in the 1990s while working in IT for a certain federal agency, I accidentally discovered that the entire C:\ drive of the PC used by a federal employee involved in negotiations over a multi-million-dollar subcontracting action had been shared out to the entire internal network where the contents could have been viewed by any of several thousand people. I wrote it up; sent it to the security folks. Their response? Crickets. Always made lots of noise about busting someone for the then-new pastime of porn surfing at work (this was back when very few people had Internet access at home) but when it came to things where actual business integrity was compromised, there was little care and little effort.

{ shocked }Looks up from his Sun Sunfire V240 w/ UltraSPARC that runs fully modern Gentoo Linux perfectly well...{ /shocked }

I worked with VMS for a total of about seven years, up to 1999. There are things about it that make *ix look positively quaint, starting with the filesystem. I doubt I'll have occasion to work with it again, but someone who chose to make VMS the basis of a modern operation could do a hell of a lot worse.

Meaning no disrespect, I think that you don't have your eye on the ball and you're not thinking medium-long-term.

The most important travel need in the US is simply the daily grind of home/school/work/store. Our interstate highways and our airlines work quite well, but grinding commutes are what eat up people's time, health, and cars and burn gasoline, oil, and rubber. I'm entering middle age, have a small family, and live about 31 miles east-northeast from the center of a major US metropolitan area. Working in IT as I do, I don't really have a whole lot of control over where I work from one year to another and right now, my work and life situation has me in the car about 12 hours from Monday morning to Friday evening. It would be even more if I took a job outside of the northeast quadrant of the metro area. A few years ago, I worked a contract job right in the center of town; most of the time I drove about 18 miles to get to the closest heavy-rail station and then took a third-rail-powered train with self-propelled cars the rest of the way in (about 25 minutes). I'm sure many of you have worse stories but my point is that a heavy-rail system can't provide me with a station within three miles of my house, much less one I can walk to - and the roads don't support biking.

I'm big on monorails because you can place smaller stations out where people live - a design freedom that comes from being able to have cheap inobtrusive aerial right-of-way, which means no grade crossings. A computerized transit system that would make it possible to get in a monorail car in one station and have the system get you to the station you want to go to in a close-to-optimal fashion (i.e., in near-minimal time and with nearly as few car changes as possible) would be the most transformative and beneficial use of mass transit money you could have. Of course, nothing precludes having trains or individual cars at smaller stations getting you to larger stations where long-haul monorail trains or for that matter heavy-rail trains stop and take you to other cities.

Don't live with the idea that "culture, ideas, people [crossing] distance boundaries much more easily" is a good thing. People freak out when they're surrounded by people and concepts that are alien to them and especially if they lose control over how much of that they're forced to process. Freaked-out people aren't content; they make trouble.

When you think about the future (just decades; no need to look out hundreds), the biggest difference between then and now will be that *distance will be expensive.* $100 ATL -> RDU flights will be gone and an 18-wheeler going from Minneapolis to New York City will be significantly more expensive to hire. Getting an object or a person from one city to another by *any* means will have significant costs, so the ability to not just get around and move objects around but also *get things done* within a relatively small geographical area becomes more important. "Cheap distance" connecting cheap labor to American consumers is what has decimated American manufacturing; this is something that we can expect to see reverse and the idea of buying a refrigerator or furniture that was produced within a few hundred miles of where you buy it may become reasonable.

I think HSR's dead before it gets out of the station and I'm therefore unenthused at the prospect of dumping a lot of money into it.

It's biggest theoretical competitor is commercial air travel. Both CA and HSR require concentrated entry points. You can have smaller, closer-together HSR stations than you can CA airports but that helps little; planes can approach/leave airports from/to any direction but trains have to stay on the tracks that are laid down.

Trains - especially HSR trains - require fixed maintenance-needing infrastructure for every inch of travel; planes just need the sky.

Planes, for the vast majority of their gate-to-gate time, are oblivious to terrain, water, land usage, and other forms of transportation. They are somewhat affected by weather, at least close to and at airports. Heavy snow or ice would either bring HSR trains down to a crawl, especially to the extent that a snowplow locomotive would have to roll down tracks ahead of a train.

Trains of any sort are most useful when the stations are near where people actually live, but where people actually live is the hardest place to lay track.

I think the money ought to instead go into mass transit that gets people out of grinding commutes and gives people better options for getting between home, school, and work, and that's why I rah-rah for monorail. Monorail mostly uses aerial right-of-way and therefore can be built in, around, and over even densely populated communities. Both large and small stations are practical and being able to have small stations is key to being able to put in stations near neighborhoods. Monorail costs less per mile - something which counterintuitively keeps monorail from being built more than it is because it's the public and not corporations who benefit the most. There's still plenty of corporate benefit with monorail but monorail doesn't maximize their profits. That's why government at some level would have to drive monorail projects - the whole "general welfare" thing must come first.

I remember when Harry Thornton of WDEF-TV in Chattanooga got in hot water over something like this in the 1970s. Here's some info on it: http://www.wdef.com/video/about_us_2/01/2008_6