But you're still talking about small distances. "All the way from London to Barcelona" is less than the distance between Seattle and Los Angeles, and that's just on one coast of the U.S. In addition, the population density between those two cities is relatively low, other than the San Francisco and Portland areas, so the economics are questionable.
A train across the U.S. would be three times as long as the London-Barcelona link. And this is my point: because of distances, population density differences, and the competition with air travel, for anything but quite local travel in the U.S., no-one is likely to use high-speed rail unless the air network becomes completely unworkable. The latter could happen, but it hasn't really happened yet.
Not sure from your wording if you're suggesting e.g. linking Seattle to LA: that's at least 1100 miles, more than double the distance of that 800km Paris-Marseille high-speed stretch mentioned elsewhere in this subthread. So with current real-world high-speed train technology, you're talking about a 7 hour trip. That's not competitive with airlines in terms of time, even with current security measures. It also would be unlikely to be competitive on price, particularly if a faster-than-ever-before high-tech system had to be built.
The San Francisco - San Diego corridor is more on the scale of the Paris-Marseille rail link (at over 600 miles, it's a little longer). Certainly, high-speed train networks in these places would be nice. But there are not that many places in the US where high speed rail can link enough cities together to make it much more than a local metro system. Some of the places where it is viable are already considering high-speed rail, and some already have it (kind of: e.g. Amtrak's Acela).
Yes, a train would create a sonic boom if it were fast enough. Somewhere around 1980, there was speculation about building a cross-country underground train, which would move through tunnels with the air partially evacuated. Of course, that was never going to happen.
I'm not arguing that the U.S. just shouldn't pursue trains. In the current environment, it probably will. But Europeans tend to get a misleading sense of the practicality of trains as an alternative to planes, because they live in such a small area.
Currently, Paris-Marseille, 800 km, is done in 3 hours
And that's probably one of the longest high-speed rail stretches, right? The distances in the US make a good air network essential. Given the very different population distribution, and the size of the country, making rail competitive with that air network, except in special cases, is a tough proposition.
Actually, I'd like to know more about the rail systems that have even the 800 - 1000-mile range well handled. With stops, even with high-speed trains, such trips are probably taking at least 8 hours, which is not realistic for business travel within the U.S. And that's the problem: distances in the U.S. are large, so a good air network is essential. Given a good air network, making rail competitive with that, except in special cases, is a tough proposition. The romance I mentioned in the subject line is that people are imagining European-style short-haul high-speed rail travel as a desirable outcome, while ignoring the economic realities of a different situation.
No-one who gets interviewed on the Colbert Report "actually thinks they're doing an interview". Try actually watching it sometime, and also keep in mind that Colbert deliberately acts as the "ass" you claim he his, to skewer the people who I can only assume are your heroes, Bill O'Reilly foremost among them.
If they kill 100 or 1,000 our innocent civilians, you think we should respond by killing thousands or tens of thousands of innocent their civilians? That's about the only thing I can think of that will swell the terrorist ranks more quickly than our current meddling in the region.
Actually, neither of you are thinking big enough. Dubya was a step in the right direction, a crazy faux cowboy who refuses to back down. But in the end, he's too civilized and restrained. What's really needed is someone who's willing to go through with major genocide, using nuclear weapons, to remind humanity of what's at the end of that road. We haven't had such a reminder since 1945, and it's starting to show.
After all, there are over 6 billion of us, we can afford to lose a few billion. The remaining ones will hopefully have a bit more respect for the value of peace. It's an evil job, but somebody's gotta do it.
High speed rail is a major utility between cities and towns in most modern nations, except the US.
Could you tell me which of those modern nations have train networks that allow you to travel, say, the 1300km between NYC and Chicago, or the 4500km between NYC and LA, in a timely fashion that's even remotely competitive with air travel? Or are you suggesting that the U.S. create a new rail system the likes of which the world has never seen? (Be interesting to watch *that* being done on time, and under budget...)
European countries with good rail systems, as well as Japan, are *tiny* compared to the U.S. It's true that there are some short-haul trips, like NY to DC or Boston, which could benefit from faster and more reliable train service. But the air network would still be needed for anything longer distance, and the reality is that the train service isn't likely to be able to compete other than in exceptional cases, short of major technological advances which haven't happened yet.
ultimately we have to remember that air travel is a very expensive, cumbersome and fragile way to travel.
Compared to what, and how do you justify that claim? Certainly not in terms of actual passenger injuries per mile, since air travel is close to rail travel in that respect, and much better than road travel. For longer trips in particular, alternative forms of transportation can't compete with air travel in terms of speed, and it's not as easy as you might think to compete in terms of cost. Rail isn't cheaper than air in many (most?) cases, and that's not just because of market distortion etc. Building a faster, more ubiquitous and more reliable rail system wouldn't help bring costs down.
NY to Chicago is an 18-hour train trip. NY to LA is something like 56 hours, IIRC. Faster train systems would help, but no country in the world has succeeded in making train travel a really viable system over such long distances. The U.S. dependence on jet travel is a pretty rational one, assuming you don't hanker for the days when travelling across country and back was a multi-week affair.
How about the Jack Bauer Bridge instead. Think about it, the bridge would get built right the first time, it would only take one person to do it, and it would only take 24 hours to complete.
Or 12 hours, if everyone would just follow Jack's instructions!
Why is the UN wasting its time on Asia-Pacific, when it could be recommending that Israel and Hezbollah "seriously consider" adopting Microsoft Office? The shared trauma of dealing with Office will surely bring the two sides closer, eventually leading to a ceasefire after Clippy the paperclip pops up one too many times.
Technically, the universe could be 5 minutes old, created by a being who thought it would be amusing to have everyone think it was billions of years old
If that's the case, then our job is to figure out what age the being wants us to think it is. Once we get the right answer, maybe she'll give us a cookie.
Correction: there are many cabals, but no individual cabal has the kind of power that the conspiracy theorist's cabals have. The real cabals either compete with each other, or operate in different areas.
The myth of the single central super-cabal is a bit like the myth of God: people invent God to explain lots of little things and some big things, because it's easier to personify everything into a single "person" than to grapple with all of the myriad factors directly. The myth of the super-cabal is a way of grappling with the fact that many different groups of people exercise control over our lives in different ways, most of which are not at all transparent or under our control.
Some of our best friends were dinosaurs, I think we'd know if they weren't mammals. Perhaps your paleontologists should recheck their data. Then again, it was 65 million years ago, and all you squishy carbon-based organisms look alike to us.
The problem with your theory is that there's no evidence of large-scale objects in the universe, like planets, stars, nebulae and galaxies, behaving according to any kind of intelligence. Their behavior is determined by relatively simple (pun intended) physical laws, such as the laws of gravity. If the universe is a superbeing, it's a pretty predictable and uninteresting one. If you were a microscopic creature inside our bodies, you'd see all sorts of activity that you couldn't explain with simple laws. If you were stuck in one location, there'd be no way to come up with an explanation for the behavior you see, the way we've developed physical laws to explain the behavior of the visible universe.
Besides, if you're right, then the universal superbeing could do with some shaking up. It reminds me of Zorg in the Fifth Element:
Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Take this empty glass: here it is, peaceful, serene. Boring. But if it is... destroyed. (glass shatters, robots enter to clean it up) Well, look at all these little things - so busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color! Now think of all the people that created them, technicians, engineers, hundreds of people who will be able to feed their children tonight so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny-weeny children of their own and so on and so forth. Thus adding to the great chain of life. See, by creating a little destruction, I am, in fact, encouraging life.
Thank you for bringing the THOR project to our attention. We find your idea to fire projectiles at high speed into our planet rather disturbing. Should you decide to go through with this plan, please keep in mind the following: remember that asteroid strike that wiped out most large mammals on your strangely-colored planet about 65 million of your years ago? That was us.
Yours in peace, for the moment, Department of Marsland Security
Briefly, our mission is to land in the northern polar region of Mars (about 70 N latitude) in May 2008 and to expose the upper few feet of surface material using a robotic arm to find the ice that was discovered by the Odyssey mission in 2002. The history of this ice and its interaction with the martian atmosphere will be studied throughout the 3-month primary mission. This ice-rich soil may be one of the few habitable environments on Mars where a biological system can survive.
We were pleased to learn about your upcoming Phoenix mission, and look forward to this opportunity to once again secretly study your technology from our invisible bunkers on the Martian surface. (Whatever you do, don't try to dig below 500m, retaliation will be swift and final.)
On your journey, please keep in mind that Mars uses the metric system. Any space probes detected using "Imperial" units (whose very name are an affront to the Martian Emperor, may he live forever) will be silently deflected by the planetary protection shields.
Yours truly, Mars Department of Blue Planet Studies and Relations
P.S. Regarding any rumors you may have heard about invasion, don't worry, the chances of anything coming from here are a million to one...
My archbishop swears the world is only 6010 years old!
Explain to your archbishop that he's thinking of God years, which are kind of like the inverse of dog years. According to leading physicists, 1 human year is 7 dog years (actually it's more complicated than that, but I'll keep it simple for you laypeople). OTOH, 1 God year is about 2 million human years. That number's not perfectly accurate, but they'll improve it once they've succeeded in capturing and interrogating God, using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Feh, I scoff at your breakable clay tablets. If you want durability, you can't do better than spreading ochre on the walls of a cave. Cave paintings have lasted for tens of thousands of years!
Ha ha. One of the incidents I was referring to was being apprehended with some friends by a neighbor who thought we were doing something bad. We were playing on the property of someone who was away, i.e. we were nominally trespassing, but if the person in question had been home, he would have been fine with it, since we knew him and had a good relationship with him. We were held in a room with no windows or lights while waiting for the police to arrive, taken to the police station and held while our parents were called.
Basically, a suspicious and nosy neighbor was able to create an incident from almost nothing. The police believed him over us, and gave us no benefit of the doubt until our parents got involved. The cops could have easily just driven us down the block to the home of one of our parents and straightened the whole thing out, but instead they had to act as though we needed to be taught a lesson. I was taught a lesson alright, but it wasn't the one they thought they were teaching.
None of this is a big deal in any absolute sense, but a cop who's going to use his position to essentially bully kids is not a good guy, and is probably pretty much the same sort of guy that's going to arrest someone for photographing the police. People like that shouldn't be cops, and there's no reason to put up with it.
Yeah, but bending light has other effects. Think about prisms, for example. "If this device unbends the light properly" is a big if, especially when you're talking about trying to make human-sized and human-shaped objects invisible.
Slashdot Mirror
But you're still talking about small distances. "All the way from London to Barcelona" is less than the distance between Seattle and Los Angeles, and that's just on one coast of the U.S. In addition, the population density between those two cities is relatively low, other than the San Francisco and Portland areas, so the economics are questionable.
A train across the U.S. would be three times as long as the London-Barcelona link. And this is my point: because of distances, population density differences, and the competition with air travel, for anything but quite local travel in the U.S., no-one is likely to use high-speed rail unless the air network becomes completely unworkable. The latter could happen, but it hasn't really happened yet.
Not sure from your wording if you're suggesting e.g. linking Seattle to LA: that's at least 1100 miles, more than double the distance of that 800km Paris-Marseille high-speed stretch mentioned elsewhere in this subthread. So with current real-world high-speed train technology, you're talking about a 7 hour trip. That's not competitive with airlines in terms of time, even with current security measures. It also would be unlikely to be competitive on price, particularly if a faster-than-ever-before high-tech system had to be built.
The San Francisco - San Diego corridor is more on the scale of the Paris-Marseille rail link (at over 600 miles, it's a little longer). Certainly, high-speed train networks in these places would be nice. But there are not that many places in the US where high speed rail can link enough cities together to make it much more than a local metro system. Some of the places where it is viable are already considering high-speed rail, and some already have it (kind of: e.g. Amtrak's Acela).
Yes, a train would create a sonic boom if it were fast enough. Somewhere around 1980, there was speculation about building a cross-country underground train, which would move through tunnels with the air partially evacuated. Of course, that was never going to happen.
I'm not arguing that the U.S. just shouldn't pursue trains. In the current environment, it probably will. But Europeans tend to get a misleading sense of the practicality of trains as an alternative to planes, because they live in such a small area.
Actually, I'd like to know more about the rail systems that have even the 800 - 1000-mile range well handled. With stops, even with high-speed trains, such trips are probably taking at least 8 hours, which is not realistic for business travel within the U.S. And that's the problem: distances in the U.S. are large, so a good air network is essential. Given a good air network, making rail competitive with that, except in special cases, is a tough proposition. The romance I mentioned in the subject line is that people are imagining European-style short-haul high-speed rail travel as a desirable outcome, while ignoring the economic realities of a different situation.
No-one who gets interviewed on the Colbert Report "actually thinks they're doing an interview". Try actually watching it sometime, and also keep in mind that Colbert deliberately acts as the "ass" you claim he his, to skewer the people who I can only assume are your heroes, Bill O'Reilly foremost among them.
Actually, neither of you are thinking big enough. Dubya was a step in the right direction, a crazy faux cowboy who refuses to back down. But in the end, he's too civilized and restrained. What's really needed is someone who's willing to go through with major genocide, using nuclear weapons, to remind humanity of what's at the end of that road. We haven't had such a reminder since 1945, and it's starting to show.
After all, there are over 6 billion of us, we can afford to lose a few billion. The remaining ones will hopefully have a bit more respect for the value of peace. It's an evil job, but somebody's gotta do it.
Compared to what, and how do you justify that claim? Certainly not in terms of actual passenger injuries per mile, since air travel is close to rail travel in that respect, and much better than road travel. For longer trips in particular, alternative forms of transportation can't compete with air travel in terms of speed, and it's not as easy as you might think to compete in terms of cost. Rail isn't cheaper than air in many (most?) cases, and that's not just because of market distortion etc. Building a faster, more ubiquitous and more reliable rail system wouldn't help bring costs down.
NY to Chicago is an 18-hour train trip. NY to LA is something like 56 hours, IIRC. Faster train systems would help, but no country in the world has succeeded in making train travel a really viable system over such long distances. The U.S. dependence on jet travel is a pretty rational one, assuming you don't hanker for the days when travelling across country and back was a multi-week affair.
Why is the UN wasting its time on Asia-Pacific, when it could be recommending that Israel and Hezbollah "seriously consider" adopting Microsoft Office? The shared trauma of dealing with Office will surely bring the two sides closer, eventually leading to a ceasefire after Clippy the paperclip pops up one too many times.
...oh wait, it's not. I guess all the rest is pretty moot, then.
Correction: there are many cabals, but no individual cabal has the kind of power that the conspiracy theorist's cabals have. The real cabals either compete with each other, or operate in different areas.
The myth of the single central super-cabal is a bit like the myth of God: people invent God to explain lots of little things and some big things, because it's easier to personify everything into a single "person" than to grapple with all of the myriad factors directly. The myth of the super-cabal is a way of grappling with the fact that many different groups of people exercise control over our lives in different ways, most of which are not at all transparent or under our control.
Dear TRFTS,
Dude, that was a comet that hit Jupiter. If you were really responsible, I think you'd know what kind of projectile you used.
-- alienmole, from Slashdot.mars
Some of our best friends were dinosaurs, I think we'd know if they weren't mammals. Perhaps your paleontologists should recheck their data. Then again, it was 65 million years ago, and all you squishy carbon-based organisms look alike to us.
Besides, if you're right, then the universal superbeing could do with some shaking up. It reminds me of Zorg in the Fifth Element:
Dear Blue Planet,
Thank you for bringing the THOR project to our attention. We find your idea to fire projectiles at high speed into our planet rather disturbing. Should you decide to go through with this plan, please keep in mind the following: remember that asteroid strike that wiped out most large mammals on your strangely-colored planet about 65 million of your years ago? That was us.
Yours in peace, for the moment,
Department of Marsland Security
Dear NASA,
We were pleased to learn about your upcoming Phoenix mission, and look forward to this opportunity to once again secretly study your technology from our invisible bunkers on the Martian surface. (Whatever you do, don't try to dig below 500m, retaliation will be swift and final.)
On your journey, please keep in mind that Mars uses the metric system. Any space probes detected using "Imperial" units (whose very name are an affront to the Martian Emperor, may he live forever) will be silently deflected by the planetary protection shields.
Yours truly,
Mars Department of Blue Planet Studies and Relations
P.S. Regarding any rumors you may have heard about invasion, don't worry, the chances of anything coming from here are a million to one...
Feh, I scoff at your breakable clay tablets. If you want durability, you can't do better than spreading ochre on the walls of a cave. Cave paintings have lasted for tens of thousands of years!
Perhaps topic modeling could be used to analyze Slashdot to detect dupes before they're posted?
Ha ha. One of the incidents I was referring to was being apprehended with some friends by a neighbor who thought we were doing something bad. We were playing on the property of someone who was away, i.e. we were nominally trespassing, but if the person in question had been home, he would have been fine with it, since we knew him and had a good relationship with him. We were held in a room with no windows or lights while waiting for the police to arrive, taken to the police station and held while our parents were called.
Basically, a suspicious and nosy neighbor was able to create an incident from almost nothing. The police believed him over us, and gave us no benefit of the doubt until our parents got involved. The cops could have easily just driven us down the block to the home of one of our parents and straightened the whole thing out, but instead they had to act as though we needed to be taught a lesson. I was taught a lesson alright, but it wasn't the one they thought they were teaching.
None of this is a big deal in any absolute sense, but a cop who's going to use his position to essentially bully kids is not a good guy, and is probably pretty much the same sort of guy that's going to arrest someone for photographing the police. People like that shouldn't be cops, and there's no reason to put up with it.
Yeah, but bending light has other effects. Think about prisms, for example. "If this device unbends the light properly" is a big if, especially when you're talking about trying to make human-sized and human-shaped objects invisible.