Yes, but if Washington and Oregon were to submit a proposal such as you describe, wouldn't it have gotten those same stimulus money?

Probably, but it would never go down that way.

This is the Pacific Northwest you're talking about - the plan they submitted and got federal money for (to the tune of about $780 million) is to marginally increase the speeds on the existing line, shaving 45 minutes to an hour off a 3.5 hour trip by 2023. (Not kidding, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_Corridor)

Way to shoot for the moon, guys.

-Isaac

Something tells me that the state government of California isn't particularly interested in building a railroad for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

Much of the proposed funding is federal stimulus money.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.

Oh well.

-Isaac

Actually, it isn't completely clear what the arrangement is with RIM and the various intelligence services. RIM allegedly have some kind of data-sharing/intercept agreement with U.S. agencies

RIM's customers are overwhelmingly not located in Canada. Yet RIM's servers are in Canada, rather than somewhere with cheaper power, more bandwidth, and lower network latency, like, say, Virginia. Why is that?

NSA is (OK, was) forbidden from intercepting domestic communications between US entities. But every packet a Blackberry sends is addressed to Canada! Problem solved.

Of course, if an intelligence agency is interested in you, nothing you do with a phone - no matter the make - is going to be private. OTOH, if your objective is to prevent Google or Apple or your mobile carrier from monetizing your identity, a Blackberry connected to your own BES server is a relatively easy and secure option.

I can't really be bothered at this point, though. I'm pro privacy but have realized that I am, in fact, mortal and have other things I'd rather spend time doing than operating my own VPN head-end for the purpose of backhauling my mobile IP traffic.

My single biggest beef with Android (at least the Sense-flavored version that I have to use due to ActiveSync policies) is that there's no reliable way to disable HTML email and remote element loading. As a result, I'm continually guessing from subjects and senders whether or not a given message is safe to open.

Google and/or HTC developers really should know better. At least I have a decent browser-only solution now, but I'd prefer something integrated with the base system's webkit (assuming that's what's being used to render HTML in the mail client as well as in the lousy default browser.)

-Isaac

The scary thing is... Leonard Nimoy was in the original Transformers movie. No, not that one, I mean the one from the 1980s. Leonard Nimoy voiced Galvatron in it.

Another fun, if irrelevant fact about the animated Transformers movie from 1986 - it was Orson Welles' last performance. He was the voice of Unicron, the giant planet-eating robot. Presumably this wasn't much of a stretch for the good Mr. Welles.

-Isaac

Today's Republicans think they are on the debate team and will take the opposite side of any Democrat position. I bet if the Democrats said "we are against the raping of babies", the Republicans would instinctively pick the opposite side (regardless of their personal opinion; no I am not saying or implying the Republicans are for that).

No, naive.

The R's would run campaign ads with a scary white-on-black text: "Democrat John Jackson: 'we are... raping babies" and a voiceover reminding the viewer that only Jack Johnson can be trusted to stand up to the baby-raping Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco (and we all know what that means, wink wink.) Elect Jack Johnson!

At least hiring the kid on a bike gives the kid on a bike a job.

Hypothetically, say a UAV can do the kid's job for 20% less per delivery. What are the kid's prospects now that the delivery business has been taken over by a robots? What about the kid's family who depended on that income?

I'm no luddite - it's not as though e.g. manufacture of antiretroviral medications can or should be done by people stirring pots by hand - but this doesn't sound like a good use of automation.

A much more interesting innovation in distribution is filling the extra space in Coca-Cola crates with pods for delivering medicines, leveraging the awesome distribution network of Coca-Cola (which is available in some of the most remote inhabited places on Earth.) See http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/news/-/2558/633148/-/r17ejdz/-/index.html

-Isaac