Mass transit isn't intended for places like Montana. It is intended for cities with large populations.

For example in my city, San Diego county, we have piss poor mass transit but a population of over 3 million. That means that every San Diegan owns a car and likely has a 20+ minute commute just for driving from home to the office.

In fact it is worse than that. I see many "act like they live in the country" people driving around raised 4x4 truck. When you peer in the window, it is just a middle aged lady going to the strip mall to shop for clothes.

The problem with American culture is we're trained to think individually. That is we only think about ourselves and it is supposed to be a good thing. But you see, if you're in Montana, you should be all for mass transit and denser cities, not because your area would be one to receive such treatment, more because cities like San Diego would stop eating so much of our resources like fuel. That would benefit you indirectly by making demand for fuel not so important.

You couldn't be more wrong. Here's why:

If you are a kid and you want to play, it is a lot more fun if you have a friend to play with. However, if the closest friend is just 2 miles on the other side of town, chances are you're not going to see that friend because: you are too young to drive, mommy thinks it's too far, and there's a child molester somewhere in the state.

The problem with your logic is you assume playground = kids can have fun. Or trees = kids can have fun. Or bicycles = kids can have fun. But what's the single thing people seem to aspire to do when they grow up? Find a mate. What you are suggesting is the equivalent of marrying a playground swing, slide, or monkey bars. Kids don't want that. People don't want that. What they want is the interaction with friends. The playground becomes secondary.

Now if you go to Tokyo, one of the densest cities in the world, I think you'll see something you haven't realized. It works the same in any city, but I think Tokyo is the finest example. Many homes even in the suburbs in Tokyo do not have yards. They might have a garden, maybe a space for 1 car. But that's it. The front door is usually less than 5 feet from the street. Now according to your argument, kids in Tokyo should be miserable and bored to death. But it is quite the contrary. Kids are lively. Go on a train just after school, elementary school kids riding the train together or alone without the aid of an adult. Go to a popular area or hangout for kids like say a trendy store or cafe, kids again waiting to meet up with friends and "hang out". Of all the places that are the emptiest, it is the public playgrounds that seem the most dead. Everyone else (kids included) are meeting up in various parts of the city to "play".

The strange side effect of all of this is because the kids have to walk some distance, they aren't hyperactive compared to American kids that get driven around everywhere. They also grow up with the idea that walking is a part of life. Here the first thing a kid whines about is having to walk somewhere. Well he wouldn't whine if you'd stop driving him everywhere he needs to be and if Billy his best friend was within 10-15minutes by foot rather than 30 minutes by foot.

In Tokyo access to a train station pretty much grants you access to the entire city. In order to use the train you only have to buy a ticket. There's no age requirement, no license requirement. This means as soon as a kid can buy a ticket, know what stop to get on/off, he has equivalent mobility to most adults in the city as well. That's huge. No suburban backyard can compare to that concept.

Best deals I've seen are tmobile prepaid. For example they have an unlimited data/text (up to 5gb at 4g speed) and 100 minutes for $30 a month.

Then I would actually buy an android smartphone used or new (tmobile will sell you a sim card for $2 or $6), and install google voice. Now you can have free calling within the US.

I've become a firm believer in "paid" parking or "market driven" parking. That is where we get rid of "free" parking and instead directly charge users fees for the parking they utilize. This article adequately explains why: http://www.lamag.com/features/Story.aspx?ID=1568281.

You can claim the street cleaning thing is a scam, sure I'll agree there that should go away, however, we should not have free parking at all. It is not logical. It only makes sense that the person that utilizes the parking should pay for it. That's how normal things work.

When we have "free" parking, the costs of parking are hidden from the user. This leads to abuse. If you are aware that something is free but obviously costs money to maintain or provide, then by all means as a typical capitalist, you should abuse the hell out of that free service. So now we have grown up with an expectation of "free" parking when that is clearly not the case.

This penalizes us in multiple ways. The strip mall is now twice as large in order to provide a surface level parking lot (the cheapest option). You must now buy a new house or condo with parking due to minimum parking laws (what if I don't need the space?). The city is now designed around cars and not people (we will never get density as long as this is true).

In related studies on traffic, the findings are similar. If we expand lanes on a congested freeway, demand will increase to fill up that lane because the freeway is subsidized. That is, the cost of using the freeway to users appears to be "free" therefore demand increases in order to take advantage of a free resource. The result is for a short period the freeway is not congested, then suddenly it has the same amount of traffic.

"Free" parking creates the problem it tries to cure. Users complain "parking is expensive" so the city gives them free parking, then suddenly everyone uses the parking because it is free and now there is a shortage of parking again. This is like giving people free money. They say "I have no money" so you give them $5 dollars. Then they go spend it. Then they complain they have no money again...

"Showrooming" can be used against online retailers by brick and mortar shops. They just haven't realized it. You simply go the opposite direction: stock your store with 1 model and maybe 1 or 2 units of inventory, then only offer to sell it by order. In the process you would reorganize your inventory and supply chain to support a centralized warehouse with reduced store inventories. Stores would only carry high volume units. Low volume items would generally only have display units. You offer a competitive "online" price on these items.

You would eventually beat the online retailers at their own game: customers would come into your "showroom" because they have tangible access to the products and likely pay a small markup because they can be sure they placed the order on the right product.

If the customer really must have the product in their hands at that exact moment, then you offer to sell it at that price, but charge an "expedite" fee. Now they get both options from you: slightly higher price for paying for inventory on site, or reduced warehouse price with delayed delivery.

Big retail chains need to realize what has happened. Customers didn't just say they wanted the cheapest price. They also said "I'm willing to wait a few days on my purchase if you knock the price down a bit." The big retailers need to realize how to take advantage of that and the fact that they have "showrooms".

All right, I've had enough of this "2 wrongs = 1 right" argument. Why? Because the fact is they allowed something to slide in their interests until it generated bad PR then "magically" did the right thing as the public became aware of the wrong doing. You can stick any company in this position and change the parameters. The actions are still speaking the same language: we will not do anything about it until it becomes a problem (for us, the corporation). This reactive nature is bad on so many levels because it entices the corporation to do whatever possible to evade bad PR even if it is immoral or causes things like "human death".

Do yourself a favor, read the nytimes article but first replace "Apple" with "The Corporation" and "iPad/iPhone" with "The Corporation's Product" to prevent your distortion field from taking effect.

The difference between doctors/residents and factory workers is the doctors/residents aren't working in a hazardous environment.

But even given that, two wrongs don't make one right. Both conditions should be changed in regards to their respective problems. Apple appears to not care about the issue.

Eh, I'm not that excited about autonomous automobiles. I envision something more like Wall-e where people have so much automation that they become slobs. To some degree it already happened to the U.S. just from car culture. You no longer walk more than even a quarter mile a day. Your car sits just a few steps away in your home garage. The parking space is right next to the front door of the store or the office. Now all of your medical ailments are due to being in a chair for most of the day rather than using your body for what it was made for: to move yourself.

I'm not sure why we need this when we've had the solution for quite a while. One trip to Tokyo will make you realize what we've ignored for perhaps the last 100 years in America. Tokyo itself is designed like real-life Disneyland. If you go to Disneyland and walk around in the park, you'll notice that it isn't so bad. Why? Because the inside of the park was designed for people, not cars. Tokyo is exactly like this. The center of the city was designed for people without cars. Trains and subways take you everywhere and come regularly. Thirsty? There's a vending machine 5 feet away, a convenience store 50 feet away. The closest train/subway station? A 5 minute walk. Pedestrian bridges over particularly busy streets. Buildings have no parking because nobody uses cars.

What everyone thinks of Japan (besides the anime junk) is that it is a small tiny and crappy apartment with no living space. That's true, but it is only half of the story. Nobody takes a camera and shows you how long it takes to get to the closest convenience store, the closest market, the closest restaurant, or the closest train station. But it is all possible, with your two feet and public transit. Using a car in many ways is actually more inconvenient. As bad as the weather got, I didn't mind walking. In fact walking was more interesting. I could observe my surroundings. When I was driving, I was looking to protect myself. Sure, an autonomous car would change that, but there's more to this.

When you get on (a not so busy) train there, you're free to read/sleep/play around on your phone. They already have the conveniences we dream of with autonomous cars simply because their city was built around people and transit.

The strange thing is as busy as their city is, the actual living spaces away from the center of the chaos is quiet (as in no sound). Anywhere in the U.S. which is populated will have this incessant freeway/highway hum. It's annoying. Over there at worst you live next to a train station. The train itself isn't annoying, because they're all electrified and they don't blow their horns. Instead it's the stupid announcement message that the next train will be arriving soon...

As soon as you step outside of the hotel or apartment you feel alive. You see people walking around. You can see people from the street and look into shops and see other people. That doesn't work in United Suburbia of America. Drive by the strip mall and you can barely glance inside. Get out of your car and now you're in "car defense" mode. Walk to another store on the other side of the strip mall and get tired because the parking lot is just too damn big. That's ridiculous.

Since few people own a car, you wonder how they manage to buy large objects or transport things. The simple answer is they rent a car. Most people are called "paper drivers" because they get driving licenses but don't use them regularly. They just use it when convenient. Alternatively you can also have things delivered. Since people don't own their own cars, it is actually possible to work as a delivery man. You know...kinda how we solved distributing milk without refrigeration way back... (As a side note, I'm always confused why only Pizza is delivered in the U.S. but not other fast foods.)

Every time I come back to the U.S. I'm annoyed. I know our cities don't have to be this way. We don't need novel solutions like autonomous cars to satisfy the living needs of 80% of the urban population. We don't need giant homes if the city we lived in was functional. We don't need cars for each person if the city was designed for human traffic, not auto traffic. It can happen today. We don't need autonomous cars to make it happen.

And the thing is we had that at one point. I like to look at really old San Diego (my hometown) pictures from time to time before the era of the automobile. The city looked like a city. People were out on the streets. You could peer into shops. There was a street car system for transporting people from downtown to the beaches. These days it is perfectly possible to go through your entire day without meeting a single soul face to face. Sorry, that's a pretty cold future to me.

Before you get all over me, I'm not exclusively against automobiles. There have been times when I came back and I was actually a little happy to drive again (I drive manual). What I am really after is choice. I shouldn't have to give up 90% of my living conveniences just because I have no car or be forced to pay for parking spaces to be littered around the city. Instead I should have a choice between the car, the bus, the train, or the bicycle. That's mobility freedom. For any decently large city (guessing around 1 million residents or larger), transit should be a viable option.

The problem Google has is they still don't understand service. Which you would think is odd since their search engine was built on top of being the best as services search queries...

This service problem works it's way into many things. But the worst is it is blinding them from where they got their initial success. Most of Google's products since have been released for "free as in beer". They essentially tried to apply the ad model to everything without recognizing that it doesn't work in all cases.

If they want to expand successfully into other businesses, they're going to have to accept that they're going to have to alter their money making strategy for different business segments. Sorry, that's just life. Ads don't work well in all cases.

If they want to improve Android as a platform, they should first look to their app developer base and look for ways they can work with developers to make better applications. A good amount of this will be in providing an API and tools that make it easier for the developer to make a good app. There's a lot of non-sense in the android API (I've worked with it) that make it more painful to work with than anything. For example for a while they were advocating their nifty swipe left/right to switch to a different view, but did they provide this interface and make it usable for devs? No.

I'm also going to say that they need to start hiring more employees without engineering or technical centric backgrounds. That's right, everyone from designers, to marketers, to support staff. They're missing a real human component to their business and it is starting to cause them grief and isolates their technical staff from reality. When you're surrounded by people that are not technical, you begin to understand their problems and alter your strategies for implementing your own solutions. If you're only surrounded by technically aware people, your solutions are only going to fit other technically minded people. To be clear, I'm not saying they need to grow their marketing department to rival their engineering department, instead they at least need a team large enough to take on significant marketing tasks like PR and branding and they also need to get more of their engineers out in the field rather than in the Googleplex.

Oh, I see the name of this game now. Let's change "fragmentation" to mean whatever we want it to mean.

First it was the fact that different devices existed though they were generally running the same Android version. Everyone complained "oh, fragmentation." Jobs and company went out and told the world you can't build a high quality product if you don't control the entire market vertically. That was fragmentation.

Of course many developers came out and said it wasn't really a problem. You simply target a lower API level and develop from that. If you're using undocumented features and digging in beyond what was specified, that was your problem. That's like tweaking your car's engine beyond specification with something like a turbo charger and later calling up the manufacturer and asking why the engine blew up because you used forced induction.

Nevermind that iOS has similar fragmentation issues. The screen on an iphone 3gs is not the same resolution as an iphone 4 which is not the same as an ipad. Fragmentation?

Now you say, "OMG, you can buy a phone with an old version of android!" Well no shit. The idea wasn't to pigeon hole everyone into something. That's Apple's business model, the model of complete control. When Apple decides "hey, buy a new phone" they can and will force people to do it and nobody dares to stand up to them.

For example let's talk about Siri. Siri is perfectly capable of running on EXISTING iphone 4 devices. It was shown to be possible by some hackers. Hell, Siri itself was running on iphone 3gs when Siri was an independent company. Then Apple came in and bought Siri, dropped the Siri app from the app store, and re-released it as part of iOS 5 and RESTRICTED it to iphone 4s. How is that not fragmentation? How is that not FORCED product obsolescence?

Oh yeah, that's right. Jobs and his legacy is your savior. We must justify every decision even if it potentially hurts us. But if someone else does it? EVIL! HATE! ALERT THE BLOGOSPHERE! F-R-A-G-M-E-N-T-A-T-I-O-N!!!

I recommend using Dancer. It is much newer but borrows/learns from many of the mistakes in Catalyst and other language's frameworks. It has fewer dependencies and will more likely install correctly. It is also PSGI/Plack ready. It is also designed to be more configurable so you can easily switch the templating system via a config file.

Uh, as a student of the Japanese language, I understand that there are varying degrees of politeness, but it has less to do with gender and more to do with "rank". So you speak differently to your superiors and they speak differently "down" to you.

In terms of genders, I think Japan has come quite a ways in terms of making women more "equal". There are still obvious gaps: wages for women are generally lower than men but it doesn't seem women mind this. I think it is still very common for women in Japan to stop working when they have children. The man however will continue to work to support the family. That's a fair trade if a woman doesn't expect to be working once she enters "family" life.

There are still some customs we would consider sexist here in the west. For example female office workers are often referred to as "OL" which is short for Office Lady. OL are expected to make/serve the tea in the office if they are present. But there are many other differences that really set Japanese work environments apart from western style work environments. The most notable is the priority of the "group" instead of individual.

In terms of language however, the honorifics aren't necessarily specific to gender, more ranking.

If you really want to see retardedness in terms of not only "rank" but also gender, you should try South Korea. Not only do you get the awkward language with "rank" expressions built into it, you get it at the fun level of age. That is if someone happens to be older than you by a year, you must address them differently. So before you can even talk to a random person, the first question you have to ask is "how old are you?" Add on top of it that they're heavily influenced by christianity and have a history of unwanted occupations by other countries, well, you've got a ton of bitterness and strangeness built into that kind of culture. Not saying that they're bad people, but it can really be hard to understand or deal with their culture at times.

Consider this: in South Korea, appearance is so important that it is fairly common for Korean families to provide plastic surgery as a "gift" for their daughters once they graduate high school.

But even for both cultures, I don't think either is oppressed at the "gender" level. Women in both countries seem very content and expressive with their lives. In fact, Japanese men are trending "down" in terms of dating women. There's a phenomenon called "grass eaters" going on. That is men that don't actively see women because they think it is too much hassle.

Finally in Filipino culture, there is some of this "genderness" and "ranking" built into the language. While it isn't at the general "he/she" level it is more at the family level. Any older sibling must be referred to as "kuya" for older brothers and "ate" (pronounced ah-te) for older sisters. This expands not just to your immediate family but also to any relatives and anyone considered a close relative (may not be blood related). There are many of these respectful expressions notions. For example any woman of roughly the same age group as your parents should be referred to as "aunt".

If you were to compare languages, I would say English is still the king of shedding gender and politeness. He/she still exists but that's way simpler than knowing all of these cultural/ranking specific terms. Even "Mr/Ms" is starting to go away as well as "m'am" and "sir".

I like airplanes. I really do. Someday I'll fly one myself. But beyond that, air travel has it's own set of problems. Each airplane "ride" has this annoying process called "boarding and deplaning". It's the whole reason why you have to show up 1 hour early to the airport, and while your flight arrives at maybe 2pm, it still takes you 30 minutes to be on your way out of the airport. And that's all IF things go smoothly. Chances are a bag gets lost, somebody holds up the security line, etc.

No matter how hard you try, you can't argue against that. A transfer in a large sized airport will need at least 1 hour to make it assuming things go well. But usually you plan on a 2 hours between transfer just incase you're delayed for whatever reason. It doesn't matter where you are, this seems to be the norm all over the world for air passenger travel.

A train transfer on the other hand can be as short as however fast you can run to the next train. There's also none of that take-off and landing stuff. You can even line up outside the door as the train comes to a stop. A ticket purchase can also be made minutes before the actual departure. It is quite a trip to see a good working train system in action. I recommend it. We don't have much of it here in the states.

Now on the to the cost. There are certainly a lot of dumb reasons why the California HSR project is getting inflated. It basically boils down to two groups that I'll call "Not in my backyards (NIMBY)" and "Please in my backyard". The first is easy to explain, but it is mainly rich people and people like yourself that think the project is useless. So these people band together to prevent any meaningful progress happen. I'd say their strategy is akin to that of the GOP's strategy in congress (whine as much as possible so that nothing gets done). Rich people obviously don't want the project because it will change their communities along the proposed track lines. People like yourself don't want it because you don't think it is economical.

The strange thing is the farmers and small towns along the valley DO want the train. In many studies when HSR is built, small towns that get a trains stop actually see population and economic growth due to more people having access to the town. So this becomes a lot of bickering and whining for stations, some which may not even be worth the hassle in the initial segment.

Finally there's a lot of freight companies and FRA standards that make absolutely no sense. Not only does this affect HSR, but it also affects local passenger rail services. Our passenger rail trains are generally overweight due to "safety" rules enforced by the FRA on minimum weight.

So if you combine all of those factors, what we have is a lot of unnecessary needs to address factors just so that everyone in their municipality or interest can benefit. That means unnecessary tunneling where it is perfectly viable to be at grade. Unnecessary extra tracks. Unnecessary stations. Unnecessary train specifications.

But of course people like you have to make this political, make it black-and-white. "There is no viable HSR system" is obviously not the case when the rest of the world continues to expand passenger rail services. This project is obviously overweight, I agree with that, but let's at least understand what's wrong rather than fill it up with logical fallacies. It's quite obvious that's how many things are working out in this country. Everyone seems more interested in throwing up own straw-men rather than working together to do what's reasonable.

Fun observation, the interstate highway system is probably the most expensive public works project in history. Should that have been considered a boondoggle? From wikipedia: "The initial cost estimate for the system was $25 billion over 12 years; it ended up costing $114 billion (adjusted for inflation, $425 billion in 2006 dollars) and took 35 years."

If I had to run the project I'd certainly look at implementing a shorter initial segment with less opposition. LA-Vegas would be quite profitable in my opinion. If it was only CA, perhaps SD-LA would be a possibility despite both cities being car centric.

I also wouldn't mind more local passenger rail investment instead of HSR. But nobody seems interested in public transit either. Arguments against public transit are usually "it stinks" and "there's crazy people", yet in normal circumstances, public transit works well in other countries because the "normal" people outnumber the crazies and they have sane cleaning procedures or culturally enforced rules (mainly don't be a douchebag on the train). Meanwhile we seem to be perfectly happy to have people that are clearly not qualified to drive a car on the road every minute of the day. So instead of communicating directly to the other person, now you can scream at your windshield and drive like an asshole.

I'm not going to talk to my phone for the same reason I don't call people or even pick up their calls at times; text messaging is far more convenient and private than any voice conversation.

When messages come in as text, I can read and consume them in an order that best fits my schedule. I also read much faster than someone can talk. The most annoying thing at work is older folks that like to leave 2 minute long or longer voice mails. If you have that much information to tell me, send me an email.

Voice communication is also known to be ambiguous at times even between humans. It is the entire reason why we have detailed conversations and go back-and-forth on subjects. Meanwhile a text and computer interface is accurate. There are many cases where I don't want to deal with the ambiguity of language or making something/someone understand. I know what I want to do and if there is a formal and clear interface for doing it, then lets use that.

There are only a few cases where voice commands to a computer make sense. One case is driving. Most people probably have enough brain capacity to have the phone do something for them while they're driving. Siri or something like it would be good for that.

My Nexus one doesn't do some of the things you claim. My clock is always accurate and I never had a problem with the phone switching off of wifi to 3g/2g.

The headphone jack can get a little finicky but I don't use it much. Bluetooth dock I don't have. But I do sync with bluetooth. Sometimes the phone won't sync. Haven't figured out if it is the phone or the car. I'm always on vibrate so I don't know if I've had the ringtone issue. The launcher does have issues and I'll force close it and let it restart. The screen locker can have issues but I think it is tied to the launcher having issues.