I'm not saying any particular person said that, and the question to Slashdot was asked over 2 decades ago. But I was assured that SSDs were "now reliable as an archival store", despite my informal test failure. (I had backed up something to them, and stuck them in a drawer for perhaps a year. They became unreadable.)

My sample size was small (just a couple), but it decided me not to trust SSDs for backup even though everyone on Slashdot said I should trust them. What I'm afraid is that portable USB drives will start being main with SSDs rather than spinning rust without bothering to tell me.

Not a good idea, but you could try paper tape.

Interesting statistic. I haven't tried the drug, so my response is due to the results I've read reported. I'm a bit surprised that it's as high as 1/4.

The most common side effect I've seen reported is nausea. Sometimes that can lead to vomiting, but it doesn't usually.

They're passenger (and freight) trains. The rails were built for travel, not for scenic display.
OTOH, the sure aren't high speed rail. Most of the lines were build over 50 years ago.

OTOH, the BART example was for a "high speed train", though I believe the speed is limited underground. But the rise is from perhaps two or three stories below ground to about 1 story above ground. That said, I believe that the rise is about 2-3 miles long, so it's not steep.

N.B.: I good system of automated taxis could do the job...but note "good system". Most places I've ever lived the taxis were both too expensive and to difficult to use to do the job.

A HSR network is really problematic without a really good local transit network. (One you can reasonably carry your baggage on.)

Sometimes using the highway ROW works, other times it doesn't. This partially depends on the design of the highways, and partially depends one whether they have the same destination. A train station under a section of elevated roadway can work well...but if you don't have that convenient elevated roadway things can get more difficult.

I can't even estimate costs, but they can get pretty high. (And sometimes it's easy.)

Since there are trains that go over the rocky mountains, I think that argument fails. (But it might succeed if you argue practicality rather than possibility.)

FWIW, The SFBay Area BART system has high speed trains that move from elevated to underground. It's not a steep grade, of course, but it's done. (IIRC "high speed" for the BART system is around 70 mph, and is only obtained on the long straight sections. Of course, my knowledge is multiple decades old.)

There are also real problems with sparsely available origin and destination points. And the cost of building the lines through developed areas.

If you build a good system, it will be more efficient for the areas that it serves. But rail transit has fixed routes. This makes it inflexible. And you really need to multi-track the rails, because breakdowns will occasionally happen.

FWIW, I feel that streetcars are much more plausible/effective/significant per unit cost than are high speed rails. High speed rail is useful AFTER you solve the local distribution problems.

Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.

Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.

Agree about the meaning of "hallucinate" in this context, but...

You can't be sure your brain is deterministic. It may well have features that operate at the quantum level, with the implied genuine uncertainty. Transistors are normally scaled to avoid that problem. This isn't exactly "free will" in any normal sense, but it *is* non-deterministic behavior, at least as far as we can tell. (Yeah, superdeterminism is a valid interpretation of quantum theory, and so is the multi-world interpretation and a few others that take the entire universe as context. So in some sense it's still deterministic, but it's a really weird sense. And as far as the Copenhagen interpretation [i.e. "shut up and calculate"] goes even in that sense it's non-deterministic.)

I don't think treason could have been made to apply. It's defined in the Constitution, and the definition is a *LOT* stricter than colloquial use.