be a bonus.

Other than that, when it comes to PCs there's always something amiss. Either they fumble with the key layout, the trackpad sucks in some way, or they have some kind of build-quality defect. My Air wasn't exactly perfect, but it did manage to get the key points correct. The keyboard is actually spot on (although OSX key bindings take some learning) and the trackpad is good. One thing that does suck about Macs is there's a limited selection of input devices or you need third party software to make it work right. My logitech G5 mouse is evidence of this where I had to use usb overdrive to make it work better.

But it wasn't until Apple made the Airs until everyone else started to copy. I don't care about copies, I do care that other PC manufacturers couldn't figure this out fast enough. When netbooks came out they were happy to just keep making more colors and shinier netbooks. They never thought to put a serious effort into making something thin yet sturdy. They didn't bother to make the hardware fast enough. Most of them pretty much just competed on price. Now Apple's proven people wanted something like the Air, and only now will the other manufacturers follow. That's ridiculous.

The Macbook Air is actually my second Mac. The first was the first generation of Intel Mac Minis. It was a good computer but I didn't see much of the point. It was still a time when things were underpowered and having a small desktop computer didn't have much general purpose. Your comment probably would have been applicable then. But these days the portability requirements are taking over. People are moving back to the city, they're on the go, they want a computer that can match that lifestyle. For that the Air is perfect.

If you work in programming or anything related to graphical design or the visual arts (video included) I would say yes.

For everyone else, maybe they can get by. The problem with our current displays is text is rendered like crap. The low resolution displays are the entire reason why sans-serif fonts (Arial, helvetica, etc) became popular. In print serifed fonts (Times New Roman) used to be popular because they had more DPI to work with. That meant fine details necessary for the font were actually printed nicely. On a low DPI (less than 100) serifs look like absolute junk. Yet a serif font in print is actually easier to read than a sans-serif font.

So if you read anything on an electronic device, you should want a high DPI display because it will actually be easier on your eyes. Furthermore things will start to scale naturally where as right now they just turn out to be this blurry mess because we need to apply antialiasing magic to make it look right at the expensive of being blurry.

Read the article. The girls know what they're getting into and if they have issues with it, they quit.

No, the reason why you can't get a date is because your logic and self-esteem is all wrong.

The industry is merely taking advantage of a weakness in (male) psychology. It is shown over and over again that people do judge a book by it's cover, so a marketing department would be stupid not to accept that fact. They are there to increase ROI, not be "politically correct".

Second of all anyone can get a date with the right kind of attitude. Step 1 is to treat people like people regardless of their shortcomings. You've already judged booth babes based on some slashdot headline and summary so I don't doubt that you'll do the same with others. A common theme in any social interaction is that people don't want to be judged, they want to have conversation. When trust and understanding is established, only then can advice be made and accepted.

Step 2 is to stop succumbing to your own perceived "disadvantages". It is true that some people will never accept you, but their logic is just as shallow as yours at the moment so they are not people you want to interact with anyway. But of the people that are willing to accept you, the idea is not to push them away because of your own shallowness. When you get your head over that, you can begin to have a healthy social experience.

I'm not a dad, but do you realize how hard that kind of thing is? If you want to be logical, the easiest method is to marry the ugliest woman you can find to ensure that your potential daughters have no chance at ever becoming attractive (of course these days they always have the option of plastic surgery).

These days kids have all kinds of external influences parents have no control over. Their friends, the radio/tv/internet, the people they meet everyday. The more restrictive you get the more likely you are to push your kid into making rash decisions simply out of angst. Become too loose and they're more susceptible to "meeting the wrong people". While there is certainly some kind of formula that tends to have success, it isn't full proof. You can find exceptions in nearly all cases.

That's easy:

1. Ease of use
2. Degree of current use by others

A language generally succeeds if both of those are true. Now ease of use is a moving target; if you're writing system level code, you're not going to want to use a dynamic interpreted language, if you're writing some throw-away script however, dynamic interpreted languages become attractive.

I'm not sure why we even need to ask/answer this question. Languages are just like products of technology. People use them based on their requirements and how popular they are. Popularity is important because if you have a problem, you know that others using the same product may have some experience with your problem so you can seek help/advice.

The slashdot male bias is strong in this one.

There are logical and valid reasons for why women want to get married and have kids. As women age, their fertility drops and it becomes increasingly harder to have a kid with fewer complications. If they were to follow statistics of known studies they would be having kids in their early 20s.

Generally, the logic process is quite simple: if they want to have kids then they should have kids before age 35. Wanting kids also isn't necessarily a dream, I would say it is more defined by our species and evolution. I will say socially, there is a huge difference between having a couple kids and many kids. Having many kids tends to create population problems. Having a few kids stabilizes the population. Having no kids (a declining population) is a problem as nobody will replace dead members of society.

Even though I think Zuckerberg is a douch-bag, I still think he and what I barely know of his wife are much more capable at producing beneficial "kids" to society than say... Britney Spears. If we want to be logical about this process, we should have educated and more responsible members of society doing that majority of pro-creation for us. But we don't, instead we have poorer people producing the most kids either as "mistakes" or religion or because of (initially) cheap entertainment purposes.

You can blame this on the reactions you see from girl's toys to mother's behavior but there's hard evidence that that is more likely a symptom of a deeper need.

Before you snap back at me, I think it would be a good idea to have a look at female fertility before you dismiss everything.

Let's use the xkcd example: correct horse battery staple.

Using a list of the 5000 most commonly used words, I was able to find rankings for 3 of the 4 words:

• 1813 correct
• 1291 horse
• 3226 battery

"staple" doesn't even appear on the most common 5000 word list. But let's assume it did at 5000. That means your dictionary now is 5000 words large. 5000^4 = 6.25 * 10^14.

Now let's address your suggestion:

Now your average English keyboard has 47*2 = 94 type-able characters. 94^7 = 6.48477594 * 10^13. The xkcd example assuming it was smaller than it really was beat your suggestion by an order of magnitude.

Now let's address how large people's vocabularies are. According to wikipedia:

But 6 year old kids don't have much interesting personal information that people are really after like credit cards. Let's read further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary

So let's re-do the calculations with 10,000 words: 10 000^4 = 1.0 * 10^16.

Things will only get worse if you tell people to use numbers, names, special abbreviations, etc. For example it will be highly unlikely the following phrase will be in your dictionary: "5000 most common vocabulary". People can also use natural language and still fall way out of your dictionary: "yummy carne asada dinner". They can also use personal and vulgar language: "Stupid bitch Alice, never again".

I would argue the problem isn't in the mode of transportation, it is how the city was designed. In this case suburbia is built around the car while subways and trains were intended for people and associated urban areas.

The problem withe driverless cars is it is likely going to solve nothing. The idea that they're going to solve traffic is not going to happen. Traffic occurs because demand exceeds road capacity. It doesn't matter if you have a computer doing the automation. A pipe that can only allow 10 megabits per a second isn't going to go any faster than 10 megabits per a second. Same is true for roads but instead for number of cars allowed.

Traffic is still going to occur and maybe in fact it can get worse as people now don't care about how long the commute is since they are not responsible for driving. While road capacity might improve a bit since computers can efficiently allow smaller gaps between vehicles (but wouldn't this be countered if all cars effectively follow the speed limit? here in California it is common to be above the speed limit by 10mph effectively increasing the capacity of the roads), the problem of sustainability still exists. People travelling via cars and roads for 30 minutes to 1 hour is still not right.

In fact, some will say car ownership should go down. However, if this occurs, vehicle miles travelled in a suburban setting should go up. This means instead of parking the car in your garage, it goes back to where it needs to park or to a farther passenger if it can't find another person to service in the immediate area. So while we reduce the effective number of cars available at any point, we increase the amount of travel each car must do. This currently would actually be a step backwards since many cars are actually run until they aren't cheaply maintainable. So while we aren't necessarily "wasting cars" we are wasting fuel.

A lot of people don't want to accept this but I still think this is a problem of suburban living instead of urban living. There are countless examples of people living in cities all over the world yet only in North America do we have this aversion to urban settings. The conclusion I've come to is that this is a North American cultural problem, not a human needs problem. People in other countries of the world are free to live wherever they want but they typically congregate around cities. Only in places where resources like land are plentiful do people suddenly start to consume more land and often for no good reason. Driverless cars will only feed that wastefulness.

The only thing that will likely improve is passenger safety and perhaps pedestrian safety.

Please stop recommending PHP for anything. The only good reason for using PHP is you are forced to work with a project that was done in PHP. For webpages and a clean slate, almost any other up to date programming language (including *gasp* perl!) is better than PHP.