So lets build that ringworld at the asteroid belt, which starts just past mars. We'll cheat a little and include mars and use it's distance from the sun. Given the circumference around the sun at that distance, if we could build 1 mile of that ringworld every minute of every day without stopping, at the end of each day we will have completed 1440 miles of the ringworld. At that rate the ringworld will be complete in 5, 500 years.
Oh I don't know. The instant commute. The ability to set which hours you lock the door. Meeting up in the kitchen for lunch or a snack. The ability to unlock the door if you're really needed. The ability to break your day up into smaller sections so you can garden with your kids from 3-4 and then work after dinner when it's dark. I could go on. +5 insightful is a bit of stretch for a question that deliberately obtuse.
A close family member of mine worked for AT&T Wireless since it was called Cingular. He would tell you that that business model would fail spectacularly here in the US. People here don't shop for plans, they shop for phones. They especially shop for phones they can't actually afford. Worse, they don't shop with money they've saved up. They shop with whatever flexibility they have in their monthly expenses. "What?! You don't offer a phone with that? See ya!!"
We are a month to month culture. Buying something for 500 bucks is a huge decision for most people. Adding 40 bucks a month (or whatever) is just another bill.
Pay 500 dollars now to save 40 or 60 bucks per month doesn't work for you if you ***don't have 500 dollars***. But your phone is dead and you need a new one. So what do you do? You could buy a super cheap one and get a low end phone plan. If you want that get a disposable or pre-paid phone. Otherwise you're going for the fancy smartphone without the 500 bucks. This is what most people want.
So say you did the math and you have the 500 bucks... Offering you an unsubsidized smart phone is a losing option. They make too much money subsidizing your phone and most of their customers like it that way, so why should they make less while giving away the option for you to change carriers at the drop of a hat? Easier to collude with the other carriers and make sure you can't do that.
It doesn't help the carriers until it helps them compete. There's not enough real demand to give up the lock-ins in favor of attracting a few new customers. It'll take critical mass and a lot more people demanding the unsubsidized option before it makes business sense to offer it. It's a cart and horse thing. So It'll never happen unless it's regulated to happen. Cole Brodman is correct that such regulation would vastly improve the market for consumers.
your problem is the way you define tasks. Tasks can be as granular as you need them to be. "left half step" is a task if you need it to be. The point is break up "rote learning".
You are correct in that there are many factors different studies have tried to take into account. It depends on place too. Right now you could attack somebody in broad daylight on my street and nobody would see you. It's 20 degrees outside and people don't sit and look out their windows much. The fact remains that it's never been conclusive either way.
We've had a rapist on the prowl in our area recently. He knocks on your door and then forces his way in. I'm pretty sure he doesn't care a whit about street lights.
Rather than getting street lights up it is MUCH more effective to get employment up.
People may say they feel whatever, but there are plenty of studies that show no correlation, or even an increase in crime.
Light can be a great help to criminals. Not least of which they're easier to spot when waving a flashlight. Also, if your under a streetlight, EVERYBODY NOT under a light is automatically hidden from you. But when everyone is in equal lighting and can see equally, it's harder to hide.
It's amazing how many people don't even know their eyes will adjust.
Most probably some types of crime will go up and others will go down. I'll leave it to you type "street lights crime study" into google.
You can't legitimately talk about banning cell phones without proposing we ban the millions of fast food drive-thru windows. Saying you can eat a Big Mac but you can't make a hands-free call is idiotic.
It's not about branding. It's about price and sustainability. When enough volume of thing$ are fraudulently or erroneously labeled then thing$ either end up with an artificially high price, because supply of real thing$ is known to be small; or the glut of fake thing$ artificially lower the price of the real product because supply seems plentiful, although the supply is largely fake.
Either way a free market requires accurate information regarding supply and demand in order to work properly.
Also, some people have food allergies. Others simply wish to avoid eating certain species. Others just don't like being lied to.
In all cases fraud is NOT desirable. Regardless of your taste buds or mine.
This is it. The whole article is -maybe- good reading for lawmakers and prosecutors who want to have better hindsight specifically regarding P2P laws. But it doesn't get at the heart of why P2P exploded. To understand that, just look at marijuana growth and potency over the last 30 years. It's a plant, so it takes longer to "program", but the stuff available now is orders of magnitude more powerful than the "dirt weed" available in the 70s and 80s. Law enforcement went after fields, and weight, and volume, so growers made ever increasingly potent strains. Powerful strains that grow fast and explode with buds when they reach a foot tall. Now they can make the same amount of THC in a basement in a couple months that before took a field and a year. This same phenomenon exists with prostitution, porn, gambling, horse power limits on outboard motors, large volume toilets "from Canada", etc etc.
YOU CAN'T EFFECTIVELY CURB DEMAND WITH LAWS.
All you can do is alter the supply chain.
Instead of FINALLY learning this basic tenet of human civilization that has been presenting itself for literally millenia, this time we're going to blame the internet.
Wonder what we'll be blaming in 3027?
Referring to inter-connectivity, communications, data manipulation, and Things upon which I rely to be Effective, and just generally interacting with the world, as if it were one expensive rock hammer is either deceptive or incompetent.
I wish I had mod points. This is exactly it. Nail on the head.
The money and resources that go into locking down technology, disabling features, and making the hardware and software easy and repeatable and predictable for IT folks is mostly money that is WASTED, and usually worse, spent to a harmful effect. Why? Because IT isn't there to help the IT guys. Call it a flame or troll but it's the straight truth. For most companies IT is there to help the company sell shoes or bread or tires or whatever and make money. That's it. And it's an expense.
I understand the chaos that comes with all these devices, but the solution, a locked down laptop that is "company property", takes 5 minutes to log in to, doesn't let people upload their photos or connect USB devices, takes another 3 minutes to log into any app., requires a SecureID card, doesn't let users network via linked in or facebook or whatever... doesn't sync contacts to a home pc, or google, and won't let the users load anything fun. It all destroys productivity, sucks away time, and makes the users hate the tech. "Get a personal laptop, this one is for work." Yeah! 2 bricks to carry that won't talk to each other! AWESOME! Then you throw in Windows and a learning curve, and the weight of the damn thing, and the horrible ergonomics and what you have is a big giant albatross in everyone's shoulder bag. You tack on a blackberry that feels like it was made in 1997 and works about as well and your users are just about ready to hang you. And remember, IT is a COST. IT is costing the company money, not bringing it in. And the users hate it and avoid it. Then they pick up an iPhone or Android and it's like an epiphany. No tutorials, no weight, no wait, no crazy lock downs, and just about every software productivity tool that they could want is on there and some amazing stuff they haven't even thought of. And then they look at corporate IT and wonder what the hell they're paying you for.
I'm not sure what the solution is. But I think it possibly involves LESS security and handicapping of tech and a lot more remote wiping and reimaging of things. "Do whatever you want, but when you come to me for support I'm just going to wipe your device back to "brand new""
And about the security, people are just plain nuts about IT security. If you don't care about securing the fax machines, phone lines, garbage pick up, mail room, and parking lot, why all the huge fuss about the laptops? Arch criminal hackers are not waiting around every corner to steal your users widget sales data. Nobody cares that he sold 5700 widgets last month. And if they did, they could probably snag a spreadsheet out of the trash, or social engineer some admin person to fax it to them. The doors to all the buildings are unlocked but the laptops look like this whenever somebody wants to get something done. ( Now obviously if you work for Visa or the DOJ this doesn't apply but it applies far more often than not.)
Unfortunately all that convoluted security and support keeps people employed. The low security, frequent gadget-wipe approach doesn't require so many IT employees. It's cheaper, so don't let the bosses get any ideas! Spread FUD. Scare them. Make them relearn a 12 character password every week. Yeah that sounds familiar. Besides, we need a methodology study and business analysis of what exactly it is these lusers are trying to accomplish with these gadgets, because you know, it's so hard to fathom this being less productive.
I understand where your sentiment comes from. But it assumes a fair game with dice that aren't loaded. Here's the big news you've been waiting for: The game is not fair. Opportunities are not equal. The dice are loaded. Examples are everywhere and countless, if you only look.
I actually pay tens of thousands in income taxes as well. It's infuriating. But not because poor people want my money. It's infuriating because I want my taxes to go to world class education in my community and my country as a whole. I want strong infrastructure, public resources from parks to transportation, a world class work force making things that improve our world, cannabis smokers out of jail, foreign soil not invaded or occupied, health care for everyone (no I don't think the poor pregnant woman should have her baby on the sidewalk, nor do I think working for a giant corporation should reward you with better health care than a hard working small biz owner can get, it's a right, like fresh water). Anyway, I'm happy to pay for things that make this country better, -for everyone-. Why aren't you?
also, your attitude about people poorer than yourself smacks of willful malicious ignorance. Grow up in an inner city school, grown up with one ill parent, grow up worrying about your next handful of food, turn 18 with no outfit for a job interview and no money to buy one and parents who can't help. Such people must work incredibly hard at multiple jobs to afford a shitty life. They have no time for luxuries like higher education, networking with professionals, or even simple computer training. They have no money for things like sport coats and decent teeth or transportation to an interview or a job. They are stuck. So if you still have a rock for heart after pondering all this consider this: would you rather build up the people and communities around you or build up walls to keep them out when they come for you?
For most people, the OS has been fast enough for the last decade. Boot times happen once per day at the most, programs launch once or twice per day and reside in large amounts of fast RAM. Even games reside just fine in 12GB of DDR3 and run like a champ on mid grade video cards. Where the speed breaks down for home users is Photos and Video. Everybody and their mom has digital photo and video equipment that fits in a purse or pocket. It's working with these files where the SSD shines. Forget OS caching. We want media files _initially_ read from disk to be FAST. I want to transfer 24GB of hi res images to my pc and build a Lightroom catalog all in 2 minutes so I can work on them.. (I'm still waiting.). I want hd video to load and take edits without a pausing every 3 seconds while the disk spins. Storage AND Caching for these types of apps is great on an SSD. I certainly don't want windows contaminating my sacred SSD with it's super high, low ROI IOPS.
More knowledgable professionals have probably already asked this, but I'm still curious: how closely does the air mixture and atmospheric pressure on the ISS match typical earth conditions?
The question that comes to my mind is when the hell are they going to improve service availability. In my major city's metropolitan area you can drop calls all over the place. Coverage is full of huge gaping holes, some of them a decade old. Out of town, along the interstates, calls drop like flies as 3G to Edge and back handoffs fail like so many stimulus plans. When coverage IS available the oversold bandwidth is filled to capacity often enough that "Call Failed" with 4 bars of coverage is commonplace.
Don't tell us how blazing fast your network is. Hell even a terabit connection ain't shit if it's less reliable than a cage full of messenger squirrels.
This looks really cool and certainly puts out some impressive noise. But it's hard to get excited when there's no info on horsepower, MPH, time to 60mph, or any other interesting facts. But mostly watching him cruise at 8mph is just frustrating.
OK dude, very cool. You put a ton of effort into building something really neat. But with all that engineering and noise it needs to do more than act as a lone parade float. Would love to see you racing it through the Nevada desert....
Kudos for taking it this far of course and making us hungry for more.
Cost efficiency assumes the trains are full. They won't be. Not here in the states. They'd be empty.
The biggest problem with huge trains is filling them. You could build an awesome next gen rail system here in the states but nobody would ride it. Accept for the corridor from D.C. To NYC the trains would be empty. There just aren't thousands of people every day that need to get from St. Louis to Sacramento. Maybe a couple plane loads on a busy day. But that's it. There ARE many thousands of people all going someplace different though. What rail needs to replace in large part are CARS. That means we need to be able to hop on in lots of places, and tell the thing to zip us across town. Think Street Cars of the future. If it picks up nearby every 15 minutes and takes you right where you're going you can also give up quite a bit of speed. Long trains full of a thousand people, boarding, stopping, starting, going across the countryside, stopping and going again to accommodate all the people, it's a nightmare and when we finally arrive we have to rent a car to get around!
Small single car rail is the answer. Hop on, go where you need, across country or just across town. 100mph is plenty. The power goes in the rails, the "brains" go in each car, not some big switching station.
Slashdot Mirror
So lets build that ringworld at the asteroid belt, which starts just past mars. We'll cheat a little and include mars and use it's distance from the sun. Given the circumference around the sun at that distance, if we could build 1 mile of that ringworld every minute of every day without stopping, at the end of each day we will have completed 1440 miles of the ringworld. At that rate the ringworld will be complete in 5, 500 years.
Oh I don't know. The instant commute. The ability to set which hours you lock the door. Meeting up in the kitchen for lunch or a snack. The ability to unlock the door if you're really needed. The ability to break your day up into smaller sections so you can garden with your kids from 3-4 and then work after dinner when it's dark. I could go on. +5 insightful is a bit of stretch for a question that deliberately obtuse.
A close family member of mine worked for AT&T Wireless since it was called Cingular. He would tell you that that business model would fail spectacularly here in the US. People here don't shop for plans, they shop for phones. They especially shop for phones they can't actually afford. Worse, they don't shop with money they've saved up. They shop with whatever flexibility they have in their monthly expenses. "What?! You don't offer a phone with that? See ya!!"
We are a month to month culture. Buying something for 500 bucks is a huge decision for most people. Adding 40 bucks a month (or whatever) is just another bill.
Pay 500 dollars now to save 40 or 60 bucks per month doesn't work for you if you ***don't have 500 dollars***. But your phone is dead and you need a new one. So what do you do? You could buy a super cheap one and get a low end phone plan. If you want that get a disposable or pre-paid phone. Otherwise you're going for the fancy smartphone without the 500 bucks. This is what most people want.
So say you did the math and you have the 500 bucks... Offering you an unsubsidized smart phone is a losing option. They make too much money subsidizing your phone and most of their customers like it that way, so why should they make less while giving away the option for you to change carriers at the drop of a hat? Easier to collude with the other carriers and make sure you can't do that.
It doesn't help the carriers until it helps them compete. There's not enough real demand to give up the lock-ins in favor of attracting a few new customers. It'll take critical mass and a lot more people demanding the unsubsidized option before it makes business sense to offer it. It's a cart and horse thing. So It'll never happen unless it's regulated to happen. Cole Brodman is correct that such regulation would vastly improve the market for consumers.
Yes.
Next?
I see plenty of the Energy Industry, a drilling company, Big Oil, and even an Investment Professional on the Advisory Board
I couldn't quickly find where the bulk of the department's funding comes from. But I bet it's no surprise.
They sure seem to be good friends to fracking.
-...because no-one gives a fuck about those things
I do.
"Bjork said to interleave *related* tasks".
your problem is the way you define tasks. Tasks can be as granular as you need them to be. "left half step" is a task if you need it to be. The point is break up "rote learning".
TL/DR version: Shuffle your lesson plan up.
You are correct in that there are many factors different studies have tried to take into account. It depends on place too. Right now you could attack somebody in broad daylight on my street and nobody would see you. It's 20 degrees outside and people don't sit and look out their windows much. The fact remains that it's never been conclusive either way.
We've had a rapist on the prowl in our area recently. He knocks on your door and then forces his way in. I'm pretty sure he doesn't care a whit about street lights.
Rather than getting street lights up it is MUCH more effective to get employment up.
People may say they feel whatever, but there are plenty of studies that show no correlation, or even an increase in crime.
Light can be a great help to criminals. Not least of which they're easier to spot when waving a flashlight. Also, if your under a streetlight, EVERYBODY NOT under a light is automatically hidden from you. But when everyone is in equal lighting and can see equally, it's harder to hide.
It's amazing how many people don't even know their eyes will adjust.
Most probably some types of crime will go up and others will go down. I'll leave it to you type "street lights crime study" into google.
"Always consider the possibility that installing a light may aid criminal activity."
http://www.britastro.org/dark-skies/crime.html#noreduction
Bad guys who wave flashlights are easier to spot than bad guys who don't need extra lighting.
This is it exactly.
You can't legitimately talk about banning cell phones without proposing we ban the millions of fast food drive-thru windows. Saying you can eat a Big Mac but you can't make a hands-free call is idiotic.
It doesn't matter what kind of security team they have.
Even if you LOVE it, the name is so bad you can't even tell anybody about it. Hell I already forget how to spell it and I just saw it 2 seconds ago.
"You can't brand fish that way"
It's not about branding. It's about price and sustainability. When enough volume of thing$ are fraudulently or erroneously labeled then thing$ either end up with an artificially high price, because supply of real thing$ is known to be small; or the glut of fake thing$ artificially lower the price of the real product because supply seems plentiful, although the supply is largely fake.
Either way a free market requires accurate information regarding supply and demand in order to work properly.
Also, some people have food allergies. Others simply wish to avoid eating certain species. Others just don't like being lied to.
In all cases fraud is NOT desirable. Regardless of your taste buds or mine.
This is it. The whole article is -maybe- good reading for lawmakers and prosecutors who want to have better hindsight specifically regarding P2P laws. But it doesn't get at the heart of why P2P exploded. To understand that, just look at marijuana growth and potency over the last 30 years. It's a plant, so it takes longer to "program", but the stuff available now is orders of magnitude more powerful than the "dirt weed" available in the 70s and 80s. Law enforcement went after fields, and weight, and volume, so growers made ever increasingly potent strains. Powerful strains that grow fast and explode with buds when they reach a foot tall. Now they can make the same amount of THC in a basement in a couple months that before took a field and a year. This same phenomenon exists with prostitution, porn, gambling, horse power limits on outboard motors, large volume toilets "from Canada", etc etc.
YOU CAN'T EFFECTIVELY CURB DEMAND WITH LAWS.
All you can do is alter the supply chain.
Instead of FINALLY learning this basic tenet of human civilization that has been presenting itself for literally millenia, this time we're going to blame the internet.
Wonder what we'll be blaming in 3027?
Referring to inter-connectivity, communications, data manipulation, and Things upon which I rely to be Effective, and just generally interacting with the world, as if it were one expensive rock hammer is either deceptive or incompetent.
I wish I had mod points. This is exactly it. Nail on the head.
The money and resources that go into locking down technology, disabling features, and making the hardware and software easy and repeatable and predictable for IT folks is mostly money that is WASTED, and usually worse, spent to a harmful effect. Why? Because IT isn't there to help the IT guys. Call it a flame or troll but it's the straight truth. For most companies IT is there to help the company sell shoes or bread or tires or whatever and make money. That's it. And it's an expense.
I understand the chaos that comes with all these devices, but the solution, a locked down laptop that is "company property", takes 5 minutes to log in to, doesn't let people upload their photos or connect USB devices, takes another 3 minutes to log into any app., requires a SecureID card, doesn't let users network via linked in or facebook or whatever... doesn't sync contacts to a home pc, or google, and won't let the users load anything fun. It all destroys productivity, sucks away time, and makes the users hate the tech. "Get a personal laptop, this one is for work." Yeah! 2 bricks to carry that won't talk to each other! AWESOME! Then you throw in Windows and a learning curve, and the weight of the damn thing, and the horrible ergonomics and what you have is a big giant albatross in everyone's shoulder bag. You tack on a blackberry that feels like it was made in 1997 and works about as well and your users are just about ready to hang you. And remember, IT is a COST. IT is costing the company money, not bringing it in. And the users hate it and avoid it. Then they pick up an iPhone or Android and it's like an epiphany. No tutorials, no weight, no wait, no crazy lock downs, and just about every software productivity tool that they could want is on there and some amazing stuff they haven't even thought of. And then they look at corporate IT and wonder what the hell they're paying you for.
I'm not sure what the solution is. But I think it possibly involves LESS security and handicapping of tech and a lot more remote wiping and reimaging of things. "Do whatever you want, but when you come to me for support I'm just going to wipe your device back to "brand new""
And about the security, people are just plain nuts about IT security. If you don't care about securing the fax machines, phone lines, garbage pick up, mail room, and parking lot, why all the huge fuss about the laptops? Arch criminal hackers are not waiting around every corner to steal your users widget sales data. Nobody cares that he sold 5700 widgets last month. And if they did, they could probably snag a spreadsheet out of the trash, or social engineer some admin person to fax it to them. The doors to all the buildings are unlocked but the laptops look like this whenever somebody wants to get something done. ( Now obviously if you work for Visa or the DOJ this doesn't apply but it applies far more often than not.)
Unfortunately all that convoluted security and support keeps people employed. The low security, frequent gadget-wipe approach doesn't require so many IT employees. It's cheaper, so don't let the bosses get any ideas! Spread FUD. Scare them. Make them relearn a 12 character password every week. Yeah that sounds familiar. Besides, we need a methodology study and business analysis of what exactly it is these lusers are trying to accomplish with these gadgets, because you know, it's so hard to fathom this being less productive.
I understand where your sentiment comes from. But it assumes a fair game with dice that aren't loaded. Here's the big news you've been waiting for: The game is not fair. Opportunities are not equal. The dice are loaded. Examples are everywhere and countless, if you only look.
I actually pay tens of thousands in income taxes as well. It's infuriating. But not because poor people want my money. It's infuriating because I want my taxes to go to world class education in my community and my country as a whole. I want strong infrastructure, public resources from parks to transportation, a world class work force making things that improve our world, cannabis smokers out of jail, foreign soil not invaded or occupied, health care for everyone (no I don't think the poor pregnant woman should have her baby on the sidewalk, nor do I think working for a giant corporation should reward you with better health care than a hard working small biz owner can get, it's a right, like fresh water). Anyway, I'm happy to pay for things that make this country better, -for everyone-. Why aren't you?
also, your attitude about people poorer than yourself smacks of willful malicious ignorance. Grow up in an inner city school, grown up with one ill parent, grow up worrying about your next handful of food, turn 18 with no outfit for a job interview and no money to buy one and parents who can't help. Such people must work incredibly hard at multiple jobs to afford a shitty life. They have no time for luxuries like higher education, networking with professionals, or even simple computer training. They have no money for things like sport coats and decent teeth or transportation to an interview or a job. They are stuck. So if you still have a rock for heart after pondering all this consider this: would you rather build up the people and communities around you or build up walls to keep them out when they come for you?
Prepare to have your mind unboggled:
For most people, the OS has been fast enough for the last decade. Boot times happen once per day at the most, programs launch once or twice per day and reside in large amounts of fast RAM. Even games reside just fine in 12GB of DDR3 and run like a champ on mid grade video cards. Where the speed breaks down for home users is Photos and Video. Everybody and their mom has digital photo and video equipment that fits in a purse or pocket.
It's working with these files where the SSD shines. Forget OS caching. We want media files _initially_ read from disk to be FAST. I want to transfer 24GB of hi res images to my pc and build a Lightroom catalog all in 2 minutes so I can work on them.. (I'm still waiting.). I want hd video to load and take edits without a pausing every 3 seconds while the disk spins. Storage AND Caching for these types of apps is great on an SSD. I certainly don't want windows contaminating my sacred SSD with it's super high, low ROI IOPS.
More knowledgable professionals have probably already asked this, but I'm still curious: how closely does the air mixture and atmospheric pressure on the ISS match typical earth conditions?
Eyes breath.
The question that comes to my mind is when the hell are they going to improve service availability. In my major city's metropolitan area you can drop calls all over the place. Coverage is full of huge gaping holes, some of them a decade old. Out of town, along the interstates, calls drop like flies as 3G to Edge and back handoffs fail like so many stimulus plans. When coverage IS available the oversold bandwidth is filled to capacity often enough that "Call Failed" with 4 bars of coverage is commonplace.
Don't tell us how blazing fast your network is. Hell even a terabit connection ain't shit if it's less reliable than a cage full of messenger squirrels.
"How is this "huge?" What the hell are you going to do with it? Someone tweets and uses an exclamation point, so you... what now?"
You look at more of their tweets until you're 98% sure. Then target your advertising.
GONG! Thanks for playing.
How can Wired write an entire article, and slashdot write a summary, all about a website, and nobody includes the link to Kahn Academy!?? Geesh
This looks really cool and certainly puts out some impressive noise. But it's hard to get excited when there's no info on horsepower, MPH, time to 60mph, or any other interesting facts.
But mostly watching him cruise at 8mph is just frustrating.
OK dude, very cool. You put a ton of effort into building something really neat. But with all that engineering and noise it needs to do more than act as a lone parade float. Would love to see you racing it through the Nevada desert....
Kudos for taking it this far of course and making us hungry for more.
THIS! +5
Cost efficiency assumes the trains are full. They won't be. Not here in the states. They'd be empty.
The biggest problem with huge trains is filling them. You could build an awesome next gen rail system here in the states but nobody would ride it. Accept for the corridor from D.C. To NYC the trains would be empty. There just aren't thousands of people every day that need to get from St. Louis to Sacramento. Maybe a couple plane loads on a busy day. But that's it. There ARE many thousands of people all going someplace different though. What rail needs to replace in large part are CARS. That means we need to be able to hop on in lots of places, and tell the thing to zip us across town. Think Street Cars of the future. If it picks up nearby every 15 minutes and takes you right where you're going you can also give up quite a bit of speed. Long trains full of a thousand people, boarding, stopping, starting, going across the countryside, stopping and going again to accommodate all the people, it's a nightmare and when we finally arrive we have to rent a car to get around!
Small single car rail is the answer. Hop on, go where you need, across country or just across town. 100mph is plenty. The power goes in the rails, the "brains" go in each car, not some big switching station.