I'm going to hope that was a joke. I don't have the heart to explain all of economics tonight.

Then let me invest, rather than prebuy. Let me buy a tiny part of the profits. But I'm not going to pay to pre-purchase an item that doesn't exist yet from a company with little to no track record. That puts all the risk on me, the consumer, rather than the entrepeneur. That's ass backwards.

Which is why I'll never do a kickstarter- I'm not going to pay extra for early access to a product that I can't test and may never be made. I'd be willing to invest for a share of the profits, but not pay extra for a presale.

Back in the 80s and early 90s I was working in New Jersey and often doing projects in DC. Taking the train was a lot less stressful than flying, and typically took only about 15 minutes longer, but sometimes I'd fly from Newark to National Airport. There were shuttle planes every hour, you only needed about 15 minutes at the airport to catch your plane, and if you missed it there'd be another one an hour later. (Except occasionally, with bad weather or whatever.) So we'd usually aim to get to the airport 20-30 minutes before our flight, and if you didn't get a bad Metro connection downtown you could walk at the airport, or if you did you could run and usually still get on.

Between Boston, NYC, and DC, Amtrak runs the really fast Acela trains, the pretty fast Metroliners, and the slower local trains. There's also lots of commuter train service in the Northeast that isn't Amtrak, such as New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, SEPTA, DC Metro, etc. Back in the 1980s and early 90s I used to take the trains from New Jersey to DC (before the Acela started, so Metroliner if I could, or the slow trains otherwise.) Depending on where I was going in DC, it was often faster to take the train, because there's a lot less "hurry up and wait" and the train stations were more centrally located.

Outside the northeast, Amtrak runs passenger service, mostly long-haul, with occasional shorter-distance service like the trains from San Francisco Bay Area up to Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. That service runs on the same rails that carry freight trains, and freight has higher priority, so sometimes the passenger trains have to wait. I've never been on one that mixed passengers and freight, but I suppose it's possible that they're doing some of that these days.

Back when I was taking the trains, Wifi hadn't been invented, most people didn't have cell phones, and cell phones mainly worked near the city; there was a big service gap between Baltimore and Philly. I was once in one of the dining cars, and the old guy sitting across from me had the smallest cellphone I'd ever seen (a Motorola flip-phone analog), the smallest laptop I'd ever seen (a 6-pound IBM model you could only get in Japan), and an alphanumeric Skytel pager (which was also cool.) He was Professor Dave Farber, then of UPenn, and he'd just been working on the EFF founding :-)

Except it hasn't. There's a reason why empathy and altruism exist, and both have shown positive correlation with the ability of the species to survive.

it would be foolish to say that human activity has no consequence, though what matters is how much.

That has always been my opinion as well. We know the destructive capabilities we have on the environment (Love Canal, Bhopal, Agent Orange) as well as the general effects we have (heat islands around cities, depletion of water aquifers, increased desertification due to forest removal, etc), the question is, how much of what we do is causing the effects we see now? Is everything our fault, is this part of a natural cycle, or some combination thereof?

What's funny is we routinely see news articles where farmers are talked to and almost without exception they all say climate change is real and if you don't believe it, ask a farmer. Considering the conservative nature of most farmers, one would highly doubt they would be saying such things if they didn't believe it.

"By my hand, a $BAD_EVENT can happen to anyone, any time. There is no defense unless you crawl into your shell and stop living life. You might sometimes think you are safe but no matter who you are, I might inflict $BAD_EVENT upon you. The random $BAD_EVENTs will continue until you, my pool of victims, collectively persuade your government to alter its policies in accordance with my wishes."

We all agree that the above really is the very essence of terrorism, right?

export BAD_EVENT=reporting innocent people to the terrorist suspect database

So do the decent thing America and get a socialized healthcare system

Fuck that. I shouldn't have to pay the medical expenses for smokers, alcoholics or drug users.

You want to ruin your body, do it on your own dime. I shouldn't be penalized for your actions.

Lots of big corporations have more complicated tax liabilities that can't be handled by being registered in just one company. It's not uncommon to have multiple layers of corporate shells, with different layers being the ones that officially do some part of the business in that country so as to minimize overall taxes. One such approach is the Double Irish Arrangement often with a "Dutch Sandwich" in between, and Wikipedia identifies Google as one of a number of well-known large companies doing things like this.

Only against future gambling winnings. And I'm not sure how it crosses over years, I've never lost enough in 1 year to have to care.

When America can afford to look to the stars, they should. Until then, they are wasting their time (and precious taxpayer money).

If that isn't the finest example of short-sighted thinking, I don't know what is. What you're suggesting is we wait until the last possible second to explore what might be out there just because NASA's budget represents a fraction of a percent of the overall national budget.

If you're that concerned about Federal spending, we can cut the military by 50%, stop all subsidies to business (sugar productoin, ethanol production, farm subsidies in general, scientific advances, production incentives, etc), not to mention all the entitlements people complain someone else is receiving but not the ones they're receiving.

If you want to go that way, I'll back you, but you can't then complain when things fall apart because the private sector has come to rely on government largess.

politics is bullshit.

No, "nicely done" to you, because you know just how to push my buttons, proving you to be a better troll than I. It's not POLITICS!

By misspelling "grief" you defied the adaptive Huffman table's expected distribution, thereby wasting memory. You're lucky this is a C64 story where memory is abundant, because if you had posted this in a VIC-20 story (where every single byte truly counts) I would have called you Not Worthy.

where can I get it?

Dude, it's right there in your ROM.