Google Maps reports LA-->SF at 382 mi, 5 hours 35 minutes.

He said "if it were not for CHP, I could make it in five every time".

Shaving 35 minutes off a five hour trip is really easy if you drive reasonably (i.e. non-dangerously) fast.

In fact pretty much all the time I am somewhere five-ten minutes per hour faster than the Google estimate.

If you waste money to procure a handshake, you shouldnt be in business.

If you don't understand the true value of a real face to face handshake is at times immeasurable, you DEFINITELY should not be in business.

"conventional" high-speed rail is a proven concept in use today in many non-North American countries.

I have used high speed rail in Europe, including Germany.

It's nice but usually slower than planes.

The hyperloop has the chance to be significantly better than airplane travel, at a reduced environmental (and noise) impact compared to a train.

I am totally against the California rail project because even the current high estimates are probably 5x lower than actual cost. But if we build the hyperloop, we advance all kinds of technology and leapfrog the state of the art in ground travel.

If you make a smartphone app or a desktop application users have to install your app to run it.

While technically true it is irrelevant since installing is just as easy as clicking a link, and discovery of teh app itself is far easier than your web site that exists only in the abstract until someone can find it.

If I were writing a new thing from scratch these days (and I am), there's no way I would start with web if I had any desire to make it a lasting concern.

If you are hacked, all of the people using your application between when you are hacked and when you take down the site until it's fixed are hacked.

But there's then also the downtime if you have to take it offline...

But so many applications depend upon a web service anyway, so you get the worst of both - a native app that still doesn't work correctly if the backend is not available.

You really cannot write a mobile app for which that is true, because mobile apps are just not going to be able to connect at times. A semi-disconnected state is where they fare best.

That's why I think web-apps are a lot more practical for desktop use than mobile, all of the restrictions just make it very hard to write a web app that works well on mobile.

With the single code base across all applications, I mean it in the sense that it's all HTLM5 plus Javascript.

Language is the least of your issues with any application. The savings of being able to use teh same language across platforms is slight because all of the work in GUI is in testing.

And with mobile web apps if you use too many libraries it bogs down the thing to unusablity on many devices. I really think there's a huge distinction between mobile web apps and desktop web apps...

What if the windshield fogs over at a critical moment during your trip???

Well being a white surface on which the projection would be even more visible I'd be pretty damn happy I had an IR view of the road ahead instead of nothing at all!!

I would of course run the defroster rather than rely on the video for long...

If iTunes isn't real money, then why is PayPal real money?

I regularly get iTunes gift cards at a discount off face value, so do lots of people.

Meanwhile whoever gets discounts off the money they send through PayPal? I think there's on introductory credit for getting a PayPal VISA, and that is it.

That's why I say iTunes is less like "real" money to people, because you can load it up at a lesser expense than using real money.

But none of that affects the application developer, they get the same amount on their end...

Why is Google Docs better, at least in principle, than Microsoft Office? Because I can use Google Docs from Windows, from Linux, from Mac, from FreeBSD, from Android, from Tizen, from Blackberry, etc... etc...

The thing is, people don;t have Windows AND Linux AND a Mac...

The have a small number of devices, and if the data can be read on one and worked on on the other, good enough.

That is true of most people, and why web apps have not mattered that much.

After some thought I think Glass is a really bad idea for driving. Having the screen floating in your vision reduces what you can see in the same way a really badly place side pillar in the car can... I guess we can call it the G-Pillar.

Infrared cameras at night and in fog, anyone?

I would LOVE to see that.

But, as a projection overlaid on my windshield, or at least a pretty large projection on the bottom of the windshield. Or even in the large screen embedded in my dashboard that highlights heat sources.

Having a small floating screen that kind of messes with your peripheral vision is NOT the best way to deliver IR video feeds from the front of your car.

It's only a click to install an app too. Only there's a whole lot more web you have to fight for attention against, and more things that can go wrong in the process of delivering a web app to the user. Bad WiFi day for the user? A small hiccup in an app install, but it makes your web app look like garbage.

For instance, Safari on iOS won't let you access the user's system logs (which other apps might occasionally write personal information to) but the containers that run native apps do.

That's not true, what you can do is query the logging system

While it may seem a fine distinction, you are still working through an API. A native app doesn't have "much less restrictive access" to the OS, it just has BROADER access.

Pretty much all of the untethered jailbreaks have come from holes in Safari - not native apps - because Safari actually has lower level access into the system in terms of running a more powerful javascript engine.

For one thing, this applies only if your web application uses a "page" model, not an AJAX model.

No, then it's even worse, because you are not obviously going to a new page, but you get the same annoying delay as if you had...

The same thing can happen if your native application's version control server or backup server gets hacked.

Come on. It would have to be hacked, then a change made with no-one noticing, then it would have to go out to the app store in an update. It's farcically far-fetched and even if it did happen, still would take a LONG time to reach users because someone would still have to submit it to the app store... it could take months.

If iTunes isn't real money, then why is PayPal real money?

Because there are several orders of magnitude more people that CAN AND WILL pay you via iTunes instead of PayPal. I've used both systems. PayPal is great from the standpoint of being able to get you money but it's way more of an obstacle to the user than in-app purchases are.

Although car integration for Glass makes a lot more practical sense for me than other uses, I think there are a lot of other options that give you better and richer feedback. In car screens would have more detail than Glass, HUD displays projected on your lower windshield would be better yet as they could provide a ton of useful info.

If you discover a big bug/security hole in your web app, though, and make a fix, it is fixed

And if you are hacked, EVERYONE of your users is hacked also, instantly. There is some value even in the small buffer an Android app store deployment provides.

And if your web server goes down ALL of your users are down. A native app can keep on trucking and upload updates to you later.

Plus, with a web app, you have one code base across Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc.

Holy cow is THAT wrong. You have never done serious mobile web development.