Can you point to a reference hardware design which runs all OS, or which allows the consumer to pick?
No... that does not exist yet.

So for now at least, phones are tied to the OS or vice-versa.

Someday it will never matter what platform you use, and all your data is stored in open formats, and your data can be opened in competitive software, etc. but that is a LONG way off. The phone companies in the USA spent -millions- of dollars a few years ago, trying to convince everyone why you could not keep your phone number when you switched phone carriers.

Phones just are not like commodity PC hardware, or laptops.

It's good that you are attempting to argue this based on cost, but you do realize you have ignored federal subsidies for the automotive sector, correct?

Ignoring the costs of war (just to keep the argument simpler), the feds spend less than 1% of transportation spending on rail and the rest goes to build new highways (most of which doesn't serve to help traffic, but does serve to build access to land owned by well-heeled developers).

Hidden subsidies make this argument impossible. 90% of Americans believe the federal has tax accounts for a substantial amount of the price of gas, AND that the gas tax pays for the roads. I even see letters to the local paper asking why the police don't arrest bike riders for "stealing" space on the road without paying taxes. The majority of the cost of road construction comes from 2 places: income taxes, and loans from oil rich states (who don't want to give us a reason to quit).

The places you mention do make the most sense for high speed rail, as well as pockets in Florida, urban rust belt, and parts of the west coast. DC isn't a "maybe"... if it were safe to bring a bike on the highways, you could beat traffic home whether your commute were 5 miles or 15... DC is a congested mess.

This isn't about "replacing" any method - that angle smacks of taking away choice. This is about expanding choices.

We have 2 wars going on, and we're not making any economic sacrifices for them so the day of rekoning will be that much harder. My grandmother told me stories how during WW2 you would be berated for NOT carpooling, not growing a 'victory garden', and not recycling. We were promised we could ignore looming economic problems and it would sort itself out.

For years, people who talked about "peak oil" were dismissed as making it all up for some socialist agenda. If you want to be really scared, take a look at today's headlines about Saudi Arabia misrepresenting it's oil reserves by 40%, the US government knew it but kept quiet. Thanks to Wikileaks, we know the truth now. (Although it was really kind of obvious once the rest of the word got developed, that oil couldn't remain the domain of any 1 economy)

Now we're about to EXIT a major recession - a recession which has tempered worldwide oil consumption. Other economies are bidding for the same barrels of oil, and will be able to outbid the USA because we don't MAKE anything after outsourcing and offshoring it all away. That's like playing a game of poker where you keep bluffing -and- borrowing from the other players at the table.

High speed rail won't grow our economy - nothing can do that except a return to manufacturing. But without high speed rail, we're going to lose a lot more dollars to the middle east, or maybe we'll rely on Russia for energy...

I didn't even bring up climate change, because frankly it is so politicized :-(
I'm not pro-coal, but it is worth pointing out that even if some high speed electric rail were powered by dirty coal, those trains would have far lower CO2 emissions than the same number of drivers in cars. In a lot of places, cars idle for much of the time, and under the best conditions gas vehicles achieve less than 15% efficiency which is far less than a coal plant (plus a regional power plant can be upgraded to run cleaner FAR easier than all the cars in that area getting individual pollution upgrades, which is not feasable. It is interesting that energy profits are privatized, but air/land/water pollution is socialized.

Oh, and airlines? They're only cheap because the taxpayer supports them.
During good years airlines do not save money for rainy day - it goes out as dividends and bonuses. Instead of investing in efficiency, airlines lobby for taxpayer-underwritten loans... which a few years later (rainy day) the airlines default on. That defaulted debt is passed on to the federal government.

So Kansas does not want to fund high speed rail, even if it helps lower our dependence on fossil fuel and even if that helps our national security??
My my my!

OK
Kansas gets $1.30 in federal dollars for every $1 they pay in federal taxes.
(Source: Federal Tax Burdens and Spending By State, easily googled... )

So how about we tell Kansas that if they don't want to pitch in to build HS rail -where it makes technical sense- that we'll turn highway construction back over to the states? That's a lot of Kansas pork right there.

FYI - My native state of New Hampshire gets $0.75 cents in federal spending for every $1 we pay the feds. It's nearly the same in Massachusetts and California.

In fact, MOST of the so-called fiscally conservative red states depend on pork. The more high tech and developed states are paying through the nose to support them.

Not to imply Kansas is the biggest federal welfare queen. Depending on the year, that honor goes between Alaska, West Virginia, and New Mexico. And to be fair, Hawaii is a pretty blue state and they're big dependents on the feds but mostly the states getting less than 1:1 are blue, and ones getting more than 1:1 are red.

We could also look at the imbalance of military base distribution and base closings, which has disproportionally hit the Northeast (despite both NYC and Boston being prime terrorism targets), and move a few bases from Kansas to where there is less coverage per capita.

If we want to play regional games, we can..

Good luck getting red states to sign off on high speed rail that only benefits the liberal northeast!

Technically, I don't think you are suggesting Boston to DC. That's actually a very long corridor and most ridership will ride PART of that route, not the whole thing. Well the same benefits can be applied to other congested hotspots, in Florida, Texas, Chicago and California. These are also very dense regional routes which could benefit.

If you want to take the fiscally conservative approach, you can do a LOT to help rail by working to end taxpayer welfare for the oil companies, and make the feds a minority funder for new highway construction.

Ending federal loan guarantees for the airlines would do a lot to fix transporation in the US. This is corporate welfare. Everybody KNOWS that the airlines rack up huge taxpayer underwritten loans, rack up debt, and then file for bankruptcy again and again. Shareholders privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

You'll never get the country to demand a fix if you ask them. All they'll want to know is will they pay more at the pump or airline ticket, and they don't -care- that they're actually paying MORE via subsidies. If your argument has fewer words, you always win.

>Just remember, you're going to wind up going through the same security bullshit getting on a high speed train as you would with an airplane.

Completely untrue... please check your facts. That is unless you are speculating on what "might" happen in the future, which is not an argument but a negative argument.

I don't dispute your experience - and it is common - but why blame Amtrak? Rail tracks are owned and maintained by the freight companies.

Can you imagine how car-friendly the US highway system would be if it were owned by trucking companies? You wouldn't blame your local tax driver or Greyhound for those problems, would you?

The biggest drag on rail in the USA is the fact that the federal government HEAVILY subsidizes the airlines, highway construction, and fossil fuel in general to a factor of 200 dollars for every 1 dollar spent to keep Amtrak alive. In fact Exxon Mobil was the #1 earner last year, and paid ZERO in federal taxes for 2009 (they actually got money BACK from the taxpayer).

The thing that burns me most is Sony taking their customers for GRANTED. The model of PS3 I bought -advertised- OtherOS, and it's was what nudged me into buying it (I had a PS2, but I was never really a console guy..).

Having been a home Linux user for like 16 years or so... it's taken a lot of abuse like this from Sony for me to finally admit: Sony is more evil than Microsoft. When Sony put rootkits on their music CDs, I wasn'0t affected but that was only because I ran Linux... otherwise...

Microsoft just abuses file formats, and uses monopoly tactics. Sony uses bait and switch, timeout features that take something promised away from you.. Sony presumes loyalty. The only thing Sony has going for it is the PS3.... it's been a decade since they innovated in home theatre setups and now they're just a discount brand.

The PS3 -almost- tanked as a project, and would have taken down the company. At that time, Sony was doing everything it could to win converts... including PS3. In the US at least, I can't return the PS3 or successfully sue them for false advertising... but I can remember how Sony is morally bankrupt. Even though I won't buy another console ever again, I hope Microsoft or Nintendo buries Sony.

China's status as the world's largest manufacturer - and soon the world's highest-tech manufacturer - plus all those IOUs they own means that they will be able to do whatever the hell they want. China's not interested in raising their standard of living too fast, if it means that a huge disparity exists between the poor and the really dirt-poor. China doesn't want the manufacturing to race to the next developing nation, and it's big enough that they know there will always be suitable numbers of desperate unemployed population to keep wages (and worker demands) very low.

But China's not stupid, they're plowing this money and tech into their military. Their submarine navy for example isn't made to carry nukes, but they ARE made to act as underwater troop carriers.

They seem to have all the same functions as the free press, albiet without any hollywood gossip or corporate owners.

Is there some legal definition which excludes WikiLeaks from being called a media organization?

He says it as "th3j35t3r" because he is a Lisp programmer...

Comcast is doing WONDERS to educate the public about the importance of DNS.

Years ago, just after the SECOND major Comcast outage, I switched from Comcast nameservers to some pretty old and reliable AT&T nameservers at 4.2.2.1. Of course there was OpenDNS also but it's a pain to remember their DNS server IP addresses.

Since then I switched to Google's free DNS - same benefit, but faster and "8.8.8.8" and "8.8.4.4" is -incredibly- easy for people to remember.

Now with Comcast's THIRD major DNS outage, people resorted to using Facebook and Twitter using just their mobile phones. Guess what? Nearly everyone who bitched about Comcast got a reply from some friend, just go plug in these numbers in Network Settings... and many did! The word IS spreading....

Nokia *alienated* their user base, sadly.

As an n800 owner, I expected the hardware would become obsolete... eventually. I could see making the n800 with built in GPS... but then the n900 as a PHONE and then signaling to the developer base that Maemo5 will abandon the 800 + 810 user base... that hurt. Then the n900 was obsoleted before it even shipped.

Nokia gets praise for making a system that was largely open, but they weren't open enough. When a product is truly open, it can not be killed by the manufacturer.

I suspect developing for MeGoo is inly slightly more relevant than developing for the nostalgia/emulator crowd.

I'd like to see a tablet that's truly open... something that encourages hacking, as in a tablet equivalent of the Arduino platform (a popular micro processor based on open sourced hardware).

As a web developer, the iPad kicks ass for getting work done.. actually *replacing* my laptop for many things: reviewing online (or offline) documentation, checking email, and oh.. testing my work via Safari Mobile. If your work IS the web, the iPad rocks. In a pinch, I could code on it using a bluetooth keyboard, but that's not really what it is best at obviously.

At the very least, it makes a hell of second or third monitor (and has a much better display than the standard 75DPI used on most desktop and laptop displays).

I do have some serious gripes, primarily that of depending on iTunes to sync everything (but I get around that well enough with an old Linksys NAS200 stuffed with 2Tb in drives, a TZO.COM dynamic dns account, and port forwarding on my home router).

I actually held off on an iPad until the Samsung Galaxy reviews came out... I only use Linux at home and work, and a droid for my phone... I -really- wanted my platform to be a droid. My last "Internet tablet" was a Nokia N800 running Maemo... a pity that Nokia smothered their tablet line and moved the OS goalposts so many times (even now, the n800 is impressive... but lacks newer software).

Maybe in a couple of hardware revisions, android tablets will get there. I'm sure of it. But right now Android is not designed for tablets, and people are trying to force it into that hardware...

You are either trolling here, or you grew up in some kind of rich bubble.

Would you care to at least cite some respected source for this insulting "fact"?

I think public school teachers are *saints* for doing what they do... all that college debt of a masters degree, simply to enter a career field whose starting pay is well under $ 30K?
Then once they are working, they will too often discover they have to pay for classroom supplies out of their OWN pocket (and often it is because public-school bashers like yourself lobby to starve schools of funds).
Are you serious?

I think everyone will agree there are bad teachers, and even bad schools. Superintendents are grossly overpaid politicians. You have the same problems in fire and police (but for some reason the libertarian crowd does not attack those public servants, yet anyways)

I live in New Hampshire, the so-called libertarian utopia. You can see the harmful effects of the state model of (under) funding schools, leaving poor towns to fund poor schools. It's not a secret that most of the state's biggest income earning "libertarians" were either educated in out of state public schools or had parents wealthy enough to foot the bill for their college. It's a trendy politic to be anti-civic.

>Of coarse I would prefer that USians start following the Chinese example, and value education / hard work,

Oh, the irony of your statement...

But I do agree with you that US conservatives admire China. Thanks to Republicans, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Communist Party of China working hand and hand.. it's only a matter of YEARS before US workers go on strike, l demanding the end of all holiday overtime, workman's compensation, anti-discrimination laws, and anti-child labor laws. Why? Because it will be the only way to compete.

And that's why conservatives do not want to tax imports from countries who execute democratic "activists". Conservatives know they do not have the votes to return to the 1860's, but they CAN slowly and silently fiscally weaken the US economy with underinvestment and unfair trade policies, until there's really no alternative for the American majority to accept as all the hard won gains collapsed.