Some of the Europeans I've run into say that Amtrak's on-board experience compares favorably to what they get in their countries, even if the trains are slower.

As someone who's travelled on more than his fair share of trains in Europeland - at least on the west coast, Amtrak trains are super-comfy. Big seats, loads of legroom, decent food (on the last trip - previous trip a few years ago involved a fossilised, tepid space-burger).

Best of all, there's often a carriage specifically for viewing the scenery going past. Of which there is a lot. Possibly including someone describing the scenery going past. I learned a lot about Mount Saint Helens that way. (Main reason for choosing trains - I fly a fair amount also.) Way better views than, say, the Eurostar - where you never even glimpse the sea you've been under.

I vaguely recall the WiFi working when I went from Seattle to Vancouver BC. Not terribly fast, but enough to email friends and family about the delays. (A swing-bridge had got stuck in the 'open' position, and the train had to wait for half an hour or so. The driver had then disappeared somewhere to get a sandwich, causing another ten minutes delay.)

Amtrak is great fun (some of the announcements on that Vancouver trip were gloriously surreal) but it's hardly an efficient means of transportation. I got the train from Seattle to Portland once, and realised it's a similar distance between the two cities as it is from Brussels to Paris. I used to catch the Thalys between Brussels and Paris - in the time it took to go from Seattle to Portland (including a freight-train-induced pause in sidings), I could have gone from Brussels to Paris to Brussels then back to Paris again.

Bullshit, my brother owned a wholesale nursery for almost 20yrs, the Aussie mega-drought killed it a few years ago. Plants sold in department stores and supermarkets are grown on contract, often the buyer supplies the patented seed/rootstock via a third party to the contract. At harvest time the buyer's insurance company sends out an assessor to make sure the crop is in good health. The plants leave the "farm" in excellent condition, from that point onwards they start to die unless they are properly taken care of in terms of light, temperature, and moisture. Warehouses, the insides of shipping containers, vans, etc, are normally dark, dry places, there's also a limit as to how long you can keep an outside plant displayed inside a supermarket, which (unlike the insurer) the store generally ignores until the leaves start falling off. I've found that supermarkets that sell poor quality plants also tend to sell poor quality fruit and veg, most likely for similar reasons.

Agreed, but they get a lot of their stock from the same wholesalers, just like the local fruit and veg shop gets their stock from the same wholesale market the big supermarkets shop at.

Reminds me of a quip from an Aussie acquaintance a few years ago: He said he was happy that Australia got the criminals and America got the religious groups.

Of course, that's not really relevant to this issue. Politicians anywhere should be assumed corrupt and on the take unless they can prove otherwise. And laws limiting the population's access to information about their government's inner workings are de-facto proof of the "otherwise".

Or what?

I didn't say you have less corruption in general.

You have less corruption of this particular kind.

This kind of corruption is based on overzealous and overly complex rules and regulations. 3rd world countries usually don't have those, what they have is a lack of regulations, leading to the other kind of corruption, where you need to grease palms to get the wheels of the engine in motion at all, for example.

Hey, that's Sherlock Holmes!

Your typical slashdotter probably sits closer to their router than the plants. And is about as likely to germinate.

Good thing, too, or we'd see a rash of siamese sextuplets.

Though, to be fair, I'd thought that all the hallucinogens I took back in college had messed up my genes royally, but my daughter turned out perfect. Better than perfect. She can type like a banshee with those twelve fingers.

Windows: It's what plants crave! At least when I look around me, all plants grow under the windows and none under my Linux box.

The experiment was setup to validate a foregone conclusion. The (probable, as I can't read the Danish complete report) untested control factor was the impact the different rooms had in the absence of the routers. Retesting both samples without the presence of the routers could fix this issue.

Anyway, it is good science (it is testable and verifiable) but bad journalism.

Unless it can be reproduced or its mechanism explained, it is nothing but fuel to add to the "communication radiation exposure is bad" hysteria.

You'd think that with all the federal money that Amtrak gets that they would already have better services available.

The federal money is to make sure there are not better services available. One of the strings tied to the federal subsidy is that many of the most useful national rail lines had to be abandoned to the private freight lines. This has been going on for decades now. Strangely, the private freight carriers don't seem to be the ones who worked so hard to kill the American passenger railroads.

Rail service in the US did not die because people didn't want it. It died because some very powerful interests didn't want people to have it. The corporatists and the political Right in America hate passenger trains with a passion. They actually get angry about it for some reason.

I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash [wikipedia.org] is freight, not commuter service.

By design.

What's surprising is that passenger rail continues in the US despite the efforts of some very powerful lobbying groups to kill it.

People just like trains, and if they had just left more lines intact, the number of riders annually would be a lot more than the current 35 million. It boggles my mind that I cannot ride the train from Chicago to Memphis and back without some ridiculous routing.

rest of the country has lots of freight

Wait, are you calling me fat?

Obvious: GP works for BP.

Prior to the Classical Greek era there was no philosophy that really even vaguely resembled modern science. Not even the Greeks possessed actual science, but at least they tried out different methodologies.