90% chance you are right, but dreamers take risk on the 10%. Dreamers risked their lives to build the first airplane, risked their career on the first microcomputers (Woz at HP), risked their presidency on the first national health-insurance system, etc.

We owe a debt of gratitude and appreciation to the dreamers and risk takers. They gave us our future.

The morons in Congress almost didn't let the Russians be part of the project, even though they were the only country in the world that actually had experience building and maintaining a space station.

In bigger cities, such a contraption would have to be computer-controlled to reduce the risk of human error to an acceptable level. But perhaps if something gets going in a rural area, investments in city-friendly control infrastructure will follow. Thus, it doesn't have to start out being city-ready; it just has to start out (and gain usage).

Something like NASA's vertical-takeoff Puffin design sounds like the way to go for those without big yards or landing spots. Although, that's not really a "car". But "mass commuter planes" is close enough. 2D traffic sucks here; time to up-grade.

putting 100% of our efforts into robotics and AI so that radiation-hardened machines can do whatever it is that's still worthwhile to do in space.

Robots can't colonize an asteroid or moon, and that's one of the truly worthwhile things to do in space. They can prepare the site to a certain extent, but it's not really a colony until Earth life is resident. You're right that sending people to LEO is pretty much worthless, but that's NOT where we should be limiting ourselves to. To our knowledge, the universe is ours for the taking, and only the shortsightness of politicians and businessmen is keeping it from us.

Alas Senator McGovern, in his counter-scientific war on fat, has probably killed more Americans than any war.

Don't take the McGovern name as a true test of good governance.

As of September 1941, the US Navy was waging war against Germany in the Atlantic. This followed numerous violations of the Hague Conventions regarding neutrality, in favor of the Allies. One reason Hitler declared war was that he figured Germany and the US were at war for practical purposes already, and he wanted to be seen as starting the war. Most people in the US wanted to stay out of the war against Germany, but they were becoming increasingly convinced that they wouldn't be able to.

While the US kicked Japanese butt really hard (not to slight our Australian and New Zealand allies), US participation in the war against Germany was not really as vital. By the time US intervention was making a real difference, Germany was on its way down (using 20/20 hindsight here). The Soviet Union was the biggest single contributor to the downfall of Nazi Germany, Britain probably the second. The US role was massive and highly successful, but it was generally to late to be actually decisive.

BTW, does anybody else remember apparent pressure being put on the CIA to say what Bush wanted? Or what they finally put out, which was that Iraq wasn't actually an immediate threat?

I don't understand why they would fixate on old technology...

Revoke his Nerd Card immediately. He is not one of us. I bet his computer chair is completely free of pizza stains too.

Man, the hoops people jump thru over nostalgia for pixellated pr0n.

Highways had clout in other ways. Shortly before WWII, a bright and upcoming officer named Eisenhower was ordered to take a truck convoy across the US, to see how that worked. The answer was badly. I suspect that particular experience played a part in the building of the interstates.

What about it? As far as I can tell, it's a non sequitur. The one has nothing to do with the other, aside from the fact that they were both car-related things that Steve Jobs is known for. I'm not going to defend everything the guy did or suggest it was all legal (far from it!). I'm merely agreeing with something I once heard reported that I thought was an interesting factoid.

Taken out of context, as it was in the summary, I fully agree that "West Coast" is ambiguous, given the international readership of Slashdot. That's why I made a point of very intentionally establishing context first, by mentioning that it was an LA Times article. I then used an "and" to pair it with the "West Coast" term, indicating that I think you need both to satisfactorily determine the time zone in question, rather than just one or the other.

If you can't safely take one hand off the wheel briefly, um, don't get a manual transmission. Strangely, I rarely see large piles of stick-shift cars wrecked beside the highway on my daily commute.