Highspeed trains need special tracks. Creating these tracks involves confiscating a lot of land from people along the way.

Roads also need a lot of space. So I don't entirely see your point. Maybe roads need 20% less space or something, but it's not like they need no space.

Doing this creates many lovely opportunities for corruption in government as the route can go a lot of ways depending on who influences it.

We have solved huge parts of that in Europe. We do it with open goverment, post journals showing mail that has arrived to a government agency, political hearings were everybody can send in their opinion, and the agency has to comment and publish all hearing comments. This mostly works. In the cases where it doesn't work, a sufficiently pissed of party can take the case to court to have the process reviewed.

"It says something about the state of train travel in America" yeah it sure does. It says that people would rather drive than be subject to that TSA garbage.

Straw man. We don't have TSA garbage on european high speed railways. And while I can take the train for long distances in the Europe, I believe I'd be taking a plane in the USA, exposing me to that very TSA garbage.

Oh there's so many vulnerabilities with electric typewriters, especially the single-use ribbon. Manual typewriters with a fabric ribbon that is re-used might still need to be burned.

Yes, there is security vulnerabilities. But compared to a computer, containing millions of lines of code, and the capability of running arbitary software, a typewriter is a very simple envirorment, with fewer unknown and bugs.

Securing a simple envirorment is easier than securing the complex. Take a Selectric typewriter - you can check the software manually as it's probably quite short. You can easily verify it, and there is NO reason why any other software should be present. This is not the case with a computer.

Or mechanical typewriter - no software, so the only storage mechanism is the ribbon.

So yeah, a bit of physical security is needed. The ribbons needs to be handled as classified. The drums may contain imprints, and neads to destructed safely. Sound might reveal something, so the room needs soundproofing and checks for unwanted bugs. But compared to a computer, it's quite trivial, and the security is within the reach of even a small organization.

Or are they thinking they will go it alone and continue to update their Linux distro/kernel just because it is open source? Do they really think they are qualified to do that? Or is the hope that they can spend money to keep the OS in long-term-support status?

That is not as hard as it sounds. There's already tons of mission critical in-house applications in banks, some of them probably quite a lot more complex than an OS with some drivers and an application on top of it...

What you're asking for is basically an emergency stop. The problem is that in some cases this can be dangerous as well. What if there's a truck 30 feet behind you, and you suddenly by accident (or inherent fault) activate the emergency stop? Safety is complex, and I'm not sure emergency stop is a good idea here, as it introduces it's own problems.

I'd recommend using e-mail. It's open to everyone to use, and they probably already have registered one. They can provide any and all metadata in the free-form text field known as "body", and it even supports multiple file attachments!

But it also means getting the metadata as free-form-text, which is likely to need interpreting before processing. A HTML form on the other hand will provide, by comparison, quite standardised data format. It also provides an easy file upload facility.

Writing something in PHP/Python that accepts uploads and stores metadata in a database is not very much work to hack together. The main work will be deciding the fields and so on. A form can require an entry in the field for antenna type, whilst in e-mail it's easy to forget a field.

The main challenge I guess is to get people to submit information...

If they cared even remotely enough to do that, then they would have already hardwired the indicator light to the same power source as the camera so that one couldn't be run without the other regardless of the firmware.

This is essentially what apple did, according to the report. They connected the LED to the standby signal, which normally has to be disabled to read data from the camera chip. So far, so good.

But the camera chip also has a configuration register - and one of the register options are to disable listening to the standby signal, and go ahead without caring about this signal. So it looks like the designers overlooked that option, or didn't think about it as a serious scenario.

So my impression is that apple has gone further than I've imagined to make a good design, but sadly not a bugfree design. Remember that all designs, hardware or software, may have bugs.

This is wrong at two levels. First, when technology was new, a monopoly was sensible, to ensure access to telephone for most people, because building lines was expensive. Building lines in a city may be profitable, but not in rural areas. A monopoly can force a entity to provide coverage both places, in exchange for a (limited) monopoly. So yes, the community can indeed be better of by granting a monopoly in some situations. Second, even if it's a free market, the first actor will always have the upper hand, as they have more potential customers to pick from, and it is more unlikely that a customer will switch once they have a provider. Building a copper/fiber network to the curb is damn expensive, so not many players are able to this. So if we'd not have monopolies, we probably woudn't have as good coverage, and if we didn't have monopolies, the first player would still be favoured. Norway also had telco monopoly, building the network up to ca. 1995. But the government owned telco has been regulated into providing the copper for other DSL telcos, for a fixed price (~10$ month per customer), and the other DSL telcos can rent rack space in Telenor's facilities for installing DSLAMs and so on.