Really? You can buy debit/prepaid cards at pretty much any major retailer in the United States. I'll submit that a lot of people outside the first world probably have limited access to bank accounts and credit cards.

Yahoo doesn't pay dividends and has 14000 employees...they are't really a small startup, that's my only point about market cap. I would guess they have a legal department they could consult on this.

I think having a market cap of 17.75B isn't really in the "small to medium-sized business" category. So Flickr/Yahoo could do it that way assuming their in-house counsel says that it abides by the law.

Other then varnish and squid what caching reverse proxy software is there? It looks like Nginx added caching to their core recently, although I'm not exactly sure if its intended to act in the same capacity as squid and varnish or to be more like mod_cache for lighttpd. I guess you could use apache and mod_proxy but that's not exactly high performance. I know my employer looked at the various offerings and we ended up writing our own on top of a webserver called OKWS.

Actually one of the provisions of the federal government taking over passenger rail (aka Amtrak) was that they got priority over freight. This is slowly being enforced more and more so it wouldn't be a factor. One thing I wonder is why the government doesn't just take some of the right of way that they granted the railroads way back when. The Pennsylvania Railroad used to have 4 tracks going clear across the state from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Since then they have ripped out 2 of them, why not have the government replace them with rail that's rated for high speed operation?

I think a large part of the problem is the regulations associated with running trains faster. I mean if I was a shareholder in the railroads and they could perform upgrades to get stuff across the country in 1 week instead of 2 and thereby beat the trucking industry it seems like it would be a worthwhile investment.